It's not like it's rocket ~#@?"" no wait, it IS rocket science, and built into those thrusters are myriad plosives of hinky characters, 'edgey' situations, sex acts of every shape/form, ying-yang realities, WW2 nominal scenarios galore, paranoia/parabolas/gravitational parable all splattered willy-nilly Pollack'd cover art of "Gravity's Rainbow" book. 'Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch,' aka, don't fuck with the Rocketman - (you hear that Herr (hair) Rump? you gonna get bunches of peeps vap'd - them, us & whole lot of bystanders - who knows but WW111). Was ist los, Jackson? (Jackson used colloquially 14 times in "GR" - book published in '73 - Pynchon married Melanie Jackson '90 - had a son also named Jackson). That tidbit squares with the circularity of revolving door characters' use in many of his novels - what he likes keeps on showing up.

There are some decent reviews of this book [here on gr's] both adulatory and derogatory - they are equally relevant in my opinion - the book is itself a zeroing out parable of equilibrium, a stasis of annihilation. This was my second reading about four years apart - first time through was an act of blind tribulation, a suffering through as penance for sins of hubristic reaching - wanted to read the unreadable - same as "Finnegan's" and less so "Ulysses" which also took two reads to assemble meaning. Anyway, I get it, this book disturbs while it dazzles, dances and drubs, deracinates, degrades, deadens nerve endings so much so that, by the fulmination of culmination I'm done in. Pynch you is one crazy hepcat Joyce'd be jiggered wit. Five star fungibles.

Bitcoin=V2?!

Review of Gravity's Rainbow

Brilliant, Frustrating, Falls Short of Greatness, and not for the Faint of Heart



I don't usually use images in my reviews. But this review screamed for one.

Several caveats for anyone attempting to read this.

1. You most likely won't get through it on your first attempt. I didn't.

2. Reading this is a project! The book is nearly 800 pages, and pretty convoluted. It's like reading Joyce's "Ulysses" (although I think "Ulysses" is the better book). You need to allocate more time and attention than you'll need for the average book. I found the combination of audiobook and Kindle book useful. For a book like "Gravity's Rainbow", the audio helped me get through it, but it wasn't sufficient. I frequently followed along in the Kindle version.

You'll also need some reference material. I used the Gravity's Rainbow Wiki...not the Wikipedia one, but this site, which has info on all things Thomas Pynchon: http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.c...
This wasn't particularly satisfactory as a resource, but it was better than nothing. There are some books available, such as Steven Weisenburger's "A Gravity's Rainbow Companion", but my library didn't have this, so I settled for the Wiki.

The Wiki had some information, but it was extremely difficult to navigate, and lots of references were missing. For example, towards the end of the book, there was a guy named Zhlubb. I know enough Yiddish to know this is an unattractive, boorish, or dumb person, but the Wiki didn't even mention it.

Worse, you have to dig to find anything. The page-by-page reference guide left a lot of stuff out.

There was a page of German translations, but more than half the German words used weren't there, and I had to search for them.

3. You most likely won't understand a lot of the obscure references, even if you research them while you read. If you research every single word you don't know, you'll never finish the book.

There are multiple references to European and American history and popular culture. There's lots of information about various mystical traditions.

Also there are words in multiple languages---German, Herero (an African language), French, Spanish, and Russian, among others.

Pynchon also loves neologisms. Obviously, you won't find these made up words in any reference material. That throws even more confusion into the mix.

So don't get too bogged down in knowing everything. Just concentrate on getting through the book.

4. This may be the kind of book, that like "Ulysses", needs multiple readings. (However, unlike with "Ulysses", I may not have the patience or the desire to read it again).

5. This book is definitely NOT for the faint hearted or easily offended. It's filled with cheerfully obscene language (and lots of it), violence (although not nearly as much as other books), ethnic jokes, scatalogical jokes, petty criminals and generally amoral characters, drinking, drugging---including smoking marijuana, taking amphetamines and psychomimetics (LSD didn't exist yet), shooting heroine and snorting and shooting cocaine. (I did wonder how much of the endless drug taking was historically accurate or if Pynchon was imposing the 60s drug culture on a World War II background. Maybe it doesn't matter, since this is basically Pynchon's hallucinatory fantasy set in a World War II and postwar background. But--the book does seem to be historically accurate in other respects, so maybe the drug scene is too.).

There is also grossness of every kind (example: in one very funny dinner scene, some characters are making up disgusting alliterative food names such as "Vomit Vichyssoise". The scene is quite humorous if you take it in the right spirit, although a lot of it's admittedly the kind of stuff children would laugh at, so it's both irritating and comical.).

