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Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by the American writer Thomas Pynchon. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät ("black device"), which is slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000".

Traversing a wide range of knowledge, Gravity's Rainbow crosses boundaries between high and low culture, between literary propriety and profanity, and between science and speculative metaphysics. It shared the 1974 US National Book Award for Fiction with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Although selected by the Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Pulitzer Advisory Board was offended by its content, some of which was described as 'unreadable', 'turgid', 'overwritten', and in parts 'obscene'. No Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction that year. The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Time named Gravity's Rainbow one of its "All-Time 100 Greatest Novels", a list of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and it is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest American novels ever written.

Dedication
Gravity's Rainbow carries the dedication "For Richard Fariña". Pynchon had been a good friend of Fariña, a folk singer and novelist, since they had attended Cornell University together. Fariña had died in a motorcycle accident in 1966.

The title
Gravity's Rainbow is composed of four parts, each segmented into a number of episodes. In the original editions of the book, the episodes were separated by a row of seven small squares. Many readers, reviewers, and scholars, such as Richard Poirier, have suggested that the squares resemble the film perforations known as "sprocket holes" that engage with the teeth in a film camera or projector to advance the strip of film. The squares, however, were inserted by Edwin Kennebeck, an editor at the book's original publisher, Viking Press. Kennebeck denied that the layout was intentional, and later editions of the novel separate the segments with only one square.

Part 1: Beyond the Zero (21 episodes)
The name "Beyond the Zero" refers to lack of total extinction of a conditioned stimulus. The events of this part occur primarily during the Christmas Advent season of 1944 from December 18–26, coinciding in part with the Battle of the Bulge. The epigraph is a quotation from a pamphlet written by the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and first published in 1962: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death." The epigraph reflects themes of anticipated redemption and blurring of the sacred and secular, both of which pervade Part 1. The epigraph is also potentially ironic, given von Braun's central role in the development of Nazi Germany's V-2 rocket.

Part 2: Une Perm au Casino Hermann Goering (8 episodes)
"Une Perm au Casino Hermann Goering" is French for "A Furlough at the Hermann Göring Casino". The events of this section span the five months from Christmas 1944 through to Whitsunday the following year, May 20, 1945. The misrepresentation or reinterpretation of identity is reflected in Slothrop's journey as well as the epigraph, attributed to Merian C. Cooper, speaking to Fay Wray prior to her starring role in King Kong, as recounted by Wray in the September 21, 1969, issue of The New York Times: "You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood."

Part 3: In the Zone (32 episodes)
Part 3 is set during the summer of 1945 with analepses (literary flashbacks) to the time period of Part 2 with most events taking place between May 18 and August 6; the day of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima and also the Feast of the Transfiguration. The epigraph is taken from The Wizard of Oz, spoken by Dorothy as she arrives in Oz and shows her disorientation with the new environment: "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas any more...".

Part 4: The Counterforce (12 episodes)
Part 4 begins shortly after August 6, 1945, and covers the period up to September 14 of that same year; the day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, with extended analepses to Easter/April Fool's weekend of 1945 and culminating in a prolepsis to 1970. The simple epigraphical quotation, "What?" is attributed to Richard M. Nixon, and was added after the galleys of the novel had been printed to insinuate the President's involvement in the unfolding Watergate scandal. The original quotation for this section (in the advance reading copies of the book) was an excerpt from the lyrics to the Joni Mitchell song "Cactus Tree" ("She has brought them to her senses/They have laughed inside her laughter/Now she rallies her defenses/For she fears that one will ask her/For eternity/And she's so busy being free"), so the change in quotation jumped a large cultural divide.

Plot
Part One: "Beyond the Zero": The opening pages of the novel follow Pirate Prentice, an employee of the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.), first in his dreams, and later around the house in wartime London that he shares with several others in the S.O.E. He soon is driven to the site of a V-2 rocket strike. Pirate's associate Teddy Bloat photographs a map depicting the sexual encounters of U.S. Army Lt. Tyrone Slothrop, an employee of a fictional technical intelligence unit, ACHTUNG. Slothrop and his background are detailed through discussions by some of his co-workers and through references to his family's history, reaching back to early colonial times, in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. (There are loose parallels to Pynchon's own family history.) Slothrop's (fictional) home town of Mingeborough is mentioned for the first time (although the town and a young boy named Hogan Slothrop had previously been featured in Pynchon's short story, "The Secret Integration"). That family setting will be mentioned several times much later in the novel, following the family's decline over time within a Puritan legacy of sterility and death.

Employees of a fictional top secret psychological warfare agency called PISCES, headquartered at a former insane asylum known as "The White Visitation", investigate Slothrop's map of his presumed sexual encounters in London, finding that each location appears to precede a V-2 rocket strike in the same place by several days. This coincidence intrigues Pavlovian behavioral psychologist Edward W. Pointsman, who thinks there may be a direct causal relationship between Slothrop's erections and the missile strikes, and his associate, statistician Roger Mexico, who suggests that the relationship is only a random coincidence of probabilities, as seen in Poisson distributions, leading to further reflections in this section and later on topics as broad as the occult, Determinism, the reverse flow of time, and the sexuality of the rocket itself. Pointsman is all the more intrigued to find that as a baby, Slothrop had been subjected to behavioral experiments conducted by a Dr. Laszlo Jamf that involved the stimulation of his penis to erections.

Many characters not significant until later are introduced in "Beyond the Zero", including one of Dr. Jamf's former students, Franz Pökler, a German engineer who has worked on early German experiments in rocketry and later on the V-2 rocket, and Pökler's wife Leni, a former student radical. Others who appear significant in Part One, such as Pointsman's associate Thomas Gwenhidwy and Roger Mexico's girlfriend Jessica Swanlake, vanish from the narrative and don't re-appear until much later. Indeed, most of the 400 named characters make only single appearances, serving merely to demonstrate the sheer scope of Pynchon's universe. Character names sometimes consist of outrageous puns (such as "Joaquin Stick") but may also relate to particular traits of that character or to themes within the novel. Some names of historical characters also have thematic relevance. Under the influence of sodium amytal administered through Pointsman's maneuvers, Slothrop has a hallucinatory flashback to a scene in Boston's Roxbury district. References here include "Red, the Negro shoeshine boy", who will much later be known as the Black Power leader Malcolm X, and jazz saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, both of whom represent a threat to white racism. Another fictional character, Katje Borgesius, is contacted in this section by Pirate in order to bring her to safety from the Continent to England. Katje had been a Dutch double agent who infiltrated a V-2 rocket-launching battery commanded by a sadistic SS officer named Captain Blicero. Blicero had kept Katje and a young soldier named Gottfried as sex slaves in a perverse enactment of the Hansel and Gretel story. However, Blicero (a Teutonic name connoting Death) is also revealed to be the code name of a former Lieutenant Weissman ("White Man") who earlier appeared in Pynchon's first novel, V. He has had an ongoing but now-severed relationship with Enzian, a Herero he had brought to Germany from German South West Africa (now Namibia), and who is the leader of a group of Herero rocket technicians known as the Schwarzkommando, who had been helping Blicero in his own project to create and fire a rocket. Katje, on the other hand, will come under Pointsman's control in England, while, as the Christmas season ends, Roger Mexico worries about losing Jessica Swanlake to her other, bureaucratic and sedate, boyfriend, Jeremy (also referred to as "Beaver" because of his beard).

Part Two: "Une Perm au Casino Hermann Goering": Slothrop is sent away by his superiors under mysterious circumstances to a casino on the recently liberated French Riviera, in which almost the entirety of Part Two takes place. He is in fact being monitored by associates of Pointsman, including Katje and a linguist named Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. One of the more bizarre Pavlovian episodes involves the conditioning of trained octopus Grigori to attack Katje. Early in part two, the octopus attacks Katje on the beach in France, and Slothrop is "conveniently" at hand to rescue her. Katje and Slothrop eventually have sex. At the Casino, he learns of a rocket with the irregular serial number 00000 (Slothrop comments that the numbering system doesn't allow for four zeroes in one serial, let alone five), which features a mysterious component called the S-Gerät (short for Schwarzgerät, 'black device'), made out of the hitherto unknown plastic Imipolex G. It is hinted that Slothrop's prescience of rocket hits is due to being conditioned as an infant by the creator of Imipolex G, Laszlo Jamf. Later, the reality of this story is called into question, as is the very existence of Slothrop's original sexual exploits.

Meanwhile, at The White Visitation, Pointsman brings the unit and its mission under his control. The unit's nominal commander, Brigadier General Ernest Pudding, who is haunted by his traumatic memories of World War I, is brought to (literal) submission through sado-masochistic rituals with Katje, engineered by Pointsman.

