Gravity's Rainbow

DannyL

Wild Horses
The final page has always stayed with me - a moment, glancing upwards, before the inevitability of death - "There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs....". Fucking hell. Still absoutely slays me.
 

luka

Well-known member
Apparently he smoked a lot of weed. There's some story about a guy tracking him down at the time and him having a bin full of it, also Jules Siegel, an old college friend, said he'd told him that he was "so fucked up I can't remember writing some of this stuff".

It's very obviously a cannaboid imagination.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Remarkably coherent for a stoner fantasy though? I'd also thought he must've been on speed. Just the scope, the multifarious nature of the references. It's like a bloody encyclopedia of the 20th century really, as others were implying above
 

version

Well-known member
The process was apparently just him being locked in a room on the beach in California for around ten years, smoking huge amounts of weed and writing eight hours or so a day. He had a little figure of Porky Pig on his desk and a note pinned to the wall which read "Eschew Sloth" and he would write on graph paper in very precise, "engineer's" handwriting.
 

luka

Well-known member
One of Pounds themes in The Cantos is the way money makes a mockery of the nation state, in the same way the wealthy donate to both Republican and Democratic party in the US
 

version

Well-known member
"It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments... no more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments."
 

luka

Well-known member
I've read 590 pages. This edition has 901, so I'm almost two thirds of the way through and what has just occurred to me is that this is not a funny book and Pynchon is not a funny man. 590 pages and not a single chuckle or grin.
 

version

Well-known member
I think he's funny, but in a very dorky, laboured way that I have to be in the mood for; GR strikes as me more sad than anything anyway.
 

luka

Well-known member
Obviously it's too long and too diffuse and the lack pf purpose, direction and clarity means sometimes I want to give up but mostly I'm enjoying it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I didn't think it was particularly funny either. Maybe the odd moment but that's not my memory of the book and it's not what I wanted from it or judged it on.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
I like the orgy scene with Greta's daughter, can't remember her name. Who cares, right? She's dead now. And the final scene with the kids in the rocket. The rest is just a convoluted mess (with some real clever writing and dense reference material you can plunder for years and (wasted) years!).
 
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forclosure

Well-known member
Pyncheon is a white whale for me ive got Lot 49 but i find i kinda stop and start with it i dont think its bad but i dunno its works in spurts for me, recognize theres alot of reffences in there that i dont get because i aint read as much as him his sense of humour comes across more slapsticky than i expected but thats just me.

Id like to read Mason & Dixon and GR but something in my guy tells me im not ready for those two yet

I also have bleeding edge but waiting to get around to that one at some point.

As much as it makes him out to be a freakshow and is part of that reclusive author bullshit myth there is something incredibly appealing to me about a guy who nobody knows what he looks like and the only pics of him date back to when he was in the navy in his early 20s,hes not a recluse out of some self-made mythologizing he just prefers to keep to himself and not deal with the reporters and all that yet SOMEHOW he seems to be completly ontop of whats going on in the world.

Id be lying if i were to say especially with how our relationships with the internet has flumoxed and warped over the years that i dont envy him
 

version

Well-known member
Some tabloid actually got a couple of shots of him recently, apparently they staked out his apartment building and snapped him on his way to vote with his son. A freelancer from Norway managed to track him down too.
 

version

Well-known member
The whole thing was so classless and unnecessary, anyone who knows who he is knows how he feels about reporters and his privacy and there's more than enough material in his books for those interested.
 
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