All That Jazz

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Lindsay Gillies responds to Chris Stolz:
"chris stolz writes:
If there is a writer who has captured the structural intricacies and
freeforms of jazz (truly schizophrenic music) it would be Pynchon.
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agreed 110%.  there is a deep relationship between Pynchon's prose style and
bebop and its children,  . . . "


Well, yes, but . . . 

Pynchon admits admiring Kerouac, the master of "sweet spontaneous bop
prosody" (if I remember Ginsberg's words correctly), but he doesn't stick
a roll of teletype paper in and go at it either.

Pynchon obviously loves music of all forms, though he seems rather distrustful
of High Modernist works from Stravinksy to von Webern to Stockhausen as well
as such Romantics and Beethoven and Wagner.

On the other hand, his writing has a high degree of structure to it that has
affinities with Baroque and or Classicism.   I don't think TRP would ever
find Mozart "boring" as someone claimed (but maybe Haydn).  Like the bopsters,
though, he often employs structure only to undercut it at the same time.


Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)