Slothrop becomes increasingly paranoid as old associates disappear. He begins to suspect he is being monitored and adopts the persona (one of many) of "Ian Scuffling", a British war correspondent. He escapes from the casino into "The Zone", the coalescing post-war wasteland of Europe, first to Nice in France and then to Switzerland, searching for the 00000 and S-Gerät. In the closing of Part Two, Katje is revealed to be safe in England, enjoying a day at the beach with Roger Mexico and Jessica, as well as Pointsman, who is in charge of Slothrop's furtive supervision. While unable to contact Slothrop (or prohibited from contacting him), Katje continues to follow his actions through Pointsman, who is showing greater signs of mental instability.

Part Three, "In The Zone": Slothrop's quest continues for some time as he meets or is chased by other characters, compared at various times to such characters as Orpheus and Wagner's Tannhäuser. He learns more about his own past, Dr. Jamf's experiments on him, and his father's apparent complicity. In this section, Slothrop comes to doubt that his search for the S-Gerat is a Grail quest and finds his paranoia ("the fear that everything is connected") succumbing to "anti-paranoia" ("the fear that nothing is connected"). On the way he meets Geli Tripping, a self-described witch in love with a Russian colonel, Vaslav Tchitcherine, who had previously worked for the Soviet state bringing the New Turkic Alphabet to central Asia, especially Soviet Kazakhstan, where he had sought a mystical experience referred to as the "Kirghiz Light". Slothrop and Geli have a near-mystical experience at the summit of the Brocken, the German mountain that was the setting for Walpurgisnacht in Goethe's Faust. Slothrop's travels bring him to Nordhausen, in Germany, and the Mittelwerk, where V-2 rockets were assembled using slave labor from the Dora concentration camp. Confronted by the racist American Major Duane Marvy, he escapes in a slapstick chase.

Slothrop meets members of the Schwarzkommando, a fictional cadre of African rocket technicians, descended from survivors of the Herero genocide of 1904 who were brought to Europe by German colonials. An extensive subplot details a schism within the Schwarzkommando; one faction is bent on a program of racial suicide, while the other finds mystical, semi-religious meaning in the V-2 rocket. Another long subplot details Tchitcherine's past and his quest to hunt and kill Enzian, leader of the latter group of Schwarzkommando and, it turns out, Tchitcherine's half-brother.

With papers identifying him as former German film star Max Schlepzig in Berlin, Slothrop adopts an operatic Viking costume with the horns removed from the helmet, making it look like a rocket nose-cone and is given the name "Rocketman". One of the people he meets is the American sailor Pig Bodine (who or whose ancestors appear in most of Pynchon's other works). Bodine commissions Slothrop to retrieve a large stash of hashish from the centre of the Potsdam Conference. In the nearby abandoned movie studio that was once the center of the German film industry, Slothrop meets Margherita (Greta) Erdmann, a former silent film actress from the era of German Expressionist film, now in physical and mental decline. Slothrop also comes to meet Gerhardt von Göll, a megalomaniac German director who had previously been seen in Britain, directing a fake propaganda film featuring Black soldiers in Germany. Von Göll is now involved in black market activities. In the longest episode of the book, we learn more of the history of Franz Pökler, who fathered a child, Ilse, with his wife Leni after being aroused by Greta's image in an erotic scene in Alpdrücken, von Göll's "masterpiece". Greta had also become pregnant in the filming of that scene, producing a daughter of her own, Bianca. While working on the V-2 project, Pökler had been coerced into working on the S-Gerät by Blicero, who was holding Ilse in a concentration camp, allowing her to visit Pökler only once a year. As Ilse ages over several years, however, Pökler becomes increasingly paranoid that she is really a series of impostors sent each year to mollify him. Pökler's work for Blicero is tied to the history of organic chemistry, with its own outcomes in the production of dyes and plastics and the international cartels that would come to control them, such as I.G. Farben, and a culture of death-in-life.

Slothrop is led by Margherita to northern Germany and onto the Anubis, a private yacht (named for the Egyptian god of the dead) filled with uninhibited European aristocrats. Here, Slothrop has sex with Margherita's teenage daughter, Bianca. Margherita, along with her partner, Thanatz, are revealed to know more about the 00000, S-Gerät, and Imipolex G than they let on. Ensign Morituri, a Japanese liaison officer, tells Slothrop about how Margherita and Thanatz had brought their traveling sado-masochistic act to Captain Blicero's rocket battery, from which Rocket 00000 had apparently been fired in the spring of 1945, towards the end of the war. Margherita spent many days in a mysterious and ambiguously described factory, where she was clothed in an outfit made from the "erotic" plastic Imipolex G. Slothrop falls overboard and is rescued by black marketeers heading towards Peenemünde, the test site for the V-2 rocket, now occupied by Soviet forces.

Slothrop later returns to the Anubis to find Bianca dead, possibly hastening his already hinted-at decline. He continues his pilgrimage through northern Germany, having changed clothing with Tchitcherine, arriving at Lüneberg Heath and the town of Cuxhaven, also sites of tests and launches by Allied forces of captured V-2 rockets. On the way, he again meets Major Marvy, who fails to recognize him. At a village festival, he is invited by children to don the costume of a pre-Christian Pig Hero, "Plechazunga". Meeting Pökler at the abandoned amusement park where Ilse used to meet her father, Slothrop finds out more about his childhood and the 00000. It becomes steadily apparent that Slothrop is connected to Laszlo Jamf through Lyle Bland, a Slothrop family friend who apparently played a role in funding Jamf's experiments on the infant Slothrop. Bland, in turn, is connected to many threads, including pinball machines and the Masons, that implicate him as part of an international conspiracy of industrial cartels.

Slothrop is introduced to and sleeps with Solange, a prostitute who is actually Leni Pökler, recently freed from a concentration camp herself. In the same building, Major Marvy has found Slothrop's pig costume and dons it, only to be caught, sedated, and castrated by agents working for Pointsman, who believe that Slothrop is still in the suit. Major political and social realignments have been taking place throughout The Zone. Towards the end of this section, several characters not seen since early in the novel make a return, including Pointsman, who is now in official disgrace, as bureaucratic operatives consider how to deal with him. Other characters, including Pirate Prentice and Katje Borgesius, begin to coalesce as a group styling itself as the "Counterforce" in resistance to the emerging post-war military-industrial complex.

Part Four: The Counterforce: Elements in this section become increasingly fantastic and sometimes self-referential, the narrator at one point saying, "You will want cause and effect. All right" (page 663 in the Viking edition) before explaining how certain events in Part 3 tie in. Despite the efforts of some to save him, Slothrop is repeatedly sidetracked until his persona fragments totally, more than one hundred pages before the novel's end. A flashback reveals how Roger Mexico, now in Germany, has come to join the Counterforce despite its inherent contradictions as a group organizing against international organizations. A long digression gives the story of "Byron the Bulb", a sentient, seemingly immortal lightbulb whose existence links with Dr. Jamf and his experiments and to the integration of power companies and their Grid to the network of cartels. The Schwarzkommando become reunited and finish construction of their own version of the 00000 rocket.

There are several brief, hallucinatory stories of comic, fallible superheroes; silly Kamikaze pilots; and an "Incident in the Transvestites' Toilet" where Slothrop has been hiding in drag. Such incidents may be products of Slothrop's finally collapsed mind; or of the increasingly chaotic state of affairs outside the realm of a rising technological class and society that comes to be labeled the "Raketen-Stadt" (Rocket-State) of the future. For Slothrop, these scenes more or less culminate with his finding, and failing to understand, a headline announcing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Tchitcherine is told by his superior officer that he is to head back to the U.S.S.R. with some German rocket scientists, despite his own misgivings about Marxist dialectics. A conference is held by members of the Counterforce, which now includes some with questionable pasts, personalities, or motives, such as von Göll. Jessica tells Roger that she is going to marry Jeremy/Beaver. Invited to a dinner at the home of a German industrialist, Roger and Pig Bodine manage to escape with the help of some disgusting culinary repartee, but it becomes increasingly clear that the Counterforce does not have the capacity to counter the emerging Rocket State, in part because "the Man has a branch office in each of our brains".

Some individuals, however, provide some hope. Earlier, Slothrop had encountered the young boy Ludwig on what seems to be a futile quest to find his lost pet lemming. Meeting once again, it turns out that the lemming has been found. Geli Tripping's complete love for Tchitcherine and her connection with the natural organic world contrasts with a flashback in which Blicero explains to Gottfried his obsessive desire to transcend nature and "its cycle of infection and death". Geli does cast a spell on Tchitcherine that (perhaps) keeps him from recognizing Enzian when they finally meet, averting a potentially fatal encounter.

The final identification of Slothrop of any certainty is his picture on the cover of an album by obscure English band "The Fool" (another allusion to Tarot, which becomes increasingly significant), where he is credited as playing the harmonica and kazoo. The hundred pages or so of the novel include titled vignettes that summarize events in Slothrop's home town of Mingeborough; offer a (self-referential) reading of the Tarot cards for Weismann/Blicero, who also prepares for a final launch of the 00000 rocket with Gottfried in the nosecone; describe failed last-minute non-rescues by popular culture heroes; and allude to the Sacrifice of Isaac and the mythical figures of Apollo and Orpheus.

