I'm not sure where I am in reference to where we're supposed to be. My big library copy was repossessed, and I'm stuck again with the crappy paperback & tiny type. This whole area seems to have a lot less Slothy & more out & out explication of the cosmic forces. It's almost as if the time since the Anubis the book is spending more time in some sort of cosmic dream world where the boundaries of life, death, dreams, and reality are fluid. (Yet by contrast Slothy's now running around dressed as an archetypal pig. Perhaps he represents us all wallowing in the filth of materiality.)

I like the idea of Orpheus, but he keeps running into damaged Eurydices that he can't be bothered to reclaim from death. Pokler would like to reclaim his Ilse, I think, more than Slothrop Bianca.

Thank goshness for the various web explications, otherwise I would've been totally lost in the Pirate Prentice section. Some people claim it's a dream, others a real joint mental state. Does anyone in our group have the definitive answer?

The other thing that's starting to strike me more & more is the reintroduction of the people we left back in England. I just hope in the reading this time I have some grasp of what the hell happens to Slothy, even if he just wansders as a bum around East Germany, or goes home & raises 2.5 children.

It’s a testament to how much the Zone has twisted my mind that, from the first moment it appeared, I was pretty sure that Slothrop was going to screw that pig.

It's a further testament that I was disappointed when he didn’t. Although the thought certainly crossed his mind, which in the Zone counts just as much as actually doing it.

And yes, I can see what happens when you connect the dots on all that, and yes, I am ashamed.

I've been having visions of Mr. P sitting with two flashing knitting needles, strands from threads from many different spools of yarn trailing all around him as he knits, knits his spider web together. Finally the Bland strand has been reincorporated back into the web. p588-591, awesome! "Lucky Bland, to be free of it."

I was wondering if this would be a good time to annouce that I'm finally all caught up. No? Alrighty then.

the cover came off my copy today as I picked it up off the passenger seat of my car. and it's like waking up and finding out that all my fingernails were removed overnight and placed neatly in a row of 10 by my pillow.

just so happens, one of my favorite discussions has some tangential connection to cecil's post...

--------
"This is some kind of plot, right?" Slothrop sucking saliva from velvet pile.

"Everything is some kind of plot, man," Bodine laughing.

"And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways," Solange illustrating with a dance of hands, red-pointed fingervectors.
--------

...and page 614 is even better, but i don't want to spoil it for you.

i'm telling on everybody

This is my shameless 'just for the mug' comment. I gave myself a week's spring break from the Rainbow, liked it, and took another. Life without Pynchon seems more conceivable now than it did a month ago, when I was having trouble holding back to the 50 page limit. I can't shake the feeling that even as Pynchon gathers some of the threads here towards the end, the story's much less like an arc that it is like Osbie Feel's bunch of wildly proliferating bananas--by page 600, you've had banana pancakes, banana shakes, banana cereal, banana toast, banana splits, banana cream pie, etc. Now I like bananas as much as the next guy. And I realize there are sound philosophical reasons for not writing the umpteenth 'arc' book in Western lit. It's just, well maybe it's just me, probably is, I'm just feeling a little banana'd-out.

The good C.V. tells me my last comment reads like a 'suicide note', so I'd better clarify that I'm still on the march, just with a few blisters on my feet to account for the pique. Forgive! We'll see this thing through together, right to the final blast. Onward!

All the movie/theater references throughout the book made it all to easy for me to imagine the Slothrop-in-a-Pig-Suit sequence as a Blake Edwards production starring Peter Sellers as our hapless-but-invulnerable protagonist. Of course, Blake Edwards would probaly have stopped more than slightly short of having Marvey don the suit and suffer a fate that while perhaps deserved was pretty unpleasant to contemplate.

Arggh. Been behind so long it looks like ahead to me... But still plugging along in der Zone. Looking forward to the pig section -- sounds like dressup Deliverance. The tone/'tude of the Rocketman section reminds me of Kavalier and Clay hero fantasies.

last night I dreamt that I was in a meeting at work and someone was taking notes. And when I looked over at their notes, I saw that 5 of the points they'd written down were "Enzian."

About "There Is No Arc": I recall telling Cecil a few weeks ago that the arc of the book is from complex to straightforward to complex again. CV was whining that the going was getting too easy; I think my exact words were, "Don't worry, he'll stir shit up again before we're through." Some of the comments are reflecting that ("cosmic dream world"), and folks should not mistake this confusion for accidental or some kind of hurdle to the real purpose of the book.

The point of GR is not principally to learn lessons from the development of characters therein (a favorite definition of "novel" by a favorite professor). The point is the exercise of language, especially such exercises as will avoid boring Pynchon. I don't know whether he wants to whip a woman's breast with rose thorns, or blow up a fat man dressed as Plechazunga, but he definitely wants to put those words next each other to see their effect. The putting is sometimes arranging and sometimes slapping on the book canvas; although he can draw a straight line, he's more often Pollack than Mondrian. Characters and development are alternately a tool toward language (Mondrian) or an accidental outcome of it (Pollack).

Blake Edwards is an excellent but deceptive comparison. Edwards would have arranged the scene for its visual incongruity, but he would have had something to teach us about the character at the same time. In Pynchon, we might learn, we might see a character develop, but Pynchon doesn't care whether we do or not; that's incidental to the mental-visual impact of the word scene.

After 500+ pages, I find my brain working with less than the usual keenness.

Cecil, I think you missed the best blog subtitle: "Take that, you frauds out there in the Branches."

"CV was whining that the going was getting too easy..."

Too easy? Madness! That must have been right after my last dose of sodium amytal....