I'm reading the flipping novel, and it's brilliant and confusing. I look things up all the time, and then I go down the rabbit hole of the internet, and I'm not reading the novel any more. I'm reading it slowly too, so I'm going very slow. There's a lot of poetry, and it's endlessly referential and encyclopedic. I'm on page 232 right now and I started on 12/17/22. I take breaks from reading it.
Spoiler? I mean this is just disgusting, revolting, and I'm not sure if smacking into it without a warning is going to be the worst thing in the world. Then I read the getting pissed on, drinking it, and eating shit section on p. 234-236. Yikes.
When I read that the Buddha at cow shit, and his own shit as part of his mortification phase, which he doesn't see as the path, part of his trying everything out to find the way, I wasn't so grossed out, because I wasn't imagining into the the scene.
The next day, tomorrow, Dark Side of the Moon turns 50.
I'm on page 247 and he writes about Bob Steele and Johnny Mack Brown, both western actors. Steele was in Rio Bravo, Of Mice And Men, Pork Chop Hill and The Big Sleep. Brown was in a lot of films too.
I watched The Return of Jack Slade. It’s a slapdash western, in a way, hard to follow. My daughter covers he face when Mari Blanchard and John Ericson kiss. Mari Blanchard died of cancer at age 47, and Ericson fleed Nazi Germany, and lived to be 93.
It's instructive to see these movies, movies have advanced quite a lot but mostly videos have become democratized, everyone has them, so a movie is the pinnacle of expense, art and storytelling. It was a newish medium back then, the culture hadn't developed, and westerns were a popular format, there are hardly none these days. They are sort of referenced in Mandalorian and Boba Fett science fiction, Cowboy Bebop anime. Space is seen as the wild west of the future. I can't gush enough about Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape, The Expanse, The 100, and they become more midling, but Dark Matter, Doctor Who and Firefly, Dark Angel.
Star Trek has many iterations from the original series, next generation, and Deep Space 9, my personal favorite. I love them all, even the new one Discovery, they keep pushing boundaries, and fighting to be maximally peaceful in a violent world. There's honestly nothing like them, though at times Battlestar Galactica sometimes got there in it's own way. Each new show pushes the boundaries of an imagined future, what magic technology can create, what various corrupt or ideal political structures can we explore. There are so many subgenres in sci-fi from comedy, adventure, horror, family, time travel, AI, Dystopia, apocalypse. Peabody and Sherman is fun historical sci-fi.
Hunger Games just came to Netflix in the USA. Murderbot novels, and so many great Sci-fi writers. I've read most of the Hugo and Nebula award winners back into the 70's.
Star Wars is now saturating the seemingly endless narratives of spin off characters, developing the franchise. Opinions are flying and my son wants to be a producer just to control a narrative. That is his most passionate wish. I think it's great he has such strong opinions.
Half of 50 is 25, and it’s 25 years since The Big Lebowski came out.
There’s a guy on Reddit who does Gravity’s Rainbow doodles.
New podcast on GR, Great American Novel. Couple of English professors discuss. They have southern accents. Scott Yarbrough teaches in Charleston, South Carolina. Kirk Curnutt teaches at Troy State University Montgomery Alabama.
Proverbs for paranoids (from GR)
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creature is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
4.You hide, They seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
P.262-7
He finds that he has drifted as far as the Odeon, one of the great last world cafés, whose specialty is not listed anywhere indeed has never been pinned down. Lenin, Trotsky, James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out at these tables. Whatever it was they all had in common: whatever they'd come to this vantage to score ... perhaps it had to do with the people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or desperations in one fateful piece of street dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West's ancient curse. . .Link:
The Conversation: Join the Counterforce: Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern epic Gravity’s Rainbow at 50.
My previous posts on GR:
Un Perm' au Casino Herman Goering
Recent thoughts on Gravity's Rainbow
Recent thoughts on Gravity's Rainbow
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