Welcome to the end of week 1! Got any insights on the first 50 pages? Advice for the weary? Complaints about bunions? If you’re on the march, this is the spot to share, to care, and to shout out.
(I should also say, for them what’s interested in qualifying toward Poobah status and fabulous GRDM prizes, this also marks the first week that “counts,” stats-wise — the league has ruled last week as sort of a warm up.) Next Tuesday: Let’s meet back up at page 113 (132 in the Bantam edition) a week from today — it’s the section that ends: “tarnished silver crown….”
If you missed last week’s thread, be sure to check it out — a number of entertaining comments were dropped off just yesterday, including an entirely unexpected bodyslam on Kurt Vonnegut, jr.
Thanks much for joining in and see you at the tarnished crown,
-CV
26 comments for “The Gravity’s Rainbow Deathmarch, Week 1, thread 1”
e.
January 11, 2005 at 9:08 am
So far it’s like a great song–lovely sounding language. Sure some of the lyrics are obscure, but the music carries you along. I decided not to look at the companion while reading (though if anyone wants to share tidbits on the first 50 pages, I’d be curious), but I do look up a few words as I go. “Musaceous” sounded promising. Turns out to mean belonging to the banana or plantain family. Will try slipping it into conversation soon….
if kesey’s ‘one flew over the cuckoo’s nest’ was lsd inspired, i wonder what narcotic, nepenthe, or stupefacient inspired pynchie. could help to know, as i may be willing to imbibe it to understand WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON. i read like i’m in a trance, a stream of conscious-reading, wandering, flying, floating, with words that skate and shuffle and poke, but rarely stick.
cecil, this march is for you.
Since many of us read Brautigan, thought I’d toss in something I noticed last time I read Troutfishing in America. The stylistic trick of breaking out of the narrative into a list of things, whether a shopping list, or variations on “the Kenosha Kid,” seems to track back to Thoreau and Walden at least, with a stopover in William Carlos Williams (e.g., Patterson). When Thoreau did it, I think it was out of pure nerdiness and probably for his own amusement. When Brautigan does it, I think it’s because TFA is kind of like Walden revisited, so it feels like a direct reference. When Pynchon does it, I wonder if it’s meant as a tip of the hat, or just a handy, time-tested device for injecting humor and changing the subject? Any reactions?
So far I’ve been finding this book much less daunting than I remember. I’m not sure why. It may be that this first part is relatively coherent–I remember that I didn’t give up before until more like page 100. I don’t think it’s because I’m smarter than I was before, in fact quite the opposite. It may be that I’m so much less intelligent than I used to be that I no longer realize how much I’m missing.
Or it may be a question of approach. I think that before I tried to stubbornly bull through it at high speed. This moderately paced approach seems to work much better. I’ve found that if you take your time, each individual scene does eventually make sense on its own terms. If you’re having trouble, I recommend scrawling the words “Don’t Panic” in large, friendly letters on the cover.
Speaking of the moderate pace, though, what gives with the increased page load this week?
So-called Bill writes:
“Speaking of the moderate pace, though, what gives with the increased page load this week?”
Cecil responds:
it was a bad break between sections — the choice was either 40 or 60 pages for this leg, and the magic eight-ball said “asking deathmarchers to read an extra 10 pages this week will bring you good fortune.”
Re Zoro’s question bout TFA/Walden, I see it more as a stylistic thing than any direct reference — part of the trance-inducing mesmer Pynchon seems determined to release. Any other thoughts?
So-called Bill sounds very much like real-life Bill; kudos to the pod manufacturer.
Zoro–for the ultimate in list-making novelists see (in a shop somewhere, but perhaps don’t purchase) “Life, A User’s Manual” by Georges Perec. Maybe Perec was referencing the writers you mention as well (or even Pynchon–LAUM came out five years after GR); all I know is that Perec almost killed me with his endless listing listing. But I wonder if Perec’s lists, and Pynchon’s too, are about simulating the burgeoning overwhelming quality of being in a world full of things, people, impressions. Forgive me purists, but it suddenly reminds me of the scene in “Amelie” where she’s walking with the blind man, rapidly listing all that she sees so that he can experience the comprehensive nature of sight for a minute or two.
