recorded history

[jeff severs]

 we only have about 70 or 80 years worth of (recorded)
>music, still small enough to categorize it into "styles"; doo-wop, jazz,
>acid rock, heavy metal etc. Then I imagine one hundred years from now, how
>will people be interpreting disco music for example? They will be able to
>pin point the exact date "Funkytown" by Lipps, Inc. was recorded (1980) but
>what will that tell them?
>        Anyway I started thinking about this after seeing Pynchon's
>technique of putting the year after all those movie titles in VINELAND e.g.
>"Ghostbusters" (1984)

I think this is right on, especially in regard to film. I think Pynchon is
attuned to the fact that he's a historian of an era in which an entirely
new language, that of the film, is developing -- perhaps he can do more to
shake up our reified assumptions about film than he can those about the
written word. I've never known a world without the recorded image, but
Pynchon forces me to take a hard look at what I accept as intelligible in a
film: it's maddening to realize that, for instance, most every "cute meet"
in popular film proceeds according to an accepted pattern (courters in
profile; close-ups of each face; over-the-shoulder shots... you know the
drill). What's _this_ language going to look like a hundred years from now?


If the blank screen on the last page of GR is the "film we have not learned
to see," is the "closeup of the face, a face we all know" what we learn to
see? Is this learning true to that blankness, or is it what the "nation of
starers" comforts itself (reach between your own cold legs) with seeing? I
think Pynchon documents the profound effect of film on what we can and
can't see as a 'human' image.

I haven't even touched Vineland. Anyone?

Jeff