I’ve added to the sidebar the schedule for the Gravity’s Rainbow read, which I’ll post here for posterity too.

The novel is divided up into four large parts or books, and each book is composed of several sections, which in my edition (and I suspect most editions) are separated by a series of seven squares in a row, somewhat reminiscent of the edge of a reel of film (which for the whippersnappers among us is what they used to put the moving pictures on). The schedule notation lists the large part and the smaller section, separated by a dot. This keeps us from having to wrangle page numbers. In my edition, at this pace, I’ll be reading 80 – 90 pages a week, which seems entirely doable, though I can tell you from past experience that getting through the nightly slate of on average 12 pages at a time is occasionally a real chore.

When working out when to have a batch of pages read, look at the date and make sure you’ve read through the listed section by that date, as spoilers may ensue. Look for the first post about the text itself sometime during the week of the 27th.

I’ve got in mind a nice slow pace of 80 – 90 pages per week spanning about 11 weeks. As noted above, my prior reading was pretty slipshod, and I’m not a very informed reader of the work. I’ll be following along in a reader’s guide as I go, but I’d still be really pleased if someone with real knowledge of the book were to join me in blogging the thing. If you are such a person, or know such a person, please speak up (infinitezombies at gmail if you’re shy). Else you’ll be stuck with me and any other amateurs who sign up  to blog along with me. We’ve usually had three to five bloggers total, so if you’d like to play, speak up about that too.

Barring crazy life interference in the mean time, figure on having the first twelve sections of Gravity’s Rainbow under your belt by February 27. I’ll try to post a few things in advance to get us started.

Today, nearly a month before I expected it, my copy of Moby-Dick in Pictures, the book his project turned into, arrived, and it is gorgeous. Although there is a paperback copy, I opted for the hard-back copy. It’s a few bricks worth of book and it comes sheathed in a lovely and sturdy box. Matt gives us a beauty of a foreword outlining the life of the project and then steps back and lets us look at the art. It’s mesmerizing to flip through the book, and I can’t wait to find the time to read Moby-Dick again with Matt’s complete series as a page-by-page companion.

If you’re a student or fan of Moby-Dick and ephemera, do yourself a favor and get your hands on a copy of this book.

The book and its box.

I bought the Fin Back whale drawing months ago. Here's the reproduction next to the original.

Unit #4, more or less equidistant from both the hospital parking lot and the steep ravine, is a repository for Alzheimer’s patients with VA pensions. #4′s residents wear jammies 24/7, the diapers underneath giving them a lumpy and toddlerish aspect. The patients are frequently visible at #4′s windows, in jammies, splayed and open-mouthed, sometimes shrieking, sometimes just mutely open-mouthed, splayed against the windows. They give everybody at Ennet House the howling fantods. One ancient retired Air Force nurse does nothing but scream ‘Help!’ for hours at a time from a second-story window. Since the Ennet House residents are drilled in a Boston-AA recovery program that places great emphasis on ‘Asking for Help,’ the retired shrieking Air Force nurse is the object of a certain grim amusement, sometimes. Not six weeks ago, a huge stolen HELP WANTED sign was found attached to #4′s siding right below the retired shrieking nurse’s window, and #4′s director was less than amused, and demanded that Pat Montesian determine and punish the Ennet House residents responsible, and Pat had delegated the investigation to Don Gately, and though Gately had a pretty good idea who the perps were he didn’t have the heart to really press and kick ass over something so much like what he’d done himself, when new and cynical, and so the whole thing pretty much blew over.

…

‘d been a confarmed bowl-splatterer for yars b’yond contin’. ‘d been barred from t’facilities at o’t’ troock stops twixt hair’n Nork for yars. T’wallpaper in de loo a t’ome hoong in t’ese carled sheets froom t’wall, ay till yo. But now woon dey . . . ay’ll remaember’t'always. T’were a wake to t’day ofter ay stewed oop for me ninety-day chip. Ay were tray moents sobber. Ay were thar on t’throne a’t'ome, you new. No’t'put too fain a point’on it, ay prodooced as er uzhal and … and ay war soo amazed as to no’t'belaven’ me yairs. ‘Twas a sone so wonefamiliar at t’first ay tought ay’d droped me wallet in t’loo, do you new. Ay tought ay’d droped me wallet in t’loo as Good is me wetness. So doan ay bend twixt m’knays and’ad a luke in t’dim o’t'loo, and codn’t belave me’yize. So gud paple ay do then ay drope to m’knays by t’loo an’t'ad a rail luke. A loaver’s luke, d’yo new. And friends t’were loavely past me pur poewers t’say. T’were a tard in t’loo. A rail tard. T’were farm an’ teppered an’ aiver so jaintly aitched. T’luked … constroocted instaid’ve sprayed. T’luked as ay fel’t'in me ‘eart Good ‘imsailf maint a tard t’luke. Me friends, this tard’o'mine practically had a poolse. Ay sted doan on m’knays and tanked me Har Par, which ay choose t’call me Har Par Good, an’ ay been tankin me Har Par own m’knays aiver sin, marnin and natetime an in t’loo’s'well, aiver sin.

…

It kind of enrages Lenz to like somebody. There would be no way to say any of this out loud to Green. As it gets past 2200h. and the meatloaf in his pocket’s baggie’s gotten dark and hard from disuse the pressure to exploit the c. 2216 interval for resolution builds to a terrible pitch, but Lenz still can’t yet quite get it up to ask Green to walk back some other way at least once in a while. How does he do it and still have Green know that he thinks he’s OK? But you don’t come right out there and let somebody hear you say you think they’re OK. When it’s a girl you’re just trying to X it’s a different thing, straightforwarder; but like for instance where do you look with your eyes when you tell somebody you like them and mean what you say? You can’t look right at them, because then what if their eyes look at you as your eyes look at them and you lock eyes as you’re saying it, and then there’d be some awful like voltage or energy there, hanging between you. But you can’t look away like you’re nervous, like some nervous kid asking for a date or something. You can’t go around giving that kind of thing of yourself away.

