McCintic

[jbor]

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>From: Don Corathers <crawdad at one.net>
>

> I took the presence of the other musicians to be an indication that Sphere
> was a player to be reckoned with.

Yes, I think you are quite right. The paragraph at 59.5 which opens the
scene is vivid. It focuses directly on Sphere: it is "the green baby spot"
which heightens "every vein and whisker" for those watching and which gives
his skin a surreal appearance, and those lines on his face have been formed
by his devotion to his music, "etched" there by the "force of his
embouchure", as you noted. This, and the appearance of that ubiquitous
second person pronoun ("you could see") in what is purportedly detached
narration, support the notion that Pynchon is using personal experience to
create the scene (Siegel's comments corroborate this), and that the
narrator, and the more perceptive members of the crowd with whom the
narrative agency aligns (Winsome, Çharisma and Fu), are in hushed and
respectful awe of the man's playing.

At the end of the section Fu mimes breaking a beer bottle to murder the
presumptuous idiot who comments about McLintic "playing all the notes Bird
missed". I think narrator, author and reader are (meant to be) in empathy
with Fu and the others here: I am, at least. The remark is a backhanded
compliment which actually denigrates Bird's genius, and I think it goes
right to the heart of that comment of Susan Sontag's (and, similarly,
Judith's recent complaint here) about "interpretation being the revenge of
the intellect on art". The idea that one jazz musician (any creative artist
in fact) is a "reincarnation" of another does credit to neither, diminishes
the individuality of the artist and the uniqueness of the art -- and the
experience of the art -- particularly with something as spontaneous as
freestyle jazz. Not only that, the idiot is talking when s/he should be
listening. It is those who are silent -- the other musicians and Winsome,
Charisma and Fu -- who are in the right (as far as the text is concerned, at
least). And, the fact that the other musicians "listened hard, trying to
dig", highlights just how innovative the soloist's performance is.

best