Let's talk about Gravity's Rainbow

Let's talk about Gravity's Rainbow

I'm about 200 pages in and I'm finding it surprisingly penetrable. After hearing it was the 'Everest of fiction'. Yes, it is a challenge but not as much as I was expecting.

Does it get harder as it goes on, as in more scientifically technical? I'm enjoying it very much so far, its blend of humour, paranoia, absurdity, sex and nihilistic commentary is all very appealing to me in a book.

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>scientifically technical
Whaaaaaaaaaat

It's a long Burroughs-esque poem with shit eating & child fucking.

Ive never read it, but Ive also heard from multiple sources that the book has quite a bit of engineering jargon

>he doesn't do research while he reads books in order to gain a better understanding of them
pleb

>he needs to do research while he reads books in order to gain a better understanding of them
pleb

you are literally describing only a few pages, not the whole fucking book

kind of, there are moments

towards the end, for like a hundred or so pages, it gets pretty weird yeah sort of what people usually are talking about when they say its super unreadable but yeah its not that hard at all i read it when i was 15 hey hey look at me im so smart

wait til the last 200 kiddo . . . heh . . . the Counterforce will get to you . . .

Consider this: Pynchon was just a shit-kicking Cornell dude and he published V at age 26, and got Gravity's Rainbow out there at age 36. Unreal.

Noooope.

Burroughs-esque WW2 epic acid-poem covers the rest. I can see you're proud for having read it, so congrats!!!

The guy was an engineer for Boeing, not exactly an average joe

Hahahaha no, he was a technical writer! Do you know what that is?

forty million frenchmen can't be wrong

hahaha

staging.airflowsciences.com/rkn/Pynchon/None.bomarc/index.html

something like that.

He's still pretty damn smart

Lol

Why is Pynchon so good?!

Everest isn't even the everest of mountains. Finnegans wake is the K2 of literature.

The fact that he can bamboozle, impress, trigger, and meme thousands of people at once

I don't know because I only got about 200 pages in myself before giving up (I just didn't have the time any more).

But from those 200 pages, It seems to me the "scientific aspect" of this book has been overblown. There are moments, of course. I recall pretty early on Roger being frustrated with Jessica for not understanding statistical models, and there's a passage comparing the V2s falling poetically to other Poisson processes. There are also some early passages that are clearly punning on the history of behaviorist psychology.

IDK to me it's like Beckett's novels and medieval/early modern philosophy. If you have a deep understanding of the latter, a little million nuances start to pop out and make the book more enjoyable. But the nuances are not crucial for basic literary understanding.

>(I just didn't have the time any more).

yeah. those Pokemon won't just catch themselves.

I'm a PhD student in philosophy, which, believe it or not, keeps me extremely busy.

This is neat. The beginning part sounds a lot like Pynchon, if this is supposed the man himself.

PhD in philosophy, huh? Nnnnnnnnneat.

Shiny Pidgey yet?

> repeat after me, "Do you want fries with that?"

These are the worst threads on Veeky Forums. Not the shitposting, not the Tao Lin or Mira Gonzalez threads, not the women or minority hating threads, not the "I'm a literary genius threads," but these. The threads with a underlying feeling of "I'm so special because I read books" while barely understanding anything about them. The fact that you only got 200 pages into Gravity's Rainbow before making a stupid thread about it, and having to tell everyone about it demonstrates this. Yeah you try to cover yourself with ironic jokes, and little buddy-buddy remarks like "surprisingly penetrable" but I know you think you're smart and "cultured" for reading Gravity's Rainbow. You don't understand anything about the importance of art. Oh maybe you like a few phrases here and there, and get a little tingle occasionally, but you ultimately use art for yourself. Because you think it adds an interesting side to your personality. You love thinking about having read books, but have no idea of what their actual significance is. You probably enjoy saying that "the prose is good." You act all innocent, telling yourself and trying to give off the impression that you don't take yourself too seriously, that books are just a fun hobby for you.. And you are what is killing literature, you and your ignorant, self-aggrandizing whoring of the only secular means of saving the human soul.

What's your area of study?

Also, can you tell me how Leibniz manages to reconcile the idea that our actions are "certain, but not necessary" with the idea that all our future predicates are already contained in us, and that this is the best of all possible worlds?

obviously not busy enough to waste time on Veeky Forums

No.
I remember hearing about GR and how 'dense' it is, how 'you have to pay attention' and 'there are so many obscure references' and 'it is sooooooo funny'.
So I got it, read it....
And said 'WTF?' and read it again, immediately.
It isn't very dense, it isn't very funny, it isn't very technical, and it isn't very hard to read. It isn't much of anything, really.
No, let me correct that - it is a fine example about how a fair number of people in the English speaking world confuse 'overly complicated' with 'clever' and 'turgid' with 'smart'.
Bottom line? It isn't very good, but it had curse words, drugs, and sex in the early 1970's so it got famous.

>"Stop reading books for fun!"
FTFY

This is a great copy pasta attempt. Hope it catches on.

kek.

You sound pretty butthurt over some dude wanting to talk about a book he's reading. How's life going pal, everything okay?

Then stop spouting bullshit about him so he can appear smarter, you cocksucker. Grow a fucking spine.

Nigga, Ulysses is K2. Slighter smaller than Everest but far greater a challenge but still terrestrial.

FW is Olympus Mons.

well arent you a special little snowflake

sorry to post something not to your liking sir, we will fix this right away. no need to cry baby user

theres literally one calculus joke thats a simple integration. and like one formula that you dont need to know at all.

it got way better around page 170 for me. middle of the book is the most fun.

nice, i see you

>It isn't very dense, it isn't very funny, it isn't very technical, and it isn't very hard to read. It isn't much of anything, really.


so you immediately got the joke about "young fur henchmen"? wow, must be amazing to be so effortlessly literate.

>"young fur henchmen"
wow, so deep