Gravity's Rainbow: Part VII

I'll admit: I thought about not doing these anymore. I guess my attention span for writing about books I'm reading runs to six commentaries before I can't be bothered. But then I reread the previous parts and thought, "Why am I keeping from the world my superior perspective on this novel, infused with healthy dollops of confusion and mentions of re-reading entire sections three or four times (seven or eight if there's sex in them)?" And then my brain was all, "That's the narcissist I and five people on the Internet know and love! Keep at it, champion!"

My brain calls me champion because otherwise I'd spend a lot more time ignoring it than I already do. I mean, if I'm not going to listen to it warn me about computer viruses when I'm searching for Poison Ivy/Killer Croc cosplay porn the first five hundred times, why does it think I'll listen to it the next five hundred? But it keeps on trying! And how smart can it be anyway? Whose computer is almost entirely free of viruses?! That's right! The local Portland library's, that's whose!

The first sentence of this section describes Roger Mexico in a way that probably also describes me, "hunched Dracula-style inside his Burberry." By making that statement, I've now admitted to owning a Burberry coat. But I don't want you to get the idea that I know anything about fashion! I simply bought it for $20 from a used clothing store for a Philip K. Dick costume for a San Francisco themed New Year's Eve party. My entire thought process when purchasing it was this: "This will make me look like a mentally ill homeless person which is almost certainly what Philip K. Dick looked like on his better days!" Only later did I learn it was a fancy lad's coat when people would say things to me like, "Oh! I love your Burberry!" And I'd respond, "I don't have any blueberries."

I understand Pynchon's method of writing in a way in which I mean I don't actually understand a lot of it but I understand why he's writing it that way. I get it. He's entertaining himself in a lot of ways. He's saying things in ways he thinks are hilarious or poetic or interesting and couldn't give any number of fucks whether or not the reader understands it in the way he does. What I don't understand is how he found an audience doing this?! Seriously. Can somebody explain it to me so that I can get an audience as well? I suppose the difference is that Pynchon is incomprehensible in a way that makes you think, "He's way smarter than I am! If I carry this book around, people will think I'm that smart!" But I'm incomprehensible in a way that makes you think, "This guy is an idiot who admitted to wanting to suck Lobo's dick even though he couldn't quite tell if Lobo was super cool or reminded him of a clown and maybe it's because of both of those?! Also Grunion Guy doesn't have any books to carry around which is perfect because who would want to be seen with one? I'd rather be caught with an oversized coffee table book collecting the nastiest spreads from Oui magazine!"

Is that Oui coffee table book a thing you can be caught with because I'd like to order it on Amazon, please.

At one point in this section, Roger Mexico calls Jessica's boyfriend Beaver "Nutria." It's hilarious jokes like that which make me think, "How the fuck did I not realize this book was absolutely hilarious?!"

You can read that previous paragraph as completely earnest or totally sarcastic. I don't fucking give a shit.

This section tells the story of how Jessica and Roger met. Pynchon describes it as "what Hollywood likes to call a 'cute meet.'" Having only heard that phrase late in my life, I would have sworn it was a modern, 21st Century Internet term. I suppose I can still be surprised by some things! Some times you think life just can't offer up any more new things; usually that happens after your first sexual experience where your butthole is involved.

Christ, how terribly disappointing does my life sound when I describe learning that "cute meet" is an older expression as one of life's great surprises?

This is the section that describes Roger Mexico's discomfort working statistics for the Psi groups. He is searching for evidence of something outside the realm of the living via science and data. It seems a dismal hope for somebody without any psychic powers at all, working amid people who can seemingly do magic with their minds. Sure, he also works with Pointsman whose only super power is making dogs produce inordinate amounts of drool. So he's not totally alone in his inability to transcend reality. Although he's definitely not as passionate about his number crunching as Pointsman is about his stimuli.

Roger reminisces about his cute meet with Jessica as he and Jessica head into London to meet with Pointsman. As they're traveling through the streets, they pass by a recently rocketed neighborhood which gives us my favorite passage from this section:

"Once Roger and Jessica might have stopped. But they're both alumni of the Battle of Britain, both have been drafted into the early black mornings and the crying for mercy, the dumb inertia of cobbles and beams, the profound shortage of mercy in those days. . . . By the time one has pulled one's nth victim or part of a victim free of one's nth pile of rubble, he told her once, angry, weary, it has ceased to be that personal . . . the value of n may be different for each of us, but I'm sorry: sooner or later . . ."

