Otto is earnestly explaining his views on the Mother Conspiracy. It’s not often a sympathetic girl will listen. The Mothers get together once a year, in secret, at these giant conventions, and exchange information. Recipes, games, key phrases to use on their children. “What did yours use to say when she wanted to make you… Continue reading The Mother Conspiracy (Gravity’s Rainbow)
He left the dodoes to rot, he couldn’t endure to eat their flesh. Usually, he hunted alone. But often, after months of it, the isolation would begin to change him, change his very perceptions—the jagged mountains in full daylight flaring as he watched into freak saffrons, streaming indigos, the sky his glass house, all the… Continue reading The extinction of the dodo | A passage from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
WEISSMANN’S TAROT Weissmann’s Tarot is better than Slothrop’s. Here are the real cards, exactly as they came up. Significator: Knight of Swords Covered by: The Tower Crossed by: Queen of Swords Crowning: King of Cups Beneath: Ace of Swords Before: 4 of Cups Behind: 4 of Pentacles Self: Page of Pentacles House: 8 of Cups… Continue reading Weissmann’s Tarot | Gravity’s Rainbow
What you felt stirring across the land… it was the equinox… green spring equal nights… canyons are opening up, at the bottoms are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a hood of smell… human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be… Continue reading God’s spoilers (Gravity’s Rainbow)
Later, toward dusk, several enormous water bugs, a very dark reddish brown, emerge like elves from the wainscoting, and go lumbering toward the larder—pregnant mother bugs too, with baby translucent outrider bugs flowing along like a convoy escort. At night, in the very late silences between bombers, ack-ack fire and falling rockets, they can be… Continue reading Christmas bugs (Gravity’s Rainbow)
Later, toward dusk, several enormous water bugs, a very dark reddish brown, emerge like elves from the wainscoting, and go lumbering toward the larder—pregnant mother bugs too, with baby translucent outrider bugs flowing along like a convoy escort. At night, in the very late silences between bombers, ack-ack fire and falling rockets, they can be… Continue reading Christmas bugs (Gravity’s Rainbow)
In a corporate State 1, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses 2. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable 3 . Games, fairy-tales, legends from history, all the paraphernalia of make-believe 4 can be adapted and even embodied in a physical place, such as at Zwölfkinder 5. Over the… Continue reading A place must be made for innocence | Gravity’s Rainbow, annotations and illustrations for page 419
I’ll be adding to these and then doing more the next time (?!) I read Gravity’s Rainbow. Pages 82-83: The White Visitation, etc. Page 103: Black Markets, King Kong, etc. Pages 148-49: Preterite/Elect, Lurianic Kabbalah, Uncanny X-Men, etc. Page 203: Rainbows, Fuck-yous, Plastic Man, etc. Pages 204-05: Paper, mise en abyme, a silkenness of girls, etc. Page… Continue reading Gravity’s Rainbow annotations (so far)
Rainbow’s Gravity Vibrators Yawing I Saw Vibrant Orgy Aviary Bowstring Warty Virgin’s Boa Varsity War Bingo Brain Sow Gravity Wintry Bag Savior Bargain Ivy Worts Abstain, Wry Vigor! A Gravity Bro Wins Wry Bi Navigators Braying Sitar Vow Wait, Braving Rosy Raving Ways Orbit Vagina Bits Worry Bit Vaginas—Worry Vibrating Ya Rows Winy Gravitas, Bro Nay—Vibrator… Continue reading 69 Gravity’s Rainbow Anagrams
Overhead, on the molded plaster ceiling, Methodist versions of Christ’s kingdom swarm: lions cuddle with lambs, fruit spills lushly and without pause into the arms and about the feet of gentlemen and ladies, swains and milkmaids. No one’s expression is quite right. The wee creatures leer, the fiercer beasts have a drugged or sedated look,… Continue reading Gravity’s Rainbow — Annotations and illustrations for pages 82-83
Disney’s Fantasia is one of the better film adaptations of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. At least this thought zipped into my head a few weeks back, as I watched the film with my wife and kids. I was in the middle of a second reading of the novel, an immediate rereading prompted by the first reading. It looped me back in.… Continue reading A last riff (for now) on Gravity’s Rainbow (and Disney’s Fantasia)
What you felt stirring across the land… it was the equinox… green spring equal nights… canyons are opening up, at the bottoms are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a hood of smell… human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be… Continue reading God’s spoilers (Gravity’s Rainbow)
“I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in the World. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever—though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have.… Continue reading Critical Mass (Gravity’s Rainbow)
Otto is earnestly explaining his views on the Mother Conspiracy. It’s not often a sympathetic girl will listen. The Mothers get together once a year, in secret, at these giant conventions, and exchange information. Recipes, games, key phrases to use on their children. “What did yours use to say when she wanted to make you… Continue reading The Mother Conspiracy (Gravity’s Rainbow)
It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted… secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology… by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life… Continue reading The politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted (Gravity’s Rainbow)
Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim… Continue reading The Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth (Gravity’s Rainbow)
I enjoy rereading more than reading. Returning to Moby-Dick, 2666, Ulysses, or Blood Meridian reveals so much more: More depth, more art, more structure, more precision, more humor, more pain, more more. Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow is all more. Rereading Gravity’s Rainbow is like reading it for the first time, or, rather, more precisely, that is how I am experiencing it now—with… Continue reading A first riff on rereading Gravity’s Rainbow (and some thoughts on Weisenburger’s Companion)
