so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

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

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 :)