Status Updates From Gravity's Rainbow

Pynchon's ravings here at near the halfway point have gotten so digressive and maximalist; literally everything that pops into his head goes onto the page and I guess I'm just going to ride this thing like a mismatched array of riptides and cross currents and chaotic waves to the shoreline if they take me there. The beauty of the writing keeps me grounded enough. That's all for now.

Slothrop: Where is he? Why didn’t he show? Who are you?
Voice: The Kid got busted. And you know me, Slothrop. Remember? I’m Never.
Slothrop (peering): You, Never? (A pause.) Did the - Kenosha Kid?

The snow in this slum darkness has the appearance of soot in a negative... it flows in and out of the night....

Q. Then what about all the others? Boston. London. The ones who live in cities. Are those people real, or what?
A. Some are real, and some aren’t.
Q. Well are the real ones necessary? or unnecessary?
A. It depends what you have in mind.
Q. Shit, I don’t have anything in mind.
A. We do.

Look on it as an optimization problem. The country can best support only one of each.

Slothrop moves among the bins and hung cloths, invisible,...and Slothrop is puzzled. Isn’t there supposed to be only one of each?

pineapples fermenting in the sun, about to blow up,

Whappo sulks. His top hat reflects the coming holocaust.

shit that Whappo is such a caution. Always baiting his master in ‘hopes of getting a leather-keen stripe or two across those dusky Afro-Scandinavian buttocks,

This must mean that the one-of-each rule applies only to forms of life, such as little pards, and not to objects, such as bandannas).

Whappo also sports a bandanna of the regulation magenta and green (Crutchfield is supposed to have a closetful of ‘these silken scarves back home at “Rancho Peligroso” and “never rides out into the rock-country and riverbed trails ‘without a dozen or two stashed in his saddlebags.

but lately he’s been havin’ these fantasies about that rattlesnake, too! Fangs just tickling the foreskin... the pale mouth open wide, and the horrible joy in the crescent eyes.

But it proves to be not quite that lonely. Sparse, yes, but a good deal better than solitary.

Only one fight, one victory, one loss. And only one president, and one assassin, and one election, True. One of each of everything. You had thought of solipsism, and imagined the structure to be populated—on your level—by only, terribly, one.

Not “archetypical” westwardman, but the only.

It’s cold. The wind blows. He can ‘feel only his isolation. They want him inside there but he can’t join them. Something prevents him: once inside, it would be like taking some kind of blood oath. They would “never release him. There are no guarantees he might not | be asked to do something... something so...

the intricacy of these dwellings amazes him. It is a place of sheltering from disaster. Not necessarily the flushings of the Toilet—these occur here only as a sort of inferred disturbance, behind this ancient sky, in its corroded evenness of tone—but something else has been terribly at this country, something poor soggy Slothrop cannot see or hear

seems he’s been tumbling ass over tea-kettle—though there’s no way to tell in this murky shit- storm, no visual references

At which precise point there comes this godawful surge from up the line, noise growing like a tidal wave, a jam-packed wavefront of shit, vomit, toilet paper and dingle-berries in mind-boggling mosaic, rushing down on panicky Slothrop like an MTA subway train on its own hapless victim.
(I wonder when they added the B)

A hopeful thought to carry with you down the toilet.