so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

I think it is very hard also. It took me c. 2 years to read. Wasted years? Maybe.

It is queer the number of people who talk about stopping at the bananas.

i've never read any postmodern lit (except lot 49 before this) because i hate it in theory, it's not my fave and i'm certain this won't be my fave either but it is fun as a lark, even an exteremely extended one. plus many wonderful discoveries await if you have patience, like the bit about the dodoes...

sorry im typing like this, i don't usually i don't think but...lots of caffiene.

where i stopped last [this] night [morning]: (slothrop has just bumbed into an old female companion in the street and is going up to her landlady's)

Mrs. Quoad's is up three dark flights, with the dome of faraway St. Paul's out its kitchen window visible in the smoke of certain afternoons, and the lady herself tiny in a rose plush chair in the sitting-room by the wireless, listening to Primo Scala's Accordion Band. She looks healthy enough. On the table, though, is her crumpled chiffon handkerchief: feathered blots of blood in and out the convolutions like a floral pattern.

and where i picked up this morning [afternoon]:

"You were here when I had that horrid quotidian ague," she recalls Slothrop, "the day we brewed the wormwood tea," sure enough, the very taste now, rising through his shoe-soles, taking him along. They're reassembling . . . it must be outside his memory . . . cool clean interior, girl and woman, independent of his shorthand of stars . . . so many fading-faced girls, windy canalsides, bed-sitters, bus-stop good-bys, how can he be expected to remember? but this room has gone on carifying: part of whoever he was inside has kindly remained, stored quiescent these months outside his head, distributed throygh all the grainy shadows, the grease-hazy jars of herbs, candies, spices; all the Compton Mackenzie novels on the shelf, glassy ambrotypes of her late husband Austin night-dusted inside gilded frams up on the mantel where last time Michaelmas daisies greeted and razzled from a little Sevres vase she and Austin found together one Saturday long ago in a Wardour Street shop. . . .

well that's fantastic, isn't it? and it isn't why isn't it???

that passage above is followed by a literally LOL scene where slothrop is gorged by each with the most unspeakably vile candies known to man. yeah this book is pretty genius and i am SO sorry about all the typos there...nevermind i guess but it is a typically great paragraph, trust me.

With almost any other writer there is, I can suppress this kind of idiotic neurotic questioning, but Tommy P gets me fired up every time.

i'm sorry i'm way too fucked up to discuss this right now but have you ever read any ts eliot? i promise to talk more later.

Post-modern lit in general yes is obnoxious but do not discount Donald Barthelme or early John Barth (through Chimera) if you are enjoying Gravity's Rainbow this much.

There's one other thing I just remembered about the style/plot split. The National Book Award selection committee chose Gravity's Rainbow under some kind of protest about its supposed unreadability. Pynchon sent a clown to accept the award.

That and the banana nausea thing early on were the two bits I enjoyed.

I think it may be slightly unhelpful to talk about GR as PoMo lit. I guess I would call it post-Beat, post-hippy, post-'permissive-age' / The 1960s / whatever US Romantic espionage fiction. But possibly for some that means PoMo.

The scene with Slothrop and the English girl I found offensive, or at least annoying. I have said often before, and seem to be saying again: the book is oversexed, sexually obsessed, crammed with promiscuity and rampant (male) infidelity, to an extent that to me was odious.

i haven't read this, at all, over the past three days. but tonight i will probably read some.

esotericness wasn't what got me, rather the bloated boringness. my eyes glazed over at the banana roll-call, and i skipped and skimmed around for several years running.

I don't know what 'hazmat' means.

(Haz - Hazardous Mat - Materials)

ugh. i hated catch 22. i think i have a problem with the late-modernist masculine canon.

Got much less bogged down the second time around - the first time there was definitely too much to take in all at once.

I've read Vineland twice too, and considering rereading M&D pretty soon - again, the sheer density means I probably missed a lot of the nuances first time around.

When I said 'I don't really agree', that meant, largely: 'you like the book and I don't'. I don't think I had very specific points in mind. But I will look and think, about that.

http://www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html

The long Gerald Howard piece is pretty interesting.

