So here we are at Week 14, and now it’s all right there, all right there within reach. Me myself, I’m about 8 pages off target, which is the closest I’ve been in a long while. The most recent stretch has been one of my favorites. In particular, the story of Byron the Bulb, which came across as pretty much a perfect thing. And it’s just two more weeks now. Just two more weeks, and the inside back cover will finally be revealed…. Next week: UPDATE — we’d originally targeted page 706 (p/v), but I like So-Called Bill’s suggestion from the comments of belaying those orders and taking one more week to soak up a little extra Pynchon goodness. So let’s call this week a time loop and let folks catch up and retrace their steps.
14 comments for “The Gravity’s Rainbow Deathmarch, Week 14”
Dr. Vitz
April 12, 2005 at 12:50 pm
I was just looking over week 13’s comments.
Re: the lack of the holocaust – considering how much violence is inherent in the novel ask yourself,
how many people can you objectively say died during it?
Nature doesn’t know extinction, only transformation.
Hi Dr. V.,
I get the last part–it’s our old pal Wernher von Braun, right? And I see your point that relatively few characters have died in the novel considering its subject matter. But doesn’t that just amplify C.V.’s question? Genocide’s clearly on Pynchon’s mind—Hereros, dodos, Camp Dora, etc. So is the atom bomb (p. 642). Why does he leave these matters in the wings? Cap’n Marsupial suggests they’re more powerful for being approached obliquely. Could be. It also leaves us readers in the by now familiar position of being “on the edges of revelations.” But it’s hard to believe that Pynchon, who handles the Herero’s fate so poignantly, intends us to take Werner von Braun’s quote as an adequate response to the Holocaust, or WW II, or atomic annihilation, or any other act that involves ending a human life. Unless you take a really cosmic view and think of humanity as just circles of interlinked carbon. Which maybe P. does, but I dunno … his writing has so much more heart than that. Or have I misunderstood you?
The good Dr. V raises a really interesting question about “extinction” vs. “tranformation”: what’s up with the spirit world in the story? It’s puzzled me up to now but makes a new kind of sense after Byron the Bulb. Our perception of a fixed self that ends with death–could that be a conspiracy too? To keep our sense of possibility dim & reserve the Other Side for the Enlightened elite? Is death just Being at a different frequency? How seriously does Pynchon intend us to take the whole “life after death” thread? And do they play Schoenberg in Heaven??
One of my favorite lines/sections is just too long to get its moment on the top of the page. I feel compelled to reprint it here and not just let it pass without mention. This is from page 572 (p/v):
“In the streets loudspeakers, buzzing metal throats, are proclaiming an early curfew tonight. Through some window of the town, lying in some bed, already browsing at the edges of the fields of sleep, is a kid for whom the metal voice with its foreign accent is a sign of nightly security, to be part of the wild fields, the rain on the sea, dogs, smells of cooking from strange windows, dirt roads . . . part of this unrecoverable summer . . . .”
I want to respond to Rodney without getting too heavy handed about casting my interpretation over this discussion (which may prove impossible).
Actual death is inevitable, just as heat death is inevitable. But as I pointed out a while back in the
“Sold on Suicide” section – even the act of trying to embrace death may actual lead to an almost infinite forestalling of it.
Byron the Bulb is a great example – he shouldn’t be immortal, but he is. Yet that isn’t necessarily good as he’s left with a kind of existential horror as history’s perpetual witness (FWIW – Kenosha, WI reappears in this section).
I think it was Rodney who said (and I paraphrase) that things are “just about to be meaningful.” But most of us recognize that being close isn’t the same as being there. Death in the wings is just about to get us, but that’s not the same as reaching death, is it?
They play Schoenberg in heaven and in hell, but in heaven the instruments are in tune.
Cecil, how old were you during your “unrecoverable summer”? Mine, I was 12: scent of roses wafting in on a hot evening, sounds of hummingbirds around the Callistemon (“bottle brush” trees) and the radio playing a Dodger game, number 2 pencil moving roughly over lined paper on a wooden desktop. I can never feel that way again: my experience dominated by my senses, not by my thoughts.
I was dissatisfied with my performance on last week’s pages, so I decided to backtrack a little and I’m now officially behind for the first time in a while. But I’ve been really enjoying myself and finding a little something to treasure on every page.
Here’s another one of those sentences that, taken out of context, seems to explain everything:
“(no serial time over there: events are all there in the same eternal moment and so certain messages don’t always “make sense” back here: they lack historical structure, they sound fanciful, or insane)
–p. 624
Also, in the course of my research I came across Professor Irwin Corey’s speech accepting the 1974 National Book Award on Pynchon’s behalf. This may be old news, someone may have already mentioned it in a previous thread, I can’t remember—but if you haven’t read it, you really should:
RaptorMage: beautiful verse. made my morning. my unrecoverable summer? probably age 15. A few weeks spent at (yes, I’ll admit it) debate camp in Georgetown, DC. Just my first dance with quasi-independence. With city livin’. Clove cigarettes. Rocky Horror. We found a way to play Joust for a penny a game. That’s right. You read that right.
