Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 59: Line 42 (1023):

Merle arrived to find the "Forest City" obsessed by the pursuit of genial desperado Blinky Morgan, who was being sought for allegedly murdering a police detective while trying to rescue a member of his gang who'd been picked up on a fur-robbery charge.

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 59: Line 41 (1022):

So despite days and nights of traveling, Merle had an eerie sense of not having left Connecticut—same plain gable-front houses, white Congregational church steeples, even stone fences—more Connecticut, just shifted west, was all.

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 59: Line 40 (1021):

This strip of Ohio due west of Connecticut had for years, since before American independence, been considered part of Connecticut's original land grant.

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 59: Line 39 (1020):

Merle had been born and raised in northwest Connecticut, a region of clockmakers, gunsmiths, and inspired thinkers, so his trip out to the Western Reserve was just a personal expression of Yankee migration generally.

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Section 7: Pages 58-59: Lines 35-38 (1016-1019):

"Mr. Rideout, we wander at the present moment through a sort of vorticalist twilight, holding up the lantern of the Maxwell Field Equations and squinting to find our way. Michelson's done this experiment before, in Berlin, but never so carefully. This new one could be the giant arc-lamp we need to light our way into the coming century. I don't know the man personally, but I'll write you a letter of introduction anyway, it can't hurt."

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 58: Line 34 (1015):

"Think this is worth going out to Cleveland for?"

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 58: Line 32-33 (1013-1014):

Indeed one finds in the devout Ætherist a propensity of character ever toward the continuous as against the discrete. Not to mention a vast patience with all those tiny whirlpools the theory has come to require."

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 58: Line 31 (1012):

It certainly depends on a belief in the waviness of light—if light were particulate, it could just go blasting through empty space with no need for any Æther to carry it.

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 58: Line 30 (1011):

Sir Oliver Lodge defined it as 'one continuous substance filling all space, which can vibrate light . . . be sheared into positive and negative electricity,' and so on in a lengthy list, almost like the Apostle's Creed.

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 58: Line 29 (1010):

Lord Salisbury said it was only a noun for the verb 'to undulate.'

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. One Line at a Time. Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 58: Line 28 (1009):

Some don't believe in it, some do, neither will convince the other, it's all faith at the moment.

Alan Moore's Jerusalem: Book 3: Vernall's Inquest: Round the Bend: Lines 1-2

Line 1: "A wake, Lucia gets up wi' the wry sing of de light."

Non-Lucy-Lips Version: "Awake, Lucia gets up with the rising of the light." Lucia wakes up at dawn.

"A wake" The language of this chapter, the language which Lucia Joyce speaks, is that of her father's language from Finnegans Wake.

"wry sing of de light" Wry seems to modify "sing of de light" or "Song of Delight." Two possible meanings seem to leap out here. Possibly Lucia wakes up in a state of delight characterized by a subtle sense of humor concerning her current state of affairs. On the other hand, she may find disappointment in what her life, her "song of delight," has come to. Ending with the word "delight" gives the reader a hopeful and optimistic feeling towards Julia but the invocation of the word "wry" throws a scanner in the works. This first line needs more context.

The current context, though, is that we know Lucia Joyce is waking up in an asylum. So perhaps she's making the best of things? Or is in a state of mind which doesn't even take into account where her body has been locked away by concerned family and friends.

Line 2: "She is a puzzle, shore enearth, as all the Nurzis and the D'actors would afform, but nibber a cross word these days, deepindig on her mendication and on every workin' grimpill's progress."

Non-Lucy-Lips Version: "She is a puzzle, sure enough, as all the nurses and the doctors would affirm, but never a cross word these days, depending on her medication and on her progress based on how every pill is working." The doctors and nurses are puzzled by Lucia but they never get angry at her, at least not recently, mostly depending on how well her medication is working.

"She is a puzzle" Nothing strange here but a simple acknowledgment that the doctors and the nurses simply can't get a read on Lucia. This also allows for some play further down the sentence with "cross word".

"shore enearth" The shore is next to the sea or the ocean. The earth is solid ground. Perhaps this is an acknowledgment that, at least currently, she's slightly tethered, grounded. But she remains on the shore and can slip out to sea at any moment, meaning lost in her delirium and madness.

"Nuzis and the D'actors" Lucia's paranoia paints the nurses as Nazis imprisoning and harming and experimenting on her. While the doctors may as well be actors pretending to help her but actually keeping her imprisoned and medicated.

"afform, but nibber a cross word" The slight altering of "affirm" to express some "form," probably Lucia's in that her form here is a puzzle which the doctors and nurses are trying to solve. In this particular metaphor, she is a crossword which they are attempting to solve with a "nib" or a pen. This means that whatever word they guess cannot be corrected if, in the future, they find it was mistaken. They put their beliefs and assumptions, expertise and experience, ahead of actually trying to correctly solve the puzzle of Lucia.

"deepindig" Lucia is deeply dug in. Who she is and her personality, her traumas and inner problems, are hidden deep within her just as all of her inner thoughts and traumas are hidden in deep in the language she speaks. Only by digging through her "Lucy Lips" can one extract what she's really thinking.

"mendication" The idea that her medication is meant to mend her with a hint at "mendicant," or a person, most likely of a religious order, who relies on sustenance from begging. Lucia's condition is much like a religious ecstasy and she relies on the charity and goodwill of those around her to keep her fed and safe from her own delirium.

"every workin' grimpill's progress." John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is one of the texts Alan Moore is in conversation with in Jerusalem. The rest of the title which is rarely given from A Pilgrim's Progress is "from This World to That Which is to Come." So the pilgrim is progressing from one world to the next, literally, in the book, from the material world to the spiritual world. It is the sole journey that matters to the religious pilgrim, how to navigate the journey while avoiding the pitfalls of this world, and Bunyan's book is an allegory for that journey. Here the work is hinted at but in Lucia Joyce's strange language. She, too, must be on a journey from one world to the next.

