Brain Pain discussion
This topic is about
Gravity’s Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow - Spine 2012
>
Questions, Resources, and General Banter - Gravity's Rainbow
date
newest »
newest »
i don't know if this is of any help, but there is a documentary about pynchon called the world of pynchon, as one of the most reclusive writers, information about him is hard to come by, so even though the documentary wasn't that great, it was still interesting....
Ali wrote: "I'm really excited about the prospect of reading this. I read GR once before, in November of last year. I loved it, but I feel that I read it too quickly because I read it all in one week, gobbling..."Are you insane?
That is a great effort. It probably would of given me an aneurysm.
Thanks for the resources.
Mod
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwXLDv...
Since we're linking stuff, I'd like to contribute this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbt30U...
because it was inspired by GR, and it's just so cool,
and this nice piece:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...
I think I'm gonna start reading GR tomorrow. I thank you all in advance for your support.
Mod
De nada!
@Christine - glad to have you along for the read. If you have a chance, take a look at the documentary I posted above; Sometime during the first 30 minutes, Pynchon's girlfriend takes the film crew to the beach house she lived in with Pynchon in Manhattan Beach while he was writing GR. If you can locate the house, take a pic of yourself there with a copy of GR - but make it Pynchonially Mysterious.....
@Christine - glad to have you along fo..."Thanks for the extra-credit assignment, Jim! I'll do that as soon as I can.(Uhm, I've lived in LA all my adult life, and yet I've never been to Manhattan Beach.)
Mod
Thanks for the extra-credit assignment, Jim! I'll do that as soon as I can.(Uhm, I've lived in LA all my adult life, and yet I've never been to Manhattan..."
When I lived in S.F. I would look for Tristero mailboxes, but never found any...
I finshed Gravity's Rainbow about three years ago, after many years of effort. Definitly a rewarding read!I will certainly be following the discussions.
Mod
I will certainly be following the discussions."
Good to have a GR veteran along for the ride!
If enough folks choose to read this, I hoping for some flavor of a long-term Spoiler thread remaining open.This book is clearly complex; and having an involved discussion, over time, with smart patient readers would be a gift.
Oh, by the way, I'm two months new to this group; and I love the Slow-Books Manifesto. Obviously there are many, many worthwhile books that most cannot read, much less process in 30 days.
OhyesIjustreadHamletIt'saboutthisdanishguywithadisfunctionalfamily.
Jim wrote: " When I lived in S.F. I would look for Tristero mailboxes, but never found any......"My friend's English Professor at SF State had a great story about finding "Tyrone Slothrop" in the phonebook, sending him a carefully worded postcard, and receiving an invitation to dinner with 'Tyrone' and his wife. "Gravity's Rainbow" was a subject of discussion at the dinner, but it was never made explicit whether or not Tyrone was actually Pynchon (the prof was fairly certain he was, but relished the ambiguity).
***Following is a spoiler alert for the insanely sensitive who think any quote from a book counts as a spoiler ****
I read GR twice through about 25 years ago when I was backpacking around various countries. It was the perfect book for a very extended trip where books in English weren't easy to come by, hence the second read due to my reluctance to part with it. Sadly, the part that seems to have stuck foremost in my brain is "You never did the Kenosha kid", which periodically bubbles up and forces me to go through all the possible variations.
Mod
This book is clearly complex; and having an involved discussion, over time, with smart p..."
Mosca and Whitney: Regarding spoilers, if you want to share some major plot point or passage that might ruin a surprise for our first time GR readers, just use the "spoiler" HTML thingy if the message/passage is about pages we haven't read yet. In general, I'm not too worried about spoilers in this Questions and Resources thread, but in the Weekly Discussion threads, please try to stay within the pages scheduled and the earlier parts. In the Weekly Discussions, I'm actually more interested in narrowing the focus to the section scheduled so we can dig deeper within a given chapter. Anyway, you get the idea. BTW, Whitney, nothing in your message constitutes a spoiler.
Jim wrote: "Anyway, you get the idea. BTW, Whitney, nothing in your message constitutes a spoiler..."It does give away that the kid never did the Kenosha, so I thought I better play it safe.
Mod
It does give away that the kid never did the Kenosha, so I thought I better play it safe."
Good one! What's a Kenosha?
I'm looking forward to this read, I could certainly use the distraction from the disaster that is buying a house. (is it normal when the home inspector quite literally bursts out laughing in every room? No don't answer that) I enjoyed The Crying of Lot 49 quite a bit, and I love the things being posted here about the mailboxes and the story with the postcard. I think I need a low work/high reading weekend. (is it normal to discuss building code violations with your cat at 5am? Don't answer that either... We're backing out of that deal anyway... The house, not the cat)
Mod
It's normal if your cat has an in with the building department...
