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

His latest reminder of Katie… and they commence fucking, the old phony rack groaning beneath them, margarita, whispering God how you hurt me and ah max… and just as Slothrops about to come, the name of her child: strained through her perfect teeth, a clear extrusion of pain that is not in play, she cries, Bianca…..

Do all these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation?

It’s easy for non-fetishist to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here— there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses… singularities!

“Are you very cruel?”
“Don’t know.”
“Could you be? Please. Find something to whip me with. Just a little. Just for the warmth.” Nostalgia. The pain of a return home. He rummages around through inquisitional props, .. before coming up with a miniature cat o nine tails, a black forest elves whip.

Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of sollipsisms. The two patterns create a third: a moire, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences…

“Greta, somebody also thought it prudent to name me Max Schlepzig.” he shows her the pass he got from suare Bummer.
She gazes at it, then at slothrop briefly. She’s begun to tremble again. Some mixture of desire and fear. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
Looking away, submissive. “Knew he was dead. He disappeared in 38. They’ve been busy, haven’t they?”

Ah, we were the Reich’s Sweethearts—Greta Erdmann and Max Schlepzig, Wonderfully Together—“
“Max Schlepzig,” repeats Slothrop, goggling “quit fooling. Max Schlepzig?”
“It wasn’t his real name. Erdmann wasn’t mine. But anything with earth and it was politically safe— earth, soil, folk…a code. Which they, staring, knew how to decipher… Max had a very Jewish name, something-sky,

“ 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.

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.