"workin' … progress" "Work in Progress" one of Alma's paintings in her art show depicting her brother's journey to the other world, his own Pilgrim's Progress. It's also a chapter title in Jerusalem (which makes sense since pretty much all the chapters in Jerusalem represent one of Alma's paintings in the show, as her show is a metaphor for Moore's book (just as Alma is a stand-in for Alan Moore)). Moore chose the phrase "Work in Progress" because it's also what James Joyce called Finnegans Wake as he was, you know, working on it.

Gravity’s Rainbow: Part XVI

This section was put in here so the reader could take a break from thinking and just laugh a lot. I remember laughing so much the first time I read this section. I would read a funny description of a terrible candy and then look up from my copy of Gravity's Rainbow—held prominently in a way which kept my hands from covering the title—glance around for somebody to make eye contact with and then laugh as if I were a laugh track for The Big Bang Theory. Then I'd nod sagely at the person whom I'm certain wasn't looking annoyed at all but totally interested and tilt my head toward the book as if to say, "Hunh? Hunh? Pretty great, right?!" Then the person would roll their eyes in the shared bond of experiencing great literature. I admit that it's not as effective as loudly blaring Alice Cooper's Killers from my station wagon as I slowly roll down the block, imagining all the kids I'm passing giving me devil horns and saying, "Rock on, dude!" But I still felt as if I were urinating on a lamp post to claim my territory. The section begins with Slothrop returned to London after his interrogations at The White Visitation. But he notices things have changed like how he's definitely being followed constantly. I'm sure Poinstman could have found people to tail Slothrop successfully so having Slothrop notice the tails and become more paranoid must be part of the conditioning for the new experiment. Having been returned to his old routine in the office he shares with his friend Tantivy, Slothrop meets a woman named Darlene with whom he's had a previous liaison. She takes him back the place she's renting from an old woman suffering from "greensickness, tetter, kibes, purples, imposthumes, and almonds in the ears, most recently a touch of scurvy." I am not Googling any of those because they're almost certainly all made up by Pynchon. Especially scurvy. And then the old woman starts giving him the candies, the wine jellies. That's when, if I were in public, I'd look up to find the eyes of some person nearby just trying to be ignored and I'd give them the quick eyebrow raise while glancing down at my book, raising it up just slightly so they understand that's what I'm gesturing to with my eyes, and then smiling that "Here we go again!" smile with a slight chuckle. After I go back to my book assured of our chummy communication, they, sitting there thinking I'm a madman, presumably go back to thinking about dog farts. "'Now I remember you—the one with the graft at the Ministry of Supply!" but [Slothrop] knows, from last time, that no gallantry can help him now. After that visit he wrote home to Nalline: 'The English are kind of weird when it comes to the way things taste, Mom. They aren't like us. It might be the climate. They go for things we would never dream of. Sometimes it is enough to turn your stomach, boy. The other day I had had one of these things they call "wine jellies." That's their idea of candy, Mom! Figure out a way to feed some to that Hitler 'n' I betcha the war'd be over tomorrow!' Now once again he finds himself checking out these ruddy gelatin objects, nodding, he hopes amiably, at Mrs. Quoad. They have the names of different wines written on them in bas-relief." And so the section of Slothrop eating a bunch of terrible candies begins. "These people are really insane. No sugar, natch. He reaches in the candy bowl, comes up with a black, ribbed licorice drop. It looks safe. But just as he's biting in, Darlene gives him, and it, a peculiar look, great timing this girl, sez, 'Oh, I though we got rid of all those—' a blithe, Gilbert & Sullivan ingenue's thewse—'years ago,' at which point Slothrop is encountering this dribbling liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels." After the blitz of offensive candies (the entirety of the passage even more humorous than the short passages I transcribed), Slothrop and Darlene fuck. As they're waking up, a rocket hits nearby. This causes Slothrop to get an instant hardon and they fuck again while somebody from outside watches through the blinds. The experiment to determine what the fuck is up with Slothrop has begun!

Gravity’s Rainbow: Part XV

We're introduced to Katje in this section. Katje is Blicero's Gretel, Slothrop's temptation, Pointsman's octopus's conditioned stimulus, Pudding's feces factory, and Pirate's—I don't know—salvation, maybe? Why does she get around so much? Whoever she is, she's important enough to be rescued by the Allies—by Pirate, to be explicit—via a message sent from Europe to London in a rocket. Was she, as Blicero suspected, always an operative for the Allies? Or was that just Blicero's paranoia, which grew so strong that he eventually sent the message to rescue her from himself via rocket? I don't know because I'm not a tenured academic who can devote the kind of time needed to understand Gravity's Rainbow! Also, I've only read the book once so far. I'll probably have it all figured out after my current, second reading! By the way, Katje means kitten in Dutch. Just in case that's important. Which it totally is because cats are fucking the best. Right up there with raccoons and goats. You might now have a slightly better understanding of me, now that you know my favorite animals are the most chaotic of our domesticated friends or, at least, in the case of the raccoon, urban dwellers. Side note: when I was around ten years old (I'm 49 now! Yeesh!), I saw my first Red Panda at the zoo and instantly declared the Red Panda as my favorite animal. I always forget how much I like them until they pop up on the Internet. Ten year old me would be severely disappointed in 49 year old me. Red Pandas didn't even make my list of favorite animals after I remembered them and had a chance to edit the previous paragraph! They only made this side note!

Speaking of loving chaotic things, I love Bob Mortimer so much that I accidentally became him.

