"Gravity's Rainbow" echoes

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I don't think it's overly simplistic to say that GR is a novel about the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, being the first (?) battle in that war.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Nov 23, 2008 10:08 AM
>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Cc: me <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>Subject: "Gravity's Rainbow" echoes...
>
>I am reading "One Minute to Midnight", a detailed book about the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962. Lots of backing and filling, so to speak, compared to other books. 
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>They called the h-bombs (and others) 'gravity bombs"! I did not know this
>in my military history vacuum. (I hate military history in general, the reading of which seems almost complicit to me...) 
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>Within Kennedy's White House, R. McNamara had a civilian "whiz kid" trying to develop an attack-no-cities, limited war strategy called "counterforce".
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>The first real international danger in the beginning of the thirteen days was from Soviet submarines with nukes, not from any ships on the sea. Which the U.S. hardly knew about.  (Cf. the submarine motif in AtD)
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>P. 87 "fear of nuclear apocalypse was seeping into American popular culture" ...In Greenwhich Village....Bob Dylan scribbled "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall"....he later said he wanted to capture "the feeling of nothingness".....Images of apocalypse came tumbling from his brain. Unsure whether he would live to write another song, he "wanted to get the most down I possibly could"...In another UNPUBLISHED song, Dylan would describe 'the fearful night we thought the world would end"..."people sat around wondering if it was the end, and so did I", Dylan told an interviewer.
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>[By the way, our 'intelligence' did not think missiles from Cuba could reach NY city, although no citizens new that. Washington, probably. But they could.]
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>Thomas Pynchon, we have (mostly) learned,was in Greenwich Village at that time. 25 years old. Finishing up, or having just finished "V.", to be published in 1963. The year in which "The Crying of Lot 49" begins.
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>Feeling, fearing a nuclear bomb coming down on one's head....any chance, ya think, it helped 'inspire' 'Gravity's Rainbow"??
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