ellauri066.html on line 366: To shorten a long story of searching for sources: the essay ‘The Control System of the V-2’ by Otto Müller includes an ‘equation for control in yaw’ (Müller, 1957: 90), and in exactly the same notation as Gravity’s Rainbow’s equation ‘describ[ing] motion under the aspect of yaw control’ (GR 284). We can conclude that this is the searched-for template for Pynchon’s Second Equation (see appendix, Figure 8). Müller’s paper is part of History of German Guided Missiles Development by Theodor Benecke and August W. Quick, published in 1957, which is based on the First Guided Missiles Seminar in Munich that took place a year earlier. The seminar was organised by the American Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development (AGARD) to collect information about the V-2 from German scientists and engineers to use in American research on guided missiles. Pynchon might have had access to this book and further material on rocketry in the Boeing Company for which he worked as a technical writer in the early 1960s.
ellauri067.html on line 272: Lukijoiden ja kääntäjien avuksi on julkaistu muutamia selitysteoksia, kuten Steven C. Weisenburgerin A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion. Pitää olla näsäviisas burgeri seuraneitinä että tajuaa Tomin höpötyxiä. Mutta se on vanhanaikaista, nyt on https://pynchonwiki.com/ ja sen 7 muuta nettilähettä. Vastaisen varalle myös Wallacelle Loppumaton läppä -wiki. Kts. myös tätä.
ellauri067.html on line 439: How much, or how little influence drugs, particularly hallucigenic drugs like lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, had on Pynchon’s narrative is unknown. If Siegel, however, is to be believed, and he should be despite any resentment he felt regarding Pynchon’s affair with his wife, then the writing of Gravity’s Rainbow was heavily influenced by drugs. In Pynchon’s most famous quote regarding this particular novel, which is notoriously difficult to interpret, he is alleged to have told Siegel,
ellauri069.html on line 76: A couple of years after Barthelme took the apartment, the writer Kirkpatrick Sale and his wife, Faith, an editor, moved in downstairs and became close friends. They had been students at Cornell with Pynchon, and Pynchon would write part of “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973) in their apartment.
ellauri069.html on line 376: Thomas Pynchonin 1973 mestaripala Painomusteen Sadeviitta on eepos, pelle-eepos, ja Suuri Amerikan Novelli, kuten Moby-Dick. Toisinkuin Melvillen lukijat, kuiteskin, Pynchonin lukijat voi mennä sivukaupalla täysin pihalla siitä mitä juonessa, tilanteessa tai tyypeissä on tapahtumassa. Kirjaa ei edes voi kunnolla lukea selaamatta samalla koko ajan esim Steven Weisenburgerin Seuraneitiä ja Michael Davitt Bellin “Some Things That ‘Happen’ (More or Less) in Gravity’s Rainbow.”
ellauri069.html on line 457: A: I never thought I would live to see a time when Gravity’s Rainbow would be denigrated and dismissed for lacking sense. This book appeared when I was a freshman at university. It was immediately chosen as part of the reading list for a course in 20th century fiction in English and regarded as important, and it was expected that simple-minded undergraduates should be able to make a serious attempt to engage with the book using heart, faith, skill, and such intelligence as they possessed. As a result, I own a first edition. ;)
ellauri069.html on line 461: It may also be a good warm-up for the querent’s reading muscles to start with Pynchon’s earlier novel V, which is excellent in its own right, but not as extravagant as the even more brilliant Gravity’s Rainbow. It is V2, after all.
ellauri069.html on line 477: Before I write this answer, I should put it out there that it took me two reads and a guide to understand what’s going on in Gravity’s Rainbow. After all that, I feel I have a proper grasp of Pynchon’s Magnum Opus. Apparently, Pynchon once said he doesn’t know how he wrote the book.
ellauri069.html on line 483: An article recently came out in the LA Times about Pynchon’s Great American Novel. The article begins by stating that Mason and Dixon is actually the most obvious candidate for the Great American Novel, and it instead suggests that Gravity’s Rainbow is perhaps the Great European Novel. The article then questions whether or not the Great American Novel even exists, and if it does if it is of a singular form or if it takes on many forms at once. After considering this question, the article finally claims that the Great American Novel is actually made up of all of Pynchon’s works fused together “into one epic Pynchoverse.” The Great American Novel certainly does not need to take place in America, but still many will argue that Gravity’s Rainbow by itself can never be considered as the Great American Novel because of its non-American setting and its wide array of characters. This is definitely debatable, but I do enjoy the idea of a “Pynchoverse” or a Pynchon Compilation being considered as the true Great American Novel. That being said, I do think most readers and Pynchonerds would undoubtedly say that Gravity's Rainbow is the Greatest Pynchon Novel.
xxx/ellauri068.html on line 187: "My own favourite tribute to Borges comes in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in which a group of Argentinian exiles, led by the adventurer Squalidozzi, and at large in Europe during World War Two, hijack a German submarine. Improbably, they are accompanied by the glamorous Graciela Imago Portales – a ‘particular friend’ of the Buenos Aires literati – to whom ‘Borges is said to have a dedicated a poem’. Two lines are cited: “El laberinto de tu incertidumbre / Me trama con la disquietante luna . . .” Of course, the quotation has puzzled scholars, as it is neatly consistent with the rhythms and motifs of Borges’ earlier work, and yet nowhere to be found in his oeuvre. It would no doubt have delighted Borges, the more so since Pynchon made it up."
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