"Cliff Notes" Guide to "Gravity's Rainbow"

[Timothy C. May]

Giant Pynchonoids,

No, this is not a serious request for the "Cliff Notes" to GR, but a
reference to such a chimaera in the movie "Miracle Mile." In this
movie, about a bunch of fellow travellers who overhear a conversation
about the impending arrival of some nuclear missiles (very GR-like,
I'd say....does one get vaporized and _then_ hear the reverse sound
track of the hypersonic missile's trajectory?), one of the female
characters opens her oh-so-yuppie briefcase and exposes the familiar
black and yellow cover of a "Cliff Notes" guide....to "Gravity's
Rainbow"!

I put my VCR in freeze frame when I got to this spot! (And in slow mo
and still frame mode, the sound track is gone completely....what would
our Blitzers think of _that_?)

Attached is a posting I made to rec.arts.movies, pointing out this GR sighting.
The movie came out in 1989, so you folks may've mentioned it already.
But in my year or more on this list, I don't recall seeing it.

BTW, the recent surge in posting volume is cheering. And the
"W.A.S.T.E." address in my sig has been there for a couple of years.
I'm involved heavily in crypto, digital money, anonymous mail, and
this is apropos. (You may have seen me in a white mask on the cover of
Issue 2 of "Wired," a year or so ago. The "Cypherpunks" are a group of
folks interested in these things....and many of them read Pynchon.
Who knows, maybe he's already one of the folks using a digital
pseudonym to pass unharassed amongst us.)

Here it is:

Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies 
From: tcmay at netcom.com (Timothy C. May) 
Subject: Re: Miracle Mile
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 1994 00:58:28 GMT 


Chodorow Jordan (jchodoro at cc.brynmawr.edu) wrote:

: My answers to the questions posed about "Miracle Mile" by Alan Light.
: Includes spoilers.

: 1.) Denise Crosby's character was, unsurprisingly, the least comprehensible
: to me as well.  How does she knows what these secret codes mean?  Oh, well,
: one of her ex-boyfriends used to work at RAND.  I mean, come on...
:     Of course, this is probably the only movie I know of that could get away
: with such silliness and actually have it add to the sense of absurdity.

She understood the secret codes because she had a copy of the "Cliff
Notes" guide to Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow." (I lost my copy
when I filed it under "V.")

And had she studied the Cliff Notes--or was it the Monarch Notes?--to
"The Crying of Lot 49," she perhaps could have aborted the launch
sequence and hence avoided the world being laid to W.A.S.T.E.


--Tim May, Cypherpunk

-- 
..........................................................................
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