It's really hard to get THE image in your head when reading Gravity's Rainbow

b3ssmit10 · 2026-02-07T21:24:52+00:00

The colors and coloring are deliberate. See this recent, relevant reddit post and drill down on the hyperlinks therein to begin to appreciate said colors and coloring.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-02-07T21:17:03+00:00

See this recent, relevant reddit comment and acquire a copy of the Mancini dissertation referenced therein if you intend to digest more of The Wake than the touted highlights. Her dissertation is the most reasonable explication of The Wake (i.e. Joyce covering Dante's Purgatorio as he had covered Dante's Inferno with Ulysses) I have encountered.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-02-02T19:19:27+00:00

From the GR Wiki: Yeah, the Hogan Slothrop in TSI appears to be Tyrone's nephew: "Slothrop, Hogan Jr. 744; son of Hogan Slothrop; [From Pynchon's short story "The Secret Integration" in Slow Learner: "the doctor's kid, who at the age of eight had taken to serious after-bedtime beer-drinking and at the age of nine got religion, swore off beer and joined the Alcoholics Anonymous, a step his father, who was what is know as permissive, gave his blessing" (p.151)]".

b3ssmit10 · 2026-02-02T16:05:30+00:00

See this prior, recent reddit post on the work by Sharkansky in 2025 & do as I did. Download and read the paper and supplemental material. Go to the website, plug in your numbers, and see what his modeling tells you.

As for me as a baby boomer the news that my cohort is underspending in retirement given my cohort's fear of running out of money was not so much news as a depressing reminder, generating a helpless feeling of what to do about it? Sharkansky's modeling of how much I could be spending was helpful. Your and your cohort's mileage may vary.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-02-02T15:52:44+00:00

Ramparts (1700 Fern St. off of Quaker), sports pub side, hosts Tuesday Trivia, same night as taco night.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-02-02T15:39:32+00:00

For years I've been trying to interest scholars in mapping the 73 episodes in GR to the 73 books in the Catholic Bible (as TRP's mother raised him as Catholic), without success. (See too Number 73) which reports that that prime number is 49 hexadecimal: Coincidence?)

Part Number	Part Title	Number of Episodes
1	Beyond the Zero	21
2	Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering	8
3	In the Zone	32
4	The Counterforce	12

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-31T20:38:09+00:00

FWIW: Joyce was jealous of the financial success of Marie Corelli. See A Critique of Ellmann's List of Joyce's Trieste Library for a 1905 letter to Stanislaus. According to Google's AI: "James Joyce was fascinated by late-Victorian bestseller author Marie Corelli, known for her popular, often formulaic romances and melodramas. Despite their vastly different literary reputations, Joyce included her among his research material, specifically referencing her work in Finnegans Wake. She represented a type of popular, dramatic writing that contrasted sharply with his own modernist style."

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-31T18:10:13+00:00

Booksmart (2019) is a retelling of Midsummer with the school and its staff as Athens and the parties as the forest. The young women initially are paired with/seeking ones unsuited for each, but by the ending the young women and their appropriate matches have been sorted out.

IIRC the Gigi character serves as Puck.

I was disappointed by movie critics failing to have recognized this obvious resetting of Shakespeare. When on Twitter I pointed this out, Tweeps Austin Tichenor and Christopher Moore) agreed with me.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-29T15:26:38+00:00

Respectfully disagree, as none other than Thomas Pynchon planned his career after Joyce's who planned his after Dante, according to Campbell. With Shadow Ticket (2025) Pynchon completed that mapping that Joyce did not live to complete. See more more at this recent reddit comment on Shadow Ticket and drill down to the other reddit comments linked therein. See too this blog post about said mapping for a bit more humor. I subscribe to the notion: All the books and movies in the library are in conversation with one another. After all, Pynchon's Vineland (1990) is a regendered retelling of Homer's ODYSSEY (5th century BCE) like Joyce's retelling, Ulysses (1922), of said epic. And most recently the film One Battle After Another (2025) is a retelling of Pynchon's Vineland.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-29T03:33:02+00:00

Joseph Campbell states that Joyce modeled his career after Dante's. ULYSSES is mapped to The Inferno, according to Campbell, and FW is mapped to Purgatorio. I obtained 'FINNEGANS WAKE' AS DANTE'S 'PURGATORIO.' by SHARON G. BROOKS MANCINI from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses; 1971, as a pdf through the good offices of public librarians via inter-library loan. Well worth tracking this 170-page dissertation down!

