ellauri066.html on line 360: Is Pynchon’s equation of motion a standard differential equation used by specialists to calculate the path of a rocket’s flight or to control its yaw? No: Pynchon’s equation does not resemble anything one might reasonably expect. […] Not only are most of the symbols in Pynchon’s equation obscure, but the general structure of the terms in the equation also makes it impossible to identify with one or other of the equations describing the position and orientation of a rocket in flight. This equation, then, is not a genuine mathematical expression in this context. It may appear authoritative to the layperson, but it is unlikely to fool a rocket scientist. (Schachterle/Aravind, 2001: 162)...
ellauri066.html on line 364: Even without substituting the remaining parameters d and c1, it is clear that Pynchon’s Second Equation resembles – and in fact is – the equation of moments that the Peenemünde physicists and engineers used to calculate and control the angular motion (yaw) of the V-2 rocket.
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.
ellauri066.html on line 368: Moore’s intuition that Pynchon’s Second Equation is real proved to be correct, and he and his colleague correctly assign the angle ϕ to the orientational range of the rocket. But since they did not know that this formula is only one in a set of equations that describe the flight path, the orientation, and the steering of the V-2, the research team was misled in their interpretation of the other parameters and terms. With Müller’s paper, we can finally determine the meaning of each term and compare these with Pynchon’s reading. The first three terms refer, respectively, to the moments of inertia, of air resistance, and of lateral air impact when the rocket yaws, and the term on the right side of the equal sign represents the steering moment of the rudders (Müller, 1957: 90, 91; Kirschstein, 1951: 73, 74). In other words, the left-hand terms describe the orientation of the rocket during flight, which is influenced by external forces such as wind currents and air resistance.
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,
ellauri067.html on line 491: There’s a dirty secret tucked away in Thomas Pynchon’s novels, eand it’s this: beyond all the postmodernism and paranoia, the anarchism and socialism, the investigations into global power, the forays into labor politics and feminism and critical race theory, the rocket science, the fourth-dimensional mathematics, the philatelic conspiracies, the ’60s radicalism and everything else that has spawned 70 or 80 monographs, probably twice as many dissertations, and hundreds if not thousands of scholarly essays, his novels are full of cheesy love stories.
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 479: Imagine a story that combines Ulysses, Catch-22, The Canterbury tales, Under the Volcano, On the Road and many others. First, there is a huge cast of characters and most times, it is unclear who’s speaking and to whom. A second challenge is getting into the context of the book. The novel demands a vast knowledge of history, geography, music, literature, science, mathematics and occult. Apart from this the book also explicitly deals with profanity, racism, violence, pedophilia, coprophilia and seemingly infinite number of sex scenes. That being said, Pynchon doesn’t throw them arbitrarily and each one of them have a purpose. The main plot itself is set at the end of World War 2 and Europe is in chaos. As new countries and alliances are being formed, so too are new perspectives within the characters. Mental state being broken down, people making poor choices and actions being justified and helps us see how people tend to live destructively. As if there complexities weren’t enough, Pynchon includes a “postmodern” aspect of the book that leaves the first-time reader confused. Pynchon’s voice is seen through this aspect and a sense of paranoia creeps throughout the book and everything is questioned.
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.
ellauri071.html on line 93: Roger’s antipathy to Coward´s comedies of manners echoes the comments about Blithe Spirit in the Advent passage at 134 and passim. Pynchon’s own antipathy to the composer, writer and actor goes all the way back to "Lowlands," one of his first published stories.
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."
xxx/ellauri178.html on line 138: While she wrote that the 1,096-page epic cemented Foster-Wallace as “one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything”, she also quoted Henry James in calling Jest a “loose, baggy monster”, adding that it read like a “vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr Wallace’s mind”. In his 2012 biography of the late Foster-Wallace, DT Max wrote that the writer “told a friend he hid in his room for two days and cried after reading yet another paragraph of Rei devoted to parallels between his first book and Pynchon’s most popular novel”.
13