Maybe that's not as good as the simple final two sentences of this section ("They are in love. Fuck the war.") but it's a nice description of the emotional attrition that violence and war and the constant threat of death will take on a person's psyche. It feels like the same kind of thing we're going through in America right now, minus the threat of instant death by V-2 with the incoming sound following.

This was a really nice section because it wasn't confusing and it was short. A short section in a Pynchon novel goes a long way. There's nothing more terrible than getting confused on the third page of a twenty page section and continuing on thinking, "I'll probably get a handle on what's going on any paragraph now!" Then you're twenty pages through it and you realize you're just going to have to give it another go. But this section could have gone on for twenty pages because it was straightforward! I think I understood it all! Roger Mexico is in love with a woman who could leave him at any moment because she's in a relationship with another man but his time with her is so magical and special that he's convinced himself that she feels the same way and he's ready to abandon everything to live a quiet domestic life with her in some hidden bombed out section of the city. He even has chickens in the bombed out garage!

It won't be for another section or so that we get inside Jessica's head to discover that she maybe isn't as all in on Roger as he is on her. Ha ha!

No wait! I take back that ha ha. It was cruel and cynical! But Roger maybe deserves me mocking him because he's really sort of put Jessica on a pedestal and might be more in love with the initial feelings of love and intimacy and the normality that the whole process of early courtship brings to his life after six years of war.

Gravity's Rainbow: Part VI

Some sections of the book seem so straightforward that they leave me suspecting I completely missed something. This is one of those sections. I suspect my ability to understand this section stems from having read this section previously and also having read 130 pages following this section. Therefore I know who Roger Mexico is as he's introduced. I know who Jessica Swanlake is. I know of their relationship and their sexual exploits and their other sexual exploits and also their sexual exploits. So when Pirate secretly hopes that it works out for them even though Jessica is practically married to a guy named Beaver, I already understand how things are sort of working out for them already!

Plotwise, the reader discovers that Pirate transfers Bloat's microfilm pictures of Slothrop's sexual conquests to Mexico so that Mexico can take them to the White Visitation to be analyzed. The reader also learns that there's some serious paranormal hokey-pokey taking place within the Allied war effort.

Is that the correct use of hokey-pokey? Fuck it. Pynchon wouldn't care!

If this isn't the first section to mention The Firm, it's the first time I noticed it mentioned. They're the capitalized "They" that's often referred to by any number of the characters swept up in Their plot. Roger Mexico runs statistics for them while feeling completely out of place in that he has no paranormal powers and isn't quite sure he believes in them. He's a statistician not a hokey-pokey man!

Pirate works for them doing his controlled fantasizing gimmick. Pirate mentions his work for Operation Black Wing, a super duper top secret initiative to ruin German morale through propaganda, both through paranormal means and strange films of native Africans living among the Germans. I think. It seems to be some kind of push to create paranoia and racial instability.

In comparing Roger Mexico's relationship with Jessica, Pirate reminisces about his affair with a married woman, Sylvia Mossmoon. I only brought her up because she has a great name. Also, maybe more importantly, the story highlights the difficulty of soldiers returning to civilian life. Pirate believes Mossmoon is his last chance at normality and when the relationship inevitably ends, he shrugs and rejoins the army.

I've known people like this and, in their embarrassment that the rejoining of the army is at best a result of failing as a civilian, they pretend to greater ideological reasons for their re-enlistment. But, in the end, it's almost certainly just a shrug and a "Well, what else can I do?"

Gravity's Rainbow: Part V

Tyrone Slothrop gets his first V2 hardon in this chapter. He's remembering back to the time he first heard a rocket hit London (two nearly at the same time). He's also recounting a story to Tantivy about the time two of the women he has slept with wind up sitting next to each other at a club he's just walked into. I think I've only read this section twice so I should probably read it a third time to see if the two women are the stars on that map that would become these first two rockets. My instincts say, "Yeah! Of course! Duh! You suck at reading, you fat loser!"

I fucking hate my instincts. Bastards.

We also learn that the V2 that Prentice was worried about earlier wasn't a real V2. It was a delivery system for a message or mission for Prentice. The chapter is mostly from Slothrop's point of view so the reader doesn't get to find out what the secret message in a missile thing is all about. Whatever it is, it isn't great because Prentice was dreading it earlier. I'm sure somebody important somewhere is having an out-of-control fantasy that's interfering with their work and Pirate has to come save the day by fantasizing for them.

