GRGR Section 31 (pp.674-700)

[Doug Millison]

I'll try to post some Notes and Questions over the next  couple of 
days.  Here's a summary of this episode, which I linked to courtesy 
of Tim Ware's helpful Pynchon Pages 
(http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/):

from Dr. Larry Daw's Summary of Gravity's Rainbow
http://rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/pynchon/pynchon.grsumm.html

(67) Slothrop flees his evil Father inside a giant factory-state, a 
City of the Future full of extrapolated 1930s swoop-façaded balconied 
skyscrapers, lean chrome caryatids with bobbed hairdos, and classy 
airships. The Radiant Hour has been stolen from the day's 24 by 
Colleagues of the Father, for sinister reasons of their own. . . . 
Slothrop escapes to Iceboxland, a place which shows Thermodynamic 
Elitism at its clearest, a Cube of Changelessness maintained by 
freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day! Outside the chaos is 
progressing too fast to comprehend. Things are just too finely 
labyrinthine for the concepts of Outside and Inside to have much 
hegemony any more. Brains ravaged by mindless pleasures send out a 
suicide message in "Low Frequency Listener." Mom Slothrop writes to 
Ambassador Kennedy about pieces of the Heavenly City falling down. 
Säure Bummer is desperate for Pig Bodine to explain the phrases "ass 
backwards" and "know Shit from Shinola." But the vile Seaman just 
goes ahead and sings "My Doper's Cadenza" with his guitar ambling and 
pelvis wiggling style! An incident in the Transvestite's Toilet might 
lead to Slothrop being sodomized by a giant black ape or blown up by 
an anarchist's bomb. There is a moment of fun with Takeshi and 
Ichizo, the Komical Kamikazes. "Streets" shows us a wirephoto of a 
giant cock dangling downward out of a white pubic bush.

MB DRO
ROSHI

Yes. Hiroshima. The Sun was in Leo and the pale Virgin was rising in 
the East. . . . Listening to the Toilet, you have to know that They 
are trying to keep us from learning that sound is actually passing 
through the Soniferous Aether. Kids substitute electricity for dope, 
believing they can "screw" in to a clean, honest, purified 
Electroworld. And we learn that Imipolex G was the first plastic that 
was truly erectile.