Plus there is loads and loads of exuberant sex. Many of the characters are totally amoral and will do it with (just about anything) that moves. There are graphic descriptions of just about any kind of sex imaginable: anal, oral, heterosexual, homosexual, transvestite, sadomasochism, necrophilia, sex with young people, sex with old people, etc. There is also lots of pedophilia (and sex with children). That seems to be Pynchon's particular favorite. It's not surprising that Nabokov was Pynchon's writing teacher in college. And Pynchon has few filters, so he writes whatever comes into his mind without inhibition. No wonder he avoids public appearances. Can you imagine him being interviewed on CNN?

In one humorous scene (I think Pynchon makes fun of himself a lot), Slothrop, the main character, feels lust towards a pig. Fortunately, bestiality seems to be the only place where Pynchon draws the line. Slothrop does NOT have sex with the pig.

6. This is not easy reading by a long shot. The already confusing plot with multiple characters and historical/literary references is made even more confusing by the fact that in many cases one or more characters may or may not be the same person. Example: we find out that Blicero is the same as Weissmann, but are Ilse and Bianca (two little girls) the same person? Is Katje also Margherita? Famous film director Gustav von Goll adopts the alias Der Springer when he becomes a big time postwar black marketer. In many cases, as in the world of a psychotic, it's unclear whether two characters are actually different people or aspects of the same person.

One website describes Pynchon as "bat shit insane". I think that's entirely possible. It's also possible that he was "under the influence" of some intoxicant the entire time he was writing this.

So---you may very well ask---why did I even bother to read this book and even give it four stars?

I read the book because I read The Crying of Lot 49 many years ago and became a Pynchon fan of sorts.

In fact, I would recommend that you read a shorter Pynchon book, like "The Crying of Lot 49" first before tackling "Gravity's Rainbow", to see if you can even stand reading Pynchon. His hallucinatory writing style is not everyone's cup of tea, to put it mildly.



public-domain.zorger.com

Ok. Now, I'll attempt to give you a "summary", which is laughably impossible for a work as meandering and cryptic as this.

The book is largely (on a surface level) about World War II German rockets: their design and creation, the rocket launches, etc. I think the title is meant to describe a rocket (although that's one of many things in the book that isn't entirely clear). Pynchon calls the rocket the "World's Biggest Phallus" or something along those lines. That type of humorous sexual symbolism is very Pynchonesque. Pynchon is also quite a geek. There are lots of very technical discussions of rocket engineering and other scientific topics. I admit that even though I'm a geek myself I didn't always completely understand the technical stuff. Of course, Pynchon's tendency towards make believe (even in technical matters), makes it even more confusing. I have found, though, that most of his scientific and technical discussions are based in fact. It's just that he inserts a made up term here and there just to have some fun.

Most of the action of the novel takes place in Europe, although there are glimpses of Africa and America as well.

The novel begins in London towards the end of World War II (1944 I think).

We are introduced to several minor characters in the beginning---"Pirate" Prentice, Osbie Feel, and Teddy Bloat (don't you love the names?) They might all live in the same house (this, like much else in this novel, is unclear). Prentice is famous for cooking with bananas, which he grows in a hothouse on his roof. All of these guys are shadowy characters, whose roles in the war are unclear. (I've read some speculation that Osbie Feel might be Pynchon himself, but I wonder if Slothrop--see below--might be Pynchon).

Our "hero" (well, not really a hero at all but the main character) is Tyrone Slothrop, an American soldier from Massachusetts stationed in London. Slothrop is a real head case. This is understandable, since, apparently a shadowy "They" (the government? academia?) have been doing clandestine psychological and psychosexual experiments on him since he was a baby. Also, his father was always trying to kill him, and his mother was an alcoholic. We see him working in an office with his British buddy Tantivy, making maps of locations the German bombs are hitting. Apparently these locations coincide with the residences of the many London girls Slothrop's slept with. He's quite the ladies' man and apparently, too, the "kiss of death" (although he's not aware that he is). It seems that a German rocket lands wherever he's had sex (and in Slothrop's case, that's a lot of places).

Anyway, Slothrop ends up in the "White Visitation", a former mental hospital that's been converted to a facility for wartime psychological research. There is a so-called "PSI Unit" there that includes a bunch of people with unusual talents, like clairvoyants, psychometrists, mediums, etc. There are also some more traditional scientists, including Pavlovian Dr. Pointsman, who does experiments on dogs and other animals (including an Octopus named Grigoriy) and Roger Mexico, a young statistician, who's mapping the frequency of the German bombings based on statistical distributions.

