Well this is it — the last stop before the final push! Just 7 days till we receive Ultimate Wisdom! Woo!
I enjoyed the last week’s reading, packed with taffy bits, although I’ll confess to getting pretty lost during the FF sequence. I’ll hafta go back and give that another read.
One recent passage I thought I’d pull out for the thread, on page 691 (p/v): “You didn’t like the haiku. It wasn’t ethereal enough? Not Japanese at all? In fact it sounded like something right outa Hollywood? Well, captain — yes you, Marine Captain Esberg from Pasadena — you have just had, the Mystery Insight! (gasps and a burst of premonitory applause) and so you — are our Paranoid . . . For The Day!)” which I thought was a really nice explicit statement re what we’ve talked about a fair bit here on the thread — the often cartoony/genre-heavy/cinematic style of the proceedings. It doesn’t necessarily say why he’s doing it, but at least it does say that we’re all named Captain Esberg from Pasadena. And again: Woo!
Next week: What can I say? See you on the other side. Perhaps it’ll be like the end of Narnia, and we’ll all be partying with the dead. Reepicheep! Peter Sachsa! Here I come!
Suggested subtitle for GR: “Hereros and Villains.”
Smiles,
Rodney
dearest patient cecil: i promise something pithy and relevant before week’s end.
This week so-called “e” tipped me off to the existence of a 1977 article by one Jules Siegel entitled “Who Is Thomas Pynchon…and Why Did He Take Off with My Wife?” Published in Playboy in 1977, this is a rambling and self-indulgent piece by a sometime friend of Pynchon’s who lived next door to him in a Cornell dorm. The somewhat misleading title refers to the fact that Pynchon apparently had an affair with Siegel’s wife; at no point, as far as I can tell, did he “take off” with her.
Anyway, amid numerous dope-smoking scenes, there are a few interesting insights into Mr. P, especially this one:
“One afternoon, Chrissie and I drove out to Manhattan Beach to see Tom, talking along with us some grass we had scored at a be-in in Griffith Park. Tom was then living in a two-room studio with kitchen that had evidently been converted from a garage. It was on a side street a couple of blocks up from the beach. The decoration was pretty much the same. A built-in bookcase had rows of piggy bands on each shelf and there was a collection of books and magazines about pigs. The kitchen cabinets contained not groceries but many empty Hills Brothers coffee cans in orderly array, as if displayed on supermarket shelves.
“His desk sat next to a window in the small living room. It had a clutter of miscellaneous papers, letters from obscure publications pleading for articles, an Olivetti portable typewriter, a thick stack of that graph paper covered with his fine script—the draft of “Gravity’s Rainbow,” which he was in the process of typing and rewriting. He felt that he had rushed through “The Crying of Lot 49” in order to get the money. He was taking no such chance with the new book, apparently having begun it soon after the publication of “V.,” interrupting it to write “The Crying of Lot 49.” Much of the draft was done in Mexico. “I was so fucked up while I was writing it,” he said, “that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can’t figure out what I could have meant.”
Elton John’s “Rocketman” graces the airwaves, and I bite through 700 pages during the chorus alone. All cock and kaboom in this book–I can’t help but feel my sex stinking in the text. Could a woman ever write anything so distasteful or indulgent or engineered? Do women even respond to TP? His books, I mean… the guy’s a scrag–my dog wouldn’t wag for him.
dan m: I enjoyed the hell out of that post — well worth the wait. I mean, ya know, i happen ta disagree, but what lovely writing. It’s like anti-log rolling. I’d love to see that in amongst the NYT etc quotes in some obscure Hungarian paperback edition of GR. And then in bold type on the back cover: “the guy’s a scrag–my dog wouldn’t wag for him!” (they’d add the exclamation mark without asking first — bastards!)
hi dan m.
one woman here, and
i love this book. love it.
found it beautiful, funny, accurate in the tiny tender particulars, crazed, creepy, and much else.
i will read it again, and everything else he’s written.
Look, this thing’s a masterpiece. Endcap it perpetually in Borders, teach it in the colleges, make Americans recite passages at ballgames. The best of ‘60s loopiness yoked to Great American Novel-sized ambition. Take THAT Europa—we’ve got a bull of our own.
Enjoyment topped out for me at about Brennschluss though. Since then it’s been the same soup—really really good soup, but pretty much the same chunks floating in every spoonful. I keep comparing Pynchon to Joyce in the intricacy and sense of omniscient mastery over every conceivable register of life—that feeling there’s nothing the writer can’t do or doesn’t know—and to Kerouac in the speedy rhythm, listy riffs, and joyful Americanismo.
Forced to choose though, I’d put Ulysses or Visions of Cody on that perpetual endcap over GR. The book wants it both ways, it wants a gleaming Modernist structure that intimidates with its grandeur and a spontaneous bop rhythm that’s open to the jazzy thrill of the random. For me, the one tends to undercuts the other: the druggy spontaneous bits come to feel like part of a larger message or purpose (one you’re never fully hip to), while the Great Themes over time can look like just excuses for inspired blowing. The prose is often pretty and very funny and always masterful. But maybe that’s just it—Pynchon’s unwillingness to give up mastery, in a story where only the anarchists are heroes. A great book, but not a reengineering of The Novel like those other two are: it’s an extension of the existing unit’s rooms.
