so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

conversation's moved on I realise, but cross-media comparisons are always really difficult, and I don't really trust them. I don't think braid-guy is being quite as facile as meaning just 'smart people' by referring to GR, but clearly referring to GR in bookland is going to be suggesting a more focused set of distinctions or a different sort of status to that of referring to it wrt games: people who are happy with non-linear, interrupted progress, and whose definition of 'fun' includes being challenged is probably the broad set of ideas at play here.

but yeah - dlh's 'theme pervades mechanics' point v s clover's nazis/sex: comparisons usually seem based on looks like (this thing has a lot of the same content as the thing to which it's being compared, nazis and sex, and maths and London presumably), feels like - (experience of playing is like the experience of reading or watching or whatever), and behaves like ('authorial' attempts to match a layer of innovation in the originating work with a meainingful level of innovation in the target work)

all of this feels a bit of a faff though, other than as a recommendation to let the experience of reading or watching something interesting, which does novel things with form or content or whatever, being an encouragement to do the same in your area. plus I'm not convinced these things map meaningfully from books to tv/films, let alone games.

no matter the interesting mechanics my experience of braid was, once I'd applied myself to achieve a certain degree of progress through it, one of inutile frustration and boredom (ie I was crap at it bcos stupid). in this respect the best comparison was that Calder edition of The Childermass I've got, which inadvertently replicates 30-odd pages of dense and clamorous theological-political polemic, which I read without realising it had been inadvertently repeated, and even when I began to suspect, I thought might be some beckettian literary game of hate with the reader and therefore I should experience it to get the full flavour. it wasn't. it was a printing error.

or 'material bug' or whatever.

my point wasn't just "looks like" but particularly "feels like" -- GR is weird and surprising and funny and outlandish and often cartoonish. blow's stuff is delicate and precocious. and that's also behaves like. GR is really not a _formally_ innovative book in any sense except for the zaniness of its plotting and cross-cutting (and perhaps the degree to which multiple themes are interwoven). Like if you want actual po-mo experimental literature there are much better exemplars. He has none of the concern with texts, the reader, textuality, that pervade the other stuff. None of those anxieties. There's fourth-wall breaking, sure, but in a casual offhand way that just sort of recognizes it as one of the grand tricks of the trade.

frederik that's a great stat, where on earth is it from

― carly rae jetson (thomp), 31. januar 2016 11:49 (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

From one of the monographs I used for my thesis, don't have it here to backtrack. Also, old factoid, might not be true still.

that Calder edition of The Childermass I've got, which inadvertently replicates 30-odd pages of dense and clamorous theological-political polemic, which I read without realising it had been inadvertently repeated, and even when I began to suspect, I thought might be some beckettian literary game of hate with the reader and therefore I should experience it to get the full flavour. it wasn't. it was a printing error.

please tell me it's not the old calder jupiter books edition from the sixties :-/
(though should probably give it a reread before attempting the two later parts)

it is. I'll dig it out and find chapter and verse. frankly it's not that much worth re-reading apart from the wonderful first few pages. monstre gai is excellent.

lol i actually started gravitys rainbow yesterday. loving it so far.

s.clover's post kinda confuses me, i always felt like gravity's rainbow and crying of lot 49 were very similar, they both have that "everything is connected, but nothing makes sense" theme and also the big critique of the modern military-industrial complex. gravity's rainbow has the added nuclear anxiety thread to it and just generally gets deeper and deeper into everything that col49 gets into but in my mind it's kind of portrait of the artist / ulysses type of thing.

― the late great, Thursday, May 10, 2012 1:01 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, Clover is right that GR isn't really about WWII per se either. I always imagine it as a veiled Vietnam book, concerning P's sense of guilt over "working on" the Minuteman ICBM (used heavily in Vietnam) while working at Boeing (I think he edited the in-house newsletter or something). His girlfriend from the time said all the main characters were based on people in their circle (apologies for the excessively biographical reading!) and it does end in the present, after all. That same girlfriend said P often like to wear disguises and playact that he was a spy or something in postwar Germany.

