Gravity's Rainbow: Part XXIX.I

This section begins with a primer on plastics, a brief history leading up to Jamf's Imipolex G. I'm not a chemist so I don't understand the lingo but I've done enough chemistry so I get the gist. That's the fairly standard description of my intelligence! I can't explain anything to anybody in great detail (except maybe why Cerebus can't get pregnant) but I'll definitely understand any amount of detailed explanation of a subject with which you'd like to bore me. Here's an example of me reading this book:

Jamf at the time was working for a Swiss outfit called Psychochemie AG, originally known as the Grossli Chemical Corporation, *Me, yawning, nodding along, eyes glazing over* a spinoff from Sandoz (where, as every schoolchild knows, the legendary Dr. Hoffman made his important discovery). *me, eyes flashing open, grin on my face, nodding enthusiastically. "Yeah, yeah! Every schoolchild! Good old Albert Hoffman! My hero! Genius!"*

The primer also describes the links between all the petrochemical companies of the time. It's probably supposed to show how big business and corporations and the advancement of science (particularly plastics, in this case) had no loyalty to any nation. It was all about profits and advancements and more profits. One of the companies had an address at Schokoladestrasse which made me happy because I knew those words. I'm not bragging! Obviously everybody knows those words! It just made me happy! In the same way somebody in the book could have said "Ziegenstrasse" and I would have come in my pants.

This is all discovered by Slothrop as he researches Jamf and Imipolex G and the German blueprints for rockets and especially this one weird rocket that was built with a section composed of Imipolex G which seems to have been top secret: The "S-Gerät, 11/00000." While doing the research, he also comes up with "Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Hmm, that may have been a proverb for paranoids in 1945 and also 1973 but I think it's just standard operating procedure for anybody with any money or power at this point. I don't think saying that makes me paranoid. I think it makes me observant.

During the days of researching, Slothrop discovers Tantivy has died. Or might have died. Basically, They want Slothrop to think he's dead so whether they sent him out to a dangerous mission to get killed or they just planted a story in the paper so Slothrop would read it, it hardly matters. Thinking Tantivy has not just died but was most likely killed by Them to get to Slothrop, Slothrop's path becomes clear. He's no longer content to sit in the Casino and study and sort of ignore that they're manipulating his life. It's time to head into The Zone and figure out what's going on.

He heads to Nice to find the address given to him by Waxwing, the address where he can get a new identity.

Just for the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky's light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now.

For Slothrop, that moment must be heaven. A promise of events without cause?! How does one so paranoid as Slothrop ever reach that stage? I guess upon arriving in a new city at dusk before he has a chance to see the strings, the facades, the seeming random coincidences that, upon slight reflection, prove themselves to be manipulations.

Slothrop arrives at the address given to him by Waxwing and winds up among a bunch of bohemian drifters and squatters. In a description of their shoes: . . . saddle-stitching in contrasting colors (such as orange on blue, and the perennial favorite, green on magenta. . . . What is it with magenta and green?! Did Pynchon suffer from some kind of PTSD derived from wearing bowling shoes?!

After a lot of paranoid delusions of conversations with people he thinks he knows but they're just wanderers and drunks, squatters and Johns, he gets his papers. He's now Ian Scuffling, war correspondent, and he's headed to Zurich.

Gravity's Rainbow: Part XXVIII

I don't know what meaning green and magenta have in this novel but they spring up again in this chapter. As Slothrop wanders around Raoul's party, he's enlisted for some secret service by a guy in a white zoot suit. As he follows him outside, they run into Jean-Claude Gongue, described as the "notorious white slaver of Marseilles," "busy white-slaving." Ha. Two of the girls he asks to be white slaves declare they do not, the first one saying she wants to be a green slave and the second one wanting to be magenta. A third wants to be vermilion but I don't think vermilion is important. She's just there to obfuscate the green and magenta bit!

I can't make a guess as to what it's about. I can only note every time it happens to appear. I think this is the third time? I'm sure I missed some. But eventually, in the final chapter, Pynchon gives us a section called "The Last Green and Magenta." So, I mean, it must mean something, right?!

The man in the zoot suit is Blodgett Waxwing. He's important because he's going to get Slothrop his own zoot suit and also forged papers so Slothrop can flee the Casino and head into Germany looking for signs of his connection to Jamf and the Rocket. Blodgett is doing so many deals that depend on so many people coming through that he's basically the Milo Minderbender of this book.

The story here tonight is a typical WW II romantic intrigue, just another evening at Raoul's place, involving a future opium shipment's being used by Tamara as security against a loan from Italo, who in turn owes Waxwing for a Sherman tank his friend Theophile is trying to smuggle into Palestine but must raise a few thousand pounds for purposes of bribing across the border, and so has put the tank up as collateral to borrow from Tamara, who is using part of her loan from Italo to pay him. But meantime the opium deal doesn't look like it's going to come through, because the middleman hasn't been heard from in several weeks, along with the money Tamara fronted him, which she got from Raoul de la Perlimpinpin through Waxwing, who is now being pressured by Raoul for the money because Italo, deciding the tank belongs to Tamara now, showed up last night and took it away to an Undisclosed Location as payment on his loan, thus causing Raoul to panic. Something like that.

At least I feel like if I read that a few more times, I could work out all the trails and connections and it would make sense. I've read Catch-22 multiple times over the last twenty-something years and I still don't know how Milo paid for the eggs.

The tank in the previous quote, driven by an angry Tamara, crashes the party. Tamara fires a round into the house (a dud so it only does minimal damage from blunt force) and Slothrop has to wrestle her out of the tank. Between the obvious sexual metaphor of the tank's gun slamming into the mansion and firing off a load and Slothrop wrestling the woman out of the tank, Slothrop's penis does not get erect. Pointsman will never get to add this occurrence to the data of his experiment because none of his minions were there (or sober enough) to report it. But I guess we, the readers, should probably make note of it, right? Just a second.

"Tank's massive turret with the gaping bell-end launches its payload into the cavernous rooms of Raoul's mansion. Slothrop's penis does not get hard even though that's the sexiest bit of writing I've ever read. You can tell by how sexily I have summarized it. Ooh la la, as the American soldiers will say to their wives after coming home and giving them gonorrhea." Note Copyright Grunion Guy 2021.

Waxwing lets Slothrop know, once and for all, that the incident with the octopus was staged. How he knows, he doesn't tell Slothrop. But he gives Slothrop a business card and a clue as to where to run to, as well as the zoot suit, and a keychain.

Before the end of this section, there's a bit about police, describing what we all know is true about them but what some people choose to pretend they don't see. And by pretending not to know this truth, we see a despicable truth about themselves as well. They never realize what they're exposing of their true selves when they deny to accept a reality with which they secretly agree.

The zoot suit is in a box tied with a purple ribbon. Keychain's there too. They both belonged to a kid who used to live in East Los Angeles, named Ricky Gutierrez. During the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, young Gutierrez was set upon by a carload of Anglo vigilantes from Whittier, beaten up while the L.A. police watched and called out advice, then arrested for disturbing the peace.

The Blue Lives Matter folk are delusional, racist bastards and anybody with any sense (mostly the senses that are the providence of the ears and eyes) knows it.