Gravity Rainbow Reading Group: Thread #2

I parallel-read shorter and lighter things to keep me charged up

How did you like Man and His Symbols?

my copy of GR just got delivered today. The new Penguin publishing one. Super excited, cant wait to finish my current read (IJ, page 660 or so..loving it) to start this one.

For those of you who've started GR, in your opinion is this something best read with a guide open on a laptop/tablet/phone next to you? Or is it fine to just read GR any old place and not worry too much about 'getting' all of the references and what not.

I'm 400p in and I still don't really know. Mostly I read through chapters whole and then look in the guide for that chapter.

I feel like it wouldn't be as great as an experience if I haven't been using some kind of aid.

There are so many times in this book that you could just misinterpret something.

But you do you

Thanks. I like the freedom of reading wherever I want, plus whenever I use the wallacewiki to accompany my IJ reading my lack of discipline leads to me watching random YouTube videos instead of reading.

I think in the beginning I'll use an aid and decide if I'll continue to do so after I get used to the novel.

I hope to make up for the previous days and continue reading GR with this thread. It's been a while since I've finished V and I really miss reading quality literature, especially since I had to drop most of my art-realted stuff lately due to studying IT - hence the "hope". Still I'm afraid if this eagerness won't burn out due to the winter exams... Also I'm a non-native speaker, and getting confused about the more convoluted sentences doesn't help at all with understanding the surreal plot.

I'm really suprised to meet such a constructive idea on this board, even though it's very appropriate. Last time I checked it was all memes and shitposting as the rest of Veeky Forums.

I was much more impressed by it than I thought I was going to be. I like the general theory of archetypes a lot, but the way Jung uses them to interpret dreams seems dubious. I think their best use would be in evolution and anthropology from a psychology perspective, and I think they could actually lend a great deal to contemporary metaphysics if they're brought in the right way.
The stuff on individuation and the basic framework about archetypes are great and I plan to read more of Jung's writings about them, but the chapters on ancient myths and art get really strange and aren't very scientifically or philosophically rigorous.

We're here anytime.

Also since you're the IT wizard: Why does my wifi sometimes just not connect at all? I'll unplug and replug and things will be fine.

Why does this happen

---
Kevin Spectro is definitely a parody of a Nazi scientist, yes?

>For those of you who've started GR, in your opinion is this something best read with a guide open on a laptop/tablet/phone next to you? Or is it fine to just read GR any old place and not worry too much about 'getting' all of the references and what not.

No one gets it on the first read. It's necessary to read it twice, not just because it's difficult but because of the circular structure. Do whatever it takes to finish it on your first read. On the second read it would be best to do some research.

Have you tried updating your wlan card drivers? If this won't help I'd blame the hardware as it doesn't sound like there's a problem with too much noise/ weak signal (replugging wouldn't work)

Please add page numbers. Even if they don't line up across all editions, it would still be a marked improvement to have a quicker reference point than adding page chunks ontop of eachother.

Updated with page numbers. The edition I'm reading is the Penguin Edition, published in 2000.

Schedule man saves the day once more.
Thank you

This reading was pretty dark. Felt a bit heavy

>You have waited in these places into the early mornings, synced in to the on-whitening of the interior, you know the Arrivals schedule by heart, by hollow heart.

I like this style, any other books like this?

Brace yourselves for the Slothrop sodium amytal dream sequence in tomorrow's reading, it's a strange one

>This reading was pretty dark. Felt a bit heavy
Buckle up, the roller coaster man just put the harness over you and gave the signal, you see that vertical tower ahead the ride slowly creeps up, quickly

Where's our Pirate Prentice friend?

These Jessica and Roger narrative is cool and all but I want some more banana action

from what I have heard instead of like 6 characters making bulk time appearance (like many novels) this has hundreds of characters that may or may not appear much or again

Tell your PC (probably windows 10 or 7 I'm guessing) to forget your wireless access point. Then unplug your WiFi Box from power, then after 45 seconds plug it back in. Then after 1 more minute, re-add your WiFi network on your PC.

I have to do this like 3 tikes a year on my work laptop.

Can someone sauce me up on where this pic is from? I want cozy reading books with sis feels

I'm just joining in so I'll have to catchup. I feel like brainlet though from my recent reading attempts.

This looks fun but I am too brainlet to read this.
Let's do this for Moby dick too, please?

