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

“ the light came from above and below at the same time, so that everyone had two shadows: Cain and Abel’s, … it was at the height of his symbolist period. Later on he began to use more natural light, to shoot more on location.

In Mickey Mouse voice:
Hey fellas! Hey c’mon, let’s all go over to slothrops, the big sap ain’t doing anything but laying on his ass, c’mon, boy! “Take that,” Slothrop mutters, “an—and that!”

Slothrop wakes again to the white room. The quiet. Raises his ass and does a few feeble bicycle exercises, then lies slapping on new flab that must’ve collected on his stomach while he was out. There is an invisible kingdom of flab, a million cells at large, and they all know who he is— soon as he’s unconscious, they start up, every one, piping in high horrible little Mickey Mouse voices,

The only strange item, which grew strange as surveillance developed, was that he seemed to be alone. To date Slothrop has still not recorded, tagged, discovered, or liberated, a single scrap of A4 hardware or intelligence.

Or has he by way of the language, caught the German mania for name giving, dividing the creation, finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist, whose molecules are words…

Tchitcherine was the wolf. The minute he put on the head, in front of the mirror by the ikon, he knew himself. He was the wolf.

It is just precisamente a seagoing tower of Babel here— the torpedo? Why is he screaming about the torpedo?

There are worse foundations than a film. Did Prince Potemkins fake villages survive catharine’s Royal progress? Will the soul of the gaucho survive the mechanics of putting him into light and sound?

“ something that antisocial?”
“ but it’s everything we believe in”…
“ but even the freest of gauchos end up selling out, you know, that’s how things are.”

It is the period of General Roca’s campaign to open the Pompas by exterminating the people who live there: turning the villages into labor camps, bringing more of the country under the control of Buenos Aires. Martin Fiero is soon sick of it. It’s against everything he knows is right. He deserts.