Mexico has a love affair with Jessica Swanlake, who's in some arm of the British military (ATS?) even though she's already affianced to another man, Jeremy "The Beaver". He sees Jessica fixing her bicycle on the roadside and offers her a ride (which is how they meet cute).

Anyway, at the "White Visitation" the sinister staff are doing more experiments on Slothrop. Notably, they are administering truth serum and interviewing him on subjects like racial tension in the U.S.

BTW, Pynchon uses the color white a lot throughout the book to symbolize death (as it does in many cultures). He uses the color black (paradoxically) in the same way. Black leader Enzian is considering suicide.

Slothrop, as a result of his "contributions" at the White Visitation is allowed to go on leave (in Southern France I think). He meets Dutch blonde bombshell Katje at a casino there. Katje has escaped from the evil sadomasochistic German Blicero who is in charge of a German rocket installation in Holland. Blicero turns out to be--or may be--Major Weissmann, whose commentaries and notebooks figure importantly in the book. (Pynchon loves puzzles, and stories within stories within stories). Blicero casts Katje and Gottfried (they look alike) as Hansel and Gretel in his bizarre sexual fantasies which they act out. Katje is, again, one of those people with a shadowy past and present. Is she a spy? A double agent?

Slothrop has an affair with Katje (he has an affair with nearly every attractive female he meets, actually). One day, his room is robbed and everything (his clothes and papers) are gone.

He escapes and somehow gets new clothes and fake papers. He then goes AWOL. Since he's effectively lost his American identity, he can never return home.

The rest of the book follows Slothrop as he drifts aimlessly through "The Zone" (which is what post-War Europe is called). Like everyone else, he is forced to survive on petty crime.

There are endless characters and subplots, some more important than others.

One subplot involves Slothrop's meeting with Geli Tripping (great name again!) a pretty young witch who is in love with Russian officer Tchitcherine. Slothrop sleeps with Geli, of course. She then sets out to search for her missing lover Tchitcherine.

Another subplot introduces us to Leni who is unhappily married to Franz Pokler, a German rocket engineer. She finally leaves him, with their child, Ilse. Both Leni and Ilse apparently end up in the camps, as Leni is a communist (and may be part Jewish? unclear).

In still another subplot, Slothrop, dressed in a Rocketman costume, is kidnapped by Argentinians (aided by Tchitcherine) while he is delivering a huge shipment of hashish. The kidnappers stick him in a stolen German U-Boat. Here he meets Margherita Erdmann (Greta) with whom he has an ardent affair. Greta likes to be whipped. She is looking for her lost daughter, Bianca. Both Slothrop and Margherita end up on the Anubis (a ship named for the Egyptian god of the dead). There are orgies on board the Anubis. Margherita's husband is also on board the Anubis.

Still another secondary character is Thanatz, obviously named after Thanatos, the Greek god of the dead.

A different subplot involves the African Herero tribe and their leader Enzian. A group of them are living in Germany as the Schwartzcommando, a group of black Africans fighting for the Nazis.

Another minor subplot introduces Takeshi and Ichizo, two manic Japanese kamikaze pilots.

In one of many "stories within the story" we hear the tale of an immortal light bulb---yes, a light bulb!!--named Byron. (Is this a humorous reference to the British romantic poet?)

Slothrop eventually ends up back in Berlin. Berlin (and all of post-war Europe) has become a stewpot of decadence. People live in the streets and inhabit burn out buildings and abandoned houses. Prostitution, drugging of all types, all forms of sexual decadence, and petty crime (drug dealing, black marketeering, etc.) have become the norm. This is not surprising, as it's now the only way to survive. His friends there are the very aged (but spry) dope dealer Saure and lovelies Trudi and Magda. He also briefly lives with Margherita.

There are numerous other subplots and endless characters. As I said, in many cases two or more characters may be the same person and it's often difficult to tell.

It's like living inside a schizophrenic's nightmares. It also sometimes felt like this novel was written in a psychotic's secret inner language that the reader couldn't possibly understand.

But--it's kind of fun to read.

Large sections of the novel are just hilarious.

There's a scene where Slothrop drops a mouth harp down a toilet (in Boston or New York) and dives in to retrieve it. It's described in nightmarish detail and hilarious magic realism.

The book is filled with endless songs and poems (some hidden, some not), many quite humorous.