…

And a lot of the people in the different brick houses are damaged or askew and lean hard to one side or are twisted into themselves, through the windows, and he can feel his heart going out into the world through them, which is good for insomnia. A woman’s voice, calling for help without any real urgency — not like the screams that signify the Moms laughing or screaming at night — sounds from a darkened upper window. And across the little street that’s crammed with cars everybody has to move at 0000h. is Ennet’s House, where the Headmistress has a disability and had had a wheelchair ramp installed and has twice invited Mario in during the day for a Caffeine-Free Millennial Fizzy, and Mario likes the place: it’s crowded and noisy and none of the furniture has protective plastic wrap, but nobody notices anybody else or comments on a disability and the Headmistress is kind to the people and the people cry in fron tof each other. The inside of it smells like an ashtray, but Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.

…

I wish for my death but have not the courage to make actions to cause death. I twice try to roll over the side of a tall Swiss hill but cannot bring myself. I curse myself for cowardice and inutile. I roll about, hoping to be hit by a vehicle of someone else, but at the last minute rolling out of the path of vehicles on Autoroutes, for I am unable to will my death. The more pain in my self, the more I am inside the self and cannot will my death, I think. I feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain. Unable to care or choose anything outside it. Unable to see anything or feel anything outside my pain.

…

Sometimes Gately would come out of a Demerol-nod and look at pale passive Pamela lying there sleeping beautifully and undergo a time-lapse clairvoyant thing where he could almost visibly watch her losing her looks through her twenties and her face starting to slide over off her skull onto the pillow she held like a stuffed toy, becoming a lounge-hag right before his eyes. The vision aroused more compassion than horror, which Gately never even considered might qualify him as a decent person.

…

And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

If there are past participants who would like to use the site as a venue for discussion of The Pale King in the coming weeks, I’ll be happy to set up user accounts and try really hard to look the other way so as to avoid the discussion (which, I’ll admit, will be hard to do). Speak up if you’re game (especially if you want to write for the blog; I’ll decide more or less arbitrarily when to stop adding new bloggers, probably somewhere around the half-dozen-participants-in-all mark). If there seems to be interest, I’ll set things up and let those who wish to drive the read run with it.

Boiling the book down to frames in a graphic format takes loads of work and time, but the folks putting the resource together are seeking to raise some money that will help accelerate production. The site through which they’re soliciting funds is a pledge site; if the pledge goal isn’t met, the project dies and no money changes hands. If the goal is met, Throwaway Horse can pay the bills for a few months and production ramps up. They’re at some 67% of the goal now, with a month-and-a-half yet to go.

If you’ve got a few bucks to spare and would like to see this neat project move forward, you can pledge here.

• Several people in the book say they’d rather be “shot with tacks” than perform some action they fear they might be expected to perform.
• Early in their courtship, Tea Cake says to Janie, “Look lak we done run our conversation from grass roots tuh pine trees.”
• When Pheoby has resolved to speak to Janie about Tea Cake, she knows she can’t just walk straight over to Janie’s house, so she meanders down the street stopping at several porches and “going straight by walking crooked.”
• Pheoby, assuring Janie that she won’t spread gossip: “Ah jus lak uh chicken. Chicken drink water, but he don’t pee-pee.”
• Tea Cake’s letter summoning Janie to Jacksonville asks her to “hurry up and come because he was about to turn into pure sugar thinking about her.”
• After waiting all night for Tea Cake to return from his gambling: “Daylight was creeping around the cracks of the world.”

It strikes me that many of the colloquial phrases I find so appealing are very concrete, even metaphoric insofar as they turn abstract things into observable phenomena. I wonder what, if any, relationship this may have to the notion I’ve expressed previously of a newborn culture following the available templates. Such phrases surely seem to be happy innovations, if they stick at all close to any template.

And now a few questions, things I took note of but haven’t really thought through yet. Maybe something here will spark some conversation (maybe not). I promise these aren’t supposed to be self-consciously coy leading questions that I think there are necessarily good answers to. They’re just things that popped into my head.

• Is there any comparison to be made between the relationship between Tea Cake and Janie and that of Logan and a Young Janie? That is, the terms of the age gap have been swapped; Janie is now the December of the relationship rather than the May. Are there ways in which age and experience play a role in the ways the relationships work? Is there room for comparison somehow of Janie to Logan Killicks (probably not)?
• Late in chapter 12, we have a meditation by Janie on marriage and in particular on how black women born in slavery viewed sitting up on a high chair like white women (which Joe forced Janie into). What would marriage have meant to recently freed slaves and to their grandchildren? It’s another white institution, something they had been told they had to do or go to Hell, I suppose. I feel like there must be some nuance here, some mingling of the old traditions with the white traditions, some meaning to it all external to the play-acting of performing the ceremony itself. Would marriage have been a sign of freedom?
• I wonder what a close comparison of the Widow Tyler’s return to Maitland to that of Janie’s as the book opens would turn up.
• As Tea Cake and Janie settle down in the muck, their house becomes the center of their community’s activity. Does this set up something of an equivalence between Tea Cake and Joe, vibrant men around whom industry and community culture centered? If so, can we take solace in the distinction that where Joe applied a sort of brute force to accomplish such a centering, it springs up naturally around the easy-going and likable Tea Cake?
• Are the longer paragraphs that close chapter 16 out of line with the tone of the rest of the book so far? They registered with me as more preachy, had more the feel of the narrator intruding editorially and directly than what we’ve read so far.