Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow--Nebula Award, Pulitzer snub
past
Sat, Jun 15, 3:30 PM - 6:30 PM GMT
124 Lounsbury Place, Kingston, NY, USA
Rachelle's home! We can barbeque outside in nice weather or snuggle in the parlour if it's rainy.
Hosts
About
This is our second event in Kingston! July will be in NYC Central Park, then August back up in Kingston, etc. etc. etc. Summer also means time for some looong reads!
February 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of Gravity’s Rainbow (700 pages). A controversial literary sensation when it was published—it was infamously snubbed by Pulitzer higher-ups, despite unanimous recommendation from the fiction jury—the novel has since gathered a daunting reputation. Like Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow is the kind of book people pretend to read to appear smart while riding the bus. A New York magazine critic once dubbed it “perhaps the least-read must-read in American history.”
The time to pick up Gravity’s Rainbow is now. It is at once a busy almanac of its era and a sort of field guide for our own. It echoes eerily in the new-ish millennium. In a way, our own age’s greasy stew of absurdity and apocalypticism, creeping death tinged with clown-shoe idiocy, suggests a world that has finally, fatefully, caught up with Pynchon. We are still living under Gravity’s Rainbow.
If anyone knows anything about the author, it’s that nobody knows a whole lot about him. Arguably the most committed living mystery in American letters, Pynchon practically makes Cormac McCarthy look like some literary gadfly. After graduating from Cornell in 1959, Pynchon moved to Seattle, where he wrote technical literature and internal newsletters for Boeing. It was there that he became intimately familiar with the science, logistics, and jargon of heavy weapons manufacturing and the emerging aerospace industry. It was also where he began honing his own literary style—in one article, he compares the relationship between the US Air Force and private aerospace contractors to a happy marriage, copping an ironic tone that would later define his fiction. Pynchon was, for a brief period, essentially a functionary (albeit a cheeky, sarcastic functionary) within America’s expanding military-industrial complex. This means he knew about ballistics. And rockets. And what these weapons were capable of doing, not only to their intended targets but to the souls of those who wrought them.
Anti-war, anti-capitalist, and prolifically vulgar, Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel of ideas, big and small. Across 700-plus pages, Pynchon teases out a hefty head trip of plots and subplots, introduces hundreds of characters, and riffs on rocket science, cinema, Germanic runology, Pavlovian behaviorism, probability theory, witchcraft, futurism, zoot-suit couture, psychedelic chemistry, and the annihilation of the dodo. But there is, amid the novel’s encyclopedic remit, something like a story.
The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel. No Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction that year. Time named Gravity's Rainbow one of its "All-Time 100 Greatest Novels", a list of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, and it is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest American novels ever written.
Great article from Wired that I was greatly inspired by for June's selection:
https://www.wired.com/story/living-under-gravitys-rainbow-thomas-pynchon/
Transportation via Trailways, Metro-North, or Amtrak, all under $30: Trailways Bus from Port Authority to Kingston (9:15am to 11:25am for $28), Metro-North from Grand Central to Poughkeepsie (8:50am to 10:57am for $20), Amtrak from Moynihan Hall to Rhinecliff (8:40am to 10:28am for $30). I can pick people up from train stations. The bus stop is walking distance to my house.
Guests are welcome to come up Friday and/or leave Sunday. I have an en-suite guest bedroom that can fit four. Miriam and Katrina drive and is willing to bring people up from the city with her--it's 1.5 to 2 hours depending on traffic. There are farmers' markets Saturday and Sunday mornings/afternoons in Kingston for anyone who wants to come early or stay late.
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Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow--Nebula Award, Pulitzer snub
past
Sat, Jun 15, 3:30 PM - 6:30 PM GMT
124 Lounsbury Place, Kingston, NY, USA
Rachelle's home! We can barbeque outside in nice weather or snuggle in the parlour if it's rainy.
Hosts
About
This is our second event in Kingston! July will be in NYC Central Park, then August back up in Kingston, etc. etc. etc. Summer also means time for some looong reads!
February 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of Gravity’s Rainbow (700 pages). A controversial literary sensation when it was published—it was infamously snubbed by Pulitzer higher-ups, despite unanimous recommendation from the fiction jury—the novel has since gathered a daunting reputation. Like Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow is the kind of book people pretend to read to appear smart while riding the bus. A New York magazine critic once dubbed it “perhaps the least-read must-read in American history.”
The time to pick up Gravity’s Rainbow is now. It is at once a busy almanac of its era and a sort of field guide for our own. It echoes eerily in the new-ish millennium. In a way, our own age’s greasy stew of absurdity and apocalypticism, creeping death tinged with clown-shoe idiocy, suggests a world that has finally, fatefully, caught up with Pynchon. We are still living under Gravity’s Rainbow.
If anyone knows anything about the author, it’s that nobody knows a whole lot about him. Arguably the most committed living mystery in American letters, Pynchon practically makes Cormac McCarthy look like some literary gadfly. After graduating from Cornell in 1959, Pynchon moved to Seattle, where he wrote technical literature and internal newsletters for Boeing. It was there that he became intimately familiar with the science, logistics, and jargon of heavy weapons manufacturing and the emerging aerospace industry. It was also where he began honing his own literary style—in one article, he compares the relationship between the US Air Force and private aerospace contractors to a happy marriage, copping an ironic tone that would later define his fiction. Pynchon was, for a brief period, essentially a functionary (albeit a cheeky, sarcastic functionary) within America’s expanding military-industrial complex. This means he knew about ballistics. And rockets. And what these weapons were capable of doing, not only to their intended targets but to the souls of those who wrought them.
Anti-war, anti-capitalist, and prolifically vulgar, Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel of ideas, big and small. Across 700-plus pages, Pynchon teases out a hefty head trip of plots and subplots, introduces hundreds of characters, and riffs on rocket science, cinema, Germanic runology, Pavlovian behaviorism, probability theory, witchcraft, futurism, zoot-suit couture, psychedelic chemistry, and the annihilation of the dodo. But there is, amid the novel’s encyclopedic remit, something like a story.
The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel. No Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction that year. Time named Gravity's Rainbow one of its "All-Time 100 Greatest Novels", a list of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, and it is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest American novels ever written.
Great article from Wired that I was greatly inspired by for June's selection:
https://www.wired.com/story/living-under-gravitys-rainbow-thomas-pynchon/
Transportation via Trailways, Metro-North, or Amtrak, all under $30: Trailways Bus from Port Authority to Kingston (9:15am to 11:25am for $28), Metro-North from Grand Central to Poughkeepsie (8:50am to 10:57am for $20), Amtrak from Moynihan Hall to Rhinecliff (8:40am to 10:28am for $30). I can pick people up from train stations. The bus stop is walking distance to my house.
Guests are welcome to come up Friday and/or leave Sunday. I have an en-suite guest bedroom that can fit four. Miriam and Katrina drive and is willing to bring people up from the city with her--it's 1.5 to 2 hours depending on traffic. There are farmers' markets Saturday and Sunday mornings/afternoons in Kingston for anyone who wants to come early or stay late.
Going
Register to see all event details
Where your group belongs