As the novel draws to an ambiguous close, the launch of the rocket with Gottfried is intercut with scenes contemporary to the novel's publication, at the (fictional) Orpheus (movie) Theater in Los Angeles, managed by a character named "Richard M. Zhlubb", a thinly-veiled parody of President Richard Nixon. Zhlubb is running a "Bengt Ekerot / Maria Casares Film Festival". Both actors played personifications of Death, in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, respectively, overt examples of several possible references in the novel to European modernist cinema. The novel concludes as a rocket (perhaps Weissman's) is frozen in its last moment of descent above the theater, where the film being projected has broken, and a hymn composed by Slothrop's heretical colonial ancestor, William Slothrop, is offered.

Style
Poet L. E. Sissman, in his Gravity's Rainbow review for The New Yorker, said of Pynchon: "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drudged and drunken orgy."

The plot of the novel is complex, containing over 400 characters and involving many different threads of narrative which intersect and weave around one another. The recurring themes throughout the plot are the V-2 rocket, interplay between free will and Calvinistic predestination, breaking the cycle of nature, behavioral psychology, sexuality, paranoia and conspiracy theories such as the Phoebus cartel and the Illuminati. Gravity's Rainbow also draws heavily on themes that Pynchon had probably encountered at his work as a technical writer for Boeing, where he edited a support newsletter for the Bomarc Missile Program support unit. The Boeing archives are known to house a vast library of historical V-2 rocket documents, which were probably accessible to Pynchon. The novel is narrated by many distinct voices, a technique further developed in Pynchon's much later novel Against the Day. The style and tone of the voices vary widely: Some narrate the plot in a highly informal tone, some are more self-referential, and some might even break the fourth wall. Some voices narrate in drastically different formats, ranging from movie-script format to stream of consciousness prose.

The narrative contains numerous descriptions of illicit sexual encounters and drug use by the main characters and supporting cast, sandwiched between dense dialogues or reveries on historic, artistic, scientific, or philosophical subjects, interspersed with whimsical nonsense-poems and allusions to obscure facets of 1940s pop culture. Many of the recurring themes will be familiar to experienced Pynchon readers, including the singing of silly songs, recurring appearances of kazoos, and extensive discussion of paranoia. According to Richard Locke, megalomaniac paranoia is the "operative emotion" behind the novel, and an increasingly central motivator for the many main characters. In many cases, this paranoia proves to be vindicated, as the many plots of the novel become increasingly interconnected, revolving around the identity and purpose of the elusive 00000 Rocket and Schwarzgerät. The novel becomes increasingly preoccupied with themes of Tarot, Paranoia, and Sacrifice. All three themes culminate in the novel's ending, and the epilogue of the many characters. The novel also features the character Pig Bodine, of Pynchon's novel V. Bodine would later become a recurring avatar of Pynchon's complex and interconnected fictional universe, making an appearance in nearly all of Pynchon's novels thereafter.

Several characters and situations from Pynchon's earlier works make at least brief appearances in the novel. Slothrop's (fictional) home town of Mingeborough, Massachusetts was the setting for his short story "The Secret Integration", which featured a young character named Hogan Slothrop, who in retrospect would seem to be Tyrone's nephew. Weismann (aka Blicero) and the story of the Herero genocide appeared in the chapter "Mondaugen's Story" in V. The eponymous character Kurt Mondaugen also reappears in Gravity's Rainbow. Some early reviewers even suggested that Gravity's Rainbow was a sequel to Pynchon's first novel, playing on the term "V-2". In Gravity's Rainbow, Clayton "Bloody" Chiclitz is a toy manufacturer accompanying Major Marvy, but he appeared later as a defense contract magnate in The Crying of Lot 49, and his company. Yoyodyne, was introduced in V. Pig Bodine also appeared in V. but had his origin in Pynchon's early short story "Low-Lands". Bodine or variants on his name and character also appear in later Pynchon novels. A very minor character in Gravity's Rainbow, Ronald Cherrycoke, would seem to be a descendant of the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, who narrates Pynchon's later novel Mason & Dixon.

Publication and critical reception
Viking Press published Gravity's Rainbow on March 14, 1973. Owing to the book's length, the hard-cover edition was priced expensively at $15 (equivalent to $ in ). Viking's president, Thomas Guinzburg, worried that the novel's high price was potentially "inhibiting", leading the publisher to take the uncommon move of simultaneously publishing a soft-cover edition at $4.95 (equivalent to $ in ).

On the novel's publication, it was reviewed in the New York Times by Richard Locke under the headline "One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years". Locke compared Pynchon's writing to that of Vladimir Nabokov, and wrote that "its technical and verbal resources bring to mind Melville and Faulkner. Immersing himself in 'the destructive element' and exploring paranoia, entropy and the love of death as primary forces in the history of our time, Pynchon establishes his imaginative continuity with the great modernist writers of the early years of this century." Locke noted that "Pynchon is obviously capable of the most intricate literary structures—plots and counterplots and symbols that twist and tangle in time and space", but was less impressed by the novel's form: "the structure is strained beyond the breaking point. Reading it is often profoundly exasperating; the book is too long and dense; despite the cornucopia of brilliant details and grand themes, one's dominant feelings in the last one to two hundred pages are a mounting restlessness, fatigue and frustration."

Reviewing the novel in the Saturday Review in March 1973, Richard Poirier stated that "At thirty-six, Pynchon has established himself as a novelist of major importance." In the highly positive review, Poirier compared Gravity's Rainbow to Moby Dick and Ulysses, and that it "marks an advance beyond either book in its treatment of cultural inheritance". Poirier noted the wide range of Pynchon's writing and said that "Pynchon is willing and able, that is, to work from a range of perspectives infinitely wider, more difficult to manage, more learned than any to be found elsewhere in contemporary literature. His genius resides in his capacity to see, to see feelingly, how these various perspectives, apparently so diverse and chaotic, are begotten of the same technology, the same supportive structures that have foundations in the theology of the seventeenth century and the science of the nineteenth." (...) "Pynchon is almost unbearably vulnerable to every aspect of contemporary experience, open to every form of sight and sound, democratically receptive to the most common and the most recondite signatures of things."

Reviewing the novel in a Swedish publication, author and critic Artur Lundkvist noted Pynchon's rare talent but was critical about the wide range of the novel: "Pynchon's weakness appears to be criticlessness, a lack of values, indiscriminate inclusion. Nothing is too high or too low to put into his all consuming machinery. But that makes the meaning of his work ambivalent or undetermined, despite the enormous power of expression and energy in his writing." Lundkvist criticized the influences from popular culture in the novel and concluded "How obvious the frequent transitions between shameless entertainment and ambitious novel art is he runs the risk of repelling two opposite types of readers. Where some finds it irresistbly funny others will find it wearisome boring... Pynchon's uncommon flexible and at the same time consumedly schizoid talent runs the risk of drowning in the rampant excess."

Anthony Burgess included Gravity's Rainbow in his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (1984), writing "this work, not yet as widely understood [as V. or The Crying of Lot 49], has a gravity more compelling than the rainbow technique (high colour, symbolism, prose tricks) would seem to imply".

On the 50th anniversary of the publication in February 2023, John Semley positively reviewed Gravity's Rainbow in Wired, noting that: "It is at once a busy almanac of its era and a sort of field guide for our own. It echoes eerily in the new-ish millennium. In a way, our own age's greasy stew of absurdity and apocalypticism, creeping death tinged with clown-shoe idiocy, suggests a world that has finally, fatefully, caught up with Pynchon. We are still living under Gravity's Rainbow."

The character name "Tyrone Slothrop" has been read as an anagram of "Sloth or Entropy" by writer Salman Rushdie.

Cultural influence
Italian scholar Guido Almansi described it as the greatest American novel published after the end of the Second World War. Sascha Pöhlmann writing for The Literary Encyclopedia stated that it is "often considered as the postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel in general". Literary scholar Tony Tanner has hailed it as "both one of the great historical novels of our time and arguably the most important literary text since Ulysses".

Though the book won the National Book Award for 1974, Pynchon chose neither to accept nor acknowledge this award. Thomas Guinzberg of the Viking Press suggested that the comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey accept the award on his behalf, to which Pynchon agreed. Corey's comical address at the ceremony was also noteworthy for being interrupted by a streaker crossing the stage.

Gravity's Rainbow has been translated to many languages, including French (as Rainbow, 1975), Spanish (as El arco iris de gravedad, 1978), German (as Die Enden der Parabel, 1981) and Serbian (as Duga gravitacije, 2019). Episodes of the novel have been translated to Japanese.

Gravity's Rainbow was translated into German by Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, and some critics think that it has had a large influence on Jelinek's own writing.

