#tyrone slothrop

[ofleafstructure]

"In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where’s his basis for comparing?"

-Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

[orchidblack]

"Well, they put me in the worst lock-up that I've ever been in, and I'd been in solitary confinement for over a year and a half. This was just a clean box with nothing but a mattress. The only contact I had with human beings was, five times a day, I could hear somebody coming down the hall to open the 'swine trough' and pass me my food. And I'd say, "Hey, can I have something to read?" And they'd say, "No". One of them was this black guy and, this one night, he came back. He opens up the trough and says, "Here man," and throws in a book. And it's dark, so I waited 'til dawn and picked it up. And it was Gravity's Rainbow."

-Timothy Leary, in conversation with William Gibson (1989)

[inajar]

“Fuck you,” whispers Slothrop. It’s the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (pt. 2, ch. 2)

[biblioklept]

Plastics and paranoia (Harold Bloom on Thomas Pynchon)

Plastics and paranoia (Harold Bloom on Thomas Pynchon)

For Pynchon, ours is the age of plastics and paranoia, dominated by the System. No one is going to dispute such a conviction; reading the New York Timesfirst thing every morning is sufficient to convince one that not even Pynchon’s imagination can match journalistic irreality. What is more startling about Pynchon is that he has found ways of representing the impulse to defy the System, even…

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[crudmeridian]

i'm larping as tyrone slothrop this halloween so everybody needs to get the FUCK out of my way

[inajar]

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (pt. 2, ch. 7)

[spaceintruderdetector]

“There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present as his own assembley--perhaps heavily paranoid voices whisper, 'his time's assembley'--and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead and being scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A.E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity...-to no clear happiness or redeeming cataclysm.”

[iamseamus]

Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter. “Personal density,” Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemunde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, “is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.”

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “Δt” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even--as Slothrop now--what you’re doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment....

Gravity’s Rainbow. Thomas Pynchon