GR is a great, super-detailed, post-modern Ulysses-on-drugs, so you will definitely be able to escape your soon-to-be-a-homeowner stress.
I'm hoping the discussion here will help pull my reading along. I'm having a terrible time with this book-it's not only difficult, it feels (and I know it's horribly sexist of me) like a very "male" book. My son will probably love it.I love the glimpses of understanding I almost have & I am determined to continue reading even though it seems possible that I will finish the book without understanding anything but the conjunctions. :(
So far, my brain's greatest pain!
Mod
Well, the first 109 pages I've read are all about the penis - bananas, rockets, actual penises, experiments with stroking an infant's penis, invisible ink that requires semen to read, etc. So no, not very sexist at all.....
Ellie said: it feels (and I know it's horribly sexist of me) like a very "male" book. My son will probably love it.Your observation is absoultley correct. I loved this book; but Pynchon has a sense of humor like an 18 year old (male) soldier. This statement holds true throughout the book.
But there is also so much more to the book. Some love it. Some hate it.
I say this, Ellie, so you know this early--this book requires a lot of effort. For me, it was worth the effort. But I don't know if I will ever have a single, resolved feeling about it.
But there are many prose passages so beautiful I will never forget them.
Thanks everyone for the responses.I feel inspired.
I also was excited by the documentary-the fact that Pynchon was best friends with Richard Farina means a lot, oddly enough I suppose, to me.
In general, the documentary convinced me that this book is an important one for me to tackle.
It's not that I can't read "male" books. It just takes more of a conscious effort to enter the thought patterns (and this is a book that takes a lot of effort even without that).
I very much want to make it through this book.
Mod
I'm hoping to join the GR discussion. I find it funny that people are worrying about spoilers in GR. I don't think GR is that kind of book. There are no key plot moments or ..."
Yes, I kind of agree that it would be hard to spoil GR since everyone knows the Allies won...
What I really aim for when talking about spoilers is trying to focus a given week's discussion around a specific part of the book. If we're discussing chapter 3 and someone makes a comment about chapter 16, that pulls a lot of attention away from what we're talking about. Hope that makes sense...
Suzanne wrote: "I find it funny that people are worrying about spoilers in GR. I don't think GR is that kind of book. There are no key plot moments or ..."Suzanne, see the discussion under "The Waves - Spine 2012" for an long discussion of people's different opinions on what they consider a 'spoiler'. Please note - it's a fairly exhaustive discussion, and I am NOT trying to reopen the issue here.
Mod
The discussion starts on June 11th. Join in when you return from your holiday. Given how complex GR is, we'll be talking about each of the sections for more than a week at a time, so plenty of overlap.
Enjoy your holiday!
Hey Everyone,I was lurking while you read The Recognitions, but I stumbled on some information tonight about Gravity's Rainbow that I thought people might find important. The kindle version of GR just became available this week, and I was thinking of getting it. While looking through the reviews, I discovered this review of the Penguin Deluxe edition of GR:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RBVC0DP4...
I had purchased this edition last year when I tried to read GR, but it just so happens that I also have a real beat up paperback edition from Bantam Books that was published in 1974. I looked up the the typo/omission that the reviewer mentions in their review and confirmed that the Penguin Deluxe version has errors.
Thanks,
Matthew
PS: I am writing this (or trying to anyway) from my iPad, so please excuse any glaring typos.
My 1974 version is like yours ("in *these* dreams" and the em-dash)... The sentence in the Penguin Deluxe edition makes no sense ("Your task, in these dreams, is often to pens."). I'd like to think the other typos the reviewer alludes to is the reason I had a hard time reading GR the first time, but I know that is not true. Either way, I think next time I try and tackle the book, I am going to read my 1974 version (and hope it doesn't disintegrate).
For what it's worth, I purchased the Penguin Modern Classic kindle version of Ulysses and it was lousy with errors. Mostly optical character recognition errors ("Air Bloom" instead of "Mr Bloom"), but some where it would have a paragraph from a previous page inserted in the text . I thought a paid version by a respectable publisher would be better than a free version. I was wrong. Amazon no longer sells the Penguin Modern Classic kindle version of Ulysses.
By the way, just a reminder, Bloomsday is this Saturday!
Mod
The sentence in the Penguin Deluxe edition makes no sense ("Your task, in these dreams, is often to pens."). I'd like to th..."
That's a pretty big mistake they made. I have a lot of Penguin books on my shelves, and now I'm wondering how many have errors.
I have a Vintage Books GR published in 2000 without the error cited above.
If anyone finds more errors in the Penguin Deluxe, please let us all know...
