Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

Pretty soon Fong’s coming back for more and more, so you create an inelastic demand for the shit, get China to make it illegal, then sucker China into a couple-three disastrous wars over the right of your merchants to sell opium, which by now you are describing as sacred. You win, China loses. Fantastic.

Chu Piang has a bond or two available himself. He is a living monument to the success of British trade policy back during the last century. This classic hustle is still famous, even today, for the cold purity of its execution: bring opium from India, introduced it into China— Howdy Fong, this here’s opium, opium, this is Fong.

Tchitcherine has a way of getting together with undesirables, sub rosa enemies of order, counterrevolutionary, odds, and ends of humanity: he doesn’t plan it, it just happens, he is a giant, super molecule with so many open bonds available at any given time, and in the drift of things… in the dance of things… howsoever… others latch on,

He envies their loneliness,their willingness to go alone,outside even a military structure,often without support or love from anyone.His own faithful network of frauleins around the zone is a compromise:he knows there’s too much comfort in it,even when the intelligence inputs are good.But the perceptible hazards of love,of attachment,are still light enough for him to accept,when balanced against what he has to do

Demanded, in his own case, that he entered the service of the rocket… beyond simple steel erection, the rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropy of lovable but scatterbrained mother nature: …, his first step towards citizenship in the zone. He was led to believe that by understanding the rocket he would come to understand truly his manhood.

There was no difference between the behavior of a God and the operations of pure chance.

Before his conscious memories began, something took him, in and out of his mother’s circular village far out in the Kakua Veld, at the borders of the land of death, a departure and a return… he was told about it years later.

North is death’s region. There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern.

To allow the tribal past to disperse, all memories ought to be public record, there’s no point in preserving history with that final zero to look forward to…

No white Afrikaner could quite put down the way it felt… something sinister was moving out in the veld: he was beginning to look at their faces, especially those of the women, lined beyond the thorn fences, and he knew beyond logical proof: there was a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to commit suicide…