This section begins with Katje being secretly filmed in Pirate's apartment while Osbie Feels prepares psychedelic mushrooms for smoking. I have never smoked mushrooms before. Is that better than eating them? Or do you still wind up just as paranoid as Slothrop when he's, um, well, when he's just being Slothrop? I once went to a strip club with a couple friends of mine while I was on mushrooms. The DJ at the club knew one of my friends and kept making references to him during the night. This caused everybody in the club to look back at our table. Strangers constantly looking up at a person on mushrooms feels aggressive and terrifying. After this happened a number of times, I turned to my friend and said, "I have to go outside." He responded, "Why? Are you going to cut somebody's head off?!" Anyway, the film will later be used to condition an octopus into attacking Katje for part of the Tyrone Slothrop experiment. But we'll get to that outrageousness later! Katje walks into the kitchen where Osbie is cooking the mushrooms down to powder just as Osbie opens the oven door which sends her into a sort of fugue state where she relives her time playing Gretel with Blicero as witch and Gottfried as Hansel. Although it's an extremely adult version of Hansel and Gretel with bits like "'the Rome-Berlin Axis' he called it the night the Italian came and they were all on the round bed, Captain Blicero plugged into Gottfried's upended asshole and the Italian at the same time into his pretty mouth" and "Katje kneeling before Blicero in highest drag, black velvet and Cuban heels, his penis squashed invisible under a flesh-colored leather jockstrap, over which he wears a false cunt. . . ." There's plenty more to that last example but I don't want to put in too many spoilers and/or visuals that might upset the squeamish. If it's true that Stephen King based his entire novel It on "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," is it possible to read Gravity's Rainbow with the conceit that the entirety of it is based on "Hansel and Gretel"? The 000000 rocket is the oven Blicero shoves Hansel inside. Except there's no Gretel to save him in this version, her having run off to the Allies. Much of the characterization in the novel is based on the methods each character is using to control what they can in the face of the War's unending random violence and death. For Blicero, Gottfried, and Katje, their method is the fairy tale of "Hansel and Gretel." It is a predetermined act in which they control their roles and their environment. Or, at least, Blicero controls them. But Katje, at least, feels it is a rational decision. I don't know, exactly, how Gottfried feels about it. It's possible we eventually get a section from his perspective (I mean prior to his perspective from within the 000000 rocket) but I don't remember it. But I will remember it soon because it's in this section! Part of Blicero's suspicion of Katje, that she might be a British spy, is a result of the "Hansel and Gretel" game itself. Isn't it Gretel who pushes the witch in the Oven in the end? Is she fated, simply by the rules of the game Blicero has chosen, to bring about his end? The game itself, used to control a world one desperately knows they have no actual way of controlling, fuels a new kind of paranoia for Blicero. She is his slave, his obedient servant, his pawn to move as he wishes. And yet, she is also his demise, his bringer of death. Just as the rockets which often misfire and fall back upon the Germans firing them, Katje presents a danger to her master, Blicero. Here, Blicero's description of Katje's commitment to Nazism, to the game: "But not Katje: no mothlike plunge. He must conclude that secretly she fears the Change, choosing instead only trivially to revise what matters least, ornament and clothing, going no further than politic transvestism, not only in Gottfried's clothing, but even in traditional masochist uniform, the French-maid outfit so inappropriate to her tall, longlegged stride, her blondeness, her questing shoulders like wings—she plays at this only . . . plays at playing." Blicero (for now the story has dipped into his perspective. As so often happens in Gravity's Rainbow, a remembrance of a character by one character often turns into the narrating perspective of that character who might remember another character which will change the perspective to that third character's point of view) contemplates an earlier point in his life when he began the trajectory (parabolic, perhaps?) of the life he currently leads. It's similar to Pointsman contemplating the minotaur and the maze and Ariadne and how the lure of Pavlovian conditioning led him to The White Visitation and planning his experiments on Slothrop. This comes after his quoting a line from Rilke: "And not once does his step ring from the soundless Destiny...." He thinks about a friend from youth who was so athletic that his Destiny as a soldier to die on the Eastern Front was practically set, simply by muscle memory, by reflex. He thinks about these Germans, these youths, all used for their ability and their belief in the lie of Deutschland Uber Alles, manipulated by others, to be sent to their deaths. But more so, he thinks about those who will survive the war, those less committed than he, those limber enough, like Katje, to change. Blicero himself has grown tired and now just looks forward to the end of his story. "He only wants now to be out of the winter, inside the Oven's warmth, darkness, steel shelter, the door behind him in a narrowing rectangle of kitchen-light gonging shut, forever. The rest is foreplay." I feel like I'm just doing a lot of summarizing but it's my only method for getting a handle on the plot and the characters which will solidify these ideas in my head which in turn should allow me to recall previous passages when I get to sections that rely on the information within these passages to fully understand and grasp the meaning of the future scenes. Blicero admits to worrying about his children, Katje and Gottfried, when he's gone. This worry makes me think it was indeed Blicero who sent the message via rocket that brings Pirate to rescue Katje (it isn't. I don't know who it was though. Katje? Piet? Wim? The Drummer? The Indian?!). As for Gottfried, well, Blicero's freedom for him is, um, somewhat different. Blicero also remembers his time in the Südwest and how he met the Herero boy, Enzian, whom he took under his wing. "Took under his wing" is an awfully innocent way of saying "sexually molested and kidnapped him back to Germany." Enzian, we will find out later, has become the leader of the Schwarzkommando. From the first time I read the book, I remembered this scene where the young boy uses the name of his God as a stand-in for