Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon, 1973

When I first read Gravity’s Rainbow nearly 14 years ago as part of my senior seminar I was only 20 years old and not very wise in the ways of the world. I had written a rather long and rambling thesis that analyzed the use of language with an exploration of Pynchon’s references to wind as a form of spoken breath represented by the destructive movement of the rocket cutting through the sky at a speed faster than spoken sound, Pynchon’s obsession with mathematical precision as a metaphor for the imperfection of communication, the representation of windmills and mandalas as the crossroads of truth and meaning through the moving and ever changing influence of time, and the breakdown of humanistic meaning in the novel as a linguistic art form. That sounds like a mouthful and although it was an effective cerebral exercise for a young undergraduate, that theoretical evaluation isn’t something that I wish to explore here.

Upon my most recent, second reading of Pynchon’s expansive work, I found myself engrossed in the text simply because it is a monumental work of artistic synthesis. Reading it for pleasure allowed me to more fully enjoy Gravity’s Rainbow more than my first, undergraduate reading because I was able to simply dive into the book without the need to prove anything to myself or a professor through a theoretical analysis. This expanded enjoyment is partially attributed to my years of expanded knowledge of world history, religions, as well as the general life experience that goes with age, which has allowed me to be more inside the joke and better appreciate the encyclopedic references that Pynchon has embedded within the text of Gravity’s Rainbow. By no means do I claim to fully get all of what is going on in Gravity’s Rainbow.

Admittedly, with over 400 characters and a difficult and convoluted plot more interested in the theme of paranoia and the connection of events across history and time than a clear and forward narrative progression, Gravity’s Rainbow is often confusing and difficult to grasp. However, in reading this book simply for fun, it was less important to get all of what was going on and in so doing I rediscovered how great a book this is. Gravity’s Rainbow is definitely on the short list of books that I’d want with me on a deserted island.

The reason being is that there is so much going on this book that it keeps giving and giving while challenging the reader to think beyond the normal paradigms of literary conventions. The novel is constructed with many narrative voices that weave their way through the text through long digressions and tangents. It is a novel that builds off of ideas in a masterful effort to present all of the weight and influence of human history at the tip of a parabolic rocket launched up into the sky with an eventual crash into the earth, pulled down by the eventual power of gravity’s seductive power. The narrative progression is constructed with mathematical precision with a parabolic arch of a rainbow represented by the four sections of the novel major chapters. The first section shoots up with an intensity, introducing the rocket, Slothrop’s strange correlation with the rocket crashes across the London landscape, and many subplots of espionage and paranoia. The middle two chapters drift aloft at the arch of the parabola with the action occurring in the German, French, and Russian Zones of the War with strange diversions into black market subterfuge, drug induced escapades, and several subplots related to the rocket’s engineering and Slothrop’s psychological conditioning. The fourth and final section speaks with an induced clarity that brings many of the drifting plots of the second and third section into focus with the rocket’s eventual crashing into the same theater that is destroyed at the novel’s opening.

Much can be said about the convoluted plot, the countless extended metaphors, and Pynchon’s voice as The postmodern author – and much has. Gravity’s Rainbow is easily one of the most analyzed postmodern books in academic settings. However, I don’t really care about that. When one relieves oneself of the overly cerebral challenge of trying to get all of what is going on, Gravity’s Rainbow becomes a thoroughly enjoyable, educational, and humorous romp of a book. I’ve said it before that Pynchon is one of those authors that causes all other fiction to seem mundane. After reading Gravity’s Rainbow the challenge becomes a choice of what to read next, because all else seems insignificant.

“The truth is that the War is keeping things alive. Things. The Ford is only one of them. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us on this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when the armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment’s weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it’s said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War.” (645)

The Rough Guide to Bali & The Lonely Planet Guides to Singapore & Bali

If you’ve been following this blog, my apologies for the lack of posts in April.  The delay in posting has been due to my lack of extensive reading during the month.  For one, I’ve taken on a very long read with Thomas Pynchon’s 760 page Gravity’s Rainbow, which has kept me occupied, but the larger distraction has been my recent two-week whirlwind trip through Singapore and Indonesia.

