Pynchon in Public Podcast

04.25: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which we continue our discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow with a look at chapters 17, 18 and 19 of Book Three.

Notes:

Alan and Liam mention the philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Here’s some information about him.

Michelle and Bo talk about the geography of Swinemünde. You can find a good map at Wikipedia.

Here’s a brief summary of the Stations of the Cross. Catholic churches usually have images of each station in some way, be they carvings, woodcuts, stained-glass, etc. Doing image searches on each of these should bring some artistic results.

04.24: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which we continue our discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow with a look at chapters 14, 15 and 16 of Book Three.

04.23: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which we continue our discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow with a look at chapters 12 and 13 of Book Three.

As this episode covers the great Rossini/Beethoven debate that the novel has been hyping up for some time, here are a few examples of each composer’s work, as chosen by Alan.

Rossini

* William Tell Overture

* Thieving Magpie

Beethoven

* String Quartet, opus 132, 3rd movement

* Piano Sonata, opus 106, Hammerklavier, 3rd Movement

Below, you’ll find examples of a few other composers mentioned in our discussion.

Wagner

* Ride of the Valkyries

* Tannhäuser Overture

* Lohengrin Prelude

Webern

* Five Pieces for Orchestra

* Six Bagatelles for String Quartet

04.22: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which we continue our discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow with a careful look at the second half of Book Three, Chapter Eleven – the Pökler chapter.

Alan mentions The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. Here’s a link to it in Google Books, and here’s the summary on Wikipedia.

Chris mentions a concept called “the deep state.” Here’s Bill Moyers with a fairly detailed explanation.

Playing a game with death in The Seventh Seal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4yXBIigZbg.

Playing games with death in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg-IG7V5eZg.

Death playing bass with Bill and Ted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0WsqcmdjVo.

On the possible origin of the name Zwölfkinder, Alan mentions the Grimm’s Fairy Tale “The Twelve Brothers.”

04.21: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which we continue our discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow with a careful look at the first half of Book Three, Chapter Eleven – the Pökler chapter.

 

04.19: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which we take a look at episodes six and seven of Book Three of Gravity’s Rainbow.

The Tristan chord, which Alan mentions as the “magic chord” in Tristan und Isolde, is F, B, G#, and D#. It can alternately be any chord with the intervals of augmented fourth, augmented sixth, and augmented ninth. You can find a sample, both written out and as a MIDI file, at Wikipedia.

04.18: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which, despite efforts by Them to stop us, we continue our work on Gravity’s Rainbow with a look at Book Three, episode five – the Tchitcherine episode.

Notes:

Here’s an example of Kyrgyz script. When writing was first developed, a Latin alphabet was used. So “A screaming comes across the sky” would have looked like this:

Bir jini asmanda bolot

Around 1920, the Arabic alphabet was adopted. The words themselves didn’t change, but how they were written changed dramatically. Most notably, Latin is written from left to right, whereas Arabic is written from right to left. So the same sentence would look like this:

بىر جىنى اسمانادا بولوت

Finally, in the early 1930s, Russia began to impose a Cyrillic alphabet onto the Kyrgyz people. Pynchon has Tchitcherine working on this project. Once again, the words didn’t change but how they were written did:

Бир жини асманда болот

If you would like to learn more about Gödel’s Theorem, here’s a nice explanation at Scientific American. And here’s a write-up at the Guardian about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

On chess outcomes and the number of atoms in the universe:

Claude Shannon – a mathematician and cryptographer called “the father of information theory” – put the lower boundary for the possible outcomes of a game of chess to be 10120. (This is called the Shannon number.) Victor Allis, a Dutch computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, put the upper bound at 5×1050. He also estimated the game-tree complexity to be at least 10123, assuming a branching factor of 35 and an average game of 80 moves.

The estimate of atoms in the known universe is often put between 4×1079 and 4×1081.

04.17: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which our discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow takes us into Book Three, episodes three and four…a little journey made with the help of Iron Butterfly.

04.16: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which we continue our discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow with a look at Book Three, episode two.

04.15: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which we begin our discussion of Book Three of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow with a look at its first episode.