That is what this thread is for, user. Ask any questions you want to, plus there a few big brained posters who have been doing some very insightful annotations. As for Moby Dick, I would love to do that next.

>Lord of the Night's children
Whomst, in your opinion?

On whitening means?

>Behind you, long, night-long queues of men in uniform move away slowly, kicking AWOL bags along, mostly silent, towards exit doors painted beige, but with edges smudged browner in bell-curves of farewell by the generation of hands.

Might be the most beautiful sentence of the novel, so far.

While that's through, there are still a few characters who take up significantly more space then the others. Slothtrop, Mexico, Pointsman and Prentice being a few of them (for now).
Been a while seen i've read so i haven't got a clue, sorry.

Man, I want to read along with you guys but I'm reading Lord of the Rings at the moment.

Should I put it on hold and read with you guys?

If you've got a bit of spare time, just read both. Otherwise, just drop LotR and read this. Both the book and this thread are super comfy

Yes.

Lord of the Rings is something you can get everything out of by yourself. Take advantage of the opportunity and finish reading Gravitys Rainbow

Why can't you do both? Our readings aren't more than 25 pages each day

Thanks guys. I'll try to get started and catch up.

I'm a little behind because I didn't pick it up on the 1st, but I just got done with reading about Slothrop's heritage, and I'm stuck on thinking about the structure of the book. Narratively not much has happened at all at this point, given that it's probably not even 5% of the book yet that might seem obvious, but really.

So far what I've gathered is that one of the rockets has come down with a letter(s) for Prentice. He has left to grab them, and we see him do so as Slothrop has arrived on the job. Granted I haven't read a whole lot of fiction on this level, but I'm imagining in a more 'straightforward' novel's prose, this could have been gotten across in 10% of the words, even keeping a lot of the ambiance like in the office. Not to say I'm not enjoying what I've been reading, the meandering tangents and intensive descriptions have been pretty fun, but is this why the book (and Pynchon at large) is so famed? I've gone in almost entirely blind on the author, memes notwithstanding, so sorry if this is obviously the reason it's popular.

>Pirate's "strange talent . . . for getting inside the fantasies of others
What this mean?

What do the pages after above lines describe? His fantasies?

"of others"

I think he is able to "see"/feel/inhabit and possibly influence the fantasies of other people. I read that bit a while ago though and am waiting for the group to catch up to where I am so I can jump back in. Can't remember what comes directly after that, The Adenoid stuff? If so there was some discussion in the last thread.

Also thanks for the annotations. Finding them really interesting.

he has ESP, retard

and maybe tyrone's dick has ESP too!

No one replied to my meme in the last thread 0.0

could use a bit of work but shows a lot of promise

I like it.

Needs work, like clearly mark them as DFW soyboy, Chad Pinecone fan. Also the references make it seem like you're not too familiar with Pynchon (but maybe you are)... Also it's current year... old meme...

Kek, didn't even see it

I presume as opposed to the colour off-white

I didnt read that part yet but it may not be a particular person but just like: the god of wine, the spirit of the mountains, the lord of the nights children....or it could be a particular person

>Granted I haven't read a whole lot of fiction on this level, but I'm imagining in a more 'straightforward' novel's prose, this could have been gotten across in 10% of the words, even keeping a lot of the ambiance like in the office
Congrats, you have recognized the difference between High Poetic Philosophical Art and YA
maybe its a hint at the possibility and interest in 'possible paranormal phenomenon', supernatural human ability: maybe the slightest bit related to the concept of 'therapists/psychologists' (how their job is to get inside a patients head, and help one another understand the visions and fantasies: I thought of that possibility due to the mentions and focus on psychologists)

He quite literally has other people's paranoid fantasies/delusions for them, which allows them to be level-headed and continue doing their jobs while staying out of trouble (like in the very beginning when he starts freaking out in place of some Rumanian guy with a sudden shift in the prose to a funny Slavic accent)

...

So did slothrop get raped?

He can view other people's dreams on a whim.

Thanks! Will never be able to complete this without your all

It's heavily imagistic and densely associative, inundating you with detail and leaving you with very little room to breathe.

