GR film sprocket holes and vistaVision

[Dave Monroe]

On 4/25/07, Clément Lévy <clemlevy at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html

Also ...

Jeffrey Eugenides

[...]

The most brilliant epigraph in the history of literature (I'm making a
sweeping claim not out of omniscience but wild enthusiasm) comes at
the beginning of Gravity's Rainbow: "Nature does not know extinction;
all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and
continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our
spiritual existence after death.—Wernher Von Braun." When I first read
those words, as a college freshman, I took them at face value—as
scientific proof (very much in vogue at the time) of the reality of
the spiritual realm. I had no idea that Von Braun, developer of the
V-2, was Hitler's chief rocket scientist. Still less did I know of his
salvation at the hands of American troops, as Berlin fell, or of his
subsequent rehabilitation in the United States, where he became
Nixon's chief rocket scientist and a member of the nasa team that put
the first man on the moon (no wonder Von Braun believed in life after
death).

Let's appreciate everything this epigraph accomplishes: It stems from,
and summons, the historical period Pynchon writes about; it
simultaneously inspires and lampoons religious sentiment; and, with
savage irony, it comes out of the mouth of someone personifying the
novel's central theme—that the Powers That Be operate behind the
scenes, owing allegiance to no nation or ideology....