This chapter begins with a quote from Pavlov at 83 and then a poem inspired by the quote, from Pavlov's point of view. After the first word of the poem, in brackets, we get "Pointsman never shows these excursions of his to anyone". So Pointsman writes poetry? As an excursion away from his work on stimulus and response? It seems surprising except, of all the things poems do, is not one of them to evoke a certain response? A poem is just another bell. Or explosion. And I wouldn't stop at just poems, of course. All writing is just a focused stimulus created to get a particular response from the subject.
As for the subject of Pavlov's talk and the poem, even though it's about the way an old person concentrates, I'm all too familiar with the subject. Pavlov was speaking on regular, mundane life. As one gets older, their concentration on one idea or object causes the surrounding ideas or objects to blur out and lose focus. The rest of the world disappears from their mind in the effort to concentrate on that single thing. I'm only 49 but I've just begun feeling this same thing. Not in the real world where it might be worrisome! But in video games where everything is hyper-real and made to push a player's reactions to the limit. I used to be really good at first person shooters. I could play a winning game of Halo while also fucking around with my buddies, barely needing all my concentration to beat my opponents. I launched more than a few nukes in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare back in the day. But lately when I'm playing Apex with my cousin's seventeen year old son, I just feel like a confused old man in a busy cafeteria. I'm busy trying to figure out where all the sounds are coming from or where I'm being shot from. Meanwhile, he just zips from one enemy to another, killing them all while I hope to at least get one assist out of the fracas. It didn't used to be like this! I was at my best interpreting the sounds of my enemies to line up my next shot! Now my poor onscreen avatar just looks like Vincent Vega looking around confused as Mia speaks to him over the intercom. Maybe I should hang up my controller and just read more.
There's a funding meeting going on at The White Visitation because everybody's worried that the Slothrop Experiment won't last too much longer. But Pointsman assures them the money will keep rolling in with the confidence of a man who has Brigadier General Pudding by the woman who shits in his mouth. When the meeting ends, we get a Busby Berkeley song and dance routine involving Webley Silvernail and all the black, white, and gray mice on the ward, grown to man-size. After the number, Pynchon gives us one of my favorite paragraphs in the book.
They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death—death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die. . . . "I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive. . . ." The guest star retires down the corridors.
Those with tender sensibilities and weak stomachs should probably stop reading this section after that beautifully melancholy and depressingly accurate moment. Because now we get to the scene where we learn how Pointsman has kept the money coming in. He's discovered, like a good Pavlovian, what stimulus Pudding needs desperately. And he's hired Katje to provide. My initial reaction after first reading this scene a few months ago was, "How come every mention of Gravity's Rainbow doesn't begin with 'There's a spectacularly graphic shit eating sex scene!'?" I suppose it's the same reason nobody begins their declaration of love for Gravity's Rainbow by saying, "The main character fucks an underage girl and pretty much falls in love with her!" Although, that's the synopsis for Lolita and people do mention it in that! I suppose somebody who hadn't heard of Lolita would be in for a huge shock if somebody just said, "It's about a teacher who goes on a grand adventure!" And I suppose mentioning either the shit eating scene or the underage girl fucking doesn't really capture the magic of Gravity's Rainbow in quite the way you'd think it would. I mean, wouldn't? Wait, what do I mean? I think I mean to say is that you should mention the loads of penis jokes before you mention the other stuff because they're more closely tied to the theme of the novel. The other stuff are just small, digressionary writing larks by Pynchon.
This scene does compare a turd to a black man's penis so that's sort of thematic with the rocket and the Schwarzkommando! Hmm, that's probably another thing that shouldn't be mentioned when trying to describe how great this book is. Because then you'd have to start backpedaling and explaining why that isn't as racist and problematic as it seems because the thought comes from a man who was already super old in 1945 and, due to his post traumatic stress disorder developed in the trenches and mustard gas of the first World War, surrounded by the stench of the mud and the decaying corpses, he has developed some kind of paradoxical phase stimulus where the smell of shit and the pain of war now make him feel sexually alive which explains why the shit reminds him that he also wants to be dominated by a large African man. Wait. Did that make it better?