I loved all of the little anecdotes sprinkled throughout, like the alliterative restaurant dishes (pubic parfait and whatnot), Benny the Bulb, the boat that magically missed the torpedos, Roger Mexico pissing all over the boardroom and then crawling out under the table, etc. I like how Pynchon maintains a jovial/fantastical feel through most of the book, I don't think it'd be near as great if he was writing a realistic narrative. And has there ever been a more musical book? There was a song every ten pages it seemed

I have to say though that the pedophilia, poop-eating, toilet-diving, etc. made me squirm while I read it and grew somewhat tiresome by the end. I'll probably pick up the commentary book at some point and re-read GR with it, but before I read any more Pynchon, I need a few years off. Phew!

j., though there are places that made me laugh i think of it as closer to, i dunno, reading comic books; most of the gags aim for amusement or wonder, instead of laffs.

what was the moment you were like 'my god I'm finishing this wonderful bastard'

mine prob custard pie dogfight

it's no good. at some point reading becomes a merely mechanical activity, the neurons or whatever stop carrying the information to my brain out of self-defense, and eventually i give in and start paying attention to what my nervous system is telling me.

maybe it would help to think of as a series and only read like 150 pages at a time, then read a different book, then try another 150 pages

this has worked for me

what was the moment you were like 'my god I'm finishing this wonderful bastard'

i had a basically antagonistic relationship toward its length throughout so i was not certain i would actually finish it until the last 50 or so pages. even then, tbh, the indecipherable (to me) tarot readings in the last twenty pages nearly defeated me straw that broke the camel’s back style. it does get “easier” after the first 200 pages but there are still so many pockets of difficulty (tchitcherine’s and enzian’s hallucinatory visions of the zone, etc.). i know the object is to breeze through it as quickly as possible but i ended up always dwelling on passages i didn’t understand. weirdly however the hardest time i had motivating myself to keep reading was during the long slapsticky passages in the zone (aerial pie fight excepted)

pökler interlude is basically when i thought “i’m glad i did this”. before that i would thrill at any bend in time (the torpedo section). marvy getting inadvertently castrated was oddly satisfying

i loved that the tchitcherine/enzian conflict built to an anticlimax, one of the strongest passages in the book

oh wait, i know, i knew i was gonna finish this in part four when thanatz gets on the boat with the dude who really wants to get struck by lightning, and that section’s transition into the immortal messianic lightbulb stuff is so good

i think the disintegrated last part is the hardest and most alienating section by far. but by then yr pretty, as it were, locked in.

like, the nixon bit-- hard to think of another book i'd tolerate that in.

byron tho a major work of short american prose fiction prob. u can read it alone as a lil borges thing even (but you shouldn't).

yep!

the story behind the nixon epigraph is so hilarious imo

oh, the epigraph is great. meant the, is it "zhlubb"? part.

yeah that’s what i thought u meant

it took me a minute to realize that section was a flash forward to the ‘70s

otm that that old imago post is otm (followup about against the day also pretty convincing imo)-- i mean the book is literally a musical, not just with songs but with numbers; plus in certain places (all over but most brutally w the camp/daughter story + most universally w The Integral) the fake? unity of infinitely subdivided time that movies work by is both technique+theme, but yes, maybe only animation accustoms the audience to surreality+discontinuity in the way the book's treatment of this stuff requires?

still think laurie anderson should have called his bluff.

agreed

honestly i think pynchon earnestly wanted that to happen

the taffy skyscraper bit (is that the same bit?) is a crazed flash forward as well

i basically considered all the action plausible right up until the oneurine torpedo, at which point i realised none of it was. but still...it all really happened obv ;)

*oneirine idk

honestly i think pynchon earnestly wanted that to happen

yeah!

think it’s reasonable to assume slothrop didn’t have all that sex

only blicero gets his orgasm :(

(nah there are other orgasms in this book)

lol

btw this is such a rich thread, v thankful for ilx in times like these

Infinite jest slays GR in terms of readability

unfortunately gravity's rainbow has put me in the mood to attack both mason & dixon and against the day but i might hold off for at least another year

i would totally read w/ u, brad

i would much rather read (finish) m&d but i'd do my part for atd too

i'd be down for a group read tbh. too long since i've read pynchon. idk why i even bother to read anything else tbh.

miseducated prolly

I'm jumping into this, but we'll see how far I get. I read V. a few years ago, it had its moments, but didn't make tons of sense to me. So far this is more comprehensible, but I'm sure it won't last.