Slothrop has been investigating the blast zones of the missiles to both get a good look at them and to deal with his increasing paranoia that they're being launched specifically at himself. Tantivy tries to calm him by pointing out that they're trying to kill everybody and that even if it was a bullet on the front, it's effectively the same way to die: you're dead before you even know you're going to die. But much like Yossarian in Catch-22, Slothrop doesn't take much comfort in knowing that the people trying to kill you aren't specifically trying to kill you but just generally trying to kill you and whoever the hell they can.

But investigating blast sites is nearing an end for Slothrop since he's being called to "The White Visitation" to help them with their testing program. He has a sense that something in his Dossier points toward an abnormal ability to sense the rockets although he still doesn't understand why they give him a hardon.

The first time through, I still didn't realize how funny this book was. This time reading it, I see the jokes I missed earlier. Like when Slothrop recounts the poem by Thomas Hooker about how wild love exists but people should grow love in Gods garden (or something. It's very much a "Don't go having sex outside of marriage with lots of folks because love is special and Godly and you should only do it super boringly to one person for your entire boring and terrible life). After recounting the poem, Pynchon writes of Slothrop's romantic encounters around London, "How Slothrop's garden grows." He then lists all the flowers named for the best sexual innuendoes.

This is one of my favorite passages from this section: "When he couldn't help he stayed clear, praying, at first, conventionally to God, first time since the other Blitz, for life to win out. But too many were dying, and presently, seeing no point, he stopped."

Oh, yes, of course. Reading it through for the third time, I see where I missed the transition from present to past. The story about the two women does take place just before Slothrop experiences his first V2 missile strike (two at once in separate locations with Slothrop between them). The two incidents are related in that way that nobody knows quite exactly how they're related and also why Slothrop gets a hardon.

The section ends with a bit of Slothrop's family history. A family that almost prospered but chose, in the end, not to. A family obsessesd with death as a debt of the living. And it ends in a remembrance of Slothrop's that I think might have greater meaning to the entirety of the book:

"[The Northern Lights] scared the shit out of him. Were the radiant curtains just about to swing open? What would the ghosts of the North, in their finery, have to show him?"

I don't know what it will have to do with the theme or anything! But I bet America dropping the bomb figures into this book at some point being that it's a bit like the V2s but on a much larger scale. Not that it comes secretly but that its final payload was nothing any of the victims would have been anticipating.

Especially since it's followed with Slothrop's reaction to the V2s glow on the horizon: "But what Lights were these? What ghosts in command? And suppose, in the next moment, all of it, the complete night, were to go out of control and curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at. . . ."

See what I mean?! How was I supposed to know, at this point, that this book was so funny!?

Gravity's Rainbow: Part IV

I don't know if the point of this next section was for the reader to conclude that Teddy Bloat is a hipster but here we are! Teddy Bloat is totally a hipster. The evidence is the long list of items he keeps in his fashionable kangaroohide messenger bag.

The other revelation is that Tyrone Slothrop is slovenly. I think that's why he's named the way he is and also Bloat is named the way he is because, um, he's a hipster? I'm not writing any sort of companion work to this book to help future readers so I don't need any supporting evidence for my conclusions.

In this section, Teddy Bloat has been tasked with taking clandestine pictures of a map on Slothrop's wall. The map is of London and is covered in stickers labeled with women's names. He's being paid by some organization to secretly gather this information. For the reader who is just 16 pages into Gravity's Rainbow, why he's doing it must remain a mystery. But for the super intelligent person who is reading Gravity's Rainbow for the third time (all at the same time: read a section once, probably reread it a second time, and then eventually reread it a third time when I get to it on my second reading which is being conducted at the same time as the first reading but with a lag of about 100 pages. I believe this is the proper way to read this book (three times!)), they understand exactly what this is about. It seems that Tyrone Slothrop's sexual conquests are all predictions of where a V2 will fall sometime in the next, on average, 4 1/2 days.

More will be learned about Tyrone's powers later when we learn that, as an infant, he was experimented on to see if he could be conditioned to get a little baby hardon due to outside non-penis stroking stimulus. The big mystery is what that stimulus was and why it might still be part of him and how maybe it's the reason he can somehow predict where the V2s will fall. And just like the V2s being portents of doom in reverse, where they bring the warning of death only after they've already exploded, so too Tyrone Slothrop somehow reacts to the falling of a V2 before it actually falls.

But I'm getting way, way ahead of myself! At least I didn't also begin discussing how Tyrone Slothrop is also being hypnotized to recall his past experiences so they can learn more about the behavoir of Black Americans (I don't think Tyrone is black himself based on his recalled experience where he climbs down a toilet to recover his harmonica) for their propaganda operation to send radio signals across the channel that are meant to heighten racial tensions with South African Germans.

