grgr (34): pinball wizzard?!

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy
I wrote:
> Howdy
> 
> This is an old movie convention.  If an audience was to be invited to
> sing along with the character on screen the lyric would be subtitled
> and a little dot (the "bouncing ball") would hop from syllable to
> syllable in time with the music.  I remember it was used in old Max
> Fleischer cartoons dating from the 1930's, when sound in film was
> still
> a novelty and movie palaces still competed with live burlesque and
> vaudeville.
> 
> Mark
> 
> P.S. Check out all the lewd old Betty Boop cartoons you can put your
> sweaty hands on!!
> 

Or did you know this already?  I assumed a cultural gap here where
perhaps I shouldn't have.... Didn't mean to sound condescending. (Did
you note my artful use of both kinds of ellipsis, there?)

You posed some questions which I rushed passed:

> --- Lorentzen / Nicklaus <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de> wrote:
> >                       "follow the bouncing ball:" (760)
> > does this, also refering back to 583, somehow suggest that the
> > pinball machine 
> > is a, well, "epistemological model" for the novel?! & if so: can
> this
> > be 
> > observed as a pop-cultural meta-framing of the text? how is gr's
> > pinball machine 
> > related to the video-games in vineland? 

Certainly some of the characters behave as though they are inanimate
pinballs rocketing back and forth under the guidance of forces beyond
their comprehension.  I'm not sure you could work it up into a
full-fledged framing device, although it does work as a recurring
metaphor.  Given my automatic reading of "bouncing ball" as noted above
the pinball connection never occurred to me in this specific instance.

RE: pinball/video games in "V", V2" and "Vineland" this would be an
interesting little study.  I suspect that P would present videogames as
more death-oriented and inanimate because great pinball play depends on
"body english," of a sort, and video games are somehow colder and more
disconnected.  This quite apart from their imagery which has also
devolved towards mayhem and dismemberment.

Mark
P.S. I tried out the Star Wars "Pod Racer" game on a friend's PC last
weekend, and boy was it fun...


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