Singapore was only meant to be the starting point for the South East Asia trip since my wife and I met two friends who were on a longer trip through Malaysia and Brunei in addition to Indonesia.  During the Singapore leg of the trip we kept busy and on the move as we dined on the cheap Singapore food and expensive Singapore drinks as we traveled around the city/country relying on the very brief Lonely Planet Pocket Singapore guidebook to help us navigate the metropolitan international city.  The guide book was helpful in directing us to some of the top spots that we enjoyed such as the Night Safari, the tree-top walk (which we aborted due to heavy monsoon rains), and the very modern temple of Buddha’s tooth.  However, the recommendation to see the historical Raffles Hotel was one of the many disappointments we faced since the guidebook didn’t prepare us for the astronomical prices of the cocktails ($26 Sing or or $22 USD for a Singapore Sling) with outright robbery prices for beer ($20 Sing or $17 USD for a pint of weak-ass Tiger Pilsner).  We quickly figured out that the best place to grab a drink was the back alley of Chinatown where a 620 ml bottle of Tiger (i.e. Heineken) only cost $7 Sing ($5.80 USD).  In my opinion, two days is enough to get a taste of Singapore.  The 50 year old city/country is a blend of Vegas and Hong Kong: it lacks cultural depth and survives primarily as an economic crossroads between the East & West.  In other words, there isn’t enough to quench a discerning traveler’s hungry palette for culture and nature.

From Singapore we traveled to Yogyakarta in Java to begin our Indonesian adventures.  Since Indonesia is a sprawling country (it is the 4th most populous nation in the world and encompasses 17,508 islands) it was difficult to pick a good guidebook for our Java leg of the trip.  There are guidebooks that cover all of Indonesia, but they are very broad and narrow in their coverage and there isn’t any one book focused on Java.  One of our travel partners did use the Lonely Planet Indonesia guide to help plan the trip, but the 916 page behemoth was too thick to lug along on the extended backpacking trip.

We stayed in Yogyakarta with the primary goal of visiting the nearby Buddhist temples of Borobudor and Pramanan (which are both spectacular) but in addition to these toursit hot-spots  we were serendipitously surprised by the joys of Yogyakarta revealed to us by the Dutch expat that ran the bed & breakfast we stayed at.  We lovingly dubbed Frans, “Uncle Frans” because he treated us like long-lost family, taking us around the city and showing us how the people live, often walking us into their homes and workplaces, showing us the many hand-made crafts that are produced by the resourceful Javanese people. We were exposed to hand-made pottery, hand-made tiling, hand-made rice-crackers, and most amazingly, hand-made paper bags.  Uncle Frans took us to rice fields and showed us how the rice is painstakingly planted by hand, harvested by hand, and sun-dried by hand.  Uncle Frans took us to the best restaurants (that only cost $1-2 USD per person) and jokingly revealed the many absurdities of the Javanese life, such as the fact that everyone parks their motorbikes inside their homes and the police stop working at 4 pm.  None of these pleasures and revelations would have been revealed to us if we had relied upon a guidebook and I am grateful we left the bulky 916 page Indonesia guide at home.

 From Yogyakarta we traveled by train and a nail-biting, death-defying taxi ride to Mt. Bromo, an active Volcano in Eastern Java.  The views of Bromo are spectacular and the main goal of this leg of the trip was to catch the spectacular sunrise and do a little hiking. We were able to climb up to the edge of the Bromo crater, which is actively steaming with noxious sulfur fumes.  The volcano has erupted three times in the last ten years (most recently in 2011) and it is absolutely crazy to think that we slept within sight of the active volcano and actually hiked up to the edge of the steaming crater, but as we had learned from Uncle Frans, just about anything goes in Java, and “you do what your like” was the motto of the trip.

