Gravity's Rainbow

A guy named Thomas Pynchon.

um in his book gravity's rainbow uh he told that there's a there's a bit of a story in there that unfolds about an immortal light bulb named byron who runs afoul of a secretive and international industrial alliance known as the phoebus cartel

and

when the cartel detects that byron has exceeded his programmed lifespan uh the committee on incandescent anomalies takes it decides to take him out by using a hitman So today, Kyle, I want to delve into the story of the Phoebus cartel and the birth of planned obsolescence in technology.

I think I know a little bit about this.

And, you know, first of all, I have to say up front, I am aware that, like, as far as, like, noided conspiracy online leftist people go, like, so many people love Pynchon.

Folks, I have tried... over and over like multiple times now i i look i might be stupid but i have tried to read gravity's rainbow on multiple occasions and and i i've like i don't not that it's bad but i've glanced off it because it's hard and i'm stupid so if somebody can give me any fucking tips on reading pension like tips for like a dumbass to to help them read that because i'm very intrigued by But it was difficult.

Have you ever tried reading that fucking book, Niall?

day.It's a desirable job, in part, because putting a book in the right customer's hands is a rewarding experience.

I sold a first edition of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which is a huge book and a really tough one to read.

And I sold it to a, she must have been 16 or 17.

She brought in the money that she needed for it as if she broke open her piggy bank, like in dollars and pennies and quarters.

They have a website where you can order rare and special books, and their listings also appear on used book platforms like Biblio and AbeBooks, which is owned by Amazon.

But Hernandez says his physical store on that cute little block in Brooklyn is the heart and soul of the business.

And whether you're buying a cheap paperback or a 760-page copy of Gravity's Rainbow, it's there on the shelf because he or one of his knowledgeable staff pulled it out of a vast ocean of used books in the hope that you would find it.

More important than efficiency is human connection, and I think that will never go out of style.

I'm

like, Thomas Pynchon? Who's that? Okay, Gravity's Rainbow's most recent work is Shadow Ticket, actually set in Wisconsin.

Oh, all right.

I don't know if you guys are literate or not, but it's a good book about this private eye who's hired to investigate the disappearance of a cheese heiress.

Gravity's Angel is the third piece on the album.

Inspired by the Thomas Pynchon novel Gravity's Rainbow, which Anderson wanted to adapt into a full-length opera, Pynchon responded to her request with a weird non-answer answer.

Instead, she wrote this song, which, as far as I can tell, isn't so much an adaptation as a mood piece.

I actually have never read any Pynchon, even though I have a degree in English.

He's served the guard public in the Congo, but he's doing his mission to obtain the Q weapon on spec for a private organization.

And the backdrop of that being this Hanseatic city, this abandoned Hanseatic port, speaks to a hollowing out of Europe's past, by the arrival of the industrialized future in the form of World War I, fascism, eventually the Nazis, which of course has a link to Gravity's Rainbow in a very real way and all of the things that that book speaks to.

I understand that's a lot, but I promise we're going to get there through the perspective of this historical reference.

So...

there are a lot of pretty much any time like a a paper or mathematical paper or theorem is mentioned that's penchon's way of dating this specific moment

yeah it's it's like the the uh semi-professional basketball games and inherent fights to tell you there's a missing day

Well, I feel like it's just a symptom of people getting high off the fact that you can pinpoint the hour that the opening of Gravity's Rainbow takes place.

Sure.

It's like this statement from the CIA about where else will we be allowed to raise Mary Hell.

Or, I mean, Gravity's Rainbow is precisely about that, that you have, you know, in part, you have this scientismic priest class, like, in extremis.

I mean, literally, you have a kind of paperclip up to the point of death and beyond, beyond the zero, And meanwhile, the people are, like you said, running wild.

Where else are they allowed to run wild to sort of go beyond the zero and create this sort of new world? Another essay.

I just didn't want to read any Thomas Pynchon.

I thought it was like AI fodder.

Oh, by the way, I don't know if you guys saw this, but they... um, and, and Darrell and Palantir admitted that they've been buying up classics, rare books, rare books and classics, and then feeding them into the, you know, to use as a template as a template, which is exactly what Tristan and I talked about with, um, with gravity's rainbow, that at first it seemed like it was a language model.

Like it's the basics for basic, you know, the basis for a language model that, and, uh, and david foster wallace

So Octavia Butler, who is widely considered, like, the greatest sci-fi writer of all time, and she's since passed, but in her book Kindred, she wrote, uh, "I lost my arm on my last trip home." Um, and that's the first sentence of that novel.

Um, in Gravity's Rainbow by, uh, Thomas, um, Pynchon, uh, he wrote, "A screaming comes across the sky." Um, in The Handmaid's Tale by, uh, Margaret Atwood, "We slept in what once had been the gymnasium." Uh, Catch-22, Joseph Heller, "It was love at first sight." Um, Martian by Andy, uh, Weir, I believe is how it's pronounced.

Uh, "I'm pretty much [censored]," was the first sentence.

Um, Ernest Hemingway's-

When we think about the last 80 years of sort of American empire coming to a head, and of American fantasies of autonomous warfare and computation.

And, like, in Gravity's Rainbow, which is a really dense book that no one should have to enjoy or read if you don't want to, but the, the protagonist is this guy named Tyrone Slothrop, which is very-

Slothrop, yeah

... w- yeah, it's very slop coded.

Yeah.

Can I add to that as well? I mean, I, I totally agree with that.

I think the, the Gravity's Rainbow reference is fascinating.

The only thing I would add is that I think you have to look beyond Palo Alto.