Example:

"My Doper's Cadenza" sung by Bodine, an American service man.

There's an abundance of funny scenes (although much of the humor is gallows humor, toilet humor, or sexual humor).

Example: Elderly Berliner Saure wants to know why Americans say "Ass backwards", when, he points out, asses are always backwards. Shouldn't they be saying "ass forwards"?

Another example: Dr. Pointsman (then Roger's boss) is trying to capture a stray dog for his experiments. Roger and Pointsman are at a bombed-out house in or around London. Pointsman gets his foot stuck in a porcelain toilet bowl, and cannot extricate himself. He is forced to limp around with the toilet bowl clamped to his foot while the dog escapes.

In another weirdly funny scene, a giant adenoid digests a London neighborhood.

Just about everyone loses their loved ones, either because love falls apart or so many people die in the war and its aftermath.

In fact, the precariousness of their existence probably accounts for a lot of the decadent behavior. These are people living with the possibility of death all the time. No wonder they drink, drug, and sex themselves into oblivion.

The main subject of the novel actually seems to be death in its many varieties and the destructiveness of war. To Pynchon, I think, even sex and excrement are metaphors for death.

Pynchon's political insight is almost prescient. He maintains (possibly correctly) that there really were no "sides" in World War II, but that there was actually collaboration between the so-called "enemies". The real Fascist rulers are corporations and greed, which know no boundaries. We can easily see that multi-national corporations run the world today. So it seems, Pynchon called that one correctly.

Also, Pynchon's Allies are committing atrocities nearly as bad as those done by the Germans. Many of the experiments done at The White Visitation are pretty awful.

In Pynchon's postwar world, no one seems to have much allegiance to their country or to the Axis or Allies anymore anyway. People colloborate across boundaries for profit and survival.

Also, the fighting has supposedly ended in the postwar "Zone". But we find out that's not true.

I didn't give this 5 stars, because I think it falls short of being a great book.

Ulysses was also faulted for "obscenity" although by comparison to Pynchon, Joyce seems like Mother Theresa. Joyce also loved to use obscure literary and historical references. He also loved popular culture.

But there the similarity ends.

"Ulysses" is a much greater book than "Gravity's Rainbow" because Leopold Bloom, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus somehow resonate with us. They are "everyman" and "everywoman" (although they are, of course, very specific characters). The point is, we connect with them as humans. Bloom is a kind and lonely man. I also thought "Ulysses" was a far more coherent book than "Gravity's Rainbow". "Gravity's Rainbow" is a bit of a shaggy dog story, although the ending does (sort of) wrap things up--if not nicely, at least in a way that kind of makes sense.

In "Gravity's Rainbow" there is much less of that feeling of identifying with the characters. We do feel for Slothrop and even like him. He's probably the closest thing to an "everyman" character in the book. Like many others, he is a product of his times. His mind has been warped by all the psycho-experiments done on him (often without his knowledge or consent). But, the amorality, crime, decadence, insanity, and the hallucinatory quality of the entire novel somehow keep us from admiring or identifying with most of the main characters. Blicero is clearly evil. Dr. Pointsman is also villainous. Most of the others are unreliable and untrustworthy. Only Enzian, the black Herero leader, comes across as a decent human being. The others would all "sell their grandmothers up the river for a dime".

Still, "Gravity's Rainbow" is a cautionary tale about the violence of war and its aftermath. Death is its main subject, as I already mentioned. Pynchon seems uncertain of the possibility of life after death, although he does seem to lean towards it. Seances contact the deceased. Even statistician Roger Mexico starts to admit that the PSI researchers may be on to something. So it seems that Pynchon is rejecting the purely logical and materialistic approach to this question.

George Guidall does a brilliant reading of "Gravity's Rainbow". I haven't always liked his audio work in the past, but he does an amazing rendition of this very difficult reading material. He's great at singing the many Pynchonesque tunes, too.

Well I suppose you could say "this is rocket science", but this is a very difficult book to summarise. On one hand you could see it as obscene, rambling and unfocused, but on the other full of humour, ideas and fantasy, pitching the reader into a learned disturbed picaresque dream story of rockets, chemistry, psychological experiments and conspiracy, set during the confusion at the end of World War II. I enjoyed parts of it and found it very intriguing, but found the whole somewhat confusing (which is probably intended).

n  An Approach for Simulating Text Consistent With Gravity’s Rainbown  
n  
n  Technical Report issued 6 July 2012 by the Simulation Lab Originating Text-based Handiwork (SLOTH)n

While the exact algorithm used by Pynchon (1973) to produce Gravity’s Rainbow (henceforth GR) was never documented, we contend that the method proposed in this paper is, on average, in a repeated sampling context, observationally equivalent. As is true of any simulation, there is a deterministic component and a random component. Simulated paths will vary, but the statistical distributions from which the stochastic terms are sampled match those of GR. Our approach, as applied to text generation, is novel¹. It is, however, closely related to the methods employed by computer scientists in the so-called Markovian Mozart initiative². We begin by describing the basic structure, we then discuss our vision of the text generation process as it applies to GR, and conclude with final thoughts on how text simulation may be used going forward.