Adaptations
According to Robert Bramkamp's docudrama about the V2 and Gravity's Rainbow, entitled Prüfstand VII, the BBC initiated a project to produce a film adaptation of Gravity's Rainbow between 1994 and 1997. Some unfinished footage is included in Bramkamp's film. The Bramkamp movie includes other dramatized sequences from the novel as well, while the main focus is on Peenemünde and the V2. The 2011 film Impolex by Alex Ross Perry is loosely inspired by Gravity's Rainbow, the title referring to the fictional polymer Imipolex G used to condition Slothrop in the novel. To commemorate 75 years since the end of World War II, in 2019, German public radio broadcasters SWR 2 and Deutschlandfunk produced a 14-hour radio play in German language which was aired in April 2020.

Music
The lyrics of Devo's song "Whip It" were inspired by Gravity's Rainbow parodies of limericks and poems; Gerald Casale specified:

"The lyrics were written by me as an imitation of Thomas Pynchon's parodies in his book Gravity's Rainbow. He had parodied limericks and poems of kind of all-American, obsessive, cult of personality ideas like Horatio Alger and 'You're #1, there's nobody else like you' kind of poems that were very funny and very clever. I thought, 'I'd like to do one like Thomas Pynchon,' so I wrote down 'Whip It' one night."

The novel inspired the 1984 song "Gravity's Angel" by Laurie Anderson. In her 2004 autobiographical performance The End of the Moon, Anderson said she once contacted Pynchon asking permission to adapt Gravity's Rainbow as an opera. Pynchon replied that he would allow her to do so only if the opera was written for a single instrument: the banjo. Anderson said she took that as a polite "no".

German avant-rock group Cassiber incorporated text from the novel in their 1990 album A Face We All Know. The use of the text was cleared with Pynchon's agent.

Pat Benatar released a 1993 album called Gravity's Rainbow after reading Thomas Pynchon's novel.

"Gravity's Rainbow" is a song by the British band Klaxons, from the album Myths of the Near Future (2007).

American progressive rock group Coheed and Cambria's song "Gravity's Union", from their science fiction concept album The Afterman: Descension (2013), is named in honor of the novel.

Canadian experimental rock group Rei dos Leitoes's song "Silent on the Island" (2010) incorporates themes from Gravity's Rainbow in its second and fourth Verse passages.

David Lowery of the American alternative rock group Camper Van Beethoven cites Gravity's Rainbow as an inspiration for the song "All Her Favorite Fruit" (1989).

The group TV Girl's song "Taking What's Not Yours", from Who Really Cares references having left Gravity's Rainbow at an ex-girlfriend's apartment.

British punk/new wave band The Paranoids released 'Theme From Gravity's Rainbow' as the 'B' side to 'The Love Job' (Hurricane Records (2) – FIRE 14 1980) with a lyric inspired by the novel. Produced by Roy Wood.

American Rock Band The Used released a song sharing the same title as part of their 2020 Album Heartwork. Bert McCracken, the band's lead singer, said that Gravity's Rainbow is one of his favorite books of all time.

Art
New York artist Zak Smith created a series of 760 drawings entitled, One Picture for Every Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel "Gravity's Rainbow", also known by the title Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel "Gravity's Rainbow". Occupying eleven rows and over eleven meters of wall space, the drawings attempt to illustrate, as literally as possible, every page of the book. The piece includes palm trees, shoes, stuffed toys, a lemon meringue pie, Richard Nixon, Sigmund Freud, an iron toad wired to an electric battery, a dominatrix, and other images from the novel. The series had a successful reception at New York's 2004 Whitney Biennial event, and was described "as a tour de force of sketching and concept" (Abbe 2004). In November 2006, Tin House Books published, Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel "Gravity's Rainbow", the book of Smith's Gravity's Rainbow drawings.

In 1999 a painting by the American artist Fred Tomaselli, inspired by the novel and titled Gravity's Rainbow (Large), was added to the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City.

Film

 * Benoit Blanc, a character in the 2019 American film Knives Out, refers to Gravity's Rainbow before admitting that he had not read it. In the standalone sequel, Glass Onion, the novel physically appears, being read by Serena Williams.
 * An early scene in the 1988 American film Miracle Mile features a character played by Denise Crosby taking what appears to be a copy of a (fictional) study guide, Cliff's Notes: Gravity's Rainbow, out of a briefcase and studies it for a short time. The film deals with the reaction of characters to an impending nuclear missile attack.
 * The novel appears in the film Interstellar.

Video games
Speaking about his video game The Witness, director Jonathan Blow said "I want to make games for people who like to read Gravity's Rainbow". He later elaborated: "Gravity's Rainbow is a very free book in a certain way. It doesn't care if you're following along exactly. It has a certain freedom and joy to it while also being pretty dark a lot of the time. I can't think of a game that has managed this emotional pan-spectrality of being very joyful and playful while simultaneously being bleak."

title: Gravity's Rainbow


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Jacques Brault

Jacques Brault (29 March 1933 – 20 October 2022) was a French Canadian poet and translator who lived in Cowansville, Quebec, Canada. He was born to a poor family, but received an excellent education at the Université de Montréal and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He became a professor at the Université de Montréal, in the Département d'études françaises and the Institut des sciences médiévales, and made frequent appearances as a cultural commentator on Radio-Canada.

Jacques Brault's extensive body of writings includes works of outstanding merit in most literary genres. He is the author of plays, novels and works of short fiction, translations and several seminal works of Canadian literary criticism. However, it is primarily for his work as a poet that Jacques Brault is admired by readers and known outside of Canada.

Brault died on 20 October 2022, at the age of 89.

Works

 * Mémoire – 1965
 * Allain Grandbois: poètes d'aujourd'hui — 1968
 * La poésie ce matin — 1971
 * Trois partitions — 1972
 * L'en dessous l'admirable — 1975 (translated into English as Within the Mystery)
 * Poèmes des quatre côtes — 1975
 * Agonie — 1984
 * Moments fragiles — 1984 (translated into English as Fragile Moments)
 * Poèmes — 1986
 * La poussière du chemin — 1989
 * Il n'y a plus de chemin — 1990 (translated into English as On the Road No More)
 * Lac noire
 * Ô saisons, ô châteaux — 1991
 * Au petit matin — 1993
 * Chemin faisan — 1995
 * Au fonds du jardin — accompagnements — 1996
 * Au bras des ombres — 1997

Accolades

 * Québec-Paris award, for Mé, in 1968
 * Governor General's Award
 * for Quand nous serons heureux, in 1970
 * for Agonie, in 1985
 * for his translation of the collection of poems Transfiguration by E.D Blodgett, in 1999
 * Prix Alain-Grandbois, for Il n'y a plus de chemin, in 1991
 * Ludger-Duvernay Prize (1978)
 * Prix Athanase-David (1986)
 * Prix Gilles-Corbeil (1996)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Jacques Brault


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Mount Dana

Mount Dana is a mountain in the U.S. state of California. Its summit marks the eastern boundary of Yosemite National Park and the western boundary of the Ansel Adams Wilderness. At an elevation of 13061 ft, it is the second highest mountain in Yosemite (after Mount Lyell), and the northernmost summit in the Sierra Nevada which is over 13000 ft in elevation. Mount Dana is the highest peak in Yosemite that is a simple hike to the summit. The mountain is named in honor of James Dwight Dana, who was a professor of natural history and geology at Yale.

Mount Dana is composed of prebatholithic rock that is mostly reddish metamorphic rock, which was composed by metavolcanics of surfacing magma from the Mesozoic Era.

Mount Dana's northern face includes a small, receding glacier known as the Dana Glacier. The Dana Meadows lie at the foot of the mountain. From the top, lakes throughout Dana Meadows, Mono Lake, Tioga Peak and many other mountains are in view.

Hike
From the Tioga Pass Road there are many easy routes. , available that lead to the summit along the mountain's western or southern slopes. These routes rise 3108 ft in elevation in 2.9 mi, (a 20.3% average grade). The trail is not frequently maintained.

There is a clearly marked path leading just above tree line. After topping a ridge, a set of use-paths and ducked routes are present, with the main path running along the easterly ridgeline. Additionally, numerous alternate trail segments begin and end at various points on the southwestern face, making parts of this hike a difficult class 2. The path segments turn into scree toward the summit, where a shallow stone-walled shelter and register are found. Significant snow fields on the mountain slopes can exist late into the summer season. Total round trip hiking time can be anywhere between 3 and 12 hours depending many factors, such as acclimatization to elevation.

After reaching a plateau above the tree line, most vegetation disappears with the exception of lichen and a few high alpine plants such as Sky Pilot (Polemonium eximium). Fauna are largely limited to spiders and insects, such as black/brown grasshoppers. The only mammals other than humans are American Pikas (which are lagomorphs, related to rabbits) and marmots.

Thunderstorms are known to arise suddenly, making the rocks slippery, and the hiking dangerous year round.

Even experienced hikers can face altitude sickness, due to the high elevation.

