The British worried about the accuracy of these aerial drones. Were they falling haphazardly over the city, or were they hitting their intended targets?
This is the seed of Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow -- a masterful, if difficult, novel about (among other things) paranoia.
Gravity's Rainbow is also a tribute to Richard Fariña's "Been Down So Long It Looks Like up To Me". Pynchon and Richard Fariña were friends. The two are very linked conceptually.
BDSLILLUTM is decidedly about paranoia. Beware girls with green knee socks.
I've never made it very far through Gravity's Rainbow (although I have tried multiple times) but I'm pretty sure it's about the ballistic V-2 missiles rather than the cruise-missile like V-1s.
That's true. It's about the V-2s (in particular, one mysterious weapon the Germans appear to be building called the "Schwarzgerät," with serial number 0000).
But that business of trying to figure out whether the bombs are random or not is central to the book. There are a lot of statisticians running around trying to figure out why the pattern of bomb blasts corresponds to the Poisson distribution.
(Of course, there's also a character whose erections appear to predict bomb blasts. Postmodernism, ftw).
I just finished reading GR a couple of months back, I wish I had read this article before...
I'll be sure to re-read this article before I read GR the next time...
Comments
The British worried about the accuracy of these aerial drones. Were they falling haphazardly over the city, or were they hitting their intended targets?
This is the seed of Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow -- a masterful, if difficult, novel about (among other things) paranoia.
Gravity's Rainbow is also a tribute to Richard Fariña's "Been Down So Long It Looks Like up To Me". Pynchon and Richard Fariña were friends. The two are very linked conceptually.
BDSLILLUTM is decidedly about paranoia. Beware girls with green knee socks.
I've never made it very far through Gravity's Rainbow (although I have tried multiple times) but I'm pretty sure it's about the ballistic V-2 missiles rather than the cruise-missile like V-1s.
That's true. It's about the V-2s (in particular, one mysterious weapon the Germans appear to be building called the "Schwarzgerät," with serial number 0000).
But that business of trying to figure out whether the bombs are random or not is central to the book. There are a lot of statisticians running around trying to figure out why the pattern of bomb blasts corresponds to the Poisson distribution.
(Of course, there's also a character whose erections appear to predict bomb blasts. Postmodernism, ftw).
I just finished reading GR a couple of months back, I wish I had read this article before... I'll be sure to re-read this article before I read GR the next time...