fucking which drives Blicero crazy with guilt and blasphemy and lust. But I didn't realize, once Enzian was introduced, that this was who that was. This is definitely something I need to keep in mind in that it colors the relationship between Blicero and Enzian. Sidekick and apprentice were the words I thought of to describe Enzian's relationship to Blicero previously; now I must also remember to add the words molestation, kidnap, and victim. And then after Blicero ponders Katje's withdrawal from the game (I think only mentally at the moment although that would set up Blicero's decision to free her completely via extraction by Pirate), the point of view shifts to Gottfried. Before I get to that, I want to clarify something I said in a previous section. I pointed at how dumb I thought my Children's Lit professor was being when she suggested we write long essays on single sentences of text. My point wasn't that critical analysis shouldn't somehow be longer than the text being analyzed; obviously that's going to happen an awful lot. Some lines and paragraphs need pages of explication! My issue was that she didn't want us straying away from that single sentence. She didn't want us bringing in other examples of the text and exploring greater themes inherent in the work while using the sentence as a basis for a longer discussion. She simply wanted us to focus exclusively on that sentence. So while I'm obviously all for dissecting the shit out of a text (although to really go in-depth on Gravity's Rainbow would take more time than I'm willing to spend so my sectional blurbs are far, far shorter than a truly explicatory dive should probably be), I'm simply not for the completely out-of-context vibe she was creating by pulling a single sentence out of the whole and concentrating exclusively on that piece. Because what does it matter if you can't refer back to the entirety of the piece of art it was pulled from? Or as Roger Mexico said: "'I don't want to get into a religious argument with you,' absence of sleep has Mexico more cranky today than usual, 'but I wonder if you people aren't a bit too—well, strong, on the virtues of analysis. I mean, once you've taken it all apart, fine, I'll be first to applaud your industry. But other than a lot of bits and pieces lying about, what have you said?'" The "you" is in italics in the previous quote because Mexico is referring back to Pointsman's previous argument that ends with "but what has one said?" Anyway, back to Gottfried, I guess! Gottfried is young enough that death is unreal to him. It is something that happens to others. The war for him is an adventure, and the game he plays with Blicero nothing more than routine, a routine that, though outrageously different, is nothing more than the routine his fellow soldiers live through. He understands that his freedom will come with the end of the War. Until then, he plays the game, he longs for Katje, and he fucks Blicero. But he is nothing more than an observer and he watches when Katje finally quits and Blicero, subsequently, throws a huge tantrum. Blicero's reaction suggests he didn't send the message to rescue Katje. Perhaps she sent it, or one of the Allies she's been secretly passing information to for the last year. According to rumors Gottfried has heard, Katje has fallen in love with a Stuka pilot in Scheveningen. This Stuka pilot exists and his name is Wim. And on her last meeting with him, she is rescued and taken back to London by Pirate after Wim and the others (Piet, the Drummer, the Indian. Who? I don't know! Maybe a reference to a movie about British spies in WWII?!) abandon her. They abandon her because they were seeking the location of Blicero and his rocket site, the one piece of information she couldn't bring herself to betray. But once she left Blicero for good, he knew she had betrayed him and he immediately had the rocket launch site moved. Now with the context of the rest of the novel, I can see where Katje came from. She was feeding information to the Allies just as Blicero suspected. But she just couldn't feed them enough. And even though her cover as a loyal Nazi party member came at the cost of sending three Jewish families to camps, she still feels she gave them more than enough information. Nobody seems to agree because she didn't give them Blicero. But Pirate takes pity on her and sends her over to The White Visitation. Here's a lengthy transcription of Pynchon's description of the commerce of the war: "She's worth nothing to them now. They were after Schußstelle 3. She gave them everything else, but kept finding reasons not to pinpoint the Captain's rocket site, and there is too much doubt by now as to how good the reasons were. True, the site was often moved about. But she could've been placed no closer to the decision-making: it was her own expressionless servant's face that leaned in over their schnapps and cigars, the charts coffee-ringed across the low tables, the cream papers stamped purple as bruised flesh. Wim and the others have invested time and lives—three Jewish families sent east—though wait now, she's more than balanced it, hasn't she, in the months out at Scheveningen? They were kids, neurotic, lonely, pilots and crews they all loved to talk, and she's fed back who knows how many reams' worth of Most Secret flimsies across the North Sea, hasn't she, squadron numbers, fueling stops, spin-recovery techniques and turning radii, power settings, radio channels, sectors, traffic patterns—hasn't she? What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled 'black' by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars. Jews also carry an element of guilt, of future blackmail, which operates, natch, in favor of the professionals." Once Pirate mentions that The White Visitation is where Katje can escape to, the scene shifts to her arrival there, and Osbie and Pirate having a conversation about going mad. I must, once again, transcribe a bit of text because it has a recurrence of "magenta and green" in an account of Dumbo (which will also have a recurrent mention later where Dumbo's magic feather becomes soldier corpses (or some such thing!)): "'Of course, of course,' sez Osbie, with a fluid passage of fingers and wrist based on the way Bela Lugosi handed a certain glass of doped wine to some fool of a juvenile lead in White Zombie, the first movie Osbie ever saw and in a sense the last, ranking on his All-Time List along with Son of Frankenstein, Freaks, Flying Down to Rio, and perhaps Dumbo, which he went to see in Oxford Street last night but mid-way through noticed, instead of a magic feather, the humorless green and magenta face of Mr. Ernest Bevin wrapped in the chubby trunk of the longlashed baby elephant, and decided it would be prudent to excuse himself."

Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour during the War.

We learn that "[w]e are never told why" Katje quits the game with Blicero. But Pynchon adds some speculation that mostly amounts to simply saying, "Fuck it." In his analysis of why he brought back Katje, Pirate teaches me the word "crotchet." I shall immediately add it to my vocabulary, much as I added hobbyhorse after reading Tristram Shandy. And then, as Katje denies being Pirate's responsibility, knowing only that she owes him a debt, Pynchon gives us the story of her ancestor Frans Van der Groov and the story of the Dodoes. And I need to take a break because this section made me weep terribly last time I read it and I must prepare. The Dodo story reads like an early draft of Mason & Dixon. It easily, aside from the linguistic style, could fit into that book (which I'll probably re-read soon). And while I thoroughly loved this section the first time I read it, I gave it no real mind to the overall novel. I do that now upon my second reading and it makes me sick to my stomach. If not an analogy of the Holocaust or of Colonial Genocides, it is certainly a portrayal of the thing within humans that allow, or perhaps demand, grisly and horrendous crimes such as those. After the story of Frans Van der Groov and his dodoes (Dodoes that found salvation, or Preterite Dodoes?), Pirate and Osbie have a short conversation about what will happen with Katje. It begins like this: "'He's haunting you,' Osbie puffing on an Amanita cigarette.     'Yes,' Pirate ranging the edges of the roof-garden, irritable in the sunset, 'but it's the last thing I want to believe. The other's been bad enough. . . .'" I don't know who the "he" and "the other" are referring to! Frans, possibly, since Pirate makes reference to having been told the story later in the novel. Pointsman, maybe? Slothrop?! I guess some things will need to remain a mystery. The section ends on a scene at The White Visitation where the film of Katje that was being recorded at the beginning of this section winds up being played for Grigori the Octopus. He's being given a stimulus to respond to in the next Chapter.

Gravity’s Rainbow: Part XIV

This section begins with some insults for "Awful Offspring" from Ned Nosepicker's Book of 50,000 Insults. Judging by the quality of the three insults excerpted, I'm glad this isn't a real book that exists. Because the insults aren't that great unless you've already read Gravity's Rainbow and, even then, they're terrible. They rely on the person recognizing the name and career of Dr. Laszlo Jamf. So even if the book were real and Dr. Laszlo Jamf were real, the person who's kid you were trying to insult when you tried out the line, "When Jamf conditioned him, he threw away the stimulus," would probably stare incomprehensively at you while trying to decide if whatever the fuck you were saying was worth an assault charge. For first time readers wondering what the fuck that Dr. Jamf insult shit was, they won't have long to wait. Unless they gave up on the book right after reading that introduction and then I guess they have to wait as long as it takes for them to try finishing Gravity's Rainbow yet again. I suppose for most people who aren't stubbornly intelligent people like me, that amount of time is determined by some sort of calculation of an infinite set approaching zero. Look, I'm not Pynchon! I don't understand higher maths and Pavlovian theory and history! I'm just a vulgar jerk on the Internet "pretending" to be stupid so that people think I'm smart! Pointsman approaches Pudding with his plan to experiment on Tyrone Slothrop. Pudding is resistant to the plan. But that's before Pointsman says, "I know a woman who is willing to piss and shit in your mouth. Now will you fund it?" And Pudding is all, "Take my money!" Pointsman alludes to Tyrone Slothrop's earliest years as an infant and how he was experimented on by Lazslo Jamf. Apparently it's common knowledge evidenced by how Ned Nosepicker used it in his insults in a book that, I'm assuming since there are 50,000 insults, wasn't meant for a niche market. Lazslo experiment was thus: "Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab.     Unconditioned response = hardon.     Conditioned stimulus = x.     Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is no longer necessary, all you need is x." While the experiment was widely circulated, the knowledge of stimulus x was never revealed. I've read Gravity's Rainbow but that doesn't mean I'm positive that it's ever truly revealed. Although it's almost certainly the smell of Jamf's experimental plastic Imipolex G. It's in this section where the reader discovers the reason for calling Chapter One "Beyond the Zero." It's about deconditioning subjects when the doctors are through with the experiment. If x causes Baby Slothrop to get a hardon, one must decondition Baby Slothrop to not get a hardon from x before ending the experiment and releasing him back into non-experimental civilian life. But the deconditioning does not end as soon as Baby Slothrop does not get a hardon at the presence of x. That's the zero point: no evidenced physical response to the stimulus. But Baby Slothrop is still reacting to the stimulus, just up to but not quite reaching the point where he gets a hardon. The deconditioning must take into account all of the conditioning prior to the evidenced hardon. This is going beyond the zero. Now how does the concept of beyond the zero work thematically with Gravity's Rainbow? Let me pause to think about it. Perhaps—now give me room to speculate here—the conditioning is living in a war under the threat of rocket attacks and everything else that goes with it. That would make the zero the end of the war. Which would presuppose that just because the war ended and the rockets stopped falling, people have not been deconditioned past the zero. They've simply lost the stimulus to which they had been responding. More than that, what if we're supposing the main metaphor of the stimulus is the rocket itself to which nobody could react anyway because it strikes before a person knew it was coming? So the stimulus is simply constant fear and paranoia of death. When the war ends, the fear and paranoia do not simply go away because there is no method to go beyond the zero to remove the conditional response. Saying the war is over and everybody is now safe and the world will return to normal is taking the patient to the zero. But not beyond. A generation must now grow up full of fear and paranoia with no idea why because there's no actual stimulus. They've just been saddled with the conditioned response that was never taken beyond the zero because there was no cathartic expression for the end of the war. One day, it was just over. Now imagine the next generation growing up under the guidance of all of these people who have not been taken beyond the zero of their conditioned response of fear and paranoia. Perhaps the postmodern experience of the world through the eyes of this and their subsequent generations is the abreaction, the release and expression of all of this fear and paranoia. It then makes sense why the atomic bomb is one of the most blatant symbols of the postmodern era. Pointsman wants to experiment on Tyrone while everybody else at The White Visitation simply espouses theories on his ability to protect where a rocket will hit by fucking somebody in the spot a few days before the rocket lands. Most of the theories, of course, rely on their fields of expertise as explanation. Pointsman is the most boggled because the hardon/rocket relationship shows all the signs of a Pavlovian stimulus/response but in reverse. The reaction takes place days before the stimulus. But the two cannot be denied because Slothrop's map of sexual conquests matches up exactly with Roger Mexico's Poisson distribution map of rocket strikes. The two are somehow linked. The problem is discovering how. Oh, Pointsman is also frustrated by the idea that women are allowing Slothrop to have sex with him. Why him?! That must be part of it, right?! Or else—Mexico's statistics and Poisson distribution being in effect everywhere—wouldn't Pointsman be getting laid at least occasionally as well?! Oh, I should put a quote I like in here now. Something to do with Poisson distribution, probably. "But if it's in the air, right here, right now, then the rockets follow from it, 100% of the time. No exceptions. When we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all. You can see how important a discovery like that would be." I mean, is Pointsman fucking depressing or what?! "Hey guys! Wanna see my Nobel Prize for eradicating the concept of free will?! It's right over here in my study which you're fated to walk into now!" The section ends with Pointsman and Mexico having a conversation on the coast (I mean, mostly ends. It actually ends on four more descriptive paragraphs but this is the main part). On my first read (I mean second read (possibly third read)), I got the general gist of it: Pointsman, for some reason, wants Mexico's approval and support for the coming Tyrone Slothrop experiment. But there's more to it and that's what I've got to chew over on yet another read through right now. Jessica has put in Mexico's mind the half of the sexual encounter that isn't Slothrop: the women. What about the women? The rockets are raining down where Slothrop has his sexual encounter which probably means on the women's apartments or homes. Could there be an aspect of misogyny here? Consciously, unconsciously, or completely at random, these women are being hurt. And all the men interested in Slothrop's hardons haven't given them a second thought. Pointsman seeks a purely mechanical and physiological explanation for Slothrop's rocket hardons predictions. How can there not be cause and effect when the pattern is obvious: hardon then rocket. Every time. But Mexico is open to other possibilities. Perhaps cause and effect, perhaps the linear way of looking at things, of reading experiments and explaining history . . . perhaps that's obsolete. Maybe there's a new way of looking at things, he suggests. Pointsman doesn't buy it but he is open to some new insight. But only based on the evidence. And so, a new experiment using what they have: ". . . reversal of rocket sounds to go on . . . clinical history of sexual conditioning, perhaps to auditory stimuli, and what appears to be a reversal of cause-and-effect." The hardest part of the section will probably turn out to be the most important. But it's a section I can't fully get a grasp on because it discusses more Pavlovian theory. It's about Pavlov's beliefs on obsession and paranoid delusion, exactly the things Slothrop deals with in Chapter Two. Pointsman's plan is to manipulate Slothrop through the various stages of paranoia and obsession so they can determine, without his bias and through only secret observation, why he does the things he does. And maybe that can answer why the rockets fall where they do (although Pointsman admits that he's not really interested in the rocket problem and only brings it up in the hopes of getting Roger's support). I should probably figure out this ultraparadoxical stuff before moving on but it hurts my brain. I'm just going to stick it in my brain surrounded by an inhibited area of my brain and let it percolate until I'm so obsessed with it that I'll definitely understand it but also I'll probably realize the ultraparadoxical phase is just a big conspiracy to get me to forget to eat and sleep properly.

