Gravity's Rainbow

version

Well-known member
That kid who shot the protesters, Kyle Rittenhouse, was in Kenosha. That's where it happened.
 

version

Well-known member
@linebaugh

"Pornographer and saint. This is the fundamental reason for tearing Pynchon out of the pantheon and sitting him in front, in the same way that we still invite Wilde, Shaw or Aristotle to watch us drink coffee. Pynchon is pertinent, an eternal contemporary. What's more, Pynchon is still alive and surely drinks coffee. Not only will he continue to take it in life, in the near future, but he has been taking it for many years – for several centuries before he was born, to be exact."
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
@Mr. Tea

Any further thoughts on GR, having reread it?
I don't think any other book I've read offers so many jewel-like bursts of genius, but then slaps you in the face with what, at worst, is a load of stoned, self-indulgent, irrelevant nonsense.

He's great when he's going off on these grand authorial soliloquys on the nature of War and Power and Capitalism and Science and Desire and Death, but then you're straight into a psychedelic flight of fancy that's neither profound, nor fun to read, nor has any apparent relevance to the main plot. I can't stand the cheesy song-and-dance routines, the general wackiness, the affectedly folksy language (all that "gee whizz oh boy" crap), the whole Crazy Sexual Adventures Of Tyrone Slothrop aspect (spontaneous, yet precisely choreographed, orgies, etc.). The custard pie fights. The drug scenes that serve mainly to say "Hey, check it out, I sure do a lot of drugs, you know."

And yet, there are passages of absolutely sublime beauty, like the ones Dan mentioned.

Frustrating, because I feel it could be a much better book than it is. But no doubt a lot of real Pynchon heads would say I just don't "get" it, and that all the songs and the druggy silliness is integral to the overall effect and can't be separated from the serious, highbrow stuff.
 

luka

Well-known member
the zone

"The most consequential event in recent history resulting in a provisional abstract space was WWII. Long encumbered with ideological myths and historical fabrications, it's important to understand how this war, for the victors, was an operation of modernisation achieved through unparalleled devastation. For global capitalism, it accomplished the essential dissolution of obsolete borders, languages, forms of sovereignty and finance or anything else that impeded the remaking of the planet for domination by mega-cartels and a permanent warfare state. It was the final clearing away of the residual shards of a pre-modern Europe.

The savagery of the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the fire bombings of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo, all without military necessity, were demonstrations of the irrelevance and disposability of a lifeworld and its inhabiatants according to the imperatives that were to shape the post-war Pax Americana. As many have shown, the war and its immediate aftermath gave birth to the National Security State, abetted by the emerging nexus of chemical, aerospace and microelectronics industries.

The famed ENIAC computer was completed in 1946 and immeidately used by the US military for calculations to predict trajectories of artillery and rockets; in the same year, it played a decisive role in the development of the first hydrogen bomb. Even in the years immediately after the war, some wanted to use atomic weapons to guarantee the unchallenged permanence of the new order. John von Neumann, advocated for a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike on all the major cities and industrial centres of the Soviet Union.

Chemical cartels began the industrialisation of agriculture with pesticides and herbicides alongside the continued development of chemical weapons for use on civilian populations. Life, whether of the body, of ecological rhythms, or of social resilience, became not just an object to be controlled and exploited but to be made into a potential object of extermination."

Jonathan Crary. Scorched Earth.
 
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