Pynchon’s work is often accused of being quite ‘random’. But while Gravity’s Rainbow contains a lot of text about bananas, it could certainly not have been written by a monkey with a typewriter. There is an order to the madness. And I will show this by employing the same technique as one of the book’s…
A part of Gravity’s Rainbow plays in the mines of Kohnstein that were repurposed for production of the V1 and V2 rockets. Prisoners of the Nazis concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora worked there under inhumane conditions. More people died manufacturing the V2 than were killed by its deployment. One of this section’s themes is the architecture of…
Gravity’s Rainbow is one of those books I could devote my whole life to and still wouldn’t understand half of it. Many parts probably aren’t meant to be understood. Fortunately, there are also some math formulas: For an excellent explanation of the formula’s origin and a discussion of its meaning within the context of…
The speed with which Earth is rotating is not something we think about every day. The only time I really noticed it was on a nightly hike in the mountains. It was a starry night, and at some point, the full moon was rising up behind a mountain massif. With the mountains as a reference…