There are some great, heavily researched guides and supplements online for GR that follow basically page by page. Totally worth it. Really illuminated my reading experience.

One thing I have to say is, at least in my experience, you might be picking up more than you realize. Take those hallucinogenic detours for what they are. Pynchon shoots into space sometimes and you just have to ride it but it always comes back to the ground. Mostly.

Trickiest part for me was remembering the 2,000 or whatever characters. That’s where the guides come in handy.

The first appreciation I've read for Gravity's Rainbow in its 50th anniversary year – many more to come I'm sure. Arguing for Pynchon's relevance but asking – if reality has become as absurd as Pynchon, does that constitute an obstacle to reading him? https://t.co/4mgRk9q32C

— James B (@piercepenniless) February 17, 2023

There are some great, heavily researched guides and supplements online for GR that follow basically page by page. Totally worth it. Really illuminated my reading experience.

I should try that. I've read the book twice, have been contemplating a third read. I think a guide might add something. It did with Ulysses.

Happy 50th birthday!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fp_lwtqXgAMypQK.jpg

hb you amazing fucked-up freak :)

"tussodyne" is a 2023 meme just waiting to unfurl

nice to see Nestlé's original brand name before they went woke

hbtp

having read three copies of this to pieces (original trade paperback w swollen red sun, frank miller penguin classic ew, 70s mass market paperback w rainbow contrails-- this one in many pieces) maybe today is the day to find a copy of that nice earlier penguin w the rocket blueprints on it

...keep hearing thread title in Letterkenny voice...

FIrst read that as "in Lemmy's voice"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99wSTVMRkIk

(6'53" if you don't want to sit through the whole thing)

Hmm...

"These masterpieces have come to Deep Vellum and to Lawton thanks to Andrei, a friend of the press and the founding steward of The Untranslated blog, the seminal reference for great books not yet available to English-speaking audiences. Andrei, a Russian-speaking book blogger from Eastern Europe, launched The Untranslated in 2013. He has described the idea for the blog as having come from reading Gravity’s Rainbow as an undergrad and wondering if there were similar works in other languages."

https://t.e2ma.net/webview/3ss14i/5ba151f32c3c2e783aa4db148566b1e7

First of all, its incredible for a blog to have that much of an impact. That the niche idea it promotes has been taken up is something.

I feel this is all a bit of a dead end. We'll see...while this stuff is still niche there will be a lot more focus on it. I have struggled with The Untranslated's writing on these books.

much as i love gigantic excessive (post)modernism there's something about seeing them all bunched together as a genre that leaves me a little eye-rolly maybe?

the thing that leaves me eye-rolly is that solenoid, while not without interest, was also very much not without boredom - tho i feel equivocal, as some aspects of it have stayed with me. it should be much much shorter tho.

i feel totally unequivocal tho about garden of seven twilights being just utter crap.

so, something’s off. big books doing lumpy or tangled things isn’t enough to justify reading or publication really imo, though fair play to the original blog for surfacing writing, it’s just they’ve all been amplified above their intrinsic power (someone will surely tell me that’s a bad metaphor - that not really being what amplification is but hopefully ykwim)

kinda breaks the veneer of sui generisity right

Feels like Biographical Entries for a Catalogue of Vast Untranslated and Unreadable Postmodern Novels is already its own fully realised metafictional exercise.

This is also, more than anything, another twitter-related production. All of the translators and Andrei are on there constantly tweeting about these things, so something was definitely brewing.

On twitter there was a big bust-up (its niche but you know) with some other people over the translation of this book.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutunamayanlar

Which I think was translated into English by his then partner. Could see them all trashing it one night. These boys are passionate! Which makes me pause, yes.

Atay's short stories are getting a translation. Which I am v much looking forward to.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/waiting-for-the-fear