Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Notes and Make-shift Graphic Organizers:
World War II and the Post Modern Landscape
Pynchon's novel takes place at the end of World War II and in my perspective is a logical and wise choice for a novel like this one. From even looking at the cover-art, the lack of summarization on the physical book itself, lack of introduction or any other type of clues that hint to the reader what is inside these pages, it is clear that Pynchon is trying to create some kind of transgressive landscape or setting in this text. Much of the first section I have read so far goes in and out of dreams, thoughts, characters, perspectives, and realities and is one of the reasons that the text is so difficult to read. And yet all of these perspectives, realities, and characters makes for a meaningful portrayal and landscape for the text at hand.
Why is World War II such a great landscape for this text? Well if one looks historically at the war and its events one can see how World War II was really an accumulation, mixing, and surmountable event that must have been incredibly hard for those who lived through it to comprehend or even fathom its existence/ occurrence. The Holocaust and the rise of Nazism, which took place during this time, was also an incredibly difficult and almost unfathomable part of World War II that must have been even more impossible to comprehend at the time. (The Holocaust was the genocide of six million Jews in Europe. This type of genocide and hatred, is something personally I find incredibly hard to understand even historically today.) In undergraduate college, I took a whole quarter of coursework on Germany leading from the end of World War I all the way through the Weimar era to the end of World War II and from what I have been able to gather from the art, readings, historical/ non-fiction texts, and the coursework I completed during this time, was that the political and social influences of this time World War I, Weimar Germany, the rise of socialism and fascism in Europe, World War II, the Holocaust, and the eventual endings of World War II created a psychological landscape in Europe that by any means was constantly in flux, and at times unfathomable. It truly was a time period that changed the world and it's cultural, social, political landscapes, and is the perfect setting for Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow and a post modern novel.
Why is World War II such a great landscape for this text? Well if one looks historically at the war and its events one can see how World War II was really an accumulation, mixing, and surmountable event that must have been incredibly hard for those who lived through it to comprehend or even fathom its existence/ occurrence. The Holocaust and the rise of Nazism, which took place during this time, was also an incredibly difficult and almost unfathomable part of World War II that must have been even more impossible to comprehend at the time. (The Holocaust was the genocide of six million Jews in Europe. This type of genocide and hatred, is something personally I find incredibly hard to understand even historically today.) In undergraduate college, I took a whole quarter of coursework on Germany leading from the end of World War I all the way through the Weimar era to the end of World War II and from what I have been able to gather from the art, readings, historical/ non-fiction texts, and the coursework I completed during this time, was that the political and social influences of this time World War I, Weimar Germany, the rise of socialism and fascism in Europe, World War II, the Holocaust, and the eventual endings of World War II created a psychological landscape in Europe that by any means was constantly in flux, and at times unfathomable. It truly was a time period that changed the world and it's cultural, social, political landscapes, and is the perfect setting for Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow and a post modern novel.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
obligatory letter to the reader. . .
Reader,
Writing for me has become over the years less and less an outlet to write my own narratives and stories whether personal or fictional. As a child, I spent many hours of my life producing what I now feel are embarrassing works of fiction, short stories, and horribly angsty teenage poetry. But as I have developed as a reader, and a student of literature, my own writing and my desire to write has become transformed in its nature. I grew to have a greater desire to write more than I had as a child, but not in the same way. Instead of writing creatively, my creativity moved off the page and more into my theoretical interpretations of texts. Perhaps socialized by my higher education and the writings I had to produce as a student; or perhaps just finally finding a genre I felt was meaningful to my own personal existence as a individual and as a reader, I have finally found that my writing has become centered around the analytic, and didactic relationship a reader can have with a text through writing. Developing this didactic relationship of the reader with the text is what I have sought to do through my writer's workshop project: this blog on Gravity's Rainbow. And although through this course I have not managed to develop this project to its fullest capacity, I have found that this is a project that is important to me and will remain with me when this course is over. I hope to continue this project for the entirety of this text, and perhaps through other texts as well. Ultimately, I hope that as a reader this project will push me into further discourse with a subject matter that I love.
~ Gwendolyn
Writing for me has become over the years less and less an outlet to write my own narratives and stories whether personal or fictional. As a child, I spent many hours of my life producing what I now feel are embarrassing works of fiction, short stories, and horribly angsty teenage poetry. But as I have developed as a reader, and a student of literature, my own writing and my desire to write has become transformed in its nature. I grew to have a greater desire to write more than I had as a child, but not in the same way. Instead of writing creatively, my creativity moved off the page and more into my theoretical interpretations of texts. Perhaps socialized by my higher education and the writings I had to produce as a student; or perhaps just finally finding a genre I felt was meaningful to my own personal existence as a individual and as a reader, I have finally found that my writing has become centered around the analytic, and didactic relationship a reader can have with a text through writing. Developing this didactic relationship of the reader with the text is what I have sought to do through my writer's workshop project: this blog on Gravity's Rainbow. And although through this course I have not managed to develop this project to its fullest capacity, I have found that this is a project that is important to me and will remain with me when this course is over. I hope to continue this project for the entirety of this text, and perhaps through other texts as well. Ultimately, I hope that as a reader this project will push me into further discourse with a subject matter that I love.
