Newbie needs help with "Gravity's Rainbow"

[Dave Monroe]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 11:58 PM, Mike Jing <mikezjing at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi! I am new here. And I need some help with Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Specifically, I have several questions about the paragraph on page 13 (Penguin 2006 Deluxe Edition):
>
> 3. What about "...your sound will be the sizzling night..."? Is it supposed to be poetic? Out of the mouth of a bum?

... a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma  wrapped inside a
Pynchon novel, alas.  One of The Great Pynchonian Enigmas, even.
However ...

11) What does `your sound will be the sizzling night' actually mean?

It sure sounds like actual dream material to me.  Another
suggestion--someone has recently mentioned one such suggestion--that
TRP uses dream material in his fiction may be found in "Nearer, My
Couch, to Thee:"  It is precisely in such episodes of mental traveling
that writers are known to do good work, sometimes even their best,
solving formal problems, getting advice from Beyond, having hpnogogic
adventures that with luck can be recovered later on.  Idle dreaming is
often of the essence of what we do.  We sell our dreams.  So real
money actually proceeds from Sloth...."  (New York Times Book Review,
June 6, 1993)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9609&msg=6670

To end on a personal note, re. "your sound will be the sizzling
night,"  I still recall with a chill the mentally somewhat slow
college janitor who turned to me one day, with a peculiarly prescient
gleam in his eye, and asked, as he emptied the waste basket, "will the
rain spoil the rhubarb, eh?"

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9609&msg=6665

But the really interesting thing here is that Pirate dreamt these
words  *before* the tramp actually says them (i.e. he "had dreamed
these very words, morning before last, just before waking"). In other
words, the tramp emphasised those particular words, and spoke directly
to Pirate, because he knew that Pirate had already dreamt them, which
is what disturbed Pirate so much at the time. So, who's reading whose
thoughts?

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0511&msg=99091

Also, e.g.,  ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9609&msg=6634

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9905&msg=38105

... me, I suspect is sounds like Something Significant (e.g.,
Kristallnacht? cf. those "last crystalliations of all the city had
debied" [p. 4] et al.), but ...

> Hope this is an appropriate topic for the list.  Any help will be greatly appreciated.

... eminently appriopriate, indeed.  I just hope I've been @ least of
some small help--others will offer help in larger sizes, I'm sure.
Thanks, and Welcome to the P-List!

> P.S.  Some background information:  English is a second language to me, although I have been living in North America for almost 20 years.  I am also trying to translate the book into Chinese so that I can share it with my mother who doesn't know any English.  There is already a Chinese translation published a couple of years ago, but as you might expect, it's full of errors of all kinds.

Hoo, boy.  Meanwhile, I have a Chinese trans. of The Crying of Lot 49.
 Know of and/or anything about it?