Simulation Structuring

Interest in random text generation appears to have begun with the famous, though untested, proposition that an infinite number of monkeys with infinite time at their keyboards would ultimately reproduce Shakespeare. Of course, pure randomness without some kind of structure is a highly inefficient path toward literary art. Plus, the process is just as likely to produce piggy porn as it is to emulate Pynchon (granting, for our purposes, that there is a distinction to be made).

The opposite side of the spectrum would be a well-defined set of sentences featuring blanks to fill in using a pre-chosen set of options. This was a style popularized by Mad Magazine³. Such an approach differs from ours in that their structure is more narrowly defined, allowing insufficient latitude to characterize the chaotic and disorienting nature of GR.

The input parameters to our simulation will, by default, result in 4 sections, 73 chapters, over 400 characters (mostly minor, wordplayfully named), and 776 pages, just as the original did. However, one of the advantages of a simulator is that the resulting length is configurable. We are also careful to specify stylistic breakdowns that may enter in a probabilistically identical way. The sampling ranges extend from ridiculous to sublime in one dimension and vulgar to sublime in another. By applying noise terms to the narrative, comprehension will vary throughout.

Text Generating Process

The backbone of our simulation structure is established in the initial step. We specify a superset of core influences which are drawn upon by the random text extractor in accordance with user-supplied probability weights. This superset, A, is defined by

A ⊂ (WWII Historical Almanac, V-2 Rocket Technical Manual, Pavlovian Psychology [loaded in backwards], German-English Dictionary, Freud’s Comprehensive List of Phallic Symbols, phrasebooks for various romance languages, Anthology of Daft ‘n’ Bawdy Poetry, Urban Thesaurus [1945 edition], Guidebook to Pharmacology, Introduction to Tarot Symbolism, Applications in Multivariate Calculus and Differential Equations, a short book of surprisingly tender love stories, a longer book of genuinely raunchy lust stories, and an assortment of engineering textbooks)

Text drawn probabilistically from A serves as our starting point, S1. The next step is to intersperse small elements of plot into S1 with insertion points determined by a Poisson distribution. Specify

f(k, λ) = λ^k ⋅ exp(-λ) / k!

where k is the number of insertion points for each sub-block of S1, ! denotes factorial, and λ is the mean inclusion rate (λ > 0, but not by much)

The storyline to be parsed and inserted as indicated above is presented (by us and by Pynchon) in skeletal form. The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature sums it up well⁴.

The sprawling narrative comprises numerous threads having to do either directly or tangentially with the secret development and deployment of a rocket by the Nazis near the end of World War II. Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop is an American working for Allied Intelligence in London. Agents of the Firm, a clandestine military organization, are investigating an apparent connection between Slothrop's erections and the targeting of incoming V-2 rockets. As a child, Slothrop was the subject of experiments conducted by a Harvard professor who is now a Nazi rocket scientist. Slothrop's quest for the truth behind these implications leads him on a nightmarish journey of either historic discovery or profound paranoia, depending on his own and the reader's interpretation.

As a work in the postmodernist tradition, nonlinearity must be actuated. At no point may the plot as a function of time (P[t]) be twice differentiable, and only rarely may it be first-order differentiable. Flashbacks, digressions, and various other discontinuities must be introduced as P[t] is inserted into S1. In a related way, causal orderings must be distorted for a more authentic Pynchonian narrative. Specify

Cause ⇔ Effect +/- δt

where δt = α + β⋅δJ + σ⋅δz with J being a jump parameter; δz being Gaussian (not DeLillovian) white noise; and α, β ‘n’ σ being user-defined constants.

Once the plot convolutions specified above are inserted, resulting in S2, various themes may be brought to bear. Seminal reviews by Penkevich (2012), Jenn(ifer) (2012), and Graye (2012) discuss a wide variety of these themes and should serve as the basis for the next stage of textual input. The motifs identified form a set B ⊂ (Nature of Control, Paranoia, Preterite vs. Elite, Us vs. Them, etc.). Sampling from B proceeds in the same manner described above for A, i.e., according to the probability weights defined by the user. We denote the result of this as S3.

