When Tchitcherine goes to the Kazakh village to record the aqyn's song, he hears an ajtys: a singing duel. Tchitcherine of course thinks of it in terms of language and the alphabet that he works for. (by the way, what is the letter under which he works?) On page 362 he "understands, abrubtly, that soon someone will come out and begin to write some of these down in the New Turkish Alphabet he helped frame...and this is how they will be lost." He comes to the realization that the voices of the boy and the girl in the singing duel, a Kazakh tradition, will fade out as other cultures try to compartmentalize and even preserve the old ways through a new alphabet.

Having read kettledrum's post, I'd like to add a bit.

Being passed over removes one from the world, so that he can stand removed and indifferent, but to what extent does this constitute a negative alienation from society contrary to man's social nature?

This reminds me of p353 near the bottom where it talks about the search for the drug to "kill intense pain without causing addiction." "There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it." While removal from the world at large takes away its painful realities, removal from it strips a person of the social character which defines them in the same way that drugs dull the pain while turning their user into a dependent who can no longer focus on anything but the next dose.

The passage about the elongated S-shaped tunnels seemed to highlight the contrast between the scientific and softer, human aspects of the characters, especially Slothrop. On one hand the tunnels could be interpreted as a double integral sign-- the text goes on to explain this more in depth with lots of scientific jargon. "That is one meaning of the shape of the tunnels down here in the Mittelwerke. Another may be the ancient rune that stands for the yew tree, or Death" (306). The companion explains that "the rune SS signified a tree symbolizing strife" (190). Honestly, I didn't fully understand that one. My favorite interpretation, however, is the final one:

While finishing up this last section, I came across a few lines that made me pause for a moment over them. One page 396, Pynchon writes, "It's sad, though. Tchitcherine likes Slothrop. He feels that, in any normal period of history, they could easily be friends. People who dress up in bizarre costumes have a savoir-vivre--not to mention the personality disorder--that he admires."

I think the most interesting aspect of these lines was Pynchon's use of the word "normal." A normal period of history. At first, I focused too much on the word "normal" alone, asking all those typical questions like "what does normal really mean?" and "who is Pynchon to decide what's normal and not?" (Although I suppose, as the author, he has every right to do so. But oh well.) But then I focused more on the "normal period of history," thinking of the absolute craziness that all these characters have been encountering in what Pynchon seems to classify as a "not-normal period of history." And, while I started out as indignant at the classifying of history based on the word "normal," I finally realized that Pynchon makes a pretty good case for it with the rest of his novel.

I have a burning and probably not immediately answerable question: Who is Dr. Lazlo Jamf?
Almost every thread of GR links back to him, yet I feel I don't really know him. We know a fair amount of details about him and his work, but I only feel that I've "heard of him" but not "met" him like I have with Pynchon's other characters.

With that out of the way, I particluarly liked the use of yin-Yang at the end of part 2 to illustrate the inexorable connection between Roger and Pointsman. The system of Yin and Yang is a binary one like Pointsman who may only exist at zero or one. However, regardless of their contrast to each other, they exist as a blended entity in nature. By that token, Roger, lying in the infinite domain from zero to one, provides the necessary link between Pointsman's binary universe and the far more complex real world of a war. In that same real world of a war where man's law and nature's law stand in open conflict, Roger faces the loss of Jessica, his salvation. Roger is among elect, the war has not passed him by costing him his salvation. "Lord Acton always sez, History is not woven by innocent hands" (281).

Semyavin, to Slothrop (261) "Life was simple before the first war. You wouldn't remember. Drugs, sex, luxury items. Currency in those days was no more than a sideline, and the term 'industrial espionage' was unknown...Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?"

I'm not sure if Pynchon wrote this as pertaining to wartime vs. peacetime (information being the currency of war?) but it made me think of changes in education over time. Today we seek information in the form of education much more vehemently than ever before and competition for good colleges is at its highest.

The other day, in my Intro to Statistics class, my professor introduced a series of equations to us. And one of them happened to be the Poisson equation. Pynchon's definition fits pretty well with the definition my professor gave us (I was actually a bit disappointed--it would be interesting, but I suppose highly unlikely, to catch Pynchon in a mistake). Anyways. I thought it was pretty cool to see a link between a literature class and a math class--I don't get those very often.

On page 307, Pynchon mentions "Slothrop and The Penis He Thought Was His Own." This really resonated with me, for some reason.

I noticed that the companion book spends a lot of time clarifying which identity Slothrop is currently using in his "escape to freedom". So far, there doesn't seem to be much purpose in his changing identity, besides an explanation to how he is alluding recapture. Every once in a while, though, it's as though Slothrop does take on his new persona- "But Ian Scuffling, ace reporter, will be sure to find a clue down in the Mittelwerke" (page 287).

I think the gender slant in this novel - though, like many of you, I wouldn't go so far as to use a more loaded term like "sexism" - comes through in the questions that define Pynchon's project more than any overt misogyny (or if there is, it has to do with the historical period, not authorial bias). To take Running Silent's example from another post of Pavlov/causality as gender neutral issues, I wonder: would a female author be so preoccupied with figuring out what-it-all-means, and be so disturbed when she cannot? I'm not going to engage the constructionist aspects of question here (e.g., "well what defines gender?"), but I will offer my two-cents about the history of critical theory.

It seems like angels have been showing up a lot in the reading lately. To date, two female characters have been connected with angels- Franz imagines his wife, Leni Pökler, as having wings that will take him away, and Katje is also described as having wing-like shoulder blades. In one of the sections on Blicero, he thinks of Rilke's Tenth Elegy, which has an Angel in it. There are a multitude of smaller references to angels, as in the carol that the children sing at Christmas, (hark the herald angel sing...) and in the scene where Katje is being photographed, and there is a reference to a certain type of mushroom that is called after an angel. Finally, there is the Angel that appears during an air raid over the city of Lübeck (p.153-154).