u/ecstatic_clump_9676

I'm coining this term to explain what's going on in Palestine. During phase 1 of genocide, target population increases. This appears benign, but it's actually how genocide works. For example, it's well known that Germans started by letting the populations of Herero and then Jews increase, for reasons. The Hutu even artificially inflated the Tutsi population so they'd have more people to kill.

Phase 1 has been ongoing for as long as I've been alive. This is actually really bad because it means that by time I'm 50 the Palestinian population will begin to decline. Something to watch out for.

don't let them confuse you, the Zionist entity is crafty (they even laced the boot of the NYPD because Palestine isn't even enough for these people?). I heard they also drop cats off of their roofs for fun, and some of them have horns on their heads

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

gravity's rainbow. Just finished Part 1 yesterday. Starting Part 2 today. But now I'm thinking, in paranoiac fashion, about how appropriate this book is for me at this point in my life (this book was made for me, like Slothrop's rocket). "An army of lovers can be defeated". The working class is invisible in this book, all you see are isolated and atomized bureaucrats, officers, professionals.

Since transitioning from industrial labor to cleaning college dorms, I learned a lot about my own psychology. This transition didn't occur in a personal vacuum, or at random: it happened because I moved in with my boyfriend. The factories around here only had night shifts available, and besides, his mom used to be a cleaner at the same college I now work at. He likes that I remind him of his mom. He even got a cheap limo from a funeral home when I moved in, because he grew up hearing this story about how his mom couldn't get her car to start one day and a friend had to drive her to work in a limo. Roger and Jessica are, I guess, the main lovers in the story.

Well, love is not enough. During the semester, I got depressed as fuck. I stopped doing much of anything—reading, writing (not that I had ever been a very disciplined reader or writer, but this was different). My cat also died, which didn't help. For some reason, I became very interested in bataille, but in a very superficial way that didn't involve much actual reading. I told my analyst I wanted to dissolve and become a convulsing body with no identity. In a few sessions, I managed to breakdown into a bizarre combination of laughter, tears, and yes, convulsions. Nothing was very interesting or worthwhile.

Well, the semester ended. The students went home, and we started deep cleaning the dormitories. This is a highly collaborative process: a crew of about twenty of us go from building to building. During the semester, I was completely isolated, mopping my own sections, cleaning the toilets I was designated, never getting to meet the other cleaners in other buildings. All of a sudden, now, it's like being in a factory again: after deep cleaning the students' rooms, we have scrub crews of five people where one person slops, followed by a scrubber, followed by a sucker with the wet vac, followed by a warm rinse and a cold rinse.

Well, all at once I was alive again. I started reading Gravity's Rainbow—I don't know why, but I'm glad I did. I talk to my coworkers about it. We make jokes, we text and snapchat each other, tell stories about the time I put my dick in a hot pizza when I was 12 or about my one coworker's experiences in prison, or tales about when one professor got fired for smearing shit all over the walls and using it to write messages about the dean. About who got raped by their stepdad, who did this, who did that, what it means to be gay, why some people are straight, about how much students love smearing their boogers on the walls and spilling soda in the furnaces, or how much trouble they have getting their shit into the actual toilets.

It's exactly like being in a factory again. I started working on getting better at writing (slow progress). I care about reading. I get excited about things again.

Well, there is a theme here: the enormous psychological benefit of being part of a crew, a workplace, of collaborative or cooperative labor and solidarity which can make a huge difference. Just some resonances from my own life, because I think this is hugely related to the book.

I'm sure some people will get pissed off and say, again, "just read the book". But, oh well, I'm not the type of person who can quietly read a book without discussion. Sucks for you. :p

Read through it a few times now, and I really don't see what's going on beyond the sentimental claptrap with a bunch of people singing in a church. Up til now it's been a pretty awesome ride with shit, erections, rockets, poisson distributions, pavlovian behaviorism, fun philosophical contrasts between Roger and pointsman, questionable paranoia, constant shifts so nothing I've read remains what it was, fragmentation, shifting perspective almost like cubism, machinery, and so on. The only real problem was the lack of a proletariat and the elite/preterite framing obscuring the class struggle. Now it's becoming, like, genuinely bad literature?

Wtf is this bullshit now? Is there a lot of this? Am I missing something? Is there irony here? Satire? Anything to save this? up to this point it's been my second favorite book besides maldoror. :/

edit: the next section is good again

For the record, I like stuff like Isidore Ducasse, Anais Nin, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon. But I want to get better at writing myself (starting from not very good at all), and I got recommended to try reading Denis Johnson, especially if I'm interested in making use of programs like Grubstreet, because apparently they like that kind of thing a lot. (I'm very uneducated, no degree, blue collar manual labor, out of the loop)

Well anyway, I know this is exactly what I'm not supposed to say. Like if someone said "I tried reaching pynchon but it was all garbled nonsense" or, you know, "why are rothko and miro famous when my 5 year old can do that". And I see he does have, like, rhythm and stuff.

But i can't get over the feeling that this is just some middle class college kid who thinks, you know, it's really cool slumming it with a bunch of junkies and trying to talk like them, and endowing them with this weird aura of spiritual bullshit. It reminds me of a really bad movie I saw a while ago called Field Niggas that was equally pretentious and also pointlessly romanticized a certain lifestyle.

It's also a bit weird because I have coworkers who talk kind of like Denis Johnson writes in some of these stories, like their natural way of speaking is to say "yous guys", and that's fine. But they wouldn't write that way, and it just comes across kind of cheap and insulting I think.

Might be I'm just annoyed because it's how I was told people are supposed to write now. But, like, really? Why are the college educated crowd so obsessed with sounding like or living like homeless junkies?

Surprised I don't see more about this on the internet. No real porn or anything? Dude's described as a mean mother (POV Tyrone) with swoony eyes (POV Jessica) who you can tell is rugged as hell (hopefully with a beard), surrounded by all these studs, and pynchon literally describes him barely getting his cock out of his pants in time before he blows.

It's a good book overall, I'm about 100 pages in. Politically kind of dumb, a lot of weird idealist baggage and maybe leans too heavily into the paranoia stuff without a solid enough materialist basis, but the writing is really fun. I enjoy how fragmented it is. Reminds me of what it's like to start in a new factory where all of a sudden you're surrounded by all these moving parts which you gradually learn to name and work with.

But Christ, it's fucking hot. The stuff with Tyrone slothrop fantasizing about the toilet after he was given truth serum was really cool too.

I hate to be too hasty because maybe I'll change my mind, but so far this is solidly my number two favorite book (number one: Songs of Maldoror). Maybe it'll start to drag or something.

I know there's a lot of, like, resonances you can follow our (le froyd, froid, freud), and in a way it's like I'm barely scratching the surface by reading it once, and that's part of the appeal I guess, like there's this abundance of material that will never really run out (or will it?). But yeah I'm surprised there's not more attention to how fucking sexy it is. I want pirate to sit on my face.