Fucking Christ this book has some weird shit going on!

Gravity's Rainbow: Part III

In the second section, we get to know a little bit more about Captain Geoffrey "Pirate" Prentice. I don't know if he's the hero or just the first character that gets the spotlight. He's Gravity's Rainbow's Catch-22's Yossarian. He's sort of stuck doing the job higher ups demand from him while he constantly worries about his death. Except he's The X-Files version of Yossarian. Yossarian didn't have any magic powers. He wasn't special at all. That was kind of the point both with his predicament and his senior officers' attitude toward his possible death. But Pirate has a super power: he can invade, take-over, and manage other people's fantasies. And once the military discovered he had this power, he was roped into using it for their benefit.

You're probably wondering, "What? Fuck you. That is not a thing in this book." Don't worry! I'm not upset that you're cussing at me in my imagination. But think about it! Mason & Dixon was 1/3 historical novel, 1/3 paranormal strangeness, and 1/3 Mason's boner. It totally makes sense.

This is the section I most remember from my previous attempts at reading the book because it's the section that talks about all of the different meals Pirate makes from bananas. Cultivating bananas and making food with them for his colleagues is sort of the thing he does to destress from living other people's fantasies. The last fantasy he had to manage for a number of years was where he attempted diplomatic relations with a gigantic and sentient adenoid that was destroying London. It was the fantasy of some guy who needed to be busy with some other shit in the Middle East but he was too busy dealing with his dream adenoid. So Pirate took over so the other guy could do his job. And then once the guy did his job and saved the world (but, as noted in the book, not from World War II. He saved it from some other historical problem that I couldn't be bothered to read more about at the local library), he was found dead in a bathtub full of custard. So I guess that's how the Paranormal Military retires the weird people they don't need anymore.

I guess Pirate's nickname "Pirate" is because he commandeers other people's fantasies?

Some other characters are mentioned but I don't know enough about them to know if what we learned was important. Like some guy named Bloat and some other guys named other things. There are a lot of characters!

It wasn't until this reading that I realized how much this book is about the weird, paranormal offshoot experiments of World War II. Maybe they were all real. Maybe they're just hyperbolic representations of the militaries experiments with ESP and Astral Projection and Mind Control. Does it matter? Probably to Pynchon! But not to a dumb casual reader like me! If I can't explain why Clifford the Big Red Dog was so fucking massive, why would I think I could explain any plot points in a Thomas Pynchon novel?! I know my fucking limits!

Gravity's Rainbow Part II: Section One

The first chapter is called "Beyond the Zero" and I don't know what that means yet. The chapter heading is followed by a quote from Wernher von Braun, the most famous German engineer who helped develop the V-2 rocket, a major character in this book. Like really major! The quote is some nonsense about how science has taught Wernher to believe unscientific pablum. That's important because a lot of this book relies on groups conducting paranormal research for reasons which become almost immediately apparent! This book is like an episode of The X-Files if The X-Files had too many characters with silly names and scenes which seamlessly slipped into different scenes from different times without warning you that everything you were reading has suddenly changed and now something else entirely is happening.

The book opens like this: "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."

After I got done giggling about a screaming coming all over the sky, I decided to think about it for awhile. Opening lines are important and you'd know that if you ever heard anybody say, "Call me Ishmael," and then nod twattishly as if they'd just recited four of Shakespeare's plays in a row. Or maybe one time somebody wanted you to think they were smart and so they said, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." If they really wanted you to think they were smart, they would continue with "It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness." But that's really gilding the lily a bit and also it's calling a bit too much attention to how A Tale of Two Cities has kind of a crappy opening. Is it really profound to say, "It was everything but it was also nothing. Think about that, prick!"

Just a second. I have to make a note for a new book I just decided to write because I thought up that great opening line.

Gravity's Rainbow starts off much better than those other dumb books I mentioned which I can pretend I've read because this is the Internet and you don't know me. These first two lines tell you something concrete about the setting.

A scream is a warning or an indication of tragedy or catastrophe. It's a portent of danger. Also a portent: anything that comes screaming across the sky! That's why the next line says this has happened before. Portents of death and the end of the world are as common as terrible opening lines in novels. But the next line is all, "But hold up, Grandma! This isn't like any portent you've ever seen before! This is postmodernism!"

The reason the current "portents" have nothing to compare them to now is that they don't portend doom after which doom follows. These new screaming portents kill before the warning comes. They travel faster than the speed of sound and so they smash into you and you die and then they scream their warning. Like, how is that fair?!

