TexAvery/MarquisDeSade

[PETER A WATTS]

Aside from these two common icons, what else do Tom P and John Zorn have 
in common? 

The way Zorn composes, to me, is startlingly parallel to the way 
Pynchon writes. Zorn has repeatedly mentioned his tendency to think in 
musical blocks, intertwining camp/genre/noise/pastiche with 
chaos/progressive/innovative creation. Zorn uses blocks of genre: bop, 
strip-club tunes, Ornette Coleman's phrasing, 5-bar blues, to their fullest
knowing there aptitudes and sublinminal effects, sucks the listener in, 
makes him lean forward and listen, just get the groove, and then lays him 
out with a left hook of chaos free jazz, abortive silence, scream, noise.
Kinda the way Pynchon reels you in with suspense, sex, 
stream-of-consciousness, and just when your about to get it, just when 
the system is revealed, pulls his dick out, leaves you wondering, reeling,
confused, as tabula rasa as a hungover undergrad's stomach on saturday 
morning, able to recieve the word with your preconceptions sucker-punched,
or just tricked, snake-charmed into numbness.
it's a pretty good technique, no?

Too, there's a shared feeling, perhaps ambivalence towards culture and Genre.
Zorn has the following on the back of _Masada_, an album that sounds like 
what would happen if Ornette went and played with some nomads in the 
deserts of Israel:

"There is a life of tradition that does not merely consist of 
conservative preservation, the constant continuation of the spiritual and 
cultural possessions of a community. There is such a thing as a treasure 
hunt within tradition, which creates a living relationship to tradition 
and to which much of what is best in current Jewish consciousness is 
indebted, even where it was--and is--expressed outside the framework of 
orthodoxy."
		--Gershom Scholem

I think Pynchon thinks much the same way. He'll use the metaphors of 
Judaism, its symbols and traditions, but he'll rage against its 
conservatism, absolutism, and reliance on the word. He'll imitate 
Fitzgerald, Joyce, Eliot, but he'll make the modernism, the assumptions 
of agency and ego that they grew out of, seem ridiculous.
A pretty good technique no?

I'm sure some of you out there can speak on this better, with more 
technical ground, than I. Does the paralel hold water?

-uwattp00 at mcl.ucsb.edu
"if you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality;
 if you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact.
 now, what do you wish to call this?"
	 	-Zen proverb 
		 meme of the week
		 teachers and students, tell your friends