A penny a game.
So-called Bill: funny, I’ve been doing exactly the same thing — stopped myself around 670 or so, went back to around 620, and I’ve been re-skimming page by page, to let it sink in a little more before the final charge….. also, that link. amazing — I hadn’t read about any of that, but it appears to be legit…. I gather Professor Corey was/is a surrealist comedian. Anyone familiar with his work?
So what would you (you being Cecil and everybody else) think about setting the clock back a week—i.e. moving this week’s target back to 663, or 666, or 669, or some multiple of 3 like that? It’s a weird idea, I know, but I think there’s some kind of celestial retrograde going on.
Could be, too, that I am losing my mind. It wouldn’t be the first time.
i’m enjoying the unrecoverable summer discussion. i find mine not in a single year, but in bed, in my childhood bedroom, over a series of years circa 8 to 12 perhaps, and the sounds through open window (no central air – my kids are missing something), lights of passing cars oddly careening off the wall, the smells of summer, especially freshly cut grass… all of these things signs of “nightly security.” Just another little perfect moment among the many in the last 600+ pages.
Wow, too many unrecoverable summers. There was one the after high school where I was think I was clinically insane. (Though I may not have been the best judge.) Or the one defined by a daisy chain woven for a girl’s red hair. . .
I’m not sure where we’re ending. I’m almost into the dinner with Bodine & Mexico. But I’m not sure, so I’m just reading.
I loved the conspiracy of the vaccuum. Did anyone find anything definitive on the Kenosha Kid? He loves making up conspiracies that we carry around within ourselves. This boils down, of course, to the conspiracy that we share that we are sentient material beings with undefinable souls, as opposed to being just flesh robots.
A buddhist would see Slothrop’s dissolution as something to work towards, getting off the wheel of life and dissolving into the aether. Why are we seeing it as tragic? I’m rambling. . . . Love the Kabbalistic stuff.
I’m officially caught up. I left the coffee shop last night and showed a friend the tip of my bookmark (it’s actually the reciept with the date I bought the thing in late december). The first comment was, “only one more sitting then?”. Not quite.
it’s just like a romance novel, you never know who is gonna end up with who.
Still behind, but enjoying the Pochler section, strangely enough. Identifying with the anguish of father separated from daughter and how it motivates him to do what might otherwise be unthinkable… Past 410, at least; working full-time again so this might be hopeless — will finish but not on time…
I was just looking over week 13’s comments.
Re: the lack of the holocaust – considering how much violence is inherent in the novel ask yourself,
how many people can you objectively say died during it?
Nature doesn’t know extinction, only transformation.
Hi Dr. V.,
I get the last part–it’s our old pal Wernher von Braun, right? And I see your point that relatively few characters have died in the novel considering its subject matter. But doesn’t that just amplify C.V.’s question? Genocide’s clearly on Pynchon’s mind—Hereros, dodos, Camp Dora, etc. So is the atom bomb (p. 642). Why does he leave these matters in the wings? Cap’n Marsupial suggests they’re more powerful for being approached obliquely. Could be. It also leaves us readers in the by now familiar position of being “on the edges of revelations.” But it’s hard to believe that Pynchon, who handles the Herero’s fate so poignantly, intends us to take Werner von Braun’s quote as an adequate response to the Holocaust, or WW II, or atomic annihilation, or any other act that involves ending a human life. Unless you take a really cosmic view and think of humanity as just circles of interlinked carbon. Which maybe P. does, but I dunno … his writing has so much more heart than that. Or have I misunderstood you?
The good Dr. V raises a really interesting question about “extinction” vs. “tranformation”: what’s up with the spirit world in the story? It’s puzzled me up to now but makes a new kind of sense after Byron the Bulb. Our perception of a fixed self that ends with death–could that be a conspiracy too? To keep our sense of possibility dim & reserve the Other Side for the Enlightened elite? Is death just Being at a different frequency? How seriously does Pynchon intend us to take the whole “life after death” thread? And do they play Schoenberg in Heaven??
One of my favorite lines/sections is just too long to get its moment on the top of the page. I feel compelled to reprint it here and not just let it pass without mention. This is from page 572 (p/v):
“In the streets loudspeakers, buzzing metal throats, are proclaiming an early curfew tonight. Through some window of the town, lying in some bed, already browsing at the edges of the fields of sleep, is a kid for whom the metal voice with its foreign accent is a sign of nightly security, to be part of the wild fields, the rain on the sea, dogs, smells of cooking from strange windows, dirt roads . . . part of this unrecoverable summer . . . .”