Personally, I have to give myself like 15 minutes of meditation before starting to muster up the juice necessary to follow along

Should I read Pynchon's earlier works before this? I got the crying of lot 49 and gravity's rainbow for christmas, and I planned to read 49 first, but I don't know how much free time I have and don't want to miss out on reading group camaraderie

ottosell.de/pynchon/rainbow.htm

Well, mind-raped yeah, definitely. It comes up later in the book but exchange for putting his son into and through Harvard, his father essentially sold him to Them for [...] purposes, landing an infant Slothrop into the hands of Laszlo Jamph and co. and then there's the whole issue of their efforts to de-condition him from (whatever they did) pushing him beyond his baseline into the weird negative space, or beyond the zero, where his (extra?)sensory disposition seems to have originated from.

I don’t think it’s necessary. The Crying of Lot 49 is still dense despite its ostensible brevity and really it’d probably just be easier to jump right into GR along with the rest of us. Reading along with the group will help you get through it and there’s plenty of fun to be had.

>Congrats, you have recognized the difference between High Poetic Philosophical Art and YA

I sincerely doubt either of you have recognized that difference (if there even is such a difference). In any case, you certainly haven't grasped it. Good luck with the rest of the book. It's really only good the second time through.

So that's what that was. I thought at first that the change in narrative style was Pinecone's way of having Slothrop talk to the people at PISCES. I guess I wasn't too far off. The whole section felt like one of those jokes that takes forever to tell and has a cheap punchline at the end. I loved it, though. Very clever.
Y O U N E V E R D I D T H E K E N O S H A K I D

"They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals—but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God’s actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year.”

It was definitely a very surreal episode, pretty hard to make heads or tails of. The bit with Crouchfield the Westwardman and the whole "only one of each" thing had me sort of confused over what Pynchon is trying to say here.

Anyone have any ideas of the significance of purple landscapes?

>purple landscapes?
can you write some context lines, type them up? Lots of various words and images and ideas in this text, not exactly coming to mind, did he just say "and the purple landscape".. multiple times?

jump in, CoL 49 won't don't do anything

group read will be best

It's nice to have something to motivate me to read every day. I've really been enjoying these threads for the most part.

How is everyone liking the book so far?

I'm on page 5.

I'm just afraid I would miss some reference
It's also hard for me to catch up with the group, I just started yesterday

archive.org/details/GravitysRainbow001ADehissed

Any news on the guy who said he was going to upload Slade's Pynchon?

night

Can someone help me with DDDD 4?
Tyrone sleeps with women and rocket falls? What does this mean?

That's what they're trying to figure out at the White Visitation, that's why Pointsman wants to experiment on him. Slothrop's boners seem to have ESP, but everyone has different theories as to how it works

What a weird story
ESP? Seriously?
Is reading this story really the best use of one's time? Am I missing something here?

>Pudding finds himself wondering, at times aloud and in the presence of subordinates, what enemy disliked him enough to assign him to Political Warfare. One is supposed to be operating in concert——yet too often in amazing dissonance——with other named areas of the War, colonies of that Mother City mapped wherever the enterprise is systematic death: P.W.E. laps over onto the Ministry of Information, the BBC European Service, the Special Operations Executive, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the F.O. Political Intelligence Department at Fitzmaurice House. Among others. When the Americans came in, their OSS, OWI, and Army Psychological Warfare Department had also to be coordinated with. Presently there arose the joint, SHAEF Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), reporting direct to Eisenhower, and to hold it all together a London Propaganda Coordinating Council, which has no real power at all.
> Who Can find his way about this lush maze of initials, arrows solid and dotted, boxes big and small, names printed and memorized? Not Ernest Pudding——that's for the New Chaps with their little green antennas out for the usable emanations of power, versed in American politics (knowing the difference between the New Dealers of OWI and the eastern and moneyed Republicans behind OSS), keeping brain-dossiers on latencies, weaknesses, tea-taking habits, erogenous zones of all who might someday be useful.

I never really appreciated the interplay of various organizations all on the same side yet all somehow in a frenzied bureaucratic chaos at cross purposes with eachother. Like Hanlon's razor might suggest, maybe the malevolence of THEM, the all pervasive ominous Them, may just be a mere consequence of coincidence, or an accretion of accidents all cascading upon our poor dear Lt.