Looked up a keyword from this first chunk: “preterition,” from preterite, for which Merriam-Webster’s gives the following definitions, which kind of helped me in sorting out where Pynchon might be going with all the rockets and erections and bananas:
1) completed, in the past (grammar: the preterite tense)
[like the rockets, by the time you hear them]
2) one who believes the prophecies of Revelation have already been fulfilled
[WW II as Armageddon? The End precedes the story?]
3) an action by God to pass over the non-elect
[“Why hasn’t the Rocket hit me, Pilgrim Slothrop?”]
I’m also taking this in impressionistically…the onslaught of characters makes my sleep-deprived mind spin. Or maybe I’ve just been reading too many Oprah book club books lately…I’m enjoying his manic sense of humor. Especially like some of the lists – my fave was Lt. Slothrop’s “godawful mess” of a desk (p. 18). The names are amusin’ and confusin’ – can he just pick a surname or nickname and stick with it for pete’s sake? I guess so far the Deathmarch has been a really nice dayhike, but it’s getting dark, I’m not sure I’m on the right trail, and I left my matches in the car.
I agree that the fanciful/absurdist names end up seeming distracting, a somewhat dated trope, but manageable, and some of the names have a real nice cadence (Roger Mexico). Also, did Scorpia Moss-something (I forget) remind anyone else of Oedipa Maas?
Per Bill, I agree that this is easier reading than I had anticipated, pleasurable and for the most part not too hard to follow. Yes, there is vocabulary that is daunting (abreaction?) and flights of rhetorical fancy and digressions-within-digressions that can be tricky to sort out, but so far so good.
One thing Tommy the Pynch has done in all his books that I’ve really loved is to change scenes seamlessly based on conversation and narrative. If he is describing a character and in so doing mentions some incident from the past, it’s more than half likely that in the next few sentences he will have switched to that moment in the past as the main line of the narrative. Bewildering, cinematic, fun. Nice work if you can get it.
now that I have figured out WHY the internet ate my comment (something to do with a missing e-mail box in the comment directions) I’ll give it another go….
The parallel universes of writer and his characters are not always meshed; the writer within a pandora’s box of associations, hallucinations, and a bottomless archive of mid-twentieth century americana; the characters trapped in hell with little to do but create small universes of their own mometary pleasures.
As I get into the early para-psy sections — around page 30-50 in the Peng./Viking — I keep thinking of this comic I used to read in the early ’90s — Doom Patrol by the great, the great, the great Grant Morrison — loaded with da da-esque parapsy-goodness. The one I remember best was The Painting That Ate Paris. Seems clear to me now that Grant was a Friend of Old Pynchon.
Did Xian really use the word “trope,” above? That’s, like…gay.
I really do wonder what Pynchon’s thinking/motivation was with all the goofy names, though. Is there any rhyme or reason to the names (Barteley Gobbitch, DeCoverly Pox…), or is it just absurdist for the hell of it?
I think there might be something to the names. I have to admit, most of them seem sort of absurdist and crazy (or go way over my head). But some of the names… Pointsman, for one. In the pages that fall not long after our first rest stop, it starts to seem like maybe he really is a Points Man. He’s all about the Points–1s and 0s, causes and effects. Couldn’t care less about the spaces in between. Now Mexico is all in-between spaces.
But what the hell do I know.
Oh, and then there’s Thunder Prodd. And Reg Le Froyd….
I think Thomas is amusing himself with the names, keeping it loose, playing lots of games but not expecting that we’ll follow every clue.
oh, i definitely think the names are meaningful, or else why risk so much distraction? i generally assume most of them are puns or metaphors or translations of foreign names that sound ordinary to us but mean strange things when translated literally, but who knows? i do find it distracting. it’s not my own aesthetic. in a way, like some of the other aspects, it’s dated, but it is what it is.
frankly, i haven’t read about so many turgid cocks since i was reading william burroughs.
e wrote:
“I think Thomas is amusing himself with the names, keeping it loose, playing lots of games but not expecting that we’ll follow every clue.”
feels like that to me too — like it’s one of the ways he shows us he’s having fun — that it’s high lit and low lit at the same time. Same for ACHTUNG and such.
