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You may be wondering: How will you, as an active participant in the GRDM, be rewarded for your considerable pain and suffering? It’s a question as old as The Book of Job. And once again, as with Job, the answer involves Pat Benatar.
To incent group participation (in the form of weekly posting to the GRDM thread), we’ve developed devised a cunningly complex 3-tier program. Here’s how it works:
GRDMer the Third Level (aka Poobah): Post all but four weeks and you’ll receive a copy of Pat Benatar’s 11th studio release: Gravity’s Rainbow.
GRDMer the Second Level (aka Big Poobah): Post all but two weeks and you’ll earn a copy of Richard Brautigan’s underappreciated, and extremely easy to read The Tokyo-Montana Express. (Think of it as a cool down after GR.) As an added bonus, Big Poobahs will also *not* receive a copy of Pat Benatar’s 11th studio release: Gravity’s Rainbow.
GRDMer the First Level (aka Grand Poobah): Post to the GRDM thread each and every week, starting on Jan 11, and you’ll be rewarded with a copy of the Tokyo-Montana Express. plus — and here’s where it gets exciting — a genuine Monkey Vortex brand “I survived the Gravity’s Rainbow Deathmarch” mug. GP’s will also not receive a copy of Pat Benatar’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Unless they really want to. In which case, oh, sure, what the hell.
Quasi-legaleso: Needless to say, prizes will be limited to folks what finish the book in the course of the Deathmarch. All books and CDs will probably be secondhand, though serviceable. And I’ll set an arbitrary max of 30 winners. Because, much as in real life, there can only be 30 winners. (On the off-chance we break 30, I’ll pull names from a beret or somesuch. At this point, we have around 28 people signed on, so…) Also, what is a qualifying post? Glad you asked. A qualifying post can be as simple as: “still here, still suffering” or: “owie” or even just: “ow.” Really, any old post will do. The goal is just to keep us all engaged and pushing each other along.
That’s it. I hope you’re enjoying the holidays. Now’s a great time to watch a lot of TV. Go outside. Look at some puppies. For soon your eyes will be filled with rainbow.
-Cecil

27 people have now signed up for the Deathmarch. And I think it’s safe to say that this little idea has now morphed from an amusing notion into a full-fledged movement — a movement that may well change the way people think about reading books and talking about them on blogs forever.
Here’s the rough plan: Tuesday will be GRDM day here on cecilvortex.com. For the next couple of weeks, that will mean short updates as folks holidize, stretch their legs, wash their socks, that sort of thing. But starting on the morning of Jan. 4, we’ll have a post indicating how far we aim to travel on the first week. Each week’s journey will be roughly 50 pages. Since editions may vary and numbers can’t be trusted, the marker will be “read up to X” rather than “read to page Y.”
Starting on the 11th I’ll post short entries here every Tuesday morning that will be meant as open threads — a spot to drop comments. I’m encouraging everyone to chime in, if only with “oh my lord, this is awful, what have I done?” More than anything, this is a GR support group.
Although a paragraph or three of pithy analysis will always be welcome, I’m going to discourage folks from giving in to old habits and churning out a 6-page paper each week. (If 27 people wrote 6 pages each week of the GRDM we’d end up with 2,430 pages of critical analysis. And that, I’m pretty sure, would make my head blow up.)
Prizes? Oh yes, there will be prizes. More on that next week….
It’s not to late to sign yourself (or several loved ones) up for the march. All are welcome. Just add a comment to this link, or drop me an email.
Merry Tuesday and watch the skies, -Cecil