In the summer of 2009, an NPS employee died after falling on a technical rock climbing route on the northeast face of Mount Dana.

title: Mount Dana


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User talk:AquaRichy

Hello, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you ever need editing help visit How does one edit a page and experiment at Sandbox. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Help or add a question to the Village pump. Regards -- sannse 15:13 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Editing of large number pages
You have done a lot of editing of Wikipedia's large number pages from billion to octillion. In general in Wikipedia, please use the American names. 66.245.27.48 22:44, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

User Categorisation
You were listed on the Wikipedians/Ontario page as living in or being associated with Ontario. As part of the User categorisation project, these lists are being replaced with user categories. If you would like to add yourself to the category that is replacing the page, please visit Category:Wikipedians in Ontario for instructions.--Rmky87 04:09, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:AquaRichy


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Religious art

Religious art is a visual representation of religious ideologies and their relationship with humans. Sacred art directly relates to religious art in the sense that its purpose is for worship and religious practices. According to one set of definitions, artworks that are inspired by religion but are not considered traditionally sacred remain under the umbrella term of religious art, but not sacred art.

Other terms often used for art of various religions are cult image, usually for the main image in a place of worship, icon in its more general sense (not restricted to Eastern Orthodox images), and "devotional image" usually meaning a smaller image for private prayer or worship. Images can often be divided into "iconic images", just showing one or more figures, and "narrative images" showing moments from an episode or story involving sacred figures.

The use of images has been controversial in many religions. The term for such opposition is aniconism, with iconoclasm being the deliberate destruction of images by people of the same religion.

Buddhist art
Buddhist art originated on the Indian subcontinent following the historical life of Siddhartha Gautama, 6th to 5th century BC, and thereafter evolved by contact with other cultures as it spread throughout Asia and the world.

Buddhist art followed believers as the dharma spread, adapted, and evolved in each new host country. It developed to the north through Central Asia and into Eastern Asia to form the Northern branch of Buddhist art.

Buddhist art followed to the east as far as Southeast Asia to form the Southern branch of Buddhist art.

In India, the Buddhist art flourished and even influenced the development of Hindu art, until Buddhism nearly disappeared in India around the 10th century due in part to the vigorous expansion of Islam alongside Hinduism.

Tibetan Buddhist art
Most Tibetan Buddhist artforms are related to the practice of Vajrayana or Buddhist tantra. Tibetan art includes thangkas and mandalas, often including depictions of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Creation of Buddhist art is usually done as a meditation as well as creating an object as aid to meditation. An example of this is the creation of a sand mandala by monks; before and after the construction prayers are recited, and the form of the mandala represents the pure surroundings (palace) of a Buddha on which is meditated to train the mind. The work is rarely, if ever, signed by the artist. Other Tibetan Buddhist art includes metal ritual objects, such as the vajra and the phurba.

Indian Buddhist art
Two places suggest more vividly than any others the vitality of Buddhist cave painting from about the 5th century AD. One is Ajanta, a site in India long forgotten until discovered in 1817. The other is Dunhuang, one of the great oasis staging posts on the Silk Road...The paintings range from calm devotional images of the Buddha to lively and crowded scenes, often featuring the seductively full-breasted and narrow-waisted women more familiar in Indian sculpture than in painting.

Christian art
Christian sacred art is produced in an attempt to illustrate, supplement and portray in tangible form the principles of Christianity, though other definitions are possible. It is to make imagery of the different beliefs in the world and what it looks like. Most Christian groups use or have used art to some extent, although some have had strong objections to some forms of religious image, and there have been major periods of iconoclasm within Christianity.

Most Christian art is allusive, or built around themes familiar to the intended observer. Images of Jesus and narrative scenes from the Life of Christ are the most common subjects, especially the images of Christ on the Cross.

Scenes from the Old Testament play a part in the art of most Christian denominations. Images of the Virgin Mary, holding the infant Jesus, and images of saints are much rarer in Protestant art than that of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

For the benefit of the illiterate, an elaborate iconographic system developed to conclusively identify scenes. For example, Saint Agnes depicted with a lamb, Saint Peter with keys, Saint Patrick with a shamrock. Each saint holds or is associated with attributes and symbols in sacred art.

History
Early Christian art survives from dates near the origins of Christianity. The oldest surviving Christian paintings are from the site at Megiddo, dated to around the year 70, and the oldest Christian sculptures are from sarcophagi, dating to the beginning of the 2nd century. Until the adoption of Christianity by Constantine Christian art derived its style and much of its iconography from popular Roman art, but from this point grand Christian buildings built under imperial patronage brought a need for Christian versions of Roman elite and official art, of which mosaics in churches in Rome are the most prominent surviving examples. Christian art would soon become the foundation of churches across Europe. Stained glass windows often depict biblical scenes to be reflected across the inner workings of the building. Murals and altarpiece art also fill churches with intricate and expressive Christian images.

During the development of early Christian art in the Byzantine empire (see Byzantine art), a more abstract aesthetic replaced the naturalism previously established in Hellenistic art. This new style was hieratic, meaning its primary purpose was to convey religious meaning rather than accurately render objects and people. Realistic perspective, proportions, light and colour were ignored in favour of geometric simplification of forms, reverse perspective and standardized conventions to portray individuals and events. The controversy over the use of graven images, the interpretation of the Second Commandment, and the crisis of Byzantine Iconoclasm led to a standardization of religious imagery within the Eastern Orthodoxy.

The Renaissance saw an increase in monumental secular works, but until the Protestant Reformation Christian art continued to be produced in great quantities, both for churches and clergy and for the laity. During this time, Michelangelo Buonarroti painted the Sistine Chapel and carved the famous Pietà, Gianlorenzo Bernini created the massive columns in St. Peter's Basilica, and Leonardo da Vinci painted the Last Supper. The Reformation had a huge effect on Christian art, rapidly bringing the production of public Christian art to a virtual halt in Protestant countries, and causing the destruction of most of the art that already existed.

As a secular, non-sectarian, universal notion of art arose in 19th-century Western Europe, secular artists occasionally treated Christian themes (Bouguereau, Manet). Only rarely was a Christian artist included in the historical canon (such as Rouault or Stanley Spencer). However many modern artists such as Eric Gill, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Jacob Epstein, Elisabeth Frink and Graham Sutherland have produced well-known works of art for churches. Through a social interpretation of Christianity, Fritz von Uhde also revived the interest in sacred art, through the depiction of Jesus in ordinary places in life.

Since the advent of printing, the sale of reproductions of pious works has been a major element of popular Christian culture. In the 19th century, this included genre painters such as Mihály Munkácsy. The invention of color lithography led to broad circulation of holy cards. In the modern era, companies specializing in modern commercial Christian artists such as Thomas Blackshear and Thomas Kinkade, although widely regarded in the fine art world as kitsch, have been very successful.

The last part of the 20th and the first part of the 21st century have seen a focused effort by artists who claim faith in Christ to re-establish art with themes that revolve around faith, Christ, God, the Church, the Bible and other classic Christian themes as worthy of respect by the secular art world. Art could then be used to cultivate the church to participate in Christianity once again. Artists such as Makoto Fujimura have had significant influence both in sacred and secular arts. Other notable artists include Larry D. Alexander, Gary P. Bergel, Carlos Cazares, Bruce Herman, Deborah Sokolove, and John August Swanson.

Confucian art
Confucian art is inspired by Confucianism, coined after the Chinese philosopher and politician Confucius. Confucian art originated in China, then spread westwards on the Silk Road, southward down to southern China and then onto Southeast Asia, and eastwards through northern China on to Japan and Korea. While it still maintains a strong influence within Indonesia, Confucian influence on western art has been limited. While Confucian themes enjoyed representation in Chinese art centers, they are fewer in comparison to the number of artworks that are about or influenced by Daoism and Buddhism.

History
Prior to the Han dynasty, the Chinese art hierarchy considered music as the highest form of art and dismissed calligraphy, poetry, and painting as art forms and craft practiced by the lower class. Nevertheless, poetry was also popular during Confucius's time, and poetry was both praised and ranked high in status with music. According to Confucius and his disciples, music strives to create and reflect harmony in the world; hence, education should begin with the foundations of poetry and moral behavior, and conclude with music. Over time, the development of the Chinese writing system promoted the growth of calligraphy and visual arts in terms of social status. Confucian aesthetics and values further contributed to the development of these visual art forms, with landscape paintings and calligraphy works centralizing on the written works and teachings of Confucianism.

Hindu art

Hinduism, with its 1 billion followers, it makes up about 15% of the world's population and as such the culture that ensues it is full of different aspects of life that are effected by art. There are 64 traditional arts that are followed that start with the classics of music and range all the way to the application and adornment of jewellery. Since religion and culture are inseparable with Hinduism recurring symbols such as the gods and their reincarnations, the lotus flower, extra limbs, and even the traditional arts make their appearances in many sculptures, paintings, music, and dance.

