Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Don't miss this amazing video about Gravity's Rainbow winning the National Book Award, including a recording of Professor Irwin Corey's hilarious acceptance speech.
Read Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech for Pynchon's 1974 National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Also, have a look at Douglas Kløvedal Lannark's exhaustive documenting of "love" in Gravity's Rainbow.
In Dulci Jubilo
A macaronic [GR's "macronic" is a misspelling] is something, a lyric for instance, that mixes two languages, in the case of "In Dulci Jubilo" (written by Heinrich Suso), Latin and German.
Heinrich Suso was born around 1300 and entered the Dominican monastery at the age of 13. During a ten year period of strict seclusion in the Dominican friary, Suso practiced severe bodily discipline.
"He wore a hair shirt and an iron chain. His under-garment had leather straps and iron nails with sharp points. He had a girdle round his neck to which his hands were fastened so that he could not scratch his sores at night. He put on leather gloves studded with spikes. He fixed a wooden cross to his back with iron nails in it. An old disused wooden door served as his bed and he had no bed-clothes except in winter when he threw an old coat over himself. For a long time he ate only once a day; he abstained from wine and at times drank nothing all day, suffering tortures of hunger and thirst."
His first work, The Book of Truth, was a defense of Eckhard's teachings, which he knew well. He was prior of the Dominicans in Constance for many years. At the age of 40, he gave up asceticism for good, and entered the state of Gelassenheit (resignation).130 Selections of his material can be read in translation in The Library of Christian Classics.
The villain in the sixth chapter of his The Little Book of Truth, reminiscent of so much of Spener and Arndt's criticism, is the "wildman" who is "skilled in words, but unpracticed in works, puffed up with pride and vanity."
