Hey /lit/ I started reading gravity's Rainbow, got to page 73, but only understand about 40% of it. It is honestly a drag but feels like I am missing alot if I skip it. At this point, should I just give up?
you won't understand most of it but i promise it's worth it. i'm on my second read through and it's one of the most beautiful things i've read.
there's no shortcut to this. you have to struggle through it and someday when you come back to it, it will have been worth it
>>7840943
>wahh thing is hard wahhh me wan quit wahhhhh
fucking millennials
>>7840959
Man its not that, its just I have other hard shit to read like finances and this is supposed to be my fiction free read so I don't want to spend so much time on it. Guess its not for me.
>>7840962
It's shit tier bait don't fall for it again
It's not a book to rush through. You know, like Ulysses...
If it's for a quick fun read, go with Latke 49, why ya gotta go with V2 for the love of fuck? Does everything got to be about being seen, or getting to say? Quietly take GR up to a mountain bunker and pore over it—otherwise stick w/Jack Reacher, Mr Wall St Wannabe Money Suspenders.
These fucking millennials...
The book is actually steeped in not just a very good understanding of history but also in Pynchon's own research into ... (wait for it) ... CONSPIRACY THEORIES!
Yes, in fact, as a fellow paranoid schizophrenic, I could not help but be astonished by Pynchon's works after I decided to read them to take a break from my own exhausting studies into the realm. The realm of conspiracy theories, you see.
What I saw was that a lot of the stuff I independently researched, not really following some syllabus or any guidelines, ended up unintentionally preparing me quite well for Gravity's Rainbow, which I had read once before but had understood nothing of.
One example: Most of the beginning of the book deals with some assholes working with British intelligence during WW2, particularly with psychic phenomena and psychological warfare, and they're all under SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, which actually had a lot of members (if I am remembering correctly) of Tavistock (which is also referred to in the damn book, Pointsman's indirect monologue referring to "those fellows up at Tavistock" or something to that effect), most notably the very influential John Rawlings Rees. According to the conspiracy theorists, it was the same damn thing, controlled by the same people with the same aims, just with a different name. This Tavistock was created in Britain before WWI to disseminate propaganda to get Britain into WWI. However, the conspiracy theorists have it that, instead of just doing that, it got the best psychologists in the world together to plan the demise of Western civilization, the brainwashing of the populace, and so on, and so on, so that the Shadow Government behind it could come to power after all the people had been psychologically neutered by it. It even exists today (supposedly) and decides everything that goes on CNN and Fox News.
So, in the book, we have these psychological warfare assholes working under the aegis of Tavistock, and SHAEF, which coincidentally (not really) happens to have many of the same damn people in it.
The references to the "Blavatskian wing" of the damned thing won't be understood unless, like any good student of occultism, you've at least heard of Helena Blavatsky, occultist extraordinaire of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who also shows up in Joyce's Ulysses, writer of such books as Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. In context, it obviously refers to those assholes in the field who are trying to scientifically see if man can develop such psychic powers as Blavatsky claims he can, obviously so they can use them against the Germans (although perhaps it goes even deeper than that???).
>>7841089
(cont.)
And you won't understand what "Ouspenskian nonsense" means, or any reference to Ouspenskians at all, in fact, unless you're acquainted with P.D. Ouspensky, the mystic and disciple of G.I. Gurdjieff who, more or less cribbing Gurdjieff's ideas, admittedly, claimed that the majority of mankind does not have freewill, self-consciousness, etc., and that it is only possible to have these by extensive self-development.
And then, according to history/conspiracy theories, the US, Britain, and Nazi Germany as well were very interested in such theories and researching into paranormal phenomena --- what better than intelligence agents who could read minds, soldiers who were developed to the absolute peak of humanity?
I could write more if anyone's interested, but only if.
>>7840979
entitled millennial detected
Read Lot 49. If you like that, read V. If you like that, read Gravity's Rainbow (though Mason & Dixon is easier and possibly better, and Inherent Vice/Bleeding Edge are as easy as Lot 49 and underrated here).
Don't start with this one, it takes the most work and Pynchon's easier when you're at least a little used to what he's trying to do.
>>7841101
So what your basically saying is the book is rich with this stuff but most of it will fly over my head?
>>7841152
Exactamundo. But don't despair --- all you have to do is throw it out and forget it ever happened.
Just for the heck of it, I'll keep going for a bit. This is one passage I've always been astonished by. Simply astonished.
>It was always easy for men to come and tell her who to be. Other girls of her generation grew up asking, “Who am I?” For them it was a question full of pain and struggle. For Gretel it was hardly even a question. She had more identities than she knew what to do with. Some of these Gretels have been only the sketchiest of surfaces—others are deeper. Many have incredible gifts, antigravity, dreams of prophecy . . . comatic images surround their faces, glowing in the air: the light itself is actually crying tears, weeping in this stylized way, as she is borne along through the mechanical cities, the meteorite walls draped in midair, every hollow and socket empty as a bone, and the failing shadow that shines black all around it . . . or is held in staring postures, long gowns, fringe and alchemical symbol, veils flowing from leather skullcaps padded concentric as a bike-racer’s helmet, with crackling-tower and obsidian helix, with drive belts and rollers, with strange airship passages that thread underneath arches, solemnly, past louvers and giant fins in the city mist. . . .
>In Weisse Sandwüste von Neumexiko she played a cowgirl. First thing, they’d asked, “Can you ride?” “Of course,” she’d answered. Never been closer than roadside ditches in time of war to any horse in her life, but she needed the work. When the moment came to saddle up, it never occurred to her to be afraid of the beast pressing up between her thighs. It was an American horse named Snake. Trained or not, it could have run away with her, even killed her. But they pranced the screen full of the Sagittarian fire, Gretel and that colt, and her smile never drew back.
>Here is one of the veils she has shed, a thin white scum, a caustic residue from one recent night in Berlin. “While you were asleep, I left the house. I went out in the street, without my shoes. I found a corpse. A man. A week’s gray beard and old gray suit. . . .” It was lying still and very white behind a wall. She lay down beside it and put her arms around it. There was frost. The body rolled toward her and the wrinkles stayed frozen in the cloth. She felt its bristled face rub her own cheek. The smell was no worse than cold meat from the icebox. She lay, holding it, till morning.
>“Tell me how it is in your land.” What woke her? Boots in the street, an early steamshovel. She can hardly hear her tired whispering.
Is Pynchon describing multiple-personality disorder induced by trauma in a young actress/prostitute before MK-Ultra was even publicly revealed by the Congressional hearings, let alone conspiracy theories about it promulgated?
Possibly, it may have been a case of extremely perceptive intuition. Maybe I misinterpret it. Or maybe, in some other way, he somehow knew.
>>7841185
Maybe I'm retarded, but having never read any Pynchon all I got out of that was that she can fill acting roles very easily. It's very unclear without context who's saying any of those quotes, unless it's just meant to be the "men" in general described in the first sentence. It's powerful and very well-written, but where the fuck does anything about trauma-induced multiple personality disorder or MK Ultra come from? Is it elaborated on in the rest of the book? If you only drew it from this passage, you're reading way too far into it.
