"There are also a number of carefully orchestrated analepses: to the day several months earlier when the first V-2 rocket fell on England; to an Easter 1942 air raid by Allied bombers on the German city of Lübeck..." (Steven Weisenburger)
analepses: in which a past event is narrated at a point later than its chronological place in a story.
"The name "Jamf" apparently derives from an acronym used by Charlie Parker: "Jive-Ass Mother-Fucker"!" Not for p. 48 from Wiki
Today I'm thinking Pynchon is a poet and a beat writer, he's riffing so much better than Kerouac. Kerouac is Desmond and Pynchon is Bird.
Googled "The White Visitionation": "The White Visitation (the secret unit of psychological warfare) is following Slothrop, studying him, and setting up sexual exploits for Slothrop to determine the pattern of the next rocket strike." (HardlyWritten)
Steven Weisenburge's companion to GR from William Nichols’s Third Book of Words to Live By (1962): "Where does the desire for ethical action come from? What makes us want to be ethical? I believe there are two forces which move us. One is belief in a Last Judgment, when every one of us has to account for what we did with God’s great gift of life on the earth. The other is belief in an immortal soul, a soul which will cherish the reward or suffer the penalty decreed in a final Judgment.Belief in God and in immortality thus give us the moral strength and the ethical guidance we need for virtually every action in our daily lives."
There's other options dude. I think ethics is good for you and everyone else because we are one and there is no permanent soul. Ethics isn't some metaphysical hooey and I don't think we need a god to tell us what is good, we need to figure it out for ourselves because God is just a mental projection from us.
Supposedly that's a sourcebook for Pynchon. But the part I do like is this: "Science, for instance, tells us that nothing in nature, not even the tiniest particle, can disappear without a trace. Think about that for a moment. Once you do, your thoughts about life will never be the same. Science has found that nothing can disappear without a trace. Nature does not know extinction. All it knows is transformation!"
One of my definitions of art is that it makes you want to do art, it's inspirational to your creative juices. I've been writing more with Pynchon, therefore it is art.
“… the Führer-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma…” p.81.
I can't tell you how sick I am of the cult of personality.
Found a good
Reddit link for the last read along of GR.
I think the idea that Slothrop philandering is the correlate that describes where the bombs will land kind of proves it's random because that is not how the world works, but in a way it is how human male sexuality works.
"Want the Change," Rilke said, "O be inspired by the flame." (
Read poem):
Want the change
by Rainer Maria Rilke
(English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.
What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.
Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming
a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.
Pynchon goes on about
Dodo birds in Mauritius. They used gastroliths like the dinosaurs. The last widely accepted sighting of a dodo was in 1662. The extinction of the dodo within less than a century of its discovery called attention to the previously unrecognised problem of human involvement in the disappearance of entire species. They appear in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a book I often think about with, "off with their head," and "curiouser and curiouser", the
Cheshire Cat. I really need to reread that one. My sons let me read them to sleep, but my daughter refuses so far. I'm going to try harder.
When I was on Galapagos the wildlife doesn't flee from you because they evolved without predators and don't run from humans. The naturalists kept telling us we couldn't touch the animals but they could touch us, if we allowed it. I think that way about my daughter. I mean I hug and kiss her sometimes, but I respect her body autonomy.
Compton Mackenzie is a Scottish writer. His highest rated novel on Goodreads is Whiskey Galore! There's a movie made of the book, in 1949, and they remade it in 2016! I'm going to watch that now. Well it was a good bit of fun but also a reason why I'm reading this book so slowly, so much background to catch up on, or maybe ignore and plough ahead. The problem with a high intensity reference postmodern novel is that I spin off on things like this all the time.
I look up
Roland Peachey. Not much about him, no wikipedia page. He plays on others albums on Spotify, which is more than the 3 songs, but honestly 3 songs is enough.
29 pages is my record for most pages read in a day.
Progress:
1/1/2023 p.100
1/2/ p. 100
1/3 p. 107
1/4 p. 112
1/5 p. 124
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