Authorial insights into human nature are treated in a similar way. However, lists constructed using the aforementioned reviews feature insights of the reviewers themselves. This, in essence, removes layers of obfuscation so that transformations are necessary to reconstruct the more muddled original set. This is achieved by adding random perturbations and mapping the results into Hilbert space. Draws from this set of transformed and re-adumbrated insights inserted into S3 give us S4.

Stylistic modifications to S4 are important when attempting to simulate the GR experience. For one, the narration should vary depending on the POV character. Allow average words per sentence in certain randomly chosen sections to be fully three times greater than the overall average. A smaller but consistently applied transformation is to take a common four-letter word and substitute in a three-letter alternative that, for what it’s worth, is phonetically more correct. For Pynchon, this meant “says” → “sez”. The result of these modifications is denoted S5.

A GR simulation would not be complete without one further stylistic “enhancement”. Any vanilla sex scenes within S5 may be replaced with random draws from Y. Denote:

U := incidence of urolagnia
C := incidence of coprophagia
K := incidence of kinkiness of any other form

We can then specify

Y=U⋅C⋅K!

Finally, the result of this last modification, S₆, should be submitted to voice recognition software and compared with Pynchon’s own voice. Any wavelets that differ by more than 2 σ should then be truncated within S₆ to create S7. It is our contention that S7 will be a lexically similar rendition of the original when the default values of the parameter inputs are chosen. Alternatively, our framework also allows customization such that GR may be generated with a twist. Options along these lines are discussed in the final section below.

Prospects Going Forward

Pynchon’s well-known penchant for formulaic detail coupled with random noise makes GR a natural vehicle for demonstrating our methods. As stated above, by choosing the relevant inputs and their GR-consistent probability values, a book very much like GR may be generated. By repeating the process, multiple instances may be constructed. With sufficient computing power, these multiple instances can be fed into a genetic algorithm to determine an “optimal” GR (where optimality is defined in terms of individual tastes). For instance, by dialing down the weight assigned to silly poems in the initial stage, one could generate a new GR of even greater ponderousness and density. Similarly, length settings may be varied. A GR sampler could be generated that is only a fraction of the original length. Or for the show-off readers out there looking for even greater challenges, a simulated version that doubles the length and halves the signal-to-noise ratio could be produced.

Of course, our methodology may be applied to simulate any piece of writing⁵. Hybridization is also possible. For instance, if the inputs for David Morrell’s First Blood were combined with those for GR, setting it in Vietnam, and substituting in violence for half the sex scenes, something like Gravity’s Rambo would result. Hybrids that do not involve GR are also possible. Inputs from classic works by Margaret Mitchell and Haruki Murakami could be combined to create Gone with the Wind-up Bird Chronicles. The key to performing these simulations well is to draw on the astute observations of reviewers for synopses, insights ‘n’ context. We encourage readers to generate these important inputs to spectrally enrich and parabolically ground all further text simulation exercises.

The code used to generate simulated versions of GR is available upon request: SLOTH, Simplatz 00001, The Zone.


Endnotes

¹As a further demonstration of our techniques, we invoked a random pun generator in the construction of this paper.

²Their simulation involves inputting all published works of a composer such as Mozart, codifying tones, tempos, and dynamics to be used in pattern recognition software that then assigns probabilities used to generate subsequent notes. For example, if the previous measure consisted of four quarter notes with the pattern E E F G, the algorithm would scan the entire sample of the composer’s works for similar patterns as well as the notes that had followed. It may then be determined that there is a 31% probability that a quarter note G will be next, a 14% probability that it will be a quarter note E, and so on. This is then fed into the simulator to randomly determine the next note consistent with the probabilities. The newly generated note pattern would then be windowed and used in an iterative fashion to determine all subsequent notes.

³An example might be to choose words or phrases to construct a political speech: My opponent is a (Republican, Democrat, cretin) and is therefore given to (flip-flopping, demagoguery, pleasuring male goats). In contrast to him, I vow to support (education, the environment, the people, bridges to nowhere only when the quid is sufficiently pro quo).

⁴While it is only right to recognize Greg (2010) for the brevity and pith of his plot summary, it did not allow us to specify a P[t] function to highlight the nonlinearity w.r.t. time.