Gravity’s Rainbow: Part XIII

If you were a reader thinking "I wonder what The White Visitation looks like and one compelling story about the patients who used to be housed there" then this is the section you've been waiting for! Because it begins with those things! In the story about the patient who escapes from The White Visitation when it used to be solely a place to house the insane, we learn that the Lord of the Sea has been named Bert. This might be important later. Try to remember it's a Pynchon novel. Every weird bit with a general eating shit directly from a woman's ass or some guy jerking off on an encoded war missive is probably important! The White Visitation slowly became more than a mental hospital as the war began. The new military occupants' first piece of business was to set up a broadcasting station to broadcast paranoid thoughts into Germany on a constant basis; it's why The White Visitation was chosen: high on a cliff overlooking the sea and facing the Continent. It was the perfect place to beam wireless paranoia directly at the German people. A BBC broadcaster named Myron Grunton took up the job. And being wireless, his paranoid programs also infiltrated the dreams and daily life of the locals. How could it not? Paranoia isn't exactly a domesticated and controllable entity. Myron's broadcasts became the first iteration of Project Black Wing. The idea of Project Black Wing began when Pirate brought back intel on a group of ex-colonial Africans—the Hereros—now living in Germany and involved in a secret weapons program for the War. What better subject to fire up paranoia among the Germans than the possibility of a race war brewing, based on the Hereros' vengeance for Germany's colonial and genocidal treatment of them back in Africa in the early 1900s? They named them the Schwarzkommando and they broadcasted, continuously, descriptions of the possible (probable!) danger of their discontent. Moving on from Project Black Wing, also headquartered at The White Visitation is our Pavlovian and his dogs, Pointsman. As the War is nearing its end and victory is in sight, Pointsman grows more and more desperate and disillusioned. His experiments have not provided him with any material to make his name known; the War, while being an apt conduit for funding, turned out to not be the ideal situation for Pavlovian ideas. And he knows that when the War ends, so will his revenue. This is why he is so desperate to get his hands on Tyrone Slothrop and his bomb predicting boners. It's hard to show how making dogs drool can be turned to usefulness in the war effort. But figuring out the cause and effect, discovering the stimulus present to give a man's penis the ability to predict where a rocket will fall, how can that be denied by the people parceling out the money?! Pointsman's biggest obstacle to more funding is Brigadier Pudding. "Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse him. His greatest triumph on the battlefield came in 1917, in the gassy, Armageddonite filth of the Ypres salient, where he conquered a bight of no man's land some 40 yards at its deepest, with a wastage of only 70% of his unit. He was pensioned off around the beginning of the Great Depression—went to sit in the study of an empty house in Devon, surrounded by photos of old comrades, none of whose gazes quite met one's own, there to go at a spot of combinatorial analysis, that favorite pastime of retired Army officers, with a rattling intense devotion." That's Pudding. Pynchon adds more that evocative opening description of Pudding which is well worth reading but my goal isn't to transcribe the entirety of the novel here! I'm just trying to come to an understanding of what is happening in every section of this book. That's not going to be easy because I already feel like I've failed with the Slothrop's Sodium Amytal hallucination. One of the great things about reading a 1973 Thomas Pynchon book in 2020 is that I have the Internet at my disposal. So when Pynchon says something like "Maud Chilkes, who looks from the rear rather like Cecil Beaton's photograph of Margot Asquith, sits dreaming of a bun and a cup of tea," I can simply Google "Cecil Beaton's photograph of Margot Asquith" and voila:

Maybe, for some reason, I'd have already been familiar with this if I'd read the book in 1973. But I doubt it! Unless there was some big Cecil Beaton revival that year.

