Chasing ... Cutting

[Dave Monroe]

... well, whoever's going to go through all these posts for Professor Krafft,
might I nominate Otto's here (see below, at LEAST)?  This might the single most
interesting observation I've seen about Gravity's Rainbow, period, and he's
apparently been sitting on it since 1982.  The entire post is, of course, of
interest, and excellently observed (that "destiny" thing, for starters, which
certainly resonates with that Protestant predestination thing as well).  But
what's the line in GR about "worlds laid on worlds" or whatever?  Palimpsests,
indeed, here.  Every time I read GR (for starters, but esp. given its ending), I
always wonder, how would you film this?  As noted earlier, can well imagine the
often strange-to-absurd-to-farcical narrative filmed, insofar as it can be,
"straight," with all sorts of subtexts (esp. those real-historical ones)
montaged, flickering, morphing, in and out of the background.  A la the image
Otto indelibly leaves us--or, at any rate, me--with here.  And i was just going
to say a little something about those rockets, those theaters, those sounds
(screaming, sirens) at the beginning and end of the novel ... well, my neurons
are firing afresh now, thank you Very Much Indeed, Otto ...

Otto Sell wrote:

The margin in my *Die Enden der Parabel* has a note from 1982:  "Auschwitz

> ?" - I see the first mentioning of the Holocaust on p. 3-4 in Pirate's
> dream, dreamily disguised as London-evacuation. The images that come up are
> of deported Jews. Remember Pirate's special talent explained in Episode Two.
> This is what millions of Jews encountered at "die Rampe," at the real "oven"
> at Auschwitz, where the final selection, the final judgment without appeal
> took place:
>
> "(...) places whose *names he has never heard* . . . (...)" (3. italics by
> TRP)
> "(...) they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is
> a judgment from which there is no appeal.
> The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees are
> ordered out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those marshaling them
> wear cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is some vast, very old
> and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery by which they
> have come here. (...) . . .  the evacuees are taken in lots, by elevator--a
> moving wood scaffold open on all sides (...)." (4)
>
> The double-meaning of *scaffold" should alarm every reader at once.
>
> Otto