Progressions

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Michael Arnowitt writes:
"Regarding Anton Webern, folks may be interested to know that he died by   
being shot accidentally by an American soldier (hmmm...) in the last weeks
of WW II.
 
   In my previous post I spoke of looking at the Kenosha Kid variations as a
musical performance by Pynchon, sort of a jazz improv.  I should have
mentioned that I was set off on this idea by a perhaps inadvertent pun in
the second paragraph of (4), where Pynchon writes, "These changes on the
text 'You never did the Kenosha Kid' are occupying Slothrop's awareness..."
The word "changes" or "the changes" is a jazz term for the progression of
chords (harmonies) underlying a jazz tune."

Webern's death will figure later in GR (natch, doesn't everything?), but
while I think there's a great deal of validity to the jazz-relations of
"The Kenosha Kid" sequence, I wanted to mention a similar antecedent from
pop culture: that remarkably self-referential tv series THE MANY LOVES
OF DOBIE GILLIS.  Dobie, based on a character created by Max Shulman, you'll
recall is an ordinary high school kid with a yen for women classmates,
especially one Thalia Menninger (played by Tuesday Weld).  In one sequence,
Thalia says to Dobie, who is hoping for a date, "All you have to do is get
the money from your father."

Dobie--who often speaks directly to the audience in front of a knockoff of
Rodin's The Thinker--turns the to camera in that place and says,
"*Get* money from my father?
Get *money* from my father?
Get money *from* my father?
Get money from *my* father?
Get money from my *father*!!!"


(BTW, the cast went on to various kinds of fame.  Weld had her film career,
Dobie's good buddy the ersatz beatnik Maynard J. Krebs was played by Bob 
GILLIGAN'S ISLAND Denver, and the woman with a crush on Dobie is now a
gayrights activist and member of the California legislature.

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)