Word: rainbowed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...weather for the third annual Gravity's Rainbow Marathon, which began last Nov. 9 on the flagstone terrace in front of Princeton University's Firestone Library, kicked off rainy and windy. Somewhere into the 38 straight hours of public reading, performed in sequence by 76 volunteers, of every word of Thomas Pynchon's 760-page (in the original edition) novel, conditions turned clear and colder. Still, through the long day and night and next day, listeners assembled and dispersed, some of them harboring a small hope that this academic homage might attract the attendance of the author himself. (Rumors about...
...better-known opening lines in American literature: "A screaming comes across the sky." Thus begins Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the mammoth and, to many, impenetrable novel that established Thomas Pynchon as the most important and mysterious writer of his generation. While his cult exfoliated, the author mostly remained silent; Slow Learner, a collection of five previously published stories, appeared in 1984. Now, at last, comes Vineland, Pynchon's first novel in nearly 17 years, and the faithful can again begin the quest for runic meanings, preferably hidden. And right up at the top of the second page of text, something...
...food in Vineland: um, as a Pynchon character might say, there seems to have been a little downscaling going on around here. The perception is accurate but also, as things develop, a trifle misleading. True, this time out Pynchon has not tried to top the apocalypse of Gravity's Rainbow. He has chosen a subject that may even cause some groaning (Oh, come on, man, grow up) among reviewers and fans: the attempts of some aging hippies to steer clear of the narcs...
...discovered his great motif, the volcano of Cotopaxi. He painted it dozens of times, and in the end the effort of grappling with the utterly unfamiliar landscape of the Andes forced him to maturity as a painter. By 1866, when he set down the glittering double-arc rainbow that spans from bare mountain to jungle in Rainy Season in the Tropics, he had attained a rhetorical grandeur of painted space that...
...painting in the White House, upstairs in the little office. It pictures Lincoln with two generals and an admiral meeting on a boat near the end of a war that pitted brother against brother. Outside the battle rages. And yet what we see in the distance is a rainbow, symbol of hope, of the passing storm. The painting's name? The Peacemakers...