GRGR(17) has begun

[rj]

sz
> Our host will post some stuff tonight.

In the meantime ... 
PLOT SUMMARY by Larry Daw
(lifted from Tim Ware's outstanding website:
http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/gravity-f.html) 

*****

(35) Say hello to Die Raketmensch . . . Slothrop is in Berlin. Starving,
he has a fantasy about the Schwarzkommando, and recognizes the mandala
of their Holy Insignia: Klar, Entlüftung, Zündung, Vorstufe, Hauptstufe,
the five positions of the launching switch in the A4 control car. But he
doesn't let on to Enzian. They watch a Rocket-raising sacred to the
Spring Equinox. Slothrop feels like Tannhäuser, the singing nincompoop,
but the G in Gerät and Imipolex does not stand for Grail. . . .  What he
gets is his new name, Rocketman, from Säure Bummer, a minion of the
legendary actress Greta Erdmann, a woman haunted by Central European
night-whispers that blow, like the skin-curtains of Berlin, more ghostly
around her fattening, wrecked beauty the closer she and Slothrop draw.
He is drawn to a decadent revel where he meets Seaman Bodine of the U.
S. destroyer John E. Badass, and thinks he sees King Kong hunkering down
to take a shit in the street. The Potsdam Conference, deciding the
proportions of post-war Germany, goes on unnoticed. . . . To Slothrop,
it is just a place to deal some dope.

(36) In full Rocketman costume, Slothrop goes to The Berlin Whitehouse
in Potsdam to steal hashish from President Harry Truman. The emptiness
of Berlin this morning is an inverse mapping of the white and geometric
capital before the destruction. The smell of corpses is everywhere --
the Tropics are reversed. Säure Bummer and Slothrop talk
rocket-mechanics. Purpurstoffe required for the vehicle's turbopump has
ruined the cocaine trade. Slothrop gets his picture in Life magazine,
with a long stiff sausage poked in his mouth. It is a Snafu for Die
Raketmensch, during the Evil Hour! He tries to escape Tchitcherine as
Max Schlepzig, but is grabbed and taken away on the Wheel, clutching in
terror to the dwindling white point of himself, in the first windrush of
anaesthesia, hovering coyly over the pit of Death. . . . It is sodium
amytal again.

*****

best