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.
Photography
Submitted by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Dept of English, New York University:
Tacked to the wall next to Slothrop's desk is a map of London, which Bloat is now busy photographing with his tiny camera. 18
It takes him four exposures, click zippety click, my how very efficient at this he's become - anyone nips in one simply drops camera into bag 19
Knowing Bloat, perhaps that's what it is, young lady gamming well-setup young man, several poses - more wholesome than anything this war's ever photographed...life, at least.... 35
Midgets in their dark winter clothes, exquisite little frocks and nip-waisted overcoats, were running all over the station, gobbling their bonvoyage chocolates and lining up for news photos. 37
Could they have settled for hotels, AR-E forms, being frisked for cameras and binoculars? 53
[Pudding] was pensioned off around the beginning of the Great Depression - went to sit in the study of an empty house in Devon, surrounded by photos of old comrades, none of whose gazes quite met one's own, 77
Cecil Beaton's photograph of Margot Asquith 78
In silence, hidden from her, the camera follows as she moves deliberately nowhere longlegged about the rooms 92
She's alone in the house, except for the secret cameraman 92
The camera records no change in her face, but why does she stand now so immobile at the door? 92
The cameraman is pleased at the unexpected effect of so much flowing crepe, 94
At the images she sees in the mirror Katje also feels a cameraman's pleasure, but knows what he cannot: that inside herself, enclosed in the soignée surface of dear fabric and dead cells, she is corruption and ashes, 94
The camera follows as she moves deliberately nowhere longlegged about the rooms, an adolescent wideness and hunching to the shoulders 113
But they want the nearly postwar luxury this week of buying an electric train set for the kid, trying that way each to light his own set of sleek little faces here, calibrating his strangeness, well-known photographs all, 132
vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell 134
Worried about security, being caught on a stray frame by one of the leather-coated photographers, who will be always at the fringes of the action. 158
From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to Webley Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze 229
Eyes have been left to weather and to tears: these days, with so much death hidden in the sky, out under the sea, among the blobs and smears of recco photographs, most women's eyes are only functional. 232
The Brigadier's lady has spent an hour at her vanity mirror with mascara, liner, shadow, and pencil, lotions and rouges, brushes and tweezers, consulting from time to time a looseleaf album filled with photographs of the reigning beauties of thirty and forty years ago, 233
"You have shit all over your mouth now. Perhaps I'll take a photograph of you like that. In case you ever get tired of me." 236
It's also the negative of a recco photograph of the city, darkbrown, festooned with water-spots, 240
His picture may hang prominently in all the guardrooms and be engraved in thousands of snowdrops' brains, 247
What the somewhat disconnected Mr. Pointsman has been hearing all this time is a voice, strangely familiar, a voice he once imagined a face in a well-known news photograph from the War to have 277
Not gonna do anything, just here to look. Most of them bring cameras. Notice you didn't. We have them for rent at the main gate, if you're interested. 295
He can put Slothrop on to champagne, furs, cameras, cigarettes....Can't just be interested in rockets, can he, that's crazy. 298
Oversize photos of John Dillinger, alone or posed with his mother, his pals, his tommygun, decorate the walls. 368-69
Remember how the Wilhelmplatz used to be? Watches, wine, jewels, cameras, heroin, fur coats, everything in the world. Nobody gave a shit, right? 370
giant photographs are posted out in the Friedrichstrasse - faces higher than a man. 373
In the smoky Berlin sky, somewhere to the left of the Funkturm in its steelwool distance, appears a full-page photo [of Slothrop as Rocketman] in Life magazine [...] holding the stupendous wiener is not visible in the photo. A SNAFU FOR ROCKETMAN, reads the caption - "Barely off the ground, the Zone's newest celebrity 'fucks up.' 377
Inside the sentry boxes are piles of confiscated cameras. 380
A shadowed plain at sundown. An enormous flatness. Camera angle is kept low. 386
At the Versuchsanstalt, behind his back, he was known as Weissmann's Monster, probably less out of racism than at the picture the two of them made, 404
Thermometers and barometers were sealed in a watertight compartment with a movie camera. 406