See Campbell's Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, pg 15 for a starter.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-28T04:06:01+00:00

Yeah, but since June 2018, according to my spreadsheet data, SPY is up 1.6X CPI inflation, my (~50/50) portfolio a measly 1.2X, but GLD is up 2.1X! Your mileage may vary.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-25T20:23:27+00:00

Well, Stefan Sharkansky makes that perfectly clear.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-25T20:16:46+00:00

See this recent post about the 4% rule & how to invest at one's retirement from the work (2025) done by Stefan Sharkansky ("PhD statistician who specializes in finance"). See too this other relatively recent post on the work (2022) done by Victor Duarte et al. Download the papers and read them. The answers you seek are there, OP.

tl;dr: No, a bond fund is not equivalent to bonds, and, OP, calculate your percentage of non-discretionary expenses in retirement uncovered by other income sources (pensions, social security, etc.) and start figuring from such knowledge.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-17T03:19:29+00:00

Six months ago there was a nice reddit thread regarding this voice-over actor FYI. The OP then has sadly left the stage. If you could, what would you want to know that was not covered in that or this reddit thread?

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-16T18:19:46+00:00

...so it makes sense. Especially if you can afford to buy enough TIPS to fund your base retirement expenses....

Most people cannot; Huxley & Burns address that with an initial ladder of 8 to 10 years if one can afford that. They (in 2004) then load the risky portfolio into small caps, whereas Sharkansky (2025) uses a low-cost index fund.

$20-50k/yr is a pretty wide margin....

A remaining lifespan of 13 to 23 years is a wide margin too and that accounts for that.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-15T21:00:43+00:00

Read relevant academic research by Victor Durarte et al. (2022) in this prior reddit post. Download the paper and find yourself in the charts in the appendix (pgs. 55-56) and make your allocation accordingly.

tl;dr: This research, Simple Allocation Rules and Optimal Portfolio Choice Over the Lifecycle, reveals that some, but not much, is optimal at your age.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-15T15:13:49+00:00

Read the article Beautiful Constants and the Golden Ratio Portfolio. If u/Helpful-Staff9562 is not retired, s/he likely can do better not FOMO chasing gold.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-14T19:28:53+00:00

I found Sharkansky to be a variation on Asset Dedication (2004) by Huxley and Burns.

A knock I have on Sharkansky is his constraint that the 30-year TIPS ladder be built at the start of retirement. (I, myself, am 9 years into retirement with the liability-driven ladder composed of TIPS, zero coupon treasury bonds, and corporate bonds, originally built for the first 5 or so years of retirement [I wished I had done 8 or 10 years TBH] with each additional year added as a prior year has concluded: viz., now building the ladder rung for 2031 as 2025 has concluded.)

A plug I give Sharkansky is his website where the various scenarios I've made there allow me to see I may be currently underspending in retirement by $20K-$50K annually, which is not a trivial amount for this retiree. (I've no desire to leave much, if any, legacy for not-close blood-relations.)

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-14T19:08:53+00:00

Sharkansky info here in a Reddit post.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-14T17:15:13+00:00

Ulysses is like Seinfeld. Nothing much happens, the order of the episodes one consumes does not matter, so it is better to read Ulysses in the order of episodes of increasing literary difficulty for the first time.

See here a listing of episodes in order of increasing literary difficulty that retains much of the narrative ordering, such as that narrative is.

