At the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland has a column on Gunter Grass, while George Will writes about the Japanese shrine to war-dead, which drives China into a tizzy.
It’s interesting, how we can’t bear to forget and we can’t bear to remember.
Here’s Hitchens reviewing a book about the moral issues of firebombing Hamburg, Dresden, Wurzbeg and other German cities during the war.
Meanwhile, I just finished re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow, which is (in part) about the German rocket bombardments of England. And behavioral science, organic chemistry, kaballah, Argentine politics, the afterlife, zoot suits, pinball, cinema, the tarot, Nixon, and the respective extinctions of the dodos and the Hereros. I’m still juggling and re-parsing What Went On.
I was at Yasakuni Jinja a few years ago and took some photos which can be found here. Unfortunately the museum was closed when I was there. The Shrine wasn’t all that unlike other shrines, except that the grounds were large and they weren’t really very well landscaped.
Does reading Gravity’s Rainbow a second time aid in remembering any of it?
It was my third reading, actually, and it DID help a lot. I was able to “follow” it much better this time, and could also figure out just where it all went off the rails (midway through the Zone). I just don’t understand why he kept falling into the phantasmagoric, since the existing narrative could’ve stood on its own just fine.
It was a rewarding experience, but it left me with this realization — and it’s something that I probably didn’t have the vocabulary for when I reread it in 1996 — that Pynchon’s zero-sum concept of capitalism is a pretty limited way of understanding markets (and conveying their effects on our lives).
Also, the fixation on blackness, feces, and gay S/M must’ve been pretty edgy in 1974, but it felt kinda dated in 2006. Which is probably a good thing.
You have any recollection of the book?
Almost none. I could tell you all about the issue of Spider-Man where the Green Goblin kills Gwen Stacey, though.