I’ll say something nice though before the week’s out because it’s really a tour de force, and only draws these criticisms because it blasts for the stars.
Almost done now–and I see what you mean, Rodney. Same soup, but it manages to retain some heat. The effect is even more expansive for me: it’s all the same meal, perhaps.
I agree also that the celestial ambitions of GR kind of hamper, or at least confound, my reading experience–I feel as though Pynchon never chooses to exclude whatever nut of language is fermenting in his noggin, and yet he deliberately structures GR with every friggin’ rhetorical scaffold the novel knows–flashing backward and forward (analepsis / prolepsis) and disordering time (hysteron proteron). It’s a buggy split, and it makes for a dense, “literary” text that begs attention even while parading its own prosody (my favorite parts do exactly that). What to take seriously, I don’t know. I guess I like not knowing, and I definitely like the idea of a text that’s ambivalent about its sincerity–can you get away with a book this unwieldy without a sense of flagrant humor? I think Ulysses a more experimental novel, less accessible to me anyway, but not as joyfully neurotic as GR.
my favorite line of the book comes at 727:
“…a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle.”
done and done, not sure a re-read is in my future but i bet i would get a lot more out the second time around. already started another book and i’m flying, gravity seems to now have the reverse effect.
Quick note to Rodney –
the original working title for GR was “Mindless Pleasures.”
Entertaining, short 1997 CNN piece here on Pynchon’s anonymity. Not too much meat to it, but a fun, quick read anyway.
Right around page 725 today. Almost there, almost there….
Ok. I think I followed the storyline much better this time (20 odd years later). It was just gibberish last time. I even think I have some idea of what Blicero was doing. I’m still a bit unclear on the final resolution of the Herero-gerat, and which rocket is mentioned at the end. (I’m trying not to spoil anything but still get some questions out.) Which still leaves me wondering why the final scene is set where & when it is.
I just found an item on Wikipedia which might tie into the final scene. Keep in mind it is a SPOILER:
“In reality, a V-2 rocket hit the Rex Cinema in Antwerp on December 16, 1944 where some 1200 people were watching the movie The Plainsman killing 567 people, the most that were killed by a single rocket during the whole war.” Tony again: The Plainsman is a film with Gary Cooper as Hickock in love iwht Calamity Jane. Can’t find any tie-in to the book, but I think of Crouchfield.
END Spoiler
I’ve got a bunch more questions & am looking forward to discussing them face to face with everyone when they’re done.
By the By, Wikipedia’s entry on the book had a screwed reference to the group in the book The Fool. Someone, probably from the CA band, linked them to the book’s entry. Well, I was amused, anyway.
Good luck to all.
i’m done.
i’m content.
and the serpent holds its tail in its mouth.
Finished – it’s ok.
Just kidding; what a ride – but I agree with rodney k.’s comment at the top of his post. The last act tends to drag. Thanks to captain m. for the info re: the movie theater at the end. And thanks to everyone for their comments and points and information and everything. Enjoyed doing this as part of a group. Thanks to CV for making it happen – obviously the cat’s got too much time on his hands. Love to all.
keep meaning to mention to those who have finished up–i finally let myself read the NYT book review of GR, published in 1973. glad i waited as it would’ve spoiled things a bit. but having gotten through now–and without giving anything away–i can say that the review helped put the vastness of what TP did in perspective and it was illuminating about likely influences. i think the reviewer made a factual mistake toward the beginning of the piece on a subject of interest to me, but i’ll save that question until everyone’s done. now, if you read the review too, you can support my point or annihilate me when the time comes. what fun!
see–hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/reviews.html
Quick note to e. that I hope isn’t really a spoiler.
Structurally, a lot of critics compare the “shape” of the story to the arc of a rocket. The dispersal of Slothrop often gets compared to a MIRV.
This reading allows a couple of thoughts:
1) Mickey Rooney’s appearance is near the story’s enter. Slothrop is pretty close to the height of his powers in Potsdam. Rooney, OTOH, had been the highest paid star in Hollywood before WWII and though he still had a career it was never as big after the war. If he were in Potsdam, it could easily be seen as his lowest point.
2) Pynchon loves harmonic motion metaphors. The structure V. in no uncertain terms (one character is even called a yo-yo in a chapter heading). The rockets arc and simple harmonic motion are similar – but for the rocket’s path being a mirror
image of a pendulum’s swing and the fact that it is
non-repeatable. But until everyone’s finished, it’s
best not to discuss finality.
Zak Smith illustrated every page of Gravity’s Rainbow
Wow, we could have used Zak Smith’s Illustrations For Each Page of Gravity’s Rainbow on the deathmarch….