Islamic art

A prohibition against depicting representational images in religious art, as well as the naturally decorative nature of Arabic script, led to the use of calligraphic decorations, which usually involved repeating geometrical patterns and vegetal forms (arabesques) that expressed ideals of order and nature. These were used on religious architecture, carpets, and handwritten documents. Islamic art has reflected this balanced, harmonious world-view. It focuses on spiritual essence rather than physical form.

While there has been an aversion to potential idol worship through Islamic history, this is a distinctly modern Sunni view. Persian miniatures, along with medieval depictions of Muhammad and angels in Islam, stand as prominent examples contrary to the modern Sunni tradition. Also, Shi'a Muslims are much less averse to the depiction of figures, including the Prophet's as long as the depiction is respectful.

Figure representation
The Islamic resistance to the representation of living beings ultimately stems from the belief that the creation of living forms is unique to God. It is for this reason that the role of images and image makers has been controversial.

The strongest statements on the subject of figural depiction are made in the Hadith (Traditions of the Prophet), where painters are challenged to "breathe life" into their creations and threatened with punishment on the Day of Judgment. The Qur'an is less specific but condemns idolatry and uses the Arabic term musawwir ("maker of forms", or artist) as an epithet for God. Partially as a result of this religious sentiment, figures in painting were often stylized and, in some cases, the destruction of figurative artworks occurred. Iconoclasm was previously known in the Byzantine period and aniconicism was a feature of the Judaic world, thus placing the Islamic objection to figurative representations within a larger context. As ornament, however, figures were largely devoid of any larger significance and perhaps therefore posed less challenge. As with other forms of Islamic ornamentation, artists freely adapted and stylized basic human and animal forms, giving rise to a great variety of figural-based designs.

Arabesque
Arabesque is a decorative art style characterized by repetitive, intricate patterns of intertwined plants and abstract curvilinear motifs. It is believed to have originated in the Islamic world, and its use spread throughout the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa. It has played an important role in Islamic art, often serving as a form of religious expression. The term "arabesque" is a French term derived from the Italian word arabesco, meaning "in the Arabic style" Arabesque patterns can be found in various media, including ceramics, architecture, calligraphy, and textiles. Since the 19th century, Arabesque art has been highly influential in Western art and design, with many designers and artists incorporating patterns into their work.

Calligraphy
Calligraphy is a highly regarded element of Islamic art. The Qur'an was transmitted in Arabic, and inherent within the Arabic script is the potential for ornamental forms. The employment of calligraphy as ornament had a definite aesthetic appeal but often also included an underlying talismanic component. While most works of art had legible inscriptions, not all Muslims would have been able to read them. One should always keep in mind, however, that calligraphy is principally a means to transmit a text, albeit in a decorative form. From its simple and primitive early examples of the 5th and 6th century AD, the Arabic alphabet developed rapidly after the rise of Islam in the 7th century into a beautiful form of art. The main two families of calligraphic styles were the dry styles, called generally the Kufic, and the soft cursive styles, which include Naskhi, Thuluth, Nastaliq and many others.

Geometry
Geometric patterns make up one of the three non-figural types of decoration in Islamic art. Whether isolated or used in combination with non-figural ornamentation or figural representation, geometric patterns are popularly associated with Islamic art, largely due to their aniconic quality. These abstract designs not only adorn the surfaces of monumental Islamic architecture but also function as the major decorative element on a vast array of objects of all types.

Types Of Geometric Styles Geometric patterns are frequently associated with Islamic art, partly because of their iconic appeal, whether used alone or in conjunction with figural depiction or non-configurable adornment. These abstract patterns are used as the primary ornamental feature on various items of all kinds, in addition to adorning the surfaces of massive Islamic buildings. Although geometric ornamentation may have peaked in the Islamic world, the Greeks, Romans and Sasanians in Iran were the sources for geometric shapes and elaborate patterns. Islamic artists incorporated significant components of the classical past to invent a new form of decoration that highlighted the vitality of order and unity. Islamic astronomers, mathematicians and scientists contributed these forms, which were crucial for their type of art style.

History And Design

Geometric shapes resemble the arabesque design found in many vegetal designs in terms of its abstraction, repeated motifs and symmetry. Geometric designs frequently coexist with calligraphic decoration. Circles and interlaced circles, squares or four-sided polygons are the typical star pattern resulting from squares and triangles inscribed in a circle. Multi-sided polygons are the four fundamental shapes or “repeat units” from which the more complex patterns are built. It is evident, however, that the intricate designs found on several things come in various sizes and configurations, making them suitable for inclusion more than category.

The geometric shape of the circle is used in Islamic art to signify the fundamental symbol of oneness and the ultimate course of all diversity in creation. As the illustration below shows, many classic Islamic patterns have ritual beginnings in the circle's raw partition into regular sections.

Four circle divisions resulted in the above pattern, created in Yazd, Iran, in the fifteenth century. From there, a regular grid of triangles is created, and then the design is added on top of it. See how the intricate pattern intertwines with the fundamental design, shown in the images above as a white outline.

Alhambra Palace Geometry

Geometric patterns, biomorphic design (arabesque) and calligraphy are expertly combined in the Alhambra in Spain from the 14th century. Islamic art is made up of these three separate but complementary fields. They are arranged in a three-tiered hierarchy, with geometry at the button. This is frequently indicated by its use on the lower portions of walls or floors, as in the example above.

The decorative features used use a variety of symmetries that are now recognized as belonging to separate mathematical groups, yet the patterns’ delicacy and elegance are unmatched in contemporary mathematical thought. Although it was once customary in Islam to use geometric shapes, these designs are works of architecture. Since the eighth century, Muslim calligraphers and geometric pattern designers have decorated mosques, castles and manuscripts. Most often, Islamic geometric designs are employed in places of worship as a way to exalt God. Grand structures made by divine geometry include buildings, gardens and floors. The Blue Mosque Geometry

There are observable patterns spanning a thousand years of Islamic history and throughout the entire Islamic world since these geometric patterns are also connected to [https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/islamic-culture#:~:text=The%20term%20%E2%80%9CIslamic%20culture%E2%80%9D%20embraces,at%20any%20point%20in%20time. Islamic culture]. In some pieces of architecture, Islamic architects follow the same guidelines, such as in the Blue Mosque and the Alhambra in Granada pictured above. The Alhambra palace in Spain and the Samarkand mosque in Uzbekistan are just two examples of the art of repeated geometric designs that can be seen worldwide.

Jain art
Jain art refers to religious works of art associated with Jainism. Even though Jainism spread only in some parts of India, it has made a significant contribution to Indian art and architecture.

Mandaean art
Mandaean art can be found in illustrated manuscript scrolls called diwan. Mandaean scroll illustrations, usually labeled with lengthy written explanations, typically contain abstract geometric drawings of uthras that are reminiscent of cubism or prehistoric rock art.

Sikh art
The art, culture, identity, and societies of the Sikhs has been merged with different locality and ethnicity of different Sikhs into categories such as 'Agrahari Sikhs', 'Dakhni Sikhs' and 'Assamese Sikhs'; however there has emerged a niche cultural phenomenon that can be described as 'Political Sikh'. The art of diaspora Sikhs such as Amarjeet Kaur Nandhra, and Amrit and Rabindra Kaur Singh (The Singh Twins), is partly informed by their Sikh spirituality and influence.

Images of the Sikh Gurus
Sikhism was founded in the 16th century by Guru Nanak, who was first painted more than 200 years after he lived. The widely popular portraits of the ten Sikh gurus only appeared in the first half of the 18th century. One of the first set of paintings of the Gurus were commissioned by Baba Ram Rai, the eldest son of the seventh Sikh guru, Guru Har Rai.

Most of the early portraits of the Sikh Gurus were painted in courtly Mughal style. Under the Mughal empire, Punjabi artists at the time became trained in the Mughal style of painting, resulting in their work being highly influenced by the Mughal style of art. The early portraits of the Sikh Gurus and the elements in them, like their outfits, turbans, and poses, looked similar to Mughal nobles and princes. The Gurus are identified in Devanagari, Gurmukhi, and Persian scripts, also composed in the Mughal style. In a painting from around 1750, the sixth Sikh guru is depicted in courtly Mughal dress and setting.

One of the first images of Guru Nanak depicts him as a pious, religious man with simple clothes and a rosary held in his hand, portraying his contemplative nature. The earlier of the ten Gurus have their images modeled on Guru Nanak's piety and simplicity. A transformation can be noticed with the sixth Guru when elements of political resistance and power are added, showing Sikh political struggles at the time. Further, with Guru Gobind Singh, elements of grandeur were added, such as royal attire, precious jewels, elegant shoes, a grand turban, and a warrior-like sword.

The Gurus are also extensively depicted in the Janamsakhis (hagiographies of the Guru). There are many paintings and depictions of Guru Nanak's life, specifically in the B-40 Janamsakhi. He is shown growing up from a little boy to a teenager to a youth, and then into a middle-aged man and eventually an old, wise man. The images also depict many core Sikh values along with the Political and Cultural forces that influenced his life and religion.