From Mt Bromo we spent a tortuous day of travel to Bali that included a van, a train, a confusing argument with ferry operators, a near miss bus ride, a tortuously long ferry ride across the Java-Bali straight, and a face-palm slapping “2 hr” bus ride along the western Bali coast that took 5 ++ hours.  Since we had woken up at 3 am to catch the Mt. Bromo sunrise, our Java to Bali travel day turned into a 24 hr nightmare.  For the Bali leg of the trip we relied on the Rough Guide to Bali & Lombok and the Lonely Planet Pocket Guide to Bali.  Neither of these guides had prepared us for how difficult the travel would be along this leg of the trip and I would urge anyone to just head to the Surabaya airport after Mt. Bromo.

Once in Bali, we did enjoy ourselves, but we only saw about 1/4 the goals of our itinerary because getting around Bali was painfully long.  The heavily touristed island lacks the infrastructure to support the many tour buses, taxis, and motorbikes that clog the two-lane roads.  At one point it took us about 2 hours to travel 5 miles to head home after our dinner on the Jimbaran Beach.  We spent most of our time relaxing on the beach and swimming in our private pools in the towns of Seminyak and Ubud.  Seminyak is an upscale touristy beach town that did provide some nice luxuries and great food, but the upcountry town of Ubud was more intriguing because it represents the heart of Bali’s arts and cultural center.  We did spend a very long day travelling to northern Bali to check out some remote waterfalls (our driver had to stop about seven times to ask for directions on the rough, single-lane gravel road) and this part of our Bali trip was my favorite because we got to see the off-beaten-path of the Bali that once was before its beach towns became overrun by tourism. The charms of Bali are its natural beauty and Hindu culture, and on this waterfall trek we were lucky enough to chance upon a funeral procession that combined both of those beauties in one as the entire village walked along the road to celebrate the passing and cremation of a fellow villager.

Overall, the trip was a blast despite the many travel headaches.  The enjoyment was primarily due to the company of my two friends and my wife as well as the company of Uncle Frans and our Bali driver named, I. Wyan, who made the trip an enjoyable and laughable feast.  As for the tour guide books we used, I wouldn’t recommend either the Lonely Planet Pocket Guides or the Rough Guide because they didn’t really prepare us for the trip and weren’t very helpful during our trip. We found that using trip adviser on the fly was was far more helpful that the books’ recommendations, and our Java and Bali friends Frans and Wyan helped us far more than the books ever did.

New Bookshelf!

It has been over a year and a half since I finished my reading challenge and granted myself the freedom to buy a new bookshelf to expand my library. In that time the old shelves were getting quite overcrowded with stacks upon stacks that were beginning to look quite sloppy.  Even my minimalist wife was starting to ask when I would get a new bookshelf to expand the library with a more appealing look.

Finally I got around to it and now have a wall of books to admire! I must say that reorganizing was quite a hassle, especially since there was some mix ups with the shelves when they arrived and once that was sorted out I found that as I moved the old shelves to realign the location of the shelves I had damaged the walls of my apartment with my securement method.  But all of those hiccups have been resolved and I finally have shelves with some room to breath…and room to read.

Gravity’s Rainbow Part One: Beyond the Zero

You: What are you reading? Is that a book about rockets (referencing the schematics on the cover)?

Me: No. Yes. Well, it is a book with rockets in it. The rockets are kind of a character that make their first appearance in the opening line with “a screaming … across the sky” as one of many German V2 rocket crashes into a theater of London, or the theater of London, penetrating the map, flying faster than the speed of sound, capable of exploding before the victims hear the explosion.

You: Oh, OK, so it is a war book? Kind of like Catch 22?

Me: Yes, but, well, um, the war is just a part of it. The book is also about the impact of a map that shows the rockets’ distribution: a secret unit of psychological warfare has determined that the rocket distributions coincide with the map of sexual exploits by an the American Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop. This lascivious lieutenant Slothrop, may have been psychologically conditioned while just a baby, through Pavlovian methods, to develop an erection to certain non-sexual stimuli. Unbeknownst to Slothrop, that conditioning was extinguished in his childhood but, now, during the war, he is developing these unexplained erections, and an undercover English espionage unit determines that Tyrone’s preterite hard-ons coincide with the location of the Nazi V2 strikes in London. 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.

