GRGR(17) Hauptstufe (380.18)

[Henry Musikar]

Brenschluss is when the engines stop (outta fuel or otherwise). Are there 
any rocket scientists out there who can tell me if brenschluss  would be the 
halfway point, the apogee, or does the rocket continue to rise; wouldn't 
that depend on the particular rocket? Was the V2 an even burn throughout its 
pre-brenschluss flight? A bullet's flight is parabolic, but almost all of 
it's burn is in the big bang....

>From: rj <rjackson at mail.usyd.edu.au>
<snip>
>On p. 380, when Slothrop bites the bullet and launches himself across
>that autobahn into the public sphere as Raketemensch for the first time
>it is the exact halfway point of the book (an achievement worthy of
>celebration and commendation all round in itself I think). I see the
>symbolism of this incident, and the battle cry in particular, as
>something more than coincidental however. If the novel traces the
>rocket's trajectory (from the "screaming across the sky" to the last
>delta-t above the theatre in which the reader sits, oblivious, at
>novel's close) then are we not too, as participants in the text, at the
>Brenschluss point, the very apogee of the parabolic arc of (the act) of
>reading the novel when Slothrop announces "Hauptstafe" here? At this
>point we too have reached the "main stage" -- it's all downhill from
>this point (literally and figuratively and reflexively too I think) --
>there's a sense of inevitability about things right about now, an
>ominous foreboding of what is to come, no turning back, the
>(meta-)projectile is on its own, with only gravity (and the gods?) at
>the helm; and there's a sudden sense of the significance of what has
>come before, a clarity, of there being a path there (both of plot *and*
>history) which cannot be retraced.
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