⁵This write-up itself was generated through simulation – a kind of meta-feature of what amounts to postmodernistic content formulation.


References

Graye, Ian, 2012, Goodreads  Review of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Greg, 2010, Goodreads  Review of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Jenn(ifer), 2012, Goodreads  Review of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Morrell, David, 1972, First Blood, Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY.

Penkevich, S., 2012, Goodreads  Review of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Pynchon, Thomas, 1973, Gravity’s Rainbow, Penguin Books, New York, NY.


Appendix A

Our rating of the original GR instance, as published by Pynchon, was derived by integrating across a uniformly distributed utility function, U(x,y). The limits of integration in the x dimension range from boring to funny; in the y dimension they range from obscure to profound.

∫ ∫ U(x,y) dx dy = ★★★

Appendix B

The following poem was generated using the simulation techniques described above. The primary input was a single page of a rhyming dictionary. A secondary input was utilized as well: The Low-Brow’s Guide to Self-Indulgence. It was meant to convey a reader’s reaction at the midway point of the GR endeavor.


I had hoped to attain
Or at the very least feign
A good stretch of the brain
With this GR campaign.

But it’s awfully arcane
And though I hate to complain
It's become a real strain.
I’m not sure I’ll stay sane.

Yet I cannot abstain
Despite genuine pain.

Besides,

Can it be the worst bane?
A skull full of Chow mein?

The Good:
This could have been so awesome. Instead it is post-modern. I nearly gave this one star, but there was just too much I admired about it. There are some great ideas in this story - something of a paranormal thriller set in Europe at the tail end and aftermath of WWII. The setting is marvellous and the prose utterly brilliant.

The Bad:
The prose really pissed me off by the end. Can’t you just let me read the story without waving all this other crap in my face? The story was obscured by sidebars to the point where I’m not even sure there was a resolution. And unless you have some very specific hobbies (mid-20th century ideas in physics, for one) then most of the references will be too obscure, and you’ll feel like you’re on the outside of an in-joke. Plus there were far too many characters.

'Friends' character the protagonist is most like:
Tyrone Slothrop might be Phoebe. Or he might not. He might be a character from a completely different show. Though one still played by Lisa Kudrow. Or more likely a Lisa Kudrow impersonator with an addiction to experimental antidepressants.

To be honest, I may not be smart enough to understand Pynchon. Very stream of consciousness with lots of excellent prose, but no discernible narrative that I can follow. I guess something about World War II and rockets.

Un’orma nell’anima

Da qualche parte ho letto e mi sono appuntato l’osservazione che “L’arcobaleno della Gravità” va considerato come un’esperienza e dunque, qualunque sia l’epilogo del rapporto che si ha con esso, il libro lascerà un’orma nell’anima.
Ancorché sintetica, mi è sembrata una definizione molto appropriata, fra le tante in cui mi sono imbattuto, e che annulla ogni proposito di abbozzare una recensione analitica o anche solo un commento, quanto meno nel senso cui siamo abituati su anobii e nelle nostre teste.

Lungo l’interminabile percorso di quest’opera, Pynchon semina talmente tante suggestioni in chi è disposto a raccoglierle (ma anche in chi resiste a questo anomalo processo di contaminazione) che possono produrre collegamenti immediati nella nostra immaginazione o più spesso riaffiorano in forme o in momenti inaspettati (anche al di fuori della lettura…) o ancora si percepiscono allo stato di latenza nel nostro subsconscio.

Inutile ripetere che non esiste trama o quando una parvenza di questa sembra affiorare si esaurisce nell’arco del singolo episodio, si contraddice e si sfilaccia, perché l’autore adotta (non sempre in modo esplicito, poiché ce ne si rende conto solo col procedere) la tecnica del deliberato depistaggio, nei confronti dei personaggi e dei lettori, seppellendo il fantasma della trama sotto un accumulo sterminato di materiali, estratti dalle matrici più disparate: dal cinema alla fisica, dai fumetti alla musica, dalla fantascienza allo slapstick, dalla pornografia alla balistica.

Altrettanto superfluo citare specifici passaggi che si imprimono con maggiore efficacia nell’immaginazione e nella memoria, perché credo che tale selezione sia decisamente soggettiva, dal momento in cui il lettore innesta il pilota automatico e si lascia andare al proprio personale itinerario mentale, imbattendosi in pagine percepibili come perle sofisticate, mattoni indigeribili o tutte le varianti intermedie, condensate in un magma che alla fine, si voglia o meno, non può lasciare inalterata la percezione stessa del leggere, il chè non è che un modo diverso per tornare a ribadire il concetto iniziale.