I want to respond to Rodney without getting too heavy handed about casting my interpretation over this discussion (which may prove impossible).
Actual death is inevitable, just as heat death is inevitable. But as I pointed out a while back in the
“Sold on Suicide” section – even the act of trying to embrace death may actual lead to an almost infinite forestalling of it.
Byron the Bulb is a great example – he shouldn’t be immortal, but he is. Yet that isn’t necessarily good as he’s left with a kind of existential horror as history’s perpetual witness (FWIW – Kenosha, WI reappears in this section).
I think it was Rodney who said (and I paraphrase) that things are “just about to be meaningful.” But most of us recognize that being close isn’t the same as being there. Death in the wings is just about to get us, but that’s not the same as reaching death, is it?
They play Schoenberg in heaven and in hell, but in heaven the instruments are in tune.
Cecil, how old were you during your “unrecoverable summer”? Mine, I was 12: scent of roses wafting in on a hot evening, sounds of hummingbirds around the Callistemon (“bottle brush” trees) and the radio playing a Dodger game, number 2 pencil moving roughly over lined paper on a wooden desktop. I can never feel that way again: my experience dominated by my senses, not by my thoughts.
28,000 words per dollar? What a steal!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/sitb-next/0140188592/ref=sbx_txt/102-5271149-0856113?%5Fencoding=UTF8#textStats
I was dissatisfied with my performance on last week’s pages, so I decided to backtrack a little and I’m now officially behind for the first time in a while. But I’ve been really enjoying myself and finding a little something to treasure on every page.
Here’s another one of those sentences that, taken out of context, seems to explain everything:
“(no serial time over there: events are all there in the same eternal moment and so certain messages don’t always “make sense” back here: they lack historical structure, they sound fanciful, or insane)
–p. 624
Also, in the course of my research I came across Professor Irwin Corey’s speech accepting the 1974 National Book Award on Pynchon’s behalf. This may be old news, someone may have already mentioned it in a previous thread, I can’t remember—but if you haven’t read it, you really should:
RaptorMage: beautiful verse. made my morning. my unrecoverable summer? probably age 15. A few weeks spent at (yes, I’ll admit it) debate camp in Georgetown, DC. Just my first dance with quasi-independence. With city livin’. Clove cigarettes. Rocky Horror. We found a way to play Joust for a penny a game. That’s right. You read that right.
A penny a game.
So-called Bill: funny, I’ve been doing exactly the same thing — stopped myself around 670 or so, went back to around 620, and I’ve been re-skimming page by page, to let it sink in a little more before the final charge….. also, that link. amazing — I hadn’t read about any of that, but it appears to be legit…. I gather Professor Corey was/is a surrealist comedian. Anyone familiar with his work?
So what would you (you being Cecil and everybody else) think about setting the clock back a week—i.e. moving this week’s target back to 663, or 666, or 669, or some multiple of 3 like that? It’s a weird idea, I know, but I think there’s some kind of celestial retrograde going on.
Could be, too, that I am losing my mind. It wouldn’t be the first time.
i’m enjoying the unrecoverable summer discussion. i find mine not in a single year, but in bed, in my childhood bedroom, over a series of years circa 8 to 12 perhaps, and the sounds through open window (no central air – my kids are missing something), lights of passing cars oddly careening off the wall, the smells of summer, especially freshly cut grass… all of these things signs of “nightly security.” Just another little perfect moment among the many in the last 600+ pages.
Wow, too many unrecoverable summers. There was one the after high school where I was think I was clinically insane. (Though I may not have been the best judge.) Or the one defined by a daisy chain woven for a girl’s red hair. . .
I’m not sure where we’re ending. I’m almost into the dinner with Bodine & Mexico. But I’m not sure, so I’m just reading.
I loved the conspiracy of the vaccuum. Did anyone find anything definitive on the Kenosha Kid? He loves making up conspiracies that we carry around within ourselves. This boils down, of course, to the conspiracy that we share that we are sentient material beings with undefinable souls, as opposed to being just flesh robots.
A buddhist would see Slothrop’s dissolution as something to work towards, getting off the wheel of life and dissolving into the aether. Why are we seeing it as tragic? I’m rambling. . . . Love the Kabbalistic stuff.
I’m officially caught up. I left the coffee shop last night and showed a friend the tip of my bookmark (it’s actually the reciept with the date I bought the thing in late december). The first comment was, “only one more sitting then?”. Not quite.
it’s just like a romance novel, you never know who is gonna end up with who.
Still behind, but enjoying the Pochler section, strangely enough. Identifying with the anguish of father separated from daughter and how it motivates him to do what might otherwise be unthinkable… Past 410, at least; working full-time again so this might be hopeless — will finish but not on time…