04.39: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which we finally, after two years of work, get to the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, with a look at the last half of the last chapter.

Chris reads from an article called “Coloring Gravity’s Rainbow” by N. Katherine Hayles and Mary B. Eiser. While the journal Pynchon Notes is no longer around, the good folks over at Orbit have cataloged and digitized the back issues, making them freely available through the Open Library of the Humanities. You can read the abstract of this article, and there’s a link at the bottom to download the article as a PDF if you care to.

Michael mentions Laika, one of the first animals in space and the first to orbit the Earth. You can read about her over at TIME, and we’ll let you infer it maybe this was Pynchon’s inspiration for some of the Pointsman storyline.