Listen, I’ve been deleriously raving about Pynchon to you guys for so long.  You have no reason to take me seriously at this point.  But I’ve been rereading Gravity’s Rainbow, and I am now even more convinced that it is the best and most relevant book of the latter 20th century.  And here are some passages from it, just to give you a flavor.   The thing is, I chose these almost at random.  I could’ve chosen any paragraph from the entire book.

“AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN.  These things appear on the walls of the Red districts in the course of the night.  Nobody can track down author or painter for any of them, leading you to suspect they’re one and the same.  Enough to make you believe in a folk-conciousness.  They are not slogans so much as texts, revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people… [elipsis in origional]

‘It’s true’, Vanya now, ‘look at the forms of capitalist expression.  Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, pornographies of deduction–aah, that sigh when we guess the muderer–all these novels, the films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute comfort…A self induced orgasm” (155)

Proverbs for Paranoids 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immortality of the Master (241)

Rocket Limerick:

There was a young fellow named Hector,

Who was quite fond of a launcher-erector.

But the squishes and pops

Of acute pressure drops

Wrecked Hector’s Hydraulic connector (306).

Oh, no.  COlonies are much, much more.  Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.  Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy.  Ehf?  Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as wolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals…Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression… (317)

(something for Sturgeon): …”from whom von Goll used to get cut rates on most of his film stock, especially on the peculiar and slow moving ‘Emulsion J’ invented by Lazlo Jamf, which somehow was able, even under ordinary daylight, to render the human skin transparent to a depth of half a millimeter, revealing the face just beneath the surface” (387) wouldn’t that be cool?

…”But, if I’m riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it…or if I passed it today somewhere in the defastation of Hamburg, breakthing the ash-dust, missing it completely…if what the IG built on this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers yesthe ‘Allied’ planes would all have been, ultimately, IG built, by way of Director Krupp, through is English interlocks–the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exaclty in space and time, each shockwave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight’s wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, decoding the holy Text..If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers who built it as a refinery never knew there were any further steps to be taken.  Their design was ‘finalized’ and they could forget it.

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 directed instead by the needs of technology…by a conspiracy bwteen human beings and techniques, bu something that needed the energy burst of war, crying, ‘Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake’ but meaning, most likely dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more more… The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms–it was only staged to look that way–but among different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite…” (520-521, all elipses and italics in original)

Ok no one wants to read too much GR before they actually read it, when they will read WAY TOO MUCH of it.

happy solstice tomorrow.