"Behold, here I am..."

[Joseph Tracy]

Enjoyable look at the relevance of the masterwork Gravity’’s Rainbow on it’s 50th anniversary.  One hopes this will draw new readers. Is he making it sound a bit less daunting as a reading experience than is realistic for most readers, or has that intellectual landscape changed? He has written a reading guide. It might be very helpful  but there is something about this material that requires personal struggle also. 

Centering  the rocketry needed to deliver atomic weapons as the dome under which our far too non-fictional international moment is taking place took some guts,  and yet doing it with such cheeriness feels appropriate to the book.  Will there be more such reviews in 2023? If I wrote such a review I would want to talk about the role of re-reading with great works, but also of the transformations that can come from immersion in the strange, of immersion in the position and experience of the estranged outsider, of the mind darkened with ruthless ambition, of fully being in the dark and waiting intently for glimmers of light and music, of being in the light and watching as the sky grows dark before its time, of the sheer madness of war, of the madness of self destruction, and the madness of freedom.

> On Feb 16, 2023, at 7:44 PM, Cagliostro_the_Impossible via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> 
> https://www.wired.com/story/living-under-gravitys-rainbow-thomas-pynchon/
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzoMNvgICGs
> 
> Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/) secure email.
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