A repulsive smut-ridden story... wait what am I even talking about, there’s barely even a comprehensible story here, it’s 750+ pages of random thoughts, repulsively senseless ultra-graphic obsessive sexual references and a stream-of-consciousness loosely regarding a World War II missile.

It had a good premise that was entirely undone by the author trying to make some kind of post modernist art statement through wildly crass imagery. It’s like trying to read a WWII novel while standing next to a person with coprolalia and a megaphone (a form of Tourette syndrome where a person continuously utters involuntary socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks and obscenities). Actually that person might be less crass than this terrible book. I truly HATE this book.

ITS ABOUT A SECRET ROCKET PROJECT IN WW II BUT I THINK SOME OF IT IS A DREAM BECAUSE IT DOESNT MAKE SENSE. THE AUTHOR IS VERY CLEVER.

I have no idea where to start or finish discussing this book. It’s too complex, surreal, sometimes hits you with sadness, sometimes it’s bizarre and random, and sometimes it’s barely comprehensible. Yet it’s truly unique and ambitious, full of ideas, encyclopedic knowledge and paranoia.

I think I’ll be brief. This is my second Pynchon after Mason & Dixon. M&D is funnier, with a huge heart and big emotions. This book is haunting and it's bigger. It’s huge and my brain is a little bit fried by the time I finished part 4. I know it’s hokey to say but this book is a singular experience, a very rare one in my reading life. With the book that big you'll definitely be more interested in some storylines more than the others. Sorry about vagueness. Ok, let's say the western subplot that was happening in the Zone somewhere in Europe with Enzian and Tchitcherine and its resolution is just chef's kiss.

Btw, this book turned 50 while I was reading it.

And sometimes I dream of discovering the edge of the World. Finding that there is an end. My mountain gentian always knew. But it has cost me so much.

‘America was the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the other side. But Europe had gone deeper–into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. It wasn’t Europe’s Original Sin–the latest name for that is Modern Analysis–but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to atone for.

‘In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now we have only the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything. . . while Death and Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here. It has never, in love, become one with...

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A MAN IN WW2 HE GETS ERECTIONS.

110319: learned 'byron the bulb' appears in many sequences of the book, perhaps signficantly, perhaps zelig- but i am not really encouraged to look for him...

301116: later addition. i am just making a bookshelf for new wave science fiction, remember reading that this was even up for a Hugo award (popular sf award), but did not win. some critic says this was a lost opportunity to establish critical value of the entire genre of science fiction. i do not know if it is possible to say one book would do it- but this book certainly is concerned with technology, with science and military, with multiple perspectives, with storytelling techniques, with hallucinogenic, sometimes hilarious vignettes. blurbs on the paperback claimed it as the most important work by a living author, so in my youth at u i read this. and was so proud. other readers claimed to admire it, but no one claimed to love it. my thought is that to fully understand say Ulysses it helps you the reader are likely educated to familiarity with Homer etc, whereas for this Pynchon perhaps you need to know chemistry, psychology- Freudian and behaviourist, ww2 history...

060916 ??? 80s: first review (by memory): this is years (decades...) since i read it. and not too likely to read again, not an easy read, not just in writing but also in so many ideas, so few characters. laughter, puzzlement, admiration, confusion, scene after scene. some critical work i once read offered to explain themes and navigate the plot, it is never a to b or even a to z that matters, not a=a or a=b, but there must be some reason for the disorder. quite possibly the comic vignettes are only interested in immersing the reader in a comic mindset, open to exactly how absurd this war is, despite all the public relations. of the hundreds and hundreds of pages and hundreds of something like characters, of the paranoid plots that engenders in memory more the various deconstructions of the ideas- that is, what critical work i have read- rather than all the goofy names, weird events, layers of espionage farces, musical routines, the traipsing through Zone of Europe in ww2, the history, the dissolution of our protagonist, the quest for the ultimate rocket (or explanation for the world), the little map correlations or strange causal parallels of missile strikes and erections... it is the half-page introduction, abduction, rescue, of Byron the (light)bulb, that persists in recall...

it seems every generation has a literary touchstone work or author (for me a much shorter work: Less than Zero by ellis), this was a bit before my time as an adult reader, but i had heard of it, i had expected it, i had really enjoyed it but perhaps more through critical discourse than the text itself... and now further details educated by philosophy even if not the sort implicit in tech and science, i can think of rereading it- but there are many books to read before i try... there are other Pomo works to read...