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GR is a cult rite of passage. You have literary aspirations? Want a literary badge of honour? Voila. Expire Perspire aspire on this. So the bon ton do. And having circumnavigated this literary Everest, victorious, but a little delirious and oxygen deprived, the finish liners now take positions for a whole new battle. The Battle of the Bulge, PoMo style. The trenches are drawn, and to the left of the house we have the Disbelievers, the Lost, the ones who just ‘don’t get it�. To the right: the righteous Chosen who have seen the pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow. And both sides have something to say: never have I see such ferment over a book on the web as this: people in binary arms, blogging to an impervious Ethernet, sometimes with a following but mostly alone in their blog code, pontificating, explaining, justifying, redeeming, reliving, applying, parsing.....shaking a fist at the heavens and reliving this monumental journey. Why do they do it? These hundreds of blog voices out there, with no one to hear.....But the pitch has fervored me: mob rule and all that. (funny that: mob rule where the mob online is millions of silos. But memetic ones. Go figure. Astral projection?). Well, they we do it because of entitlement rights. You know, first you sow (which is never easy), then you reap. Its reaping time. Anyone who has made this journey deserves a voice. Even if that bloomin� tree falls where no one can hear it.

So now I have something to say as well. Which is: my crop failed. I’m going hungry this winter. In like I planted poppy seeds but I realise I needed wheat after all. Cause I’ve been having poppy seed bonanzas for a long time now and I’m peaking: I’m dead hungry and Gravitys Rainbow is just a� ghost in the machine�.

To begin somewhere, I call my 13 year old niece to the stand. I thought to introduce her to classic films a year ago, in order that she builds a ‘repertoire� of cultural significa as she goes along. So, Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho� it was. Deemed an 18 certificate, but hey: how about I take on the role of ‘risque� aunt? This girl laughed. ‘But, its where it all started�, I protested, still coiled with the unbound tension of a twenty year hiatus in horror. ‘For you�, she replied, and instantaneously I was a fossil. Not a daredevil of cultural insights.

Same here. If you are an experimental 70s virgin, and you chance on this: it might work.

I say 70s, because here is an era which stamped and oeuvre, which defined a movement (no prunes involved), which parralleloparametered an expressiveness which earned a trademark and it is then: give or take a few years. This stretch of mid sixties to mid eighties: it has its own musk. I’ve read enough now to recognise its distinct quaff a mile away. Frenetic stylistic posturing, sometimes levied by precise historical qualia, fragmented and proud, discombobulated and victorious about it, linguistic conundrums and stylistics perforations postulating as streams of supercalifragilisticexpialidousnesness, give me a text I’ll give you a time line!

Have I not read Hod Broun, Steve Katz, John Brunner, David Ohle, Virgil Pinera, Mano, Topor, Enard, John Hawkes, Vonegutt, Hellerman and Jaroslav Hasek, the latter two not 70s but feeders into Pynchon just the same, Kavan, Delany, etc ad nauseam. Hell, even the Good Soldier Sveik is one step too far.

After all of this, how is one to ’discover� Gravity’s Rainbow? My ‘Psycho� of PoMo. Faugh! I’ve been robbed! Too late to the ball for a good time.