You: Wait….What?

Me: But that is just part of it. This isn’t just a pseudo-erotic war novel, it is a prosaic romp of encyclopedic proportion that touches upon everything from behavioral determinism to Zodiac fortune telling, from mathematical statistical analysis to drug induced hyper-paranoia, from innocent romanticism to raunchy sadism, and includes over 400 characters, all with unique back-stories each with apparently an insignificant significance in the Pynchonian universe. It is widely considered a difficult novel because of its depth, use of long-dead slang, and accurate references to all things including chemistry, engineering design, biological and psychological theory, and above all historical reference. This is really a historical novel, but it is history of World War II Europe viewed through the lens of the 1970′s Vietnam era, with a distorted but factual perspective grounded in an unreal reality. It is above all, a widely humorous novel that includes a battle with giant octopus, an over-enlarged Adenoid gland that swallows city blocks, and long digressions about the horrible taste of English candies. But despite its many humorous digressions, it is a novel that demands the reader’s close attention because it is laced with shifts in time and location and an inattentive reader may find him or herself suddenly 300 years in the past and 2000 miles away within just a few paragraphs of the previous action. Pynchon is a master of prose, and an attentive reader will get lost in the tightly woven prosaic formulas that transport the reader in the arching and archaic flow of language. It is one of my favorite novels that I read for part of my English thesis so many years ago and have finally decided to revisit and get lost in once again.

You: OK, carry on.

“What if [Roger]‘s whole generation have turned out like this? Will Postwar be nothing but “events,” newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?” (56)

Factotum

Charles Bukowski, 1975

Charles Bukowski is a diversion into the mind of an outsider living the beaten-down edge of life. Bukowski is a man of wit that doesn’t strive to speak to the learned class. His writing speaks from a voice defeated by the life that surrounds it. His is a voice that just doesn’t care what you think because spending time thinking gets in the way of the important things: such as the next drink and scrounging up the cash to pay for that drink. His voice is just obscene enough that it paints a reality that is easily imaginable and through its gritty reality is a strangely pleasurable read.

“When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” (67)

The penned first-person protagonist of Bukowski’s Factotum, Henry Chianski, is an unabashed alcoholic and womanizer. The premise of Factotum is fairly simple. Chianski is a simple guy rejected from the draft traveling the country during the second World War jumping from one job to the next. He works just long enough to raise some money to pay the rent buy some liquor and find a woman to get drunk with. Chianksi (an obvious alter ego for Bukowski) is also a struggling writer, but his story told through Factotum is less the story of an aspiring writer and more the story of struggling worker and alcoholic. I would estimate that in the 205 pages of the novel’s text Chianski catalogs working and being fired from at least 30 different odd jobs such as store clerk, machinist, warehouse stock-man, and so on. His disregard for stability is blatantly nonchalant:

“I always started a job with the feeling that I’d soon quit or be fired, and this gave me a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.” (130)

The novel reads with a driving rhythm and it is apparent that Chianksi’s alcoholism and working class struggles are a social commentary depicting a class of people rarely glamorize in artistic form. The Chianski’s of any other novel would be tragic victims or negative influences on the hero, but the Chianski of Factotum does not feign any of these high ideals: he is a man that simply is, living with who is is and what he has with no sense of ambition to become anything that he is not. Some readers may find Factotum a disappointment for it lacks true character development or plot progression. The quality of Factotum is that it stands as a documentary in novel form, a raw portrayal of a rugged and gritty reality lived by many who are often shunned or ignored.

The Man Who Sold the World

Peter Doggett, 2012

I was a David Bowie fan.