My '95 V2 blueprint edition seems to be running a couple pages fast. For me, "a few bitter flakes of snow begin to fall" falls on page 83.

heh, and with two more zeros we'd have our Unaccounted For rocket here right before our eyes

It's been referred to a couple times already at this point as the Slothrop scheme or the Sloproth Affair, but it get mentioned orthogonality countless times before it's ever directly explained later in the book. The basic gestalt is this: Slothrop is relentlessly experimented on by (monstrous individuals, psychopathic psychologists like Jamf and Spectro) Intelligence agencies in what seems to be the beginnings of an early MK ULTRA, the results with which leave him a-little-bit-broken, but seeing, rather, feeling perhaps 'a sensory cue we just aren't paying attention to.'
>"It's Slothrop. You know what he is. Even Mexico thinks . . . oh, the usual. Precognition. Psychokinesis. They have their own problems, that lot . . . But suppose *you* had the chance to study a truly classical case of. . . . some pathology, a perfect mechanism . . . . "
Go back and read that part, it's on page 48 in my edition.

>Is reading this story really the best use of one's time? Am I missing something here?
stop reading it, if you havent gained anything yet, or enjoyed the aweinspiring overpowering supreme continuous onslaught of genius of the writing, just dont read it.

DO WE NEED A FUCKING RETARD EVERY 7 POINTS TO QUESTION IF THEY SHOULD KEEP READING OR CAN READ..... FUCKING STOP IT, STOPPPPPP SHUT UPPPP NO MORE NO MORE NO MORE STOPPPPPPPP SHUTT UPPPPPP SHUT THE FUCK UPP NOWWWWWW AND FOREVER... STOPPP!!!!!!!! SHUT THE FUCK UPPPPP

no more whining baby faggot posts about not being able to read it, uncertain if you should, not thinking its good enough for you, just shut the fuck up... stop reading it... go away... stop... stop... stop

I've read this sentence to several friends on several, different occasisions where everyone was high.

I think it's amazing and i'm honestly deeply impressed with Pynchon's ability to fabricate this kind of sentences and weave them into his work. As much as i love this one though, i think the two sentences in The Crying of Lot 49 about the cardealership and the homeless guy's matress are even better.

For a large part this is what i enjoy in Delillo's work as well.

...

What's your reading speed?
I'm 7 pages per hour :(

POST 'EM

I've I had this but with this book it took longer than ever, infinite jest is a walk in the park near this. Also I've started reading before the threads I'm Already in the zone.

>the cardealership and the homeless guy's matress are even better.
can you find these sentences or type them up? would be mucho appreshed

I think its one of the ugliest book covers of all time. One of the greatest books, one of the ugliest, cheesiest, tackiest, (too) cartoonish looking covers

I love the scene where slothrop is trying all these terrible English sweets, couldn't stop laughing. This pynchon guy is something.

see if it helps to read along

My is even worse, cuz my first language is polish and I have to read 3 books at once: GR, dictionary and a translation of GR. Still, reading Pynchon in original is priceless and I'm trying to catch up since day 4 (currently reading day 2...). Luckily todays mathematical analysis exam was relatively easy and the only thing left for tomorrow is to write a review of Ulysses, so I may have some time left afterwards.
By the way I was wondering if the time from the fourth chapter: 6:43:16, has any hidden meaning? The recurring motifes of things falling from the sky, death, the Word etc. were making me feel so sentimental about V. :') Think I am a bit overly sensitive to such things, but when Leopold Bloom looked at his navel sticking out of the water, looking like a lotus flower, I wept like a baby.

>Yet at least he had believed in the cars, maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bring with them the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopeless of children, of supermarket booze, or two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust--and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes--it nauseated him to look, but he had to look.

Just look at how he builds it up. The sentence an sich is a mini story with a clear set-up, center and conclusion, painting a lively picture, of these people, these cars. The string of images evoking certain feelings for the reader, which Pynchon identifies as 'a salad of despair' which might not even be what you, as a reader, where thinking at first. All to finally conclude by telling the reader how this makes Mucho Maas feel.

I'm not at my place rightnow, so i don't have acces to my copy to find the other one, will post in a few days, if you can't wait: Yale courses has a free video on Youtube about the Crying of Lot 49, they mention it there as well. (And ofcourse, the entire video is worth watching).

>his navel sticking out of the water
I assume you meant the ending of Lotuseaters?
>the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower
Now user, i don't want to go all Freudian on you, but you do realize he's not talking about his navel here, right?

>ESP? Seriously?

yes, 'seriously'

youtube.com/watch?v=qlYkpskehmE

>please read this book with me!? would you...

Is she psycho or something? She can't even finish her sentences.

Yeah, it came out odd, I meant he as a whole looked like a Lotus flower, the navel part is a bit earlier and reminds beautifully of the thought Dedalus had in Prometeus, about the umblical cords of all people etc.