Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

“You're not a war correspondent.”
“Why does everybody keep saying that? Nobody believes me. Of course I’m a war correspondent.” Shaking the brassard at her. “Can’t you read? Sez ‘War Correspondent.’ I even have a mustache, here, don’t I? Just like that Ernest Hemingway."

Slothrop’s off the bed halfway across the room with a softoff, one sock on and the other in his teeth, head through one armhole of his undershirt, fly zipper jammed, yelling shit.

“Nope. Just a hard-working newshound, is all. No rockets, no harems.”
“It’s an arrangement,” she tells him. “It’s so unorganized out here. There have to be arrangements, You'll find out.” Indeed he will—he'll find thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple movement along roads, tracks and canals.

Seems this Tchitcherine maintains a harem, a girl in every rocket-town in the Zone. Yup, another rocket maniac. Slothrop feels like a tourist.

Well, Jesus. V-E Day just about everyplace you had a rocket, you had you a [REDACTED].

Slothrop had found a very old dictionary of technical German. It fell open to a certain page prickling with black-face type. Reading down the page, he would come to JAMF. The definition would read: I..

he knows that what’s haunting him now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G.

The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck You.... A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can’t See it, can’t make it out. Doesn’t want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing.

Well, now, what was the deal between his father and Bland? I’ve been sold, Jesus Christ I’ve been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef. Surveillance? Stinnes, like every industrial emperor, had his own company spy system. So did the IG. Does this mean Slothrop has been under their observation—m-maybe since he was born? Yaahhh...