After reading Doggett’s chronicle of the iconoclastic decade of Bowie’s creativity and stardom I have been converted to a David Bowie fanatic.  Reading through this account of Bowie’s prolific period spanning 1969-1980 I listened to each of the albums discussed and rediscovered the many voices of Bowie’s artistic imprint.  The singles that I’ve loved are now fleshed out in context with their albums and the ground-breaking efforts that motivated Bowie and inspired his would-be followers.  Amazingly, during this period Bowie released 13 diverse and influential albums and the progression of the artist to superstar to minimalist is as profound as the many personae he wore to promote his music. The many changes of the faces of Bowie were apparent as he became the glam rock alien Ziggy, the American inspired glam Aladdin, the soul singing Thin White Duke, and the minimalist Bowie of the Berlin period.  In constantly recreating himself and in recreating his sound Bowie set the stage that defined super-stardom and remains the icon that defines all of 1970′s music.

Bowie didn’t jump into stardom easily, it was a slow climb for the man who didn’t quite fit in with the ideology of the 1960′s.  To provide the back story for Bowie’s prolific 70′s, Doggett’s book starts with a short and informative 52 page biography of the pre-1970′s Bowie.   The man who grew up as the boy, David Jones, in South London’s suburbia was a child of fractured family with an influential and troubled older brother who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.  David’s brother introduced him to Beat literature and aspirations of stardom, but in the 60′s Bowie struggled with his musical goals and at one time visioned himself as a Coltrane saxophone player.  He released singles in Mod and folk styles while working in an advertising agency but few of his works were successful until the breakout of Space Oddity in 1969.

From Space Oddity through Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) Doggett reviews each of the 189 songs penned by Bowie through the “long decade” spanning 1969 to 1980.   The song-by-song analysis is often informative regarding the musical instrumentation such as tone and pitch with referential context to popular songs that influenced Bowie.  In addition to a song-by-song analysis there are essays that describe each album’s unique sound with respect to the cultural influences of the time in addition to several multi-part essays that provide context to Bowie’s changes in style, rise in stardom, promiscuity and blatant bisexuality, rampant drug use, difficulties with his manager, and retreat from stardom to rediscover himself.

The book reads quickly, especially while listening to the music and as my first in depth read of David Bowie I found The Man Who Sold the World as a thorough and enlightening chronicle.  However where the book falters is that Doggett failed to include much lyrical analysis of the songs.  This may have been due to a challenges with the rights to publish the lyrics, but I felt that the book would have definitely been strengthened with some printed lyrics and analysis.  Doggett does repeatedly acknowledge that in interview Bowie was often cryptic when discussing the meaning of his songs, especially as Bowie changed his explanations from interview to interview.  The cryptic nature of the man may have inhibited Doggett from providing the full lyrical analysis that I was looking for. In my reading,  my interests were peaked and with a little internet searching I did happen to find here at another wordpress site a thorough song-by-song analysis that nicely complements the book.

I have to mention that another complaint I have for Doggett is that as an expert on the Beatles, Doggett makes far too many references to the Beatles in his analysis of Bowie’s songs.  Of course it would be ignorant to acknowledge that the Beatles had a profound influence on Rock and while I’ve listened to Bowie I’ve always smiled at the soulfoul chant of “I heard the news today oh boy,” in Young Americans, but Doggett goes to extremes with reference to Beatles guitar riffs and lyrics in his Bowie analysis.  This gets tedious towards the Lodger and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) analyses where Doggett seamed to lazily attribute every Bowie song as an obscure Lennon or Beatles tribute.

Despite the complaints I’ve noted above, I really enjoyed The Man Who Sold the World.  I haven’t read too much pop culture or music history and this book was a nice diversion for me.  As I noted in my intro, the book has inspired me and I’m now knee deep in a period of Bowie Fanaticism as my wife (a shared Bowie fan) jokingly has complained “It is all Bowie all of the time,” in my house right now.  Everyone who loves Bowie loves Ziggy Stardust, but I will close this book review with a thankful acknowledgement that Doggett’s book helped focus my attention on two albums that I’ll proclaim as Bowie’s best: Hunky Dory and Low with Station to Station coming in as a close tie for second (the first two are so different that they can’t be compared as first or second next to each other).  The Bowie of the 70′s is a timeless musician, an artist, and a man of otherworldly influence.  Any fan should welcome the opportunity to dust off their music collection and rediscover the Bowie that was and forever will be.

