/lit/ - Literature

>finally read this
>it’s literally about BBC

Bravo

I have read all sorts of “difficult” books without much issue. Ulysses, Spengler, Aristotle, Gaddis, and more.
I started trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow rainbow and it reads like fucking gibberish. What am I missing?
Does it make more sense as you go along? I do not have aphantasia but I simply cannot paint a picture in my mind of what is happening in this book because it’s too fucking random!

1. read some pynch; the constant slapstick humor, sexual degradation, and bizarre shifts in tone and context will surely hold the attention of ur frog brain. i would go headlong into gravity's rainbow and enjoy the chaos the first time around and then try to understand it on subsequent rereads. make ur own interpretation, it'll be fun
2. books would help develop critical thinking, be slightly less normie, feel actual emotions, etc

Also not a fan of this version of GR at all besides the way they cut the pages or whatever

idk if it's the worse GR cover but it's far from the best

What is Gravity's Rainbow "about" to you? Help a brainlet understand. My understanding of the book comes through looking at it as a re-telling of Moby Dick, though that may not be explicitly what it is, it helps me contextualize and wrap my head around it.

I'm so dumb I got like 100 pages into this before I realized that I was in way over my head and had no idea what was going on. I think at one point there was a talking dog. Should I continue reading?

At the beginning, I was keeping good track. Taking notes on every character and detail. Throughout the novel, especially when I got to The Zone, I’ve had an increasing amount of passages where I feel I’ve lost too much track on who characters are, what they're doing, why, or what’s even happening on the page. My reading has been inconsistent and my attention to detail/note-taking has progressively gotten sloppier. Had the same experience with V. but on a much smaller scale, his first novel being much easier. IV and TCo49 were basically a breeze but I could tell I missed out a lot on the subtext. I’ve stuck around Pynch because I love the scope of his storytelling, creativity, and political commentary. He’s the author that got me back into reading during high school but I really haven’t broadened my horizons much since. I tried McCarthy, realized it was unwise to read Blood Meridian, having not even read Moby Dick or any of McCarthy’s other novels. Notes from Underground was good. Vonnegut was unfulfilling. No comment on Bukowski. I picked up GR while I was reading The Fountainhead and dropped Rand immediately because of the numerous soulless caricatures she wrote for - felt like a repugnant projection of vapid Hollywood fantasies. Anyways. Made it to where Slothrop is aboard the Anubis. I’m not in college nor do I plan on going, I just read because I’m passionate about literature. I’m pretty much self-taught, and as much as I love many passages of this book, especially the most recent one with Pöckler, I feel like I’m better off dropping this and reading something more essential (the ancient myths, specifically, I guess) and coming back around to this book when I’ve broken out of my midwit mentality and can genuinely enjoy this. I feel like the amount of understanding I have of it now is just not enough to see the whole thing through, as close as I might be to finishing it, and as many resources I might have to fill me in on the gaps - I just feel like they’ve gone far too wide.

Can /lit/ offer an unguided learner any advice or comments regarding my retardation dilemma.

slowly grinding through gr... in part 3 ep. 15 when talking about slothrop and bianca, pynchon says "of course slothrop lost her, and kept losing her - it was an american requirement". what did you think he meant by this?

any advice for reading really cerebral, highbrow books without missing the forest for the trees?

It has been nine days since our first thread. How are you progressing?

I'm making my way through Part 3. Getting a little more complex than Part 2 but still nowhere near the difficulty of Part 1.

>Down the toilet, lookit me, What a silly thing ta do! Hope nobody takes a pee, Yippy dippy dippy doo... At which precise point there comes this godawful surge from up the line, noise growing like a tidal wave, a jam-packed wavefront of shit, vomit, toilet paper and dingleberries in mind-boggling mosaic, rushing down on panicky Slothrop like an MTA subway train on its own hapless victim. Nowhere to run. Paralyzed, he stares back over his shoulder. A looming wall stringing long tendrils of shitpaper behind, the shockwave is on him—GAAHHH! he tries a feeble frog kick at the very last moment but already the cylinder of waste has wiped him out, dark as cold beef gelatin along his upper backbone, the paper snapping up, wrapping across his lips, his nostrils, everything gone and shit-stinking now as he has to keep batting micro-turds out of his eyelashes, it’s worse than being torpedoed by Japs! the brown liquid tearing along, carrying him helpless... seems he’s been tumbling ass over teakettle—though there’s no way to tell in this murky shitstorm, no visual references... from time to time he will brush against shrubbery, or perhaps small feathery trees. It occurs to him he hasn’t felt the touch of a hard wall since he started to tumble, if that indeed is what he’s doing.

For me, it's Roger Mexico. A little childish and hot tempered, but a good kid with a good heart deep down

Am I reading this right? 90 pages in, they've got Slothrop in the hospital for examination, and... uhh... what if he gets an erection? Will a rocket fall on them? Seems like they should know that.

God, this fucking sucks.

I am beginning to feel strongly that Gravity's Rainbow is the only novel I am interested in reading. (And re-reading.) I will will devote the rest of my literary attention to nonfiction. Is this reasonable?

So what was the 00000 rocket for?

>>18080141

you know i thought this was nonsense for the first 400 pages but once i got to the Pokler section i was blown away.

>"Learned to feel the gathering, the moving toward war that is unique to weapons programs. At first it simulates depression or non-specific anxiety. There may be esophageal spasms and unrecoverable dreams. You find you are writing notes to yourself, first thing in the morning: calm, reasoned assurances to the screaming mental case inside - 1. It is a combination. 1.1 It is a scalar quantity. 1.2. Its negative aspects are distributed isotropically. 2. It is not a conspiracy. 2.1 It is not a vector. 2.11 It is not aimed at anybody. 2.12 It is not aimed at me . . . The coffee begins to taste more and more metallic. Each deadline is now a crisis, each more intense than the last. Behind this job-like-any-other-job seems to lie something void, something terminal, something growing closer, each day, to manifestation. . . .('The new planet Pluto,' she had whispered long ago, lying in the smelly dark, her long Asta Nielsen upper lip gibbous that night as the moon that ruled her, 'Pluto is in my sign now, held tight in its claws. It moves slowly, so slowly and far away . . . but it will burst out. It is the grim phoenix which creates its own holocaust . . . deliberate resurrection. Staged. Under control. No grace, no interventions by God. Some are calling it the planet of National Socialization. Brunhubner and that crowd, all trying to suck up to Hitler now. They don't know they are telling the literal truth'. . . ."

Where do I go from here

Holy shit when this all starts coming together, I finally understand now why people rave about it. The pieces clicking into place and the entire thing starting to make sense is incredibly rewarding and beautiful.

Does this get easier after the first section (200 pages or so)?

Im 150 pages in and have a vague birds eye grasp of whats happening but I feel like I'm in the process of getting filtered.

Someone explain the ending to me, I am too dumb to get it. Was Jamf actually just a fiction? What was the 00000 and what did it do. What was the significance of ending at a cenima? Why was Blicero dying? Why did he need to sacrifice Gottfried to the rocket?