~ Gwendolyn
Two of My Favorite Illustrations From Zak Smith. . .
no. 49
no. 12
both of these images are by Zak Smith and from his website which is in the link section of my blog. I do not own these images in any way.
both of these images are by Zak Smith and from his website which is in the link section of my blog. I do not own these images in any way.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Quote Love:
This section and further sections like it I am simply going to refer to as Quote Love because in the manner I need to write and engage with in a text, I require the accumulation of many quotes that push me to a reading.
"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.
~ Wernher von Braun" (Pynchon, 2006, pg.1)
"A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself - it's own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened - that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that out to be inseparable. . . ." (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 31).
"Well: he guesses They have euchred Mexico into some such Byzantine exercise, probably to do with the Americans. Perhaps the Russians. 'The White Visitation," being devoted to psychological warfare, harbors a few of each, a Behaviorist here, a Pavlovian there. It's none of Pirate's business But he notes that with each film delivery, Roger's enthusiasm grows. Unhealthy, unhealthy: he has the sense of witnessing an addiction. He feels that his friend, his provisional wartime friend, is being used for something not quite decent," (Pynchon, 2006, 35).
"What finally irritated him out of all tolerance was that the dog didn't know how to reverse its behavior. It could open doors to the rain and the spring insects but not close them . . . knock over garbage, vomit on the floor, but not clean it up - how could anyone live with such a creature?" (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 53).
"The great balloons drift in the sky, pearl-grown, and the air is so still that this morning's brief snow still clings to the steel cables, white goes twisting peppermint-stick down thousands of feet of night. And the people who might have been asleep in the empty houses here, people blown away, some already forever . . . are they dreaming of cities that shine all over with lamps at night, of Christmases seen again from the vantage of children and not of sheep huddled so vulnerable on their bare hillside, so bleached by the Star's awful radiance? or of songs so funny, so lovely or true, that they can't be remembered on waking . . . dreams of peacetime. . . .
"What was it like? Before the war?" She knows she was alive then, a child, but it's not what she means," (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 60).
"Roger Mexico thinks it's a statistical oddity. But he feels the foundations of that discipline trembling a bit now, deeper than oddity ought to drive. Odd, odd, odd - think of the word: such white finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the tongue-stop- beyond the zero- and into the other realm. Of course you don't move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that's how you ought to be moving," (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 87).
"He dreams often these days of a very pale woman who wants him, who never speaks - but the absolute confidence in her eyes . . . his awful certainty that she, a celebrity everyone recognizes of sight, knows him and has no reason to speak to him beyond the beckoning that's in her face, sends him vibrating awake in the nights," (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 105).
"Hunting across the zero between waking and sleep, his halfway limp cock still inside her, their strengthless legs bent the same angle . . . " (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 121).
"But he must remain open - even to the possibility that the Psi people are right. "We may all be right," he puts in his journal tonight, "so may be all we have speculated, and more. Whatever we may find, there can be no doubt that he is, physiologically, historically, a monster. We must never lose control. The thought of him lost in the world of men, after the war, fills me with a deep dread I cannot extinguish. . . . " (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 147).
"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.
~ Wernher von Braun" (Pynchon, 2006, pg.1)
"A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself - it's own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened - that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that out to be inseparable. . . ." (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 31).
"Well: he guesses They have euchred Mexico into some such Byzantine exercise, probably to do with the Americans. Perhaps the Russians. 'The White Visitation," being devoted to psychological warfare, harbors a few of each, a Behaviorist here, a Pavlovian there. It's none of Pirate's business But he notes that with each film delivery, Roger's enthusiasm grows. Unhealthy, unhealthy: he has the sense of witnessing an addiction. He feels that his friend, his provisional wartime friend, is being used for something not quite decent," (Pynchon, 2006, 35).
"What finally irritated him out of all tolerance was that the dog didn't know how to reverse its behavior. It could open doors to the rain and the spring insects but not close them . . . knock over garbage, vomit on the floor, but not clean it up - how could anyone live with such a creature?" (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 53).