Or mebbe it’s a partly his brain letting off steam so as not to burn through and drop out onto the floor. Tunk.
Boy, hot trotting this week. Try & get some comments in before running away for the weekend. 1st, for Briggs, last week, the Richard Fariña dedication is for his buddy, the folk singer who died in a motorcycle crash around age 30. Pynch was his best man at RF’s wedding to the 15 year old Mimi Baez, sister of Joan. Richard & Mimi’s music is wonderful, haunting and funny (depending on the song). It’s unapologetically cutting for it’s time. Mimi died a few years ago of cancer.
I like donuts, too. Split an apple fritter with my daughter last week. Glazed buttermilks are good too.
I tried to find a Moss/Maas crossover, but dunno. Should reread 49. Maybe Maas is Moss & Prentice’s kid (?)
The name thang–I still see no need for Mexico to be a British name. In fact to me it grates, in that it reminds me that so many of these Brits don’t sound particularly British. (There IS a good British candy scene at some point in the future.) But most of these folks sound like Americans in my head. Not sure why.
I liked the part about the dog, and that the dog was conditioned by the light of the rocket, far more than whatever Pointsman & Spectro have in mind.
I wonder, with the talk of comics, if this is graspable for us as so many of us grew up on comics and wild thinking. Are we the people meant to read this book? (Maybe we were programmed by THEM to be able to read this book.)
I still need to finish this week’s section. I’m inter-reading a book by SF author Gene Wolfe. If you want to read a book with hideous vocabulary, check out his Book of the New Sun novels. It makes this look like a cake-walk. (The one I’m reading ain’t so bad, thank god.)
Say, when we want to comment mid-march should we do it here or should Cecil set up interim base camps?
’cause I spotted Malcolm X the other day and was wondering if that was just plain obvious or whut.
“frankly, i haven’t read about so many turgid cocks since i was reading william burroughs.”
You’re definitely not going to the right bookstores then. Let me take you to a couple that I know on Polk St. Plenty of turgid cock for everyone.
xian wrote: “Say, when we want to comment mid-march should we do it here or should Cecil set up interim base camps?”
For each week’s post, let’s try to stay (very roughly, no hard n fast rule, just using good judgment) within about 20 pages of the far side of the weekly target to avoid getting into too much spoiler territory….
So far it’s like a great song–lovely sounding language. Sure some of the lyrics are obscure, but the music carries you along. I decided not to look at the companion while reading (though if anyone wants to share tidbits on the first 50 pages, I’d be curious), but I do look up a few words as I go. “Musaceous” sounded promising. Turns out to mean belonging to the banana or plantain family. Will try slipping it into conversation soon….
if kesey’s ‘one flew over the cuckoo’s nest’ was lsd inspired, i wonder what narcotic, nepenthe, or stupefacient inspired pynchie. could help to know, as i may be willing to imbibe it to understand WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON. i read like i’m in a trance, a stream of conscious-reading, wandering, flying, floating, with words that skate and shuffle and poke, but rarely stick.
cecil, this march is for you.
Since many of us read Brautigan, thought I’d toss in something I noticed last time I read Troutfishing in America. The stylistic trick of breaking out of the narrative into a list of things, whether a shopping list, or variations on “the Kenosha Kid,” seems to track back to Thoreau and Walden at least, with a stopover in William Carlos Williams (e.g., Patterson). When Thoreau did it, I think it was out of pure nerdiness and probably for his own amusement. When Brautigan does it, I think it’s because TFA is kind of like Walden revisited, so it feels like a direct reference. When Pynchon does it, I wonder if it’s meant as a tip of the hat, or just a handy, time-tested device for injecting humor and changing the subject? Any reactions?
the internet ate my comment.
So far I’ve been finding this book much less daunting than I remember. I’m not sure why. It may be that this first part is relatively coherent–I remember that I didn’t give up before until more like page 100. I don’t think it’s because I’m smarter than I was before, in fact quite the opposite. It may be that I’m so much less intelligent than I used to be that I no longer realize how much I’m missing.