Sikh Art and Architecture during Maharaja Ranjit Singh's Reign
Maharaja Ranjit Singh's reign (1801-1839) holds prime importance in Sikh history. He was a great patron of art and architecture and sponsored the construction of many magnificent forts, palaces, temples, gurdwaras, precious jewels, clothes, colorful paintings, minting of coins and luxury tents and canopies. The most significant of these were the golden throne built by Hafez Muhammad Multani and the bejewelled canopy for the Guru Granth Sahib.

Ranjit Singh's most remarkable contribution was the refurbishment of the Harmandir Sahib. He invited skilled architects, artists, wood carvers and other craftsmen to Amritsar for the renovation. He also hired a technical expert for the gold plating of the Harmandir Sahib. The Harmandir Sahib is now embellished with semi-precious stones like lapis lazulli and onyx along with its marble walls on the exterior. The walls also boast Arabesque and kaleidoscopic designs. The interior is lined with mirrors and colorful glass and its upper part is covered with gilded copper plates. Besides the Harmandir Sahib, Ranjit Singh also contributed to the embellishments many other gurdwaras, drawing spectacular imagery from the Guru Granth Sahib, the lives of the Gurus and the Janamsakhis. He also contributed to temples and mosques, with one of the most significant ones being expensive silver doors at a Hindu temple of Goddess Kali. Under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, cities like Lahore, Amritsar, Multan, Sialkot, Srinagar and Patiala thrived as centres of the arts.

Taoist art
Taoist art (also spelled as Daoist art) relates to the Taoist philosophy and narratives of Lao-tzu (also spelled as Laozi) that promote "living simply and honestly and in harmony with nature."

Religious Symbolism and Iconography
Across many religions, symbols or icons are used to represent specific beliefs. These small pieces of art are summaries of religion which can and have been used by many to imply what their beliefs are. For example, Christianity being symbolized by the cross icon and Islam being symbolized by the image of the star and crescent. Also see: Religious symbols

title: Religious art


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Warren Defever

Warren Defever (first name often spelled Warn; born April 30, 1969) is a musician and producer, originally from Livonia, Michigan, and now based in Detroit. He is most known for his chameleonic project His Name Is Alive, though he is active in numerous other circles. He produced, engineered, and/or remixed recordings by Iggy and the Stooges, Easy Action, Low, Ida, Michael Hurley, Califone, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, the Gories, the Go, Nomo, Saturday Looks Good to Me, Ethan Daniel Davidson, Faruq Z. Bey, the Von Bondies, Reba Fritz, Destroy All Monsters, Jenny Toomey, Slumber Party, John Sinclair, Elizabeth Mitchell, and Lisa Loeb, as well as HNIA offshoot Velour 100.

Defever was raised in a strict religious household, along with his brothers, Johnny and Matt. He grew up a music fan. His grandfather was a musician from Saskatchewan and had taught Warren and his brothers how to play various musical instruments.

Defever began recording while still in high school, and toured as the bassist of psychobilly rock band Elvis Hitler.

For many years, Defever recorded in the basement of his parents' house, which he later bought from them.

Around the same time His Name Is Alive was departing from 4AD Records, Defever opened his own recording studio, Brown Rice, in the Detroit area. Along with Davin Brainard, Defever runs a home record label, timeSTEREO.

In 2007, Defever opened The UFO Factory, a new studio in Detroit. Everything inside was painted silver, including the piano.

title: Warren Defever


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LDraw

LDraw is a system of freeware tools for modeling Lego creations in 3D on a computer. The LDraw file format and original program were written by James Jessiman, although the file format has since evolved and extended. He also modeled many of the original parts in the parts library, which is under continuous maintenance and extension by the LDraw community. Following Jessiman's death in 1997, a variety of programs have been written that use the LDraw parts library, and file format. LDraw models are frequently rendered in POV-Ray or Blender, free 3D ray tracers.

File format
The LDraw format can divide a model into steps so that the building instructions can be incorporated into the design, and also allows for steps that rotate the camera and even move parts around in an elementary fashion. It also allows for models to be incorporated in the construction of larger models to make design easier. This also makes the file format space efficient: instead of specifying the polygons of every single stud of a specific brick for example, a shared stud file is included multiple times with transformation applied.

Parts, models, sub-models and polygons are all treated the same and are not specific to Lego models (only the parts library is). The format could be used to store any type of 3D model. Some have created bricks of other building systems for use with LDraw.

The following main three filename extensions are used by LDraw:
 * files implementing a part, subpart or primitive use
 * a Lego model consisting of 1 or more bricks use
 * multiple  files can be aggregated into files of type

The file format uses plain text data, and uses the charset UTF-8 without BOM.

Example File: 3003.dat, the Implementation of a 2 x 2 Brick
The above code defines the basic 2×2 brick. It consists of a five-sided box (box5.dat, outside) and an inverted five-sided box (inside), the connection between those two, consisting of four quads (the four lines starting with 4), the four studs on top of it (stud.dat) and the long hollow stud in the inside (stud4.dat).

All lines in an LDraw file are either empty or start with a command number, where 0 means no command (though over time, some lines starting with 0 followed by specific text in capitals also got a meaning as meta commands). The command 1 for example includes a subfile. It specifies the file's path and a transformation matrix that should be applied to it, as well as its color (where 16 means "use the color that was used when including the current file"). Command 4 specifies a four-sided polygon. There are also commands that define 2D lines. Such lines give the parts a clear contour even in non-shaded orthographic renderings.

Example File: pyramid.ldr, a Lego Model of a Pyramid
The following code specifies a simple pyramid model with three layers made of 2 x 4 bricks (brick # 3001) with changing color and a 2 x 2 brick on top.

title: LDraw


text:
Piculet

The piculets are a distinctive subfamily, Picumninae, of small woodpeckers which occur mainly in tropical South America, with just three Asian and one African species.

Like the true woodpeckers, piculets have large heads, long tongues which they use to extract their insect prey and zygodactyl feet, with two toes pointing forward, and two backwards. However, they lack the stiff tail feathers that the true woodpeckers use when climbing trees, so they are more likely than their relatives to perch on a branch rather than an upright trunk.

Their bills are shorter and less dagger-like than the true woodpeckers, so they look for insects and grubs mainly in decaying wood. Similarly, they re-use woodpecker holes for nesting, rather than making their own holes. The eggs are white, as with many hole nesters.

Typically these birds have grey or dull green upperparts and dark-streaked white underparts.

Systematics and evolution
Although not well known from fossils, the evolution of piculets is now considered rather straightforward. The disjunct occurrence of the genera, with one African species of the Southeast Asian Sasia and one Southeast Asian species of the American Picumnus is of comparatively recent origin. Molecular dating, calibrated with geographic events in the absence of a good fossil record, points at the Late Miocene, c. 8 MYA, as the point where the two genera divided into their two respective lineages. At that time, there was a notable global cooling period. The molecular distances between piculets and woodpeckers are comparatively small for subfamilies, agreeing with the hypothesis that the split between the three groups of woodpecker-like picids subfamilies occurred only during the Miocene climatic optimum, around 15 MYA. The later radiation of South American piculets is probably due to changes in topology and climate fluctuations during the Pliocene and Pleistocene. The genus Verreauxia may be accepted because of pronounced morphological similarities, but the two Picumnus lineages, despite having diverged long ago, are virtually alike except for head coloration.

The Antillean piculet (Nesoctites micromegas) has proven to be a very distinct species evolutionarily between piculets and woodpeckers and thus is nowadays placed in a subfamily of its own.

The arrangement of species in the genera is as follows

Genus Picumnus
 * Speckled piculet, P. innominatus
 * Bar-breasted piculet, P. aurifrons
 * Orinoco piculet, P. pumilus
 * Lafresnaye's piculet, P. lafresnayi
 * Golden-spangled piculet, P. exilis
 * Black-dotted piculet, P. nigropunctatus
 * Ecuadorian piculet, P. sclateri
 * Scaled piculet, P. squamulatus
 * White-bellied piculet, P. spilogaster
 * Arrowhead piculet, P. minutissimus
 * Spotted piculet, P. pygmaeus
 * Speckle-chested piculet, P. steindachneri
 * Varzea piculet, P. varzeae
 * White-barred piculet, P. cirratus
 * Ocellated piculet, P. dorbignyanus
 * Ochre-collared piculet, P. temminckii
 * White-wedged piculet, P. albosquamatus
 * Rusty-necked piculet, P. fuscus
 * Rufous-breasted piculet, P. rufiventris
 * Ochraceous piculet, P. limae
 * Mottled piculet, P. nebulosus
 * Plain-breasted piculet, P. castelnau
 * Fine-barred piculet, P. subtilis
 * Olivaceous piculet, P. olivaceus
 * Greyish piculet, P. granadensis
 * Chestnut piculet, P. cinnamomeus

Genus Sasia
 * Rufous piculet, S. abnormis
 * White-browed piculet, S. ochracea

Genus Verreauxia
 * African piculet, V. africana

title: Piculet


text:
Doyle Brunson

Doyle Frank Brunson (August 10, 1933 – May 14, 2023) was an American poker player who played professionally for over 60 years. He was a two-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event champion, a Poker Hall of Fame inductee, and the author of several books on poker.

