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)

I've posted this before--indeed, a-cuttin' an' a-pastin' from the archives 
here--but, from Jeff Economy, "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?,"  Chicago 
Reader, Friday, January 12, 2001 (Vol. 30, No. 16), pp. 28-9, Section One 
...

http://www.chireader.com/

The four-CD set is a mind-boggling collection of dispassionate, disembodied 
voices reading lists of numbers and sometimes letters in
many languages, over crashing waves of lush, unfiltered radio static, 
occasionally accompanied by perky robotic musical themes borrowed from
hell's own ice cream truck.  The collection was first issued in 1997 by a 
small British label, Irdial-Discs, whose other bog release is a two-CD 
collection of the low-frequency radio signals emitted by electromagnetic 
phenomena like the northern lights. (28)

Sferics, perhaps?  But on "numbers stations," just in case anyone's 
interested ...

Numbers stations are a black hole: no matter how much light is shed on them, 
none is returned....
    At first listen the set seems as impenetrable as the monolith in 2001, 
but, eventually, confronted with actual audible evidence of secret 
maneuverings that most of us will never, ever be privy to, yo can almost 
feel the wash from the black helicopters' rotors on the back of your 
neck....
    ... The recordings are a Rosetta stone for the language of deceit, a 
fetish object for the informationally disenfranchised. (29)

For the Conet Project, see ...

http://www.ibmpcug.co.uk/~irdial/conet.htm

And for Irdial in general ...

http://www.pcug.co.uk/~irdial/

But something just struck me here, so ...

Okay, you've got "a young engineering student named Kurt Mondaugen, late of 
the technical University in Munich" (p. 229), who will go on to work, "yes, 
at Peenemunde, developing Vergeltungswaffe Eins and Zwei" (pp. 227-8), 
"here"--i.e., "at a white outpost near the village of Kalkfontein South," 
"here in the Warmbad district" (p. 229)--as "part of a program having to do 
with atmospheric radio disturbances: sferics for shot" (ibid.) ...

J. Kerry Grant, A Companion to V. (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000), writes 
that ...

"Critics have noted the metaphorical function of mondaugen's research 
project, commenting on the similarity between the sferics and the fragments 
of information that Stencil is assembling ....  The analogy between 
Stencil's quest and the reader's meaning-making efforts is also noted" (p. 
116)

And here he cites David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (NY: 
Methuen, 1984 [q.v.]), p. 124 ...

"during the Great War one H. Barkhausen, listening in on telephone messages 
among the Allied forces" (p. 230) ...

"