I'm reading from page 145.
There are so many references in Gravity's Rainbow, I'm constantly looking things up, even heliotrope. I know it's a flower, but what kind? They're purple, small flowers. Philodendron have weird flowers called inflorescence that look like penises.
Pynchon mentions the canals of Mars. They thought there were some for a while. Mars has always been a projection of our thoughts and wishes.
Two Guys One Book is two guys struggling to comprehend Gravity’s Rainbow. The spin off on their ideology or politics, and I don’t really agree with them but it’s fun to watch them struggle with their terms and ways of understanding. It’s good to get listen to others struggling to understand. They say Pynchon as using a tangential style that suggest there is no larger meaning or order in the world. They had a patriotic angle about America, saying that every country does huge atrocities, but in America you can protest about them.
Pynchon mentions Rosa Luxemburg on p. 158. I want to read more about her.
P. 162: “ Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Bürgerlichkeit as your father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row houses by the river, dress you in the gray uniform of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does all this to you.”
P. 166: For more on the history of this breakthrough in dye-making and organic chemistry, see Simon Garfield's Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World (New York: Norton, 2001)
Alizarin is a red.
I'm reading this book very slowly. A sentence at a time, a paragraph at a time, a page at a time, a section at at a time. I think it's called an episode. I stop and start this book so much, to look things up, and just because it's a pretty easy book to put down. But I reread paragraphs over and over because I forget where I am and I go to look something up, and get lost down the rabbit hole, and then I come back read again and try to look something up again.
"Death converted into more death." p. 167
I combine my love of German soccer, with the German words and looking them up, to really absorb German culture these days.
Learned about Golliwog. Fascinating stuff. The artist who created it was born in Flushing where I live.
I've finished section one Beyond The Zero 1/31/23. Started 2/17/22, it's taken month and a half to struggle meaningfully through the first section.
First one is 175 pages.
Second is 97 pages.
Third is 337 pages.
Fourth is 134 pages.
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