During flights the camera photographed the needles swinging on the gauges. 406-07
The fall was photographed by Askania cinetheodolite rigs on the ground. In the daily rushes you would watch the frames at around 3000 feet, where the model broke through the speed of sound. There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, 407
They had scooped a hideout there in the dirt, furnished with dolls, hats, dresses, shoes, old bottles, magazines with pictures, all found out near the barbed wire, the treasure pile, they called it 408
This is her picture (hair waved like choppy seas falling down Rita Hayworth style, eyes that if it were a color snap would have yellow lids with pink rims, and a mouth like a hot dog bun on a billboard) 449
The decor is 19305 Safety Manual. That is, all over the walls, photograffiti, are pictures of Horrible Disasters in German Naval History. 450
To compensate though, all the bulkheads, and the overhead, are occupied by enormous photographs of Hitler at various forms of play. 450
Extermination camps will be turned into tourist attractions, foreigners with cameras will come piling through in droves, tickled and shivering with guilt 453
Leaving behind a few joss sticks, a copy of the Chinesische Bla'tter für Wissenschaft und Kunst, pictures of a wife and children no one had known about 454
Von Göll let the cameras run right on. 461
But it's possible, now and then, for Greta to see Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure 484
there is really no camera on shore behind the fine gray scribbling of willows 484
one day you are no longer an actor, but free now, over on the other side of the camera 494
Osbie is looking straight into the camera: straight at her, none of your idle doper's foolery here, he's acting. 535
"It's quite good fun, actually," as the camera moves in for a close-up of this individual, "only took me a week to pick up the knack of it.... 543
reach for your camera, your weapon, your cock 551
The kid shows Slothrop photos he's packing in his wallet: Ursula, eyes bright and shy, peeking out from under a pile of cabbage leaves. 556
"My dream," he admits, "is to bring all these kids back to America, out to Hollywood. I think there's a future for them in pictures. 559
Parisian slippers, gold picture-frames around still-lifes of cobbles, 570
His last picture of her is framed in the light of her kitchen, through the window, a fading golden woman 572
subtle poisons come infiltrating this well-mannered parlor with the picture of Herbert Hoover on the piano, 582
back in the fading house, derequisitioned now, occupied again by human extensions of ball-fringe, dog pictures, 629
the rest of the room seems to be at more of a distance, as through the view-finder on a camera. 634
where Slothrop in early August may see a particular newspaper photo 681
I was thinking of Denham - only him, with gun and camera 689
In one of these streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slippery cobblestones, is a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wirephoto of a giant white cock, 692
He doesn't remember sitting on the curb for so long staring at the picture. 694
c) alternatively, the projection, onto the Surface, of an electronic "image," analogous to a motion picture 700
Swaying full-color picture of a loathsomely fat drooling infant. 707
We ought to be seeing much popular-magazine coverage on the order of The Night Rog and Beaver Fought Over Jessica While She Cried in Krupp's Arms, and drool over every blurry photo 713
the failed Counterforce, the glamorous ex-rebels, half-suspected but still enjoying official immunity and sly love, cameraworthy wherever they carry on...doomed pet freaks. 713
"Do you have a photo of him?" the old woman handing her a tin army plate with the remains of her morning's Bauernfrühstuck. "I can give you a spell." 718
elaborate old china plates hung like pictures, 718
it resembles a Daguerreotype taken of the early Raketen-Stadt by a forgotten photographer in 1856: this is the picture, in fact, that killed him - he died a week later from mercury poisoning after inhaling fumes of the heated metal in his studio 725
he was a habitué of mercury fumes in moderate doses, he felt it did his brain some good, and that may account for pictures like "Der Raketen Stadt": 725
Constance Babington-Smith and her colleagues at R. A. F. Medmenham discovered the Rocket back in 1943 in recco photographs of Peenemünde. 726
There's supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group 742
Gerhardt von Göll on his camera dolly, whooping with joy, barrel-assing down the long corridors at Nymphenburg. 750
"CATCH you can hold it steady enough to see a suspender-belt straining down your thighs, white straps as slender as the legs of a fawn and the points of the black...the black CATCH" 759 (the film slipping off sprockets)