Sanctuary

William Faulkner, 1931

It has been at several years since I’ve read any Faulkner, but once upon a time I read a lot of him. Although my early high school summer reading of Absalom Absalom left me bewildered and grasping at straws as to what the heck I was reading, my exposure to the Sound the Fury as an undergraduate opened up a new appreciation for transitions in narrative voice and the subtleties of descriptive, poetic prose that I cherish to this day. Sound the Fury is a fantastic read (and I’m sure the more mature reader in me would concede the same to a rereading of Absalom) and following that introduction I gobbled up several more of Faulkner’s works such that I regret not being able to take a seminar on Faulkner that conflicted with one of my required classes.

Despite the establishment of an early love for Faulkner’s challenging and rewarding prose, I haven’t turned my attention to him for some time until most recently I was intrigued by employee postings at two separate bookstores I frequent championing Sanctuary as an underappreciated introduction to Faulkner. So, with this renewed attention I approached this book with an air of excitement to revisit an old love. Well, after having finished it, I can admit that my love for Faulkner thrives, but no longer a doting fan, I can admit that this isn’t one of his proudest achievements. Sanctuary is a good book, but there are so many more that are better. In the introduction to the book Faulkner admits this himself, acknowledging that he wrote Sanctuary primarily to make some money to support his grander writing exploits. There are some lovely narrative interludes but the story’s progression wasn’t compelling enough to capture my interests, especially since I know that Faulkner can do better than this.

Sanctuary is basically a crime novel, however unlike any run of-the-mill bestseller pulp novel, it approaches the subject of murder and rape from Faulkner’s seasoned perspective of social awareness. As is a common theme in any of Faulkner’s works, Sanctuary depicts the decline of the Southern aristocratic class, however in Sanctuary that decline isn’t a moral or economic decline specifically motivated by a character’s choices or social circumstances, it is a forced decline that comes about through the rape of a young aristocratic college student, Temple Drake, who was abandoned by her drunken suitor in a rural bootlegger house. Temple is left in the hands of misfit who goes by the name of Popeye, who morally corrupts Temple, using her for his pleasure and whim in a whorehouse. There are a couple of murders mixed in the plot in addition to a bit of mystery that results in a botched murder trial investigated and defended by the lawyer Horace Benbow.

In any of his works, Faulkner’s narrative is often difficult to follow with long prosaic conversations that don’t depict the name of the speaker. This was to be expected, what I found disappointing was that the obviously terse and violent subject matter only existed as allusions that were only revealed as inferences such as the sound of a bullet only to be explained as a murder several pages later at the scene of a funeral. As a reader who has been bathed in the blood of Cormac McCarthy, I saw the potential for a powerfully grave and dark novel dwindle in the shadows of narrative allusion. I realize that this may have been a necessity due to the censors and sensibilities of the 1930’s, but as a reader in 2013 I found these allusions to as vague teases that limited my enjoyment of the novel’s potential.

Although there were deficiencies in the impact of the story, I did find that the novel’s strengths shone through the curt portrayal of racism and the social commentary that depicted a society divided within itself. Most notably was the conflict that Benbow struggled with to protect the common law wife, Ruby Lemar, of the accused murderer, Goodwin because Ruby and Goodwin shared a child out of wedlock. Benbow’s sister and the owner of a hotel refused to house Ruby because of her low moral station, yet Ruby proves to be one of the strongest characters in the book who is ostracized by a society unwilling to look beyond the judgments of social norms. The situation shared by Ruby and Goodwin would hardly raise an eyebrow in today’s complicated social structure, yet the novel’s depiction of their struggle provides a glimpse into the social expectations that shape a culture’s beliefs and behaviors.