If anyone's interested, there is a podcast called Pynchon in Public and they are about to begin discussing GR. I wish it was a little more academic, but it's vaguely interesting.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/09/searching-for-nazi-gold

GR isn't really about WWII per se either. I always imagine it as a veiled Vietnam book

it's a book about the imaginative & organizational proclivities practiced by europeans for centuries that could, at their zenith (so to speak), bring about something like wwii, and their persistence into the vietnam era, imo.

also lots of digging and burying things underground, some of which can now be found

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/germany-moves-to-atone-for-forgotten-genocide-in-namibia

Rukoro, the Herero chief, rejected what he called Germany’s “chequebook diplomacy” and bilateral dealings with the Namibian government. “Guess what: the Hereros and the Namas of Namibia will never … declare ceasefire with generations of German governments to come. Our war will continue,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/science/giant-squid-eyes-brain-lobes.html

As for why giant squids even need such big eyes, previous research has suggested that their eyesight is uniquely adapted to spotting faint clouds of bioluminescence that indicate a sperm whale — their main known predator — is approaching from a distance.

This new study supports that conclusion, Dr. Chiao said, by showing that the part of the giant squid’s optic lobe that processes visual information is indeed rich with neurons. It also shows that giant squids probably don’t use that information to perform the complex and dramatic appearance changes other cephalopods are famous for.

After all, when you live in near-total darkness, what you’re wearing likely doesn’t matter, Dr. Chiao said.

hey i've only got 100 pages left of this goddamn thing

imo they should really retitle it This Goddamn Thing

spoiler: on the final page it says "you've been punked!"

my favorite section in the book i think is franz pökler's vacations with maybe-ilse

spoiler: on the final page it says "you've been punked!"

― A is for (Aimless), Tuesday, May 1, 2018 1:44 PM (eleven seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this would be a completely fair way for it to end so i kinda experienced a dual-lol there

I have fond memories of reading GR for the first (and only, but plan on revisiting) time like 5 summers ago.

Coincidentally I'm currently a few hundred pages into Mason & Dixon. It's fun!

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

my favorite section in the book i think is franz pökler's vacations with maybe-ilse

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), 1. maj 2018 22:44 (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, this is amazing. The whole book is so high-strung and outrageous, but the sad and more low-key parts really hits as well. There's one part, which from memory goes something like He likes to tell them about fireflies. English girls know nothing about fireflies, and that's the only thing Slothrop knows about English girls. Out of knowhere, and the homesick loneliness of it gets me every time.

That section is haunting, I’ve forgotten a fair bit of the book but that sticks

the big franz pokler chapter is like a 40-page wave of brutality. it's hard to do much else after it ends

just finished! that was. really good

poor gottfried

it's a book about the imaginative & organizational proclivities practiced by europeans for centuries that could, at their zenith (so to speak), bring about something like wwii, and their persistence into the vietnam era, imo.

also lots of digging and burying things underground, some of which can now be found

― sciatica, Monday, May 2, 2016 11:12 AM (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a great post

The ending of GR makes me too weepy to face it some days

Mason & Dixon is even better

this would make for the greatest movie of course but only really if done as a ten-hour anime

this old lj post is prob easy to make fun of but i’ve been thinking about gr’s overall relationship to film and how often its long descriptive passages feel like scene setting in a film script, but the sudden tonal shifts prob wouldn’t work as well in a live action film as in animation bc it’s fundamentally a looney tune

“Which would you rather do? The point is,” cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, “a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,” shaking his skinny old fist, “there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!”

― s.clover, Tuesday, May 15, 2012 11:00 AM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

poptimism

i've slowly come to accept that i'm simply not smart enough to read gravity's rainbow, and i'm ok with that

*i* am not smart enough to read gravity’s rainbow

just hold the reins and ride

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