The next line might be a bit confusing until you've come to reckon with the idea that the screaming portents kill before anybody knows they're coming. "It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre." Because the missile has already hit. Whoever was going to die, has died. Now it's time to get everybody to safety! I suppose there will be fire and rubble and stuff that you want to move people away from but that's just picking at nits.

The modern age has found a new way to terrify people with the specter of death. Most people think, "Oh boy! I'll live life and then when death comes, I'll probably have time to prepare or I'll have lived a good life or I'll somehow be at peace with it." But now it's more like, "Oh boy! I'll live life and then...." Well, you're dead. Just like that! Bye bye!

Most of my favorite books are about escaping the world rather than fighting back, books like Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I sometimes include The Grapes of Wrath in that because in one sense, Tom Joad flees into the shadows while his family must struggle on. But inherent in his flight is that he'll always keep fighting against injustice. So while it's one of my favorite books, I can't keep grouping it with the others. But Pynchon might be starting out Gravity's Rainbow with the inherent idea that there will be no escape and there might not even be a chance to fight. What's going to happen to you is going to happen to you and, well, you've got a lot less control over that than you might feel good about. While being evacuated, the evacuees all think, "Is this the way out?" And the answer is no, not at all. The Evacuation "is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into." Each one, believing they're the only one to think it, thinks, "You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow...."

In this chaos, we are introduced to Captain Geoffrey Prentice, also known as Pirate. In the morning after the evacuation, he notices a V-2 vapor trail rising into the sky against the horizon. He knows that means only a matter of minutes before the V-2 slams into London. He thinks about warning somebody in authority, or waking those around him, but ultimately realizes he might as well put it from his mind and go about his business. If it's going to hit, he's already dead anyway.

This is the setting which begins Gravity's Rainbow. It's heavy, like gravity! But it's not pretty like a rainbow. Maybe rainbows have negative attributes that I never learned. I know they're a symbol of God's pact to never again drown all mankind! Sometimes people say it's God's pact that he won't kill all mankind again but he's a shrewd businessman, that God, and specifically writes up in his contract that he won't drown them all. What a jerk.

The last thought about the V-2 Pirate has in this section, before he simply wipes it all from his mind and gets to making banana breakfasts for everybody, is this: "What if it should hit exactly—ahh, no—for a split second you'd have to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above, strike the top of the skull...."

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: Part One: Trepidatious First Steppery

I stopped reading The Familiar for some reason and never picked it back up. Probably because I decided to wait until every book of the series was published and/or I was dead. You might be thinking, "You just didn't understand it, you coward!" But my rebuttal to that is "Now I'm reading Gravity's Rainbow and I'm definitely not going to understand that so who's the coward now?!"

Whenever I begin reading a book, I like to come to grips with the title. Like when I was reading The Grapes of Wrath, I was all, "Oh, this book will be about angry grapes." Then when the book wasn't about angry grapes, I was all, "What the hell? How was I supposed to understand the title was a Biblical and/or Shakesperian allusion! Or maybe T.S. Eliot?" And then when I was reading House of Leaves, I was all, "Oh! This is about a house that nobody wants to remain in." And then when I finished that book, I was all, "Yep! Nailed it! Also it's a book. A house of leaves is a book. I get it. I'm smart." But now I'm reading Gravity's Rainbow and I'm going to admit something I don't usually admit: What?!

Was that an admission? I don't know.

I did some high school physics in — you guessed it! — high school and I scored barely passing grades. It's possible we learned what gravity has to do with rainbows but you know the problem with learning physics? You have to remember the first things you learn to understand the second things and so on and so forth! It's like a pyramid scheme of learning and I was a terrible salesperson. From what I remember from the class, gravity bends things and rainbows are bent at both ends. So there's probably something there, right?

Although it's unlikely, it's possible there's a character named Gravity in this book since there are characters named Pirate, Slothrop, Mexico, and Moonmoss. If that's the case, I totally understand the title! It's just a statement about some jerk's possession!

You might be wondering how I know some of the names of characters already. Well, I've already read 80 pages of this book. That would normally make it hard for me to discuss the pages I've already read but guess what? This book is so complicated that I'm reading it twice and at the same time! Yes, I've already started rereading it and let me tell you: the second time through is marginally easier to understand!

Judging on some of the sentences in this book that go on so long that I forget where they were headed when they began, I'm probably going to need some help understanding certain passages. And since I'm not taking a class on this book, I'm hoping some non-troll Internet residents will help me understand this thing! Post your smart but not smart ass comments in the comment section! And no spoilers because I probably won't understand them anyway.