Whether or not readers of Gravity's Rainbow in 1973 would have recognized this image, it's beyond doubt that 80 year old Brigadier Pudding would have used it as a point of comparison in 1944. He probably jerked off to that image on multiple occasions as a wee lad of 63. The point of Pudding's mini-biography in his introduction is to point out that he's not really happy being in charge of doling out money to a bunch of maniacs who nobody would have thought twice about pre-War but he's too old and set in his outlook to be of any serious use to other parts of the war effort. Here, have a line that broke my heart: "In the ARF wing, the stolen dogs sleep, scratch, recall shadowy smells of humans who may have loved them, listen undrooling to Ned Pointsman's oscillators and metronomes." It's just one line so it only brought me to the brink of weeping as opposed to the section on the Dodos and the other section on the Hereros' plans for generational suicide. And now we get into discussions of Pavlovian theory. It's not as confusing as Alan Moore's Lucia James chapter in Jerusalem (I mean, what is? Could I have at least chosen something understandable without unending hours of torturous speculation and guesswork? Like maybe Memento or Lost Highway?) but more confusing than the boner I get reading and Archie and Jughead comic book (because of Veronica, of course! Va-va-va-voom! If it wasn't for Veronica, the boner would be more confusing than the discussion of Pavlovian science). It's sad that I don't understand it because I'm pretty sure it's all this smart theoretical stuff that is the key that unlocks the door to the room where all the good porn is hidden. The porn is a metaphor for postmodernist themes. One dog, Vanya, has entered "the 'equivalent' phase, the first of the transmarginal phases." That means her response to the stimulus is no longer dependent on the strength of the stimulus. Her response is the same no matter how great or how meager the stimulus. Vanya's body and mind are literally being changed by her exposure to overwhelming stimuli. She no longer perceives a difference between inconsequential stimuli and life-and-death stimuli. Vanya has become numb to not just subtlety and nuance but to any degree of difference in outside stimuli she's exposed to. This is commentary on us, isn't it?! Especially in a time of war where rockets exploding around us have become just a part of our daily lives. It's an example of Roger's earlier confession to Jessica upon driving by scenes of devastation where people are searching for the living and wounded. "Once Roger and Jessica might have stopped. But they're both alumni of the Battle of Britain, both have been drafted into the early black mornings and the crying for mercy, the dumb inertia of cobbles and beams, the profound shortage of mercy in those days. . . . By the time one has pulled one's nth victim or part of a victim free of one's nth pile of rubble, he told her once, angry, weary, it has ceased to be that personal . . . the value of n my be different for each of us, but I'm sorry: sooner or later . . ." See? This is why this project is good for me in understanding Gravity's Rainbow. Because now I get why all the Pavlovian stuff! It's making sense! After the bit about the dog Vanya, Pynchon describes Brigadier Pudding's weekly group meetings. It's fucking hilarious but I won't go into it here. It's another example, 80 pages in, of how hilarious this book is and, at the 80th page or so, easily still a surprise, especially if it's your first time reading it. A reader could easily make it this far having missed the truly hilarious other parts of the book (like, say, maybe the reader thought of themselves as too intellectual for toilet humor or slapstick. Why, they would have been doubly, but sternly, apoplectic over Poinstman's hunt for a dog that winds up with his foot stuck in a toilet!). But I submit there's nobody who could get to this section and not think to themselves, "Oh! Ha ha! Good show, chap! Mighty funny, this!" Unless, of course, they missed it because they were so confused by the transmarginal stuff it caused them to miss the way Brigadier Pudding's meeting devolves into other topics so that they read the entire section and thought, "Oh! I mean, what? 'Vertical interest'? I don't get it." One scientist, Géza Rózsavölgyi, is concerned not with Pudding's meetings but how everyone at The White Visitation will be funded after the war. He believes they need a powerful program to justify their existence rather than a charismatic leader able to secure funding through pure force of ego and will. The work is what should matter; it is what should drive the science. Currently, Géza Rózsavölgyi believes that Tyrone Slothrop is their best bet for studies which will lead to a promising post-War program. And so Géza Rózsavölgyi sets out the parameters for Chapter Two: "Precise-ly why," leaps Rózsavölgyi, "we are now proposing, to give, Sloth-rop a complete-ly dif-ferent sort, of test. We are now design-ing for him, a so-called, 'projec-tive' test. The most famil-iar exam-ple of the type, is the Rorschach ink-blot. The ba-sic theory, is, that when given an unstruc-tured stimulus, some shape-less blob of exper-ience, the subject, will seek to impose, struc-ture on it. How, he goes a-bout struc-turing this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes—will provide, us with clues, to his dreams, fan-tasies, the deepest re-gions of his mind." Eyebrows going a mile a minute, extraordinarily fluid and graceful hand gestures, resembling—most likely it is deliberate, and who can blame Rosie for trying to cash in—those of his most famous compatriot, though there're the inevitable bad side-effects: staff who swear they've seen him crawling headfirst down the north façade of "The White Visitation," for example. "So we are re-ally, quite, in agree-ment, Reverend Doctor. A test, like the MMPI, is, in this respect, not adequate. It is, a struc-tured stimulus. The sub-ject can fal-sify, consciously, or repress, un-consciously. But with the projec-tive technique, nothing he can do, con-scious or otherwise, can pre-vent us, from finding what we wish, to know. We, are in control. He, cannot help, himself." Christ that was a pain in the ass to transcribe! Basically, the plan is to expose Slothrop to the rocket in more direct and intimate ways than just wandering around London getting boners where rockets will land. See what he makes of it. See how he reacts. Watch his paranoia run out of control until the world is exactly what he thinks it is: people manipulating his life to the point that he has practically no free will. And, I mean, yeah. How does one account for the observers observing the observation ruining the experiment? I mean, if you're manipulating a guy to see how he reacts and he reacts by assuming his entire world is being manipulated, does that mean, you know, anything?! Oh, and who is Rosie trying to emulate? What person is the most famous Soviet war-era compatriot? It sounds like it should be Spider-man! I said the section begins with a description of The White Visitation. But that's nothing compared with the actual detailed description of the building on which the section ends. It's practically a treatise on postmodern architecture. And that's it! This was a most enlightening section to re-read. How come we can't just re-read books instead of having to read them first before we can re-read them? They'd be so much easier to understand!