You know what? It's both a gross and a terrific scene! I highly and unhighly recommend reading it! Doo do do! [That was the Reading Rainbow music tag for when a dumb kid has finished his dumb book review.]
As for the subject of Pavlov's talk and the poem, even though it's about the way an old person concentrates, I'm all too familiar with the subject. Pavlov was speaking on regular, mundane life. As one gets older, their concentration on one idea or object causes the surrounding ideas or objects to blur out and lose focus. The rest of the world disappears from their mind in the effort to concentrate on that single thing. I'm only 49 but I've just begun feeling this same thing. Not in the real world where it might be worrisome! But in video games where everything is hyper-real and made to push a player's reactions to the limit. I used to be really good at first person shooters. I could play a winning game of Halo while also fucking around with my buddies, barely needing all my concentration to beat my opponents. I launched more than a few nukes in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare back in the day. But lately when I'm playing Apex with my cousin's seventeen year old son, I just feel like a confused old man in a busy cafeteria. I'm busy trying to figure out where all the sounds are coming from or where I'm being shot from. Meanwhile, he just zips from one enemy to another, killing them all while I hope to at least get one assist out of the fracas. It didn't used to be like this! I was at my best interpreting the sounds of my enemies to line up my next shot! Now my poor onscreen avatar just looks like Vincent Vega looking around confused as Mia speaks to him over the intercom. Maybe I should hang up my controller and just read more.
There's a funding meeting going on at The White Visitation because everybody's worried that the Slothrop Experiment won't last too much longer. But Pointsman assures them the money will keep rolling in with the confidence of a man who has Brigadier General Pudding by the woman who shits in his mouth. When the meeting ends, we get a Busby Berkeley song and dance routine involving Webley Silvernail and all the black, white, and gray mice on the ward, grown to man-size. After the number, Pynchon gives us one of my favorite paragraphs in the book.
They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death—death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die. . . . "I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive. . . ." The guest star retires down the corridors.
Those with tender sensibilities and weak stomachs should probably stop reading this section after that beautifully melancholy and depressingly accurate moment. Because now we get to the scene where we learn how Pointsman has kept the money coming in. He's discovered, like a good Pavlovian, what stimulus Pudding needs desperately. And he's hired Katje to provide. My initial reaction after first reading this scene a few months ago was, "How come every mention of Gravity's Rainbow doesn't begin with 'There's a spectacularly graphic shit eating sex scene!'?" I suppose it's the same reason nobody begins their declaration of love for Gravity's Rainbow by saying, "The main character fucks an underage girl and pretty much falls in love with her!" Although, that's the synopsis for Lolita and people do mention it in that! I suppose somebody who hadn't heard of Lolita would be in for a huge shock if somebody just said, "It's about a teacher who goes on a grand adventure!" And I suppose mentioning either the shit eating scene or the underage girl fucking doesn't really capture the magic of Gravity's Rainbow in quite the way you'd think it would. I mean, wouldn't? Wait, what do I mean? I think I mean to say is that you should mention the loads of penis jokes before you mention the other stuff because they're more closely tied to the theme of the novel. The other stuff are just small, digressionary writing larks by Pynchon.
This scene does compare a turd to a black man's penis so that's sort of thematic with the rocket and the Schwarzkommando! Hmm, that's probably another thing that shouldn't be mentioned when trying to describe how great this book is. Because then you'd have to start backpedaling and explaining why that isn't as racist and problematic as it seems because the thought comes from a man who was already super old in 1945 and, due to his post traumatic stress disorder developed in the trenches and mustard gas of the first World War, surrounded by the stench of the mud and the decaying corpses, he has developed some kind of paradoxical phase stimulus where the smell of shit and the pain of war now make him feel sexually alive which explains why the shit reminds him that he also wants to be dominated by a large African man. Wait. Did that make it better?
You know what? It's both a gross and a terrific scene! I highly and unhighly recommend reading it! Doo do do! [That was the Reading Rainbow music tag for when a dumb kid has finished his dumb book review.]
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