Much to my relief, I found that these next 100 pages went a lot more smoothly than did the previous 150. I feel like I understood a lot more of what happened; somehow it seems that Pynchon's writing style became easier to understand once the action left England (at the beginning of part 2). And maybe that's some sort of a theme--in war-confused England, the writing is very stream-of-conscious and difficult; in the sunny Riviera, the writing is more simplistic and easy to follow.

I thought it was really interesting that, after our discussion about cause and effect in class yesterday, there was a brief mention of cause and effect in the novel.

I was wondering what you all thought of the passage on pg. 212 begining " 'You were in London,' she will present whisper" and ending with "an they its children..." Did this section give anyone else pause? While the word "rainbow" has been deployed elsewhere, this seems, unless I missed something, to be the first reference to the novel's title - gravity's rainbow = some kind of connection between people + rockets (or war) + color + mathmatetical structure. The theme of the modern/rational categories being epistemologically inadequate seems to be at least one recurring point in the story, but here Pynchon seems to be indicting human feebleness to an even greater degree: "You haven't even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable.

After reading 150 pages of Gravity's Rainbow I am experiencing information overload. Whoever did the cover art did a really good job of expressing the feelings inspired by the novel. I feel like I'm in the middle of a crazy war zone whenever I start reading. This probably has something to do with the author's frequent use vivid imagery, run-on sentences, and stream of consciousness. At first I had no idea what was going on, but towards the end of the reading it seemed like some of the characters' stories are beginning to overlap and everything is becoming slightly clearer. However, I'm still feeling overwhelmed by the wealth of information that was crammed into the first 150 pages.

One thing that I find interesting about Gravity’s Rainbow is that Pynchon not only incorporates historical and cultural allusions in his work, but that he also includes a great deal of scientific and mathematical allusions as well. In one of my favorite passages so far, Pynchon describes Pirate’s banana breakfast with the expected sensory vocabulary and with the unexpected vocabulary of biology, “[the] odor of Breakfast… taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror’s secret by which- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off- the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down twenty generations…”(10)

I'm finding the names in this book fascinating and amusing. Plus, the names are the only thing that I can reliably find in the companion book. Every name gets an entry, unlike some things that I'm totally confused on and then try to look up, to no avail...

Anyway, the concept of naming as an indicator of the character's personality is pretty interesting. It reminds me of the Bible, where naming itself is imbued with significance. Naming is a form of power, and through this I suppose Pynchon is asserting power over his multitudinous characters, if only just to keep them straight in his mind. It probably helps a lot to go through one's list of people and get a clue as to who they were when they were last mentioned 500 pages ago just by reading their name. I know I wouldn't be able to figure out who they all were otherwise.

I find myself, like many of you, enjoying this book despite the density of every paragraph. Pynchon has done an amazing amount of research and frankly I'm a little embarrassed at the effort it takes me to read his book: I can't even imagine writing it.

One of the most rewarding things about reading this are the simple descriptions Pynchon provides. Often he couples a noun with an adjective that fits so perfectly that you wonder why the two words aren't used together more often. "A cold smear of sun", "slate shadows", "a silly bleeding smile".....they sound so natural and describe something so perfectly that I sometimes have to stop and think if I've heard them before.

I second (third and fourth…) everyone's opinions on the density and chaos of this book. I did thoroughly enjoy the first 150 pages, though several times I felt like I was wading through dense rainforest with a machete. The changing POVs, stream of consciousness descriptions and ridiculous number of characters bogged me down. But, we managed to survive.

One of the things I enjoy most about this book is the huge amount of knowledge Pynchon hides in the book. It switches from fact to fiction in a heartbeat, and dabbles in history, art, science, economics, sex, love, war and comedy. Trying to read Gravity's Rainbow is hard enough, imagine trying to write it! Pynchon is truly an artist- he’s weaving all these abstract descriptions together that will hopefully blend into an understandable tapestry.

As others have said before me, reading Gravity's Rainbow can be quite the chore. I too spent the first 150 pages chained to wikipedia looking up obscure references. At the same time, while I read the book, I feel as if I am watching an artist starting with a blank canvas painstakingly paint small little details as I try to guess how they contribute to the greater whole. Pynchon has a maddening habit of introducing seemlingly unrelated ideas and characters or breaks into a scene only to explain them pages down the road. For example, Pynchon explains the section where Slothrop flashes back to the Roseland Ballroom right after being injected with barbiturates (starting on p62) on page 74, where he notes that Slthrop was "willing to co under likght narcosis to help illuminate racial problems in his own country." While incredibly frustrating, the eventual explanations give me hope that slowly but surely, the novel is converging towards some level of coherence.

When starting a new book, I tend to judge it immediately based entirely on the first few pages. This probably isn't the best habit, but it's just the way I read. And so it is with Gravity's Rainbow. When launching into this monstrous novel, I first noticed the wealth of imagery, presented in the form of stream-of-conscious, abstract details. I was especially struck by the repetition of light/darkness imagery. On the first page alone, Pynchon describes "glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through", "total blackout, without one glint of light", and "velveteen darkness". I was impressed by the poetic, if somewhat sporadic, way in which Pynchon presents his ideas.

"He's wasted gallons of paint thinner striking his faithful Zippo...just to see what's happening with her face. Each new flame, a new face(39)". What I found really interesting about this first chunk of the novel were the changes of perspective and how Pynchon went about it. Even after acclimating to the dense prose and overriding bewilderment, I felt that reading the novel was an experience close to Roger Mexico's in the quote above only that Pynchon rationed the character development of his entire cast instead of just one person.

One theme I thought I kept seeing was that for all its glorification in the mind of the average 20th century character, science and cold reason does not do much to improve the characters' lives, but ironically contributes to the overall dreariness of it. We know something is off about Pointsman from start, but his "creepy" quality is really instilled and gradually built up with elaboration on his Pavlovian beliefs. Even with a real-life situation that matches exactly a textbook statistical model, Roger can agonize, but can't do anything to predict the direction of a given night's blitzkrieg.