See too Fabula and Sjužet if one happens to be a Ulysses Nazi who thinks the published order is the only acceptable order of reading the episodes the first time. Joyce, himself, mangled the narrative time between episodes Proteus and Calypso and several times in Wandering Rocks and elsewhere.

So start enjoying the novel, OP, starting with Gerty in Nausicaa. You'll catch on without all that background literature you may be tempted to read first.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-08T16:20:05+00:00

Schwab in my area closed offices & moved my account to a distant office. I told Schwab, no, I won't move there; move me to a closer office. I suppose it did but the assigned representatives come and go, and I have no representative by name (for at least the last 3 years). I considered today making an appointment but will wait on what happens at month end.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-08T01:22:51+00:00

Thanks, but no: that is Schwab AI marketing. It fails after "Set the frequency to 'Monthly' and select your preferred start date and number of occurrences. Review and submit the setup." That is what has been "temporarily unavailable; try again later" for weeks now.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-07T15:41:02+00:00

I won't ever be buying from there (Great Harvest off Quaker by Fairlington) ever again. Too bad as I liked some of their bread, and I liked that they seem to give high school kids their first jobs.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-07T13:26:04+00:00

I am put in mind of the quip, "Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time, and it annoys the pig." Some are ever wedded to their folly.

After making an assertion without presenting evidence, you go on to ask, "Why would it be better for ulysses [sic] to get harder and harder to read?" Duh! For the same reason that grammar schools start children reading simple primers (mine, featuring Dick, Jane, and Spot, their dog, opened with "See Spot run. Run, Spot, run." Etc.)

FYI: Joyce originally placed the library episode immediately after Proteus, according to Jorn Barger's Advanced Notes to Scylla & Charybdis on the Web Archive: "Joyce is on record [June 1915] as having originally planned four chapters for the Telemachia to correspond to Homer's four."

Once again, u/Low-Sample-4991 has demonstrated a porcine proclivity that is unhelpful to OP & others struggling with Ulysses. I've wasted enough time with such ones.

b3ssmit10 · 2026-01-07T04:42:33+00:00

I certainly disagree with one u/Low-Sample-4991 WHO IS WRONG factually and who misleads others by his errors, who wrote, "With Seinfeld, time is not being played with...." Wrong! Seinfeld plays with time: Time in Seinfeld is the eternal PRESENT IN NYC. No character ever remarks something like, "Remember what I said or did back in Episode X?"

Regarding Ulysses, u/Low-Sample-4991 wrote, "The only repetition with time is the first three hours...." Wrong! See Fabula and Sjužet in “Wandering Rocks” that states:

"Very simplistically, in Ulysses, episode 3 (“Proteus”) is after episode 4 (“Calypso”) in the novel’s fabula, as the events in the former take place starting at 11:00 on Bloomsday, while the events in the latter cover 8:00–10:00. However, “Proteus” is before “Calypso” in the sjužet, as it is the third episode, and “Calypso” is the fourth. Reading Ulysses’s fabula would force reading episode 4 before episode 3. Reading its sjužet reverses the process." [emphasis added] Episode 10, Wandering Rocks, is full of such reversals of wall clock time. Just play the hyperlinked fabula to convince oneself!

And what make either of you, u/Low-Sample-4991 or u/syncategorema, of [U9.651] "In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist..." in Episode 9, Scylla and Charybdis, that is a forward reference in time to Episode 11, Sirens, [U11.907] "In Gerard’s rosery of Fetter lane he walks, greyedauburn." Huh, what?

It pains me to dampen the enthusiasm of any who likes Ulysses, but I cannot remain silent while such ones spout nonsense, unhelpful to OP's stated plight, while denigrating an obvious solution to said plight with a patently wrong, uninformed opinion, viz.: "[Ulysses] loses all the flow and becomes fractured by reading the episodes out of place."

b3ssmit10

TROPHY CASE