One of the things I've discovered, as both a Nook and a Kindle owner, is that the level of proof reading for conversions may be less than fabulous. I once downloaded a copy of Bloom's translation of Plato's Republic and it was virtually without proofreading and, for me, unreadable. There were errors on every page, if I remember correctly. they later took it off the market and replaced it with a new book with a new introduction at a higher price
In most books this is not a major problem because the errors are relatively few, easy to understand, and minimally annoying.
It can be tricky, though, when a writer is using language in a way that you can't automatically correct in your mind.
Gravity's Rainbow without proofreading! My God, that is a frightening idea!
Ali wrote: "Yeah. It's sort of like Finnegans Wake without proofreading."The proof-reading of FW took 30 years and has now been published in an affordable edition:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
More here:
http://www.houyhnhnmpress.com/finnega...
I'm learning that there are more and more reasons to not trust an ereader with any text in which the shape of the text is important.
Jim wrote: "When I lived in S.F. I would look for Tristero mailboxes, but never found any..."Check again, Jim! link: Trystero spreads around the world.
FYI..someone (Jake McDougald) replied to my comment on the Amazon review and confirmed that the omission that is in the Penguin Deluxe edition is also in the kindle edition.
I am reading both the kindle and the print edition and not finding a huge difference. Plus it's just so much easier for me on the Kindle so...I'm thrilled it came out.
Matthew wrote: "Hey Everyone,I was lurking while you read The Recognitions, but I stumbled on some information tonight about Gravity's Rainbow that I thought people might find important. The kindle version of GR..."
Oh no!!! I'm reading GR on the Nook. It JUST became available on the Nook within the past few weeks, and I was SO HAPPY because, as Ellie said (in Message 43 in this thread) "...it's just so much easier for me on the Kindle..." I feel the same about the Nook.
BUT, I just found the line that Matthew is referring to in Message 32, and in my Nook edition it says "Your task, in these dreams, is often to pens."
I wonder how many other mistakes I've read so far??!!!
Matthew, thank you for sharing that Amazon review!! The "original" line beginning with "Your task.." is really a beautiful line, and if I didn't see your post here I would be wondering what on earth Pynchon is talking about, regarding "pens" !!!!!
Well, I purchased GR on the Nook, so I'm going to finish reading it on the Nook. I really have a difficult time reading "big, thick" books in the printed version, even if it's softbound. I live in NYC and walk everywhere, and whatever I'm currently reading is always in my bag, so it's been a pleasure to have the Nook for that reason. Also, some of you may remember that I broke my wrist last November and it will never be completely healed, which is another reason the Nook is SO MUCH better for me. It's difficult to hold a heavy book. (I'll be reading Infinite Jest on my Nook as well.)
Bummer!!! I hope the "task/dreams/pens" example is the worst of the mistakes in the Kindle/Nook/Penguin Deluxe editions!!
Barbara wrote: "Matthew wrote: "Hey Everyone,I was lurking while you read The Recognitions, but I stumbled on some information tonight about Gravity's Rainbow that I thought people might find important. The kind..."
Well crap. That's the edition I have too. I just got to that sentence, which made no sense, mentioned in the review. Hopefully there aren't too many more like that, because that is going to get very annoying. Plus, like Barbara said, that was a beautiful line before the Penguin edition mauled it. Oh well. I'm not about to go buy another copy, so I'll just have to deal.
Hi all,Just wanted to make sure to mention I checked my copy of the book, the 2006 Penguin Deluxe edition with the Frank Miller paper cover, and the passage mentioned missing in the Amazon review is actually in my book intact. It looks as though some copies got the last line removed at the page break and other didn't.
I'm quite thankful mine didn't. It's a libary copy and I don't have the cash to pick it up right now. (although I will be owning GR at some point.. I do want to read it again.)
Anyone else have a copy of the 2006 edition without any big noticeable errors?
-Matt
Weird...Does your copy have the deckle edge?
Yes it has the deckle edge and the cover by Frank Miller.
Good heavens, but i'm actually finding this harder than Derrida, y'all! Oodles harder.. I think i might be a bit young for all the WWII and references contemporaneous to that era that he makes, so i've now grabbed this A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel, and boy, does it seem like manna in the desert...
Mod
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y44lp_...
So has anyone noticed any other important omission besides the one mentioned in that Amazon review? I have a deckle edge, frank miller cover, penguin deluxe edition and it has that mistake. So I'm wondering if there are any other mistakes that could be important to know...
Mod
I haven't heard of any other errors. Anyone else?
Brain Pain
Books mentioned in this topic
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel (other topics)Gravity’s Rainbow (other topics)
Also, if you’ve written a review of the book, please post a link to share with the group.