"The great balloons drift in the sky, pearl-grown, and the air is so still that this morning's brief snow still clings to the steel cables, white goes twisting peppermint-stick down thousands of feet of night. And the people who might have been asleep in the empty houses here, people blown away, some already forever . . . are they dreaming of cities that shine all over with lamps at night, of Christmases seen again from the vantage of children and not of sheep huddled so vulnerable on their bare hillside, so bleached by the Star's awful radiance? or of songs so funny, so lovely or true, that they can't be remembered on waking . . . dreams of peacetime. . . .
"What was it like? Before the war?" She knows she was alive then, a child, but it's not what she means," (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 60).
"Roger Mexico thinks it's a statistical oddity. But he feels the foundations of that discipline trembling a bit now, deeper than oddity ought to drive. Odd, odd, odd - think of the word: such white finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the tongue-stop- beyond the zero- and into the other realm. Of course you don't move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that's how you ought to be moving," (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 87).
"He dreams often these days of a very pale woman who wants him, who never speaks - but the absolute confidence in her eyes . . . his awful certainty that she, a celebrity everyone recognizes of sight, knows him and has no reason to speak to him beyond the beckoning that's in her face, sends him vibrating awake in the nights," (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 105).
"Hunting across the zero between waking and sleep, his halfway limp cock still inside her, their strengthless legs bent the same angle . . . " (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 121).
"But he must remain open - even to the possibility that the Psi people are right. "We may all be right," he puts in his journal tonight, "so may be all we have speculated, and more. Whatever we may find, there can be no doubt that he is, physiologically, historically, a monster. We must never lose control. The thought of him lost in the world of men, after the war, fills me with a deep dread I cannot extinguish. . . . " (Pynchon, 2006, pg. 147).
Monday, May 9, 2011
The struggle to read Pynchon
So reading this novel has really given me time to reflect on my reading practices and since I am including this blog in my writer's workshop for 108A, I thought I would take this moment to write about how difficult it has been so far for me to read this book. This is the first novel, in a very long time, that I have definitely felt like I am having a comprehension issue or that I am extremely challenged comprehension wise. And while this can be frustrating at moments, I know the book is within my comprehension level and simply requires an amount of opportunities for re-reading, taking notes in the margins of the text, and just slowing down my reading in general for comprehension. As I have implemented these I have had much better success in reading and slowly understanding this novel, but it has taken me much longer to read than the average text. I look at this novel though as an opportunity for me to grow as a reader especially since it is so challenging. I love to read, and as an undergraduate Literature major, I was usually required to read 1.5 to 2 books per week for each class along with a assortment of critical theory and essays, so it is a refreshing change to be able to take time to read a novel at my own comprehensive pace as well as read something that is not a quick read for me.
As far as teaching goes reading a novel at pretty much my frustration level has been really helpful for me to reflect on what it might be like for our students to read texts or to struggle with the texts in the classroom. (And while I know that we often shoot for students reading at their instructional and independent levels, I also know that too often students are exposed to texts that are at their frustration level; especially those struggling readers who are far below the rest of the class.) I can definitely relate to the struggling reader now in my classroom and see how hard it must be for them to read and want to finish reading a text that is extremely hard or may be simply too hard for them. This text for me has definitely been a challenge and I'm not going to lie, at times I have contemplating dropping it for exhaustion reasons, and going back to something that I can breeze through in a week, but isn't challenging for me. And yet I also love reading so much and have such a desire to read this book, I slowly but surely keep pushing through it. But one thing I also know is that if I hadn't been given and had so many opportunities for success in reading to be able to really learn to love reading like I do, then I might not have that desire and love of reading to push through and really comprehend and read such a difficult book, which is something to think about when encouraging our students to read and how to proceed to do so.
As far as teaching goes reading a novel at pretty much my frustration level has been really helpful for me to reflect on what it might be like for our students to read texts or to struggle with the texts in the classroom. (And while I know that we often shoot for students reading at their instructional and independent levels, I also know that too often students are exposed to texts that are at their frustration level; especially those struggling readers who are far below the rest of the class.) I can definitely relate to the struggling reader now in my classroom and see how hard it must be for them to read and want to finish reading a text that is extremely hard or may be simply too hard for them. This text for me has definitely been a challenge and I'm not going to lie, at times I have contemplating dropping it for exhaustion reasons, and going back to something that I can breeze through in a week, but isn't challenging for me. And yet I also love reading so much and have such a desire to read this book, I slowly but surely keep pushing through it. But one thing I also know is that if I hadn't been given and had so many opportunities for success in reading to be able to really learn to love reading like I do, then I might not have that desire and love of reading to push through and really comprehend and read such a difficult book, which is something to think about when encouraging our students to read and how to proceed to do so.
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