Or it may be a question of approach. I think that before I tried to stubbornly bull through it at high speed. This moderately paced approach seems to work much better. I’ve found that if you take your time, each individual scene does eventually make sense on its own terms. If you’re having trouble, I recommend scrawling the words “Don’t Panic” in large, friendly letters on the cover.
Speaking of the moderate pace, though, what gives with the increased page load this week?
So-called Bill writes:
“Speaking of the moderate pace, though, what gives with the increased page load this week?”
Cecil responds:
it was a bad break between sections — the choice was either 40 or 60 pages for this leg, and the magic eight-ball said “asking deathmarchers to read an extra 10 pages this week will bring you good fortune.”
Re Zoro’s question bout TFA/Walden, I see it more as a stylistic thing than any direct reference — part of the trance-inducing mesmer Pynchon seems determined to release. Any other thoughts?
So-called Bill sounds very much like real-life Bill; kudos to the pod manufacturer.
Zoro–for the ultimate in list-making novelists see (in a shop somewhere, but perhaps don’t purchase) “Life, A User’s Manual” by Georges Perec. Maybe Perec was referencing the writers you mention as well (or even Pynchon–LAUM came out five years after GR); all I know is that Perec almost killed me with his endless listing listing. But I wonder if Perec’s lists, and Pynchon’s too, are about simulating the burgeoning overwhelming quality of being in a world full of things, people, impressions. Forgive me purists, but it suddenly reminds me of the scene in “Amelie” where she’s walking with the blind man, rapidly listing all that she sees so that he can experience the comprehensive nature of sight for a minute or two.
Looked up a keyword from this first chunk: “preterition,” from preterite, for which Merriam-Webster’s gives the following definitions, which kind of helped me in sorting out where Pynchon might be going with all the rockets and erections and bananas:
1) completed, in the past (grammar: the preterite tense)
[like the rockets, by the time you hear them]
2) one who believes the prophecies of Revelation have already been fulfilled
[WW II as Armageddon? The End precedes the story?]
3) an action by God to pass over the non-elect
[“Why hasn’t the Rocket hit me, Pilgrim Slothrop?”]
I’m also taking this in impressionistically…the onslaught of characters makes my sleep-deprived mind spin. Or maybe I’ve just been reading too many Oprah book club books lately…I’m enjoying his manic sense of humor. Especially like some of the lists – my fave was Lt. Slothrop’s “godawful mess” of a desk (p. 18). The names are amusin’ and confusin’ – can he just pick a surname or nickname and stick with it for pete’s sake? I guess so far the Deathmarch has been a really nice dayhike, but it’s getting dark, I’m not sure I’m on the right trail, and I left my matches in the car.
I agree that the fanciful/absurdist names end up seeming distracting, a somewhat dated trope, but manageable, and some of the names have a real nice cadence (Roger Mexico). Also, did Scorpia Moss-something (I forget) remind anyone else of Oedipa Maas?
Per Bill, I agree that this is easier reading than I had anticipated, pleasurable and for the most part not too hard to follow. Yes, there is vocabulary that is daunting (abreaction?) and flights of rhetorical fancy and digressions-within-digressions that can be tricky to sort out, but so far so good.
One thing Tommy the Pynch has done in all his books that I’ve really loved is to change scenes seamlessly based on conversation and narrative. If he is describing a character and in so doing mentions some incident from the past, it’s more than half likely that in the next few sentences he will have switched to that moment in the past as the main line of the narrative. Bewildering, cinematic, fun. Nice work if you can get it.
now that I have figured out WHY the internet ate my comment (something to do with a missing e-mail box in the comment directions) I’ll give it another go….
The parallel universes of writer and his characters are not always meshed; the writer within a pandora’s box of associations, hallucinations, and a bottomless archive of mid-twentieth century americana; the characters trapped in hell with little to do but create small universes of their own mometary pleasures.
I like donuts.
for the most erudite marchers, a video clip link to pynchon’s ‘simpsons’ appearance, and bonus, one artist’s illustration of the GR world.
http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/TRP_simpsons.html
http://www.themodernword.com/gr/
my burning question of the day….why is Jeff funny? (also, where is the donut?).
