grgr (34): der regenbogen der schwerkraft

[Can't Wait]

This post of Nick's is what I've been waiting for: a post not so much
About some part of the Rainbow--although this post also does
something original to this group in that it actually attempts to
summarize the book, to Say something about its totality--but a post
in the SPIRIT of the Rainbow, and I think it was exceptionally well
executed.  To me, to speak, to write in the Spirit of the Rainbow is
infitinely more valuable than any type and amount of dense
theoretical interpretizing.  The holocaust's role in the Rainbow is
nothing compared to the spirit with which its role was sewn in,
however great or small that may be.  Pynchon is a stylist above all,
and to be able to reach such stylistic virtuosity, in his spirit, is
the essence of reading him.

God Bless You, Herr Nick.

m



--- Lorentzen / Nicklaus <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
> 
>  ... summer's almost gone, & a new tide on the way ... some few
> unelaborated 
> remarks, then it'll be enough ... sloth' psycho-spiritual
> dearmorment still 
> strikes me as the novel's most exiting story ... through his
> glowing "absence" 
> we may learn to  r e a l i z e  the fullness of being ... to me
> gravity's 
> rainbow actually i s the book artaud wanted to write: --- confusing
> the people, 
> like an open door leading them there where to go they'd have never
> agreed...a 
> door simply connected with reality ... (cf. "l'ombilic des limbes",
> 1925) ... 
> german sound samples in gr: must sound quite different when you're
> no native 
> speaker, i guess ... my assumption is that it somehow, in a gloomy
> 'continental 
> way or so, must sound 'cooler' to us-americans ... in the beginning
> of the 
> twentythird & final chapter of "blood meridian" it all of sudden
> sez "sie müssen 
> schlafen aber ich muss tanzen" ... they have to sleep but i have to
> dance ... 
> not much german philosophy in gr, which, by pleading for a somehow 
> psycho-historical perspective, speaks out against 'economic
> reductionism' in 
> gestalt of karl heinrich marx ... leibniz' mathematics & the
> economics of 
> walther rathenau (- actually not their philosophies) play their
> part ... &, like 
> in m&d, prussian army-organization ... but - hey terrance! - i must
> have missed 
> the parts on "kant and his followers", no matter whether you meant
> (- never you 
> answered that one) the "idealists" or the "neo-kantians" ... a-and,
> of course, 
> synthetic drugs ... a toast to the german pharmacologist (- too
> lazy to look 
> them up now) who developed cocaine, horse & xtc ... but that's not
> the way gr 
> puts it ... even acid seems to be dissed as synthetic
> death-orientated drug ... 
> in opposite to it: mother nature's 'shrooms [- new season: check it
> out!] & weed 
> ... but as trp's enthusiastic mdma-statement shows (--- "... you
> see everything 
> with total clarity ... you have reached a state which the ancients
> have called 
> nirvana, all seeing bliss", cf. bruce eisner: ecstasy. the mdma
> story, p. 137), 
> we should differentiate between the drug taste of the user trp and
> gr's "german 
> death drugs" motif construction, which fits into the novel's
> constellation quite 
> well ... looking longer on larger areas of heath, "growing in all
> directions", 
> one can experience the strange, 'hyper-realistic' complementaryness
> of green & 
> magenta ... out of the stereo streams "two against nature", now a
> stanza that 
> could be written on gottfried & weissmann: "two against nature
> don't you 
> know/who's gonna grok the shape of things to go/two against nature
> make them 
> groan/who's gonna break the shape of things unknown" ... right
> sweetie, that's 
> not something trp has "put into the text", but - know what? - i the
> fuck don't 
> care ... neither does the man who encourages - especially in gr's
> fourth part - 
> such an amplifying reading ... some time ago i saw a tv-docu on the
> zeppelin 
> airship hindenburg (- eintausenddreihundertzwanzig pferdestärken) &
> its 
> lakehurst burning catastrophe on 5/6/37 ... two day before
> pynchon's birth not 
> far away, i thought while watching: must still have been the talk
> of the town 
> when he entered this world, german air technology crashing down
> from above ... 
> --- could this have been some kinda 'unconscious motivation' to
> write gravity's 
> rainbow? (--- this, of course, only makes sense, if trp was not, as
> naumann - 
> somehow joking? - suggested recently in that radio show, born some
> years later) 
> ... actually we don't know whether gottfried & bianca do really die
> in the 
> novel (- event-ually they will be saved) ... the final rocket start
> might 
> also be a fantasy blicero & gottfried share while enacting the
> skrying of lot 49 
> ... the volkswagen is now over downtown l.a. where the stream of
> traffic ... 
> takes me away ... a reference to "nazi-fordism" & - somehow like
> karl bopp in 
> vineland - signifying the presence of nazi-germany in post war
> america ... 
> actually a green volkswagen, my parents had from about the time i
> was born (- 
> same year as poppy z. brite & boris becker) till the early 70s, was
> the first 
> car i was regulary been driven in ... no concrete memory but some
> washed-out 
> color photographies from 1969: young family with snow & small car
> ... & now, 
> while the rain outside keeps falling on the meadows, slick dick and
> the 
> volkswagens get into "i want to kiss your feet" ...       
> 
>  i dedicate this grgr (34) to the memory of rolf dieter brinkmann
> (1940-1975), 
>  writer, collage-artist & trp's first strong reader in germany ...
> the following 
>  is m.o.p.a.t from the collage book "schnitte" (- cuts), which was
> composed in 
>  the year gr got published: 
>                                 ":i had only been 33 years on 
>                                  this planet & groped myself 
>                                  through the phantom-show : :/
>                          
>                              now i was in husum/northern germany
> 1972
>                              a hotel room with color-photo view oo
>                              zy wet dock & 1972 april, may:
>                              olevq no romano, lazium 1973 april,
> may ( :&)
>                              thin single trees against the light
> blue
>                              morning light on the altitude level
> around
>                              & saw:who am i/ :me, the northern
> german:
>                              in the last th3rd of the 20th century
> but
>                              against a world which possessed for
> more than 3
>                              million years primate's life: had:
> offices
>                              &pictures, moulded newsstands at
> road's 
>                              ends &, stuttering,the world is
> different/ :now"
> 
>   
>                                            p-list, was geht ab?
> 
>  hamburg naughty, zwotausend: kfl
>   
>                                 
> 



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