Gravity’s Rainbow: Part XII

In my children's literature class in college, the professor often wanted us to write essays based on exactly one sentence from the text. You know, really burrow down into the meat of that sentence! Get to the bottom of those scant few words by writing dozens and dozens of more words. I never really did understand how or why she wanted us to do this. I mean how much did Lloyd Alexander really want us to get out of his description of the protagonist lying down on a tree root to get some rest?! What she wanted was for us to speculate on every possible meaning of every sentence in ways that just seemed like a huge waste of time. Did she expect us to write an 800 page analysis on a 150 page book?! Oh, sure, I've been slowly working on an explication of The Bible that's about forty pages into Genesis and it's already three hundred pages long. So maybe she taught me something? No, no! She absolutely didn't! Because every time I tried to do what she expected, I would branch out (what do I mean by "branch out"? Write a seventy word explication of my word choice) and begin discussing other aspects of the story, like the sentence that came before the sentence I was supposed to be concentrating on and also the sentence which came after and, you know what? Because I was so precocious, sometimes I'd discuss sentences even more distant from the explicated sentence than that! I forgave her though because she complimented me the day I wore my Alice Cooper in Wonderland costume to my classes. But imagine if I took her advice! I already write long-winded digressions of every single thing I write something critical about. Am I also supposed to write long-winded explications of every single sentence as well? Sure, it would probably be helpful for Gravity's Rainbow! But it would also be embarrassing because people would truly understand the high percentage of sentences in this book which provoke this reaction from my brain: "DER!" Although, I will say her method of explicating texts is absolutely the right way to explicate the Lucia Joyce chapter in the third book of Alan Moore's Jerusalem. Just wait until I do some blog entries on that mind fuck! This section begins with an advertisement for Lazlo Jamf's Kryptosam, a substance which is invisible until somebody jerks off on it. Super good for secret messages unless the recipient is a woman. Although I suppose if she really needs to read the secret message, she can find a male friend and jerk him off on the message. The cute bit of the advert is how it suggests the message be sent alongside some porn appropriate to the person in question. So if you're sending a secret message to Brigadier Pudding, you'll want whatever the print equivalent to Two Girls, One Cup was in the thirties or forties. I bet the equivalent was a woman standing fully dressed with a shocked little "o" of a mouth and her hand just about covering it up as you can sort of see the hint of a toilet in the background. So risqué! The actual narrative begins with Pirate looking at the "porn" sent with his current secret message (is it the message that came in the rocket? I don't remember ever learning about the message in the small cylinder! If I had to guess using only the knowledge of what I remember from my first reading, I'd say it was a message sent in the 000000 (Gottfried and his Imipolex womb having been destroyed) about Katje and how to rescue her). The "porn" is a black and white image of Scorpia Mossmoon, the wife of Clive Mossmoon and the woman Pirate thought he could become a civilian for (until it was apparent they couldn't remain together and he re-enlisted), in the room they talked about living together in and wearing a sexy outfit which he often pictured her in but had told nobody about. So somehow They know exactly what will get him to ejaculate all over his secret message. Although it works so well Pirate nearly doesn't get his penis out and pointed at the message before blowing his secret message decoder load. A still encrypted message appears through the smear of Pirate's jizz which, after decoding in his head, gives Pirate a time, a place, and a request for help. So it might be to rescue Katje. But is it from Katje? Or is it a gift from Blicero for his little Gretel? Perhaps, although doubtful, it was from Gottfried. "There is a time given, a place, a request for help. He burns the message, fallen on him from higher than Earth's atmosphere, salvaged from Earth's prime meridian, keeps the picture, hmm, and washes his hands. His prostate is aching. There is more to this than he can see. He has no recourse, no appeal: he has to go over there and bring the operative out again. The message is tantamount to an order from the highest levels." Now to undo some of my speculation! There is no reason to believe this message came in the 000000. That rocket, being as mythical as it winds up being, was almost certainly launched nearly straight North along the magnetic line (this has to do with mathematical reasons discussed during the subsequent and much, much later allied launch of the 000001 (and was somebody in that one as well? Slothrop?! Bianca? Ludwig and his lemming?!)). But who would have sent this one? It seems obvious the operative is Katje, even Blicero suspected as much. But would she have been able to get the message into a rocket? Or, and I think maybe I might sort of understand this better when I get to the Blicero/Hansel/Gretel section later, Blicero sent it himself. This is why I needed to re-read this thing immediately! Because the first time through, I quickly forgot about Pirate's message from the rocket here. That's the problem with being so easily entertained by the secret message that can only be read after you smear semen on it. Of course I was concentrating on that aspect of this passage!