Hi all! This is a little bonus content and is slightly unrelated to this project as of now, but I thought it would be fun to share. (I do use two Gravity’s Rainbow quotes in this so there is your connection!)
Some background. I’m a high school English teacher and was given the opportunity to teach an Honors Humanities course of which I could really design to my own liking since I would be the only one teaching it. I’ve teased this book for the whole year by drawing the post horn and writing WASTE all over the room, outside the room, on tests, on presentations, etc.
We finally got to read it this fourth quarter and which was a blast. I’m not sure if everyone loved the book, but it did seem like there was a very positive feel toward it even with the mass insanity that is Lot 49. Many even said it was the best book they’d read in all of high school, two of my students are reading Inherent Vice for their final self-chosen book project, and two have expressed interest in Gravity’s Rainbow since I talk about it way too much. Post-reading, they wrote their analyses on the books, we had a large Socratic seminar trying to decipher the book, and then one student asked me in the last five minutes of class what I thought it was about. I told her that I would need more than five minutes, but I would come back the next day with my thoughts.
Hence this audio. I decided to audio record my thoughts. I literally have never done anything like this in class because I typically guide them to learn themselves and point them in the right direction (with the occasional short lecture). But I’ve never done something to this degree in class or out of it. So my disclaimer to you is that I do make some errors in what I say and I haven’t even come close to perfecting the art of the long lecture, but I am still incredibly proud of it and would genuinely say it’s one of the most important things I’ve ever done. Especially considering the group of students who I work with are genuinely some of the most intelligent and wonderful humans who I have ever met.
It’s close to 30 minutes of me talking1 which actually had them very engaged much to my surprise. Then a few minutes of questions. Unfortunately my audio cut off for one of the last questions which I’ll write below as well as writing out kind of what I responded with. But listen to the video first for some context before your read what’s below this.
Hope you listened before continuing… The question was along the lines of: “I have a question and it’s kind of personal. So where do you think you are on the ‘highway’ and where do you hope to ‘get off.’” To which I responded, to the best of my memory, “I like to think that I’ve personally found a path off the highway that has been set for ‘us.’ But it would be narcistic to truly say I knew that. I think it is really difficult, if not impossible, to know if you’ve ever truly found the right path forward. The most important thing is not that you have completely succeeded in leaving this path, but that at least there is a genuine attempt to leave it to make the world better. And where I would like to end up is… well it’s like how I stated that this type of change is impossible to achieve alone. So the way I want to end up is having helped people, like you guys, understand these ideas so you also can get off the set highway and that there might be a chance for real change because of that.”
Summarized it all up with a brief statement that despite so much stuff seeming hopeless, I do believe, and I think that the book believes, that there is hope in the world for change, so that it is important to maintain that belief moving forward and not fall into pessimism.
Hope you enjoyed the listen.2
Little Update3
Please forgive my ticks and speech repetitions lol.
As always, I am indebted to Michael S. Judge for some of the points I made. Namely, the tie ins with Oedipa’s name, the black-clad men, and a few other points. Without those jumping off points, I don’t think I ever would have been able to derive as much from this book as I did here, so thanks as always to him.
I realized the individualism/collectivism stuff came a little out of nowhere but it was set up during previous class discussions with the group in the book, the IA (Inamorato Anonymous) being an organization controlled by W.A.S.T.E. who believed/was told that love was not that answer. Thus, keeping them all as individuals, just as They would want. (Plus, obviously, how everyone who could help her either disappears or eventually refuses/‘can’t’ help).
The Crying of Lot 49 - A Lecture on Control and Change