"Like Sunday school 'round here," muttered the youth,
Having the attributes of a pickle.
(Which, knowing Pynchon, could be an uncouth
Boner joke, the vulgar's tastes to tickle.)
More likely Pynchon just wants us to grok
Chick's vinegary peevish attitude.
(But should we rule out mention of a cock,
Ignore Pynchon's go-to and seem a prude?)
When I see Pynchon mention hard and long
Objects, I think of some dark library
Where boys titter huddled in a small throng
Finding dirty jokes in Blume and Cleary.
Penis jokes abound, great ones and moaners.
Was Frost's "Birches" about gay boys' boners?
Having the attributes of a pickle.
(Which, knowing Pynchon, could be an uncouth
Boner joke, the vulgar's tastes to tickle.)
More likely Pynchon just wants us to grok
Chick's vinegary peevish attitude.
(But should we rule out mention of a cock,
Ignore Pynchon's go-to and seem a prude?)
When I see Pynchon mention hard and long
Objects, I think of some dark library
Where boys titter huddled in a small throng
Finding dirty jokes in Blume and Cleary.
Penis jokes abound, great ones and moaners.
Was Frost's "Birches" about gay boys' boners?
one day i should finish ATD. i've only ever gotten over a third thru that bastard. it's usually around the wild west threesome with the kindreds & lake that i tap out. happened twice so far
ReplyDeleteit's a shame, because i do love the prose overall & the seeming intentions. like the meta shit with the chums of chance interludes? delicious. but i'm weak. when ATD first dropped i was so hyped for it! but i never could muscle thru...
my second attempt at a full read was about two years ago now :/
I haven't finished it either but then that's because I'm doing that stupid filthy one line at a time blog on it and I keep getting distracted.
DeleteI owned Gravity's Rainbow for 20 years before I broke the seal and then couldn't stop reading it. Read it twice that year. I think I read about Prentice's banana breakfasts about fifteen times before finally getting stuck in.
I remember doing the same thing with Lord of the Rings in junior high. Read Bilbo's party about six times before finally getting past it. Then I got stuck near the start of Two Towers for some reason I can't remember and had to restart one more time to finally finish it.
my history with GR is, i started reading it for the first time in 2000. i got to the inane tangent about lice in the christ child's manger and chucked it out a second story window into the filthy february snow of richmond, va. the book seemed designed to infuriate me. but i went back out and retrieved it...
Deleteand didn't actually read it to the end. took my second pass in 2009, i believe. that time i didn't get annoyed, or stuck. i have quite pleasant memories of finishing it while waiting to be called to court for trespassing charges. (the charge was brought by some cops who were rousting undocumenteds from an abandoned building beside the railroad tracks i used as a shortcut to work. literally as i encountered 'em, they had a dude spreadeagled across the hood of their car and were insulting him for having bought a "flea market ID". i was too chickenshit to stand up for the poor guy because of the freshly-purchased weed in my bag. the cops said they'd waive the charge when i showed up to court; they just thought i needed a warning... of course the pigs didn't show & i was stuck with the fine) at any rate i showed *super* early and spent the entire afternoon deeply relishing G.R. it quite made up for leaving the courthouse a hundred & seventy five dollars poorer
now i read it every three or four years. i'm a Lot 49 guy-- i'm easy to please --but there's some damned tasty writing in G.R., yessir
my second major impediment to finishing ATD is, if i am 100% honest, the math. i can't grok the math stuff at fuckin' all
Here's a quote from my Against the Day reading, One Line at a Time, after a "Professor Gibbs" was mentioned as being at Yale:
Delete"Here's what I get when I Google "simple explanation of Gibbs Free Energy": "The Gibbs free energy of a system at any moment in time is defined as the enthalpy of the system minus the product of the temperature times the entropy of the system. The Gibbs free energy of the system is a state function because it is defined in terms of thermodynamic properties that are state functions." Oh yeah! So simple! Thanks, Google! Thanks, Science! Now I'm going to go get a Dunce Cap permanently sewn to my head."
So, yeah, I get it!