Its been years so I dont specifically recall. My guess is that it is the voice of a sort of omniscient narrator. It does seem to be a stand-in for Pynchon’s perspective to some extent. It’s such an exuberant novel. There is definitely a sense I recall that this (at the time) young man was stretching to the limit of his prodigious ability and wanted to show that ability off.

They’re similarly complex for sure. Even encyclopedic.

It’s one of the more difficult books to get through frankly but it is rewarding. The thing to appreciate when attempting it is that mid-30s Pynchon was inventing his own English grammar. Some sentences are a full page long and it will challenge your memory. So the best approach I think is to just let it wash over you. After a while your mind adapts. You’ll miss a ton the first time through and that is OK. I think I had to start it three times before I eventually got through it and I was younger then. I have reread it a few times since, once with a companion book that annotated each chapter and offered commentary on the book’s structure which is actually impressively plotted. But don’t let it intimidate. Just let it wash over you and enjoy the funny parts. There are a lot of funny parts. The audiobook route sounds less fatiguing. Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch!

Thank you for your service

Pynchon from Gravity’s Rainbow:

“Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as a diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks, continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hersey bars.”

Everything is connected

I wish Lemmy had an “Exemplary” tag like Tildes, because this response is exemplary.

That sounds exhausting

Rolling on vinyl album covers

“But of those hapless who were snared by Melkor little is known of a certainty. […] Yet this is held true by the wise of Eressëa: that all those of the Quendi that came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty and wickedness were corrupted and enslaved. Thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orkor in envy and mockery of the Eldar, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes. For the Orkor had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar; and naught that had life of its own, nor the semblance thereof, could ever Melkor make since his rebellion in the Ainulindalë before the Beginning: so say the wise. And deep in their dark hearts the Orkor loathed the Master whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery. This maybe was the vilest deed of Melkor and the most hateful to Eru”

However, recognize that grief may result. It’s a loss of the fantasy of people who love you. That hurts.

Roberts is a white male. Barrett is just a woman.

Thank you. Californian over here. I am disgusted with what our government and the magtards that voted them in are doing. Do what you need to do to defend yourselves but please keep in mind Americans are not all awful.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

George Carlin

Its not just money and power he wants. Read May Trump’s book and you’ll learn his father was a psychopath who verbally berated his older brother Fred (Mary’s father) so much so that Fred found comfort in alcohol and died young. Young Donald learned to identify with the aggressor in order to win his father’s regard. To my mind, Putin reminds Trump of his father and he wants to please his father.

He’s plenty smart in terms of verbal fluency and debate. However he lacks introspective capacity or moral center or empathy, without which he is simply an ambitiously sharp tool being wielded by others (like Thiel)

She’s been fine, but it is past time for change

Maybe not western european in particular but you sound 100% Bombadilian to me. I’ll bet your boots are yellow.

Apparently blind and unaware of the deficit.