Brunson was the first player to win $1 million in poker tournaments. He won ten WSOP bracelets throughout his career, tied with Johnny Chan and Erik Seidel for third all time, behind Phil Hellmuth's seventeen and Phil Ivey's eleven. He is also one of only three players to have won the Main Event at the World Series of Poker multiple times, which he did in 1976 and 1977. He is also one of only three players, along with Bill Boyd and Loren Klein, to have won WSOP tournaments in four consecutive years. In addition, he is the first of six players to win both the WSOP Main Event and a World Poker Tour title. In January 2006, Bluff magazine voted Brunson the most influential force in the world of poker.

On June 11, 2018, Brunson announced he was retiring from tournament poker that summer. That day, he entered the $10,000 2–7 Single Draw at the 2018 WSOP. He made the final table and finished in sixth place, earning $43,963.

Early life
Doyle Frank Brunson was born in Longworth, Texas, on August 10, 1933, as one of three children. He went to Sweetwater High School where he excelled at athletics. In the 1950 Texas Interscholastic Track Meet, he won the one-mile event with a time of 4:43. After receiving offers from many colleges, he attended Hardin–Simmons University in Abilene, Texas.

The Minneapolis Lakers of the NBA showed interest in Brunson, but a knee injury ended his hopes of becoming a professional basketball player. He occasionally required a crutch because of the injury and had said that breaking his leg ruined his lifetime dream of playing in the NBA. Brunson obtained a bachelor's degree in 1954 and a master's degree in administrative education the following year with plans to become a school principal.

Brunson had begun playing poker before his injury, playing five-card draw. He played more often after being injured, and his winnings paid for his expenses. After graduating, he took a job with Burroughs Corporation as a salesman for their business machines. On his first day, he was invited to play in a seven-card stud game and won more than a month's salary. He soon left the company and became a professional poker player.

Poker career
Brunson started by playing in illegal games on Exchange Street in Fort Worth with friend Dwayne Hamilton. Eventually, they began traveling around Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, playing in bigger games, and meeting fellow professionals Amarillo Slim and Sailor Roberts. The illegal games Brunson played in during this time were usually run by criminals who were often members of organized crime, so rules were not always enforced. Brunson had recounted the violence and criminality of that era, such as the time a player at another table was shot and killed during a game.

Hamilton moved back to Fort Worth while the others teamed up and traveled together, gambling on poker, golf, and, in Doyle's words, "just about everything". They pooled their money for gambling. After six years, they made their first serious trip to Las Vegas and lost all of it, almost six figures. They decided to stop playing as partners but remained friends.

Brunson finally settled in Las Vegas. He was a regular player at the World Series of Poker since its inception in 1970, playing in the Main Event nearly every year since then, in addition to many of the other preceding bracelet-awarding events. He made some WSOP championship event final tables before his back-to-back wins, but since this was when the event was winner-take-all, they are not counted as cashes. Besides his two championship wins in 1976 and 1977, Brunson's other Main Event cashes are: 1972 (3rd), 1980 (runner-up to three-time Main Event winner Stu Ungar), 1982 (4th), 1983 (3rd), 1997 (16th), 2004 (53rd), and 2013 (409th).

Brunson authored Super/System, which is widely considered one of the most authoritative books on poker. Originally self-published in 1978, Super/System was the book credited with transforming poker by giving ordinary players insight into how professionals such as Brunson played and won, so much so that Brunson believed that it cost him a lot of money. An updated revision, Super/System 2, was published in 2004. Besides Brunson, several top poker players contributed chapters to Super/System including Bobby Baldwin, Mike Caro, David Sklansky, Chip Reese, and Joey Hawthorne. The book is subtitled "How I made one million dollars playing poker" by Doyle Brunson. Brunson is also the author of Poker Wisdom of a Champion, originally published as According to Doyle by Lyle Stuart in 1984.

Brunson continued to play in the biggest poker games in the world, including a $4,000/$8,000 limit mixed poker game in "Bobby's Room" at the Bellagio. He also played in many of the biggest poker tournaments around the world. He won his ninth gold bracelet in a mixed games event in 2003, and in 2004, he finished 53rd (in a field of 2,576) in the No Limit Texas hold 'em Championship event. He won the Legends of Poker World Poker Tour (WPT) event in 2004 (garnering him a $1.1 million prize). He finished fourth in the WPT's first championship event.

Early in the morning on July 1, 2005, less than a week after Chan had won his 10th gold bracelet (presented to each WSOP tournament winner) – setting a new record – Brunson tied him at the 2005 WSOP by winning the $5,000 No Limit Shorthanded Texas Hold'em event. He was six bracelets behind Phil Hellmuth, who earned his 16th bracelet at the 2021 World Series of Poker. He cashed in the 2013 World Series of Poker $10,000 No Limit Hold'em Championship event, marking the fifth decade he had cashed in the event. Doyle temporarily came out of retirement from tournament play to participate in the 2021 WSOP No-Limit Hold-Em Master of Ceremonies Invitational, placing 5th behind Phil Hellmuth (4th), Norman Chad (3rd), Lon McEachern (2nd), and Vince Vaughn (1st).

As of 2023, his total live tournament winnings exceed $6,100,000. He totaled over $3,000,000 in earnings from his 37 cashes at the WSOP.

Brunson had two Texas hold'em hands named after him. The holding of ten-deuce bears his name because he won the No Limit Hold 'Em event at the World Series of Poker two years in a row with a ten and a two (1976 and 1977), in both cases completing a full house as an underdog in the final hand. The other hand known as a "Doyle Brunson", especially in Texas, is the ace and queen of any suit because, in his words, he "[tries] never to play this hand".

World Series of Poker bracelets
Adapted from the World Series of Poker website

Personal life
Brunson met his future wife, Louise, in 1959 and married her in August 1962. Louise became pregnant, but a tumor was discovered in Doyle's neck later that year. The surgeons found that the cancer had spread when it was operated on. They felt that an operation would prolong his life enough for him to see the baby's birth, so they went ahead. After the operation, no trace of the cancer could be found.

Brunson attributed his cure to the prayers of friends of his wife and their correspondence with Kathryn Kuhlman, a self-proclaimed Christian faith healer. Louise developed a tumor shortly afterward, and when she went for surgery, her tumor was also found to have disappeared. In 1975, their daughter Doyla was diagnosed with scoliosis, yet her spine straightened completely within three months. Doyla died at 18 of a heart-valve condition.

His son, Todd, also plays poker professionally. Todd won a bracelet in the $2,500 Omaha Hi-Lo at the 2005 World Series of Poker, making Doyle and Todd the first father–son combination to win World Series bracelets. His daughter Pamela played in the 2007 World Series of Poker, outlasting Todd.

Brunson died in Las Vegas on May 14, 2023, aged 89.

SEC investigation
On December 14, 2005, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed an action to enforce subpoenas issued to the attorneys of Doyle Brunson regarding his unsolicited offer in July 2005 to buy WPT Enterprises, Inc., the publicly traded owner of the World Poker Tour, at a high premium over its then-market value. Shortly after that, the Commission contended, a public relations firm Brunson hired, and a website he endorsed, publicly announced the offer. The Commission asserted that the publication of this offer, widely covered in the media, triggered a steep rise in WPT's stock price on record trading volume. Brunson and his lawyers immediately stopped responding to the WPT and the media when pressed for details. Instead, after delivering the offer, Brunson withdrew from the engagement. When the WPT publicly disclosed Brunson and his law firm's unresponsiveness, its stock price sharply declined, costing investors tens of millions of dollars in lost market value.

The SEC formally investigated whether Brunson's offer and its publication violated federal securities laws, including the anti-fraud provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The SEC subpoenaed documents and testimony from Brunson's lawyers as part of its investigation. However, Brunson, who invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to testify in the investigation, directed his lawyers to withhold certain documents and not to testify on critical aspects of the offer, under the attorney–client privilege and work-product doctrine. The subpoena enforcement action sought to set aside these privileges on various legal grounds, including the crime-fraud exception, and to compel Brunson's firm to provide the requested documents and testimony. The case was dropped by the SEC in 2007.

Doyles Room
Doyles Room was an online poker room established in 2004. Originally on the Tribeca Poker Network (now part of the Playtech iPoker network), Doyles Room moved to the Microgaming (Prima) Poker Network in 2007, then to the Cake Poker Network in January 2009, and most recently to the Yatahay Network in January 2011.

On May 26, 2011, Doyles Room was seized in accordance with an investigation into the violation of online gambling laws. Following the events of April 15, Brunson cut ties with Doyles Room. In October 2011, Doyles Room was acquired by Americas Cardroom.

title: Doyle Brunson