As I get into the early para-psy sections — around page 30-50 in the Peng./Viking — I keep thinking of this comic I used to read in the early ’90s — Doom Patrol by the great, the great, the great Grant Morrison — loaded with da da-esque parapsy-goodness. The one I remember best was The Painting That Ate Paris. Seems clear to me now that Grant was a Friend of Old Pynchon.
Did Xian really use the word “trope,” above? That’s, like…gay.
I really do wonder what Pynchon’s thinking/motivation was with all the goofy names, though. Is there any rhyme or reason to the names (Barteley Gobbitch, DeCoverly Pox…), or is it just absurdist for the hell of it?
google says, “did you mean barteley go bitch?”
I think there might be something to the names. I have to admit, most of them seem sort of absurdist and crazy (or go way over my head). But some of the names… Pointsman, for one. In the pages that fall not long after our first rest stop, it starts to seem like maybe he really is a Points Man. He’s all about the Points–1s and 0s, causes and effects. Couldn’t care less about the spaces in between. Now Mexico is all in-between spaces.
But what the hell do I know.
Oh, and then there’s Thunder Prodd. And Reg Le Froyd….
I think Thomas is amusing himself with the names, keeping it loose, playing lots of games but not expecting that we’ll follow every clue.
oh, i definitely think the names are meaningful, or else why risk so much distraction? i generally assume most of them are puns or metaphors or translations of foreign names that sound ordinary to us but mean strange things when translated literally, but who knows? i do find it distracting. it’s not my own aesthetic. in a way, like some of the other aspects, it’s dated, but it is what it is.
frankly, i haven’t read about so many turgid cocks since i was reading william burroughs.
e wrote:
“I think Thomas is amusing himself with the names, keeping it loose, playing lots of games but not expecting that we’ll follow every clue.”
feels like that to me too — like it’s one of the ways he shows us he’s having fun — that it’s high lit and low lit at the same time. Same for ACHTUNG and such.
Or mebbe it’s a partly his brain letting off steam so as not to burn through and drop out onto the floor. Tunk.
Boy, hot trotting this week. Try & get some comments in before running away for the weekend. 1st, for Briggs, last week, the Richard Fariña dedication is for his buddy, the folk singer who died in a motorcycle crash around age 30. Pynch was his best man at RF’s wedding to the 15 year old Mimi Baez, sister of Joan. Richard & Mimi’s music is wonderful, haunting and funny (depending on the song). It’s unapologetically cutting for it’s time. Mimi died a few years ago of cancer.
I like donuts, too. Split an apple fritter with my daughter last week. Glazed buttermilks are good too.
I tried to find a Moss/Maas crossover, but dunno. Should reread 49. Maybe Maas is Moss & Prentice’s kid (?)
The name thang–I still see no need for Mexico to be a British name. In fact to me it grates, in that it reminds me that so many of these Brits don’t sound particularly British. (There IS a good British candy scene at some point in the future.) But most of these folks sound like Americans in my head. Not sure why.
I liked the part about the dog, and that the dog was conditioned by the light of the rocket, far more than whatever Pointsman & Spectro have in mind.
I wonder, with the talk of comics, if this is graspable for us as so many of us grew up on comics and wild thinking. Are we the people meant to read this book? (Maybe we were programmed by THEM to be able to read this book.)
I still need to finish this week’s section. I’m inter-reading a book by SF author Gene Wolfe. If you want to read a book with hideous vocabulary, check out his Book of the New Sun novels. It makes this look like a cake-walk. (The one I’m reading ain’t so bad, thank god.)
Say, when we want to comment mid-march should we do it here or should Cecil set up interim base camps?
’cause I spotted Malcolm X the other day and was wondering if that was just plain obvious or whut.
“frankly, i haven’t read about so many turgid cocks since i was reading william burroughs.”
You’re definitely not going to the right bookstores then. Let me take you to a couple that I know on Polk St. Plenty of turgid cock for everyone.
hmm. deep breath.
mental palette cleansed?
so xian–i missed the malcolm x reference or i haven’t gotten there yet. can you elaborate?
xian wrote: “Say, when we want to comment mid-march should we do it here or should Cecil set up interim base camps?”
For each week’s post, let’s try to stay (very roughly, no hard n fast rule, just using good judgment) within about 20 pages of the far side of the weekly target to avoid getting into too much spoiler territory….