VV(12): Sferics

[Dave Monroe]

"Mondaugen was here as part of a program having to do with atmospheric radio 
disturbances: sferics for short." (V., Ch. 9, sec. i, p. 230)

>From W.T. Llhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a
Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1990), Ch. 6, "'Keep Cool, But Care,'" pp. 193-251 ...

There is a further, hardly incidental link between Sphere and the historical 
chapters.  The connection between the sferics Mondaugen records (and tries 
to decode) and the music Sphere makes is more than a pun.  Although readers 
cannot hear Sphere's music they can imagine it from Pynchon's description 
and from theor amalgamation of Theolonious Monk's and Ornette Coleman's 
playing in the fifties.  Both sferics and Sphere's music are products of 
siege--cosmic and urban, respectively.  They are both, in the coinage of 
Whitney Balliet, the "sound of surprise."  After that, however, the family 
resemblance twists to reveal additional genres.  Insofar as it is like 
Monk's and Coleman's, Sphere's jazz, though improvised, is highly practiced, 
disciplined, and regular beneath its initially apparent chaos.  Sferics are 
random noise all the way down; they simply tease auditors, who feel a 
"logical must," to find authorized messages within them at whatever comical 
cost.  Sphere's jazz works the other way.  From admittedly disparate, 
unauthorized motifs speeding by, in his music Sphere deliberates his own 
logic.  It is the opposite of finagling a phony message in random sound.  
Its construction is forthright and on the surface.  It shows how to assemble 
real life from flotsam. (238)

Recommended reading here ...

Attali, Jacques.  Noise: The Political Economy of Music
   Trans. Brian Massumi.  Mpls: U of Minn P, 1985.

Cowart, David.  "'Unthinkable Order': Music in Pynchon."
   Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion.  Carbondale:
   Southern Illinois UP, 1990.  63-95.

Hollander, John.  The Untuning of the Sky:
   Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700.
   Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1961.

Santillana, Giorgio De and Hertha Von Dechend.
   Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins
   of Human Knowledge and its Transmission through Myth.
   Boston: Godine, 1977 [1969].

My recommendations, not Lhamon's, by the way.  J.H. may or may not be 
related to C.H., but I do understand that he has a fine trans. of Dante's 
Divine Comedy out.  And on "the music of the spheres," see as well ...

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit3/unit3.html

Not to mention ...

http://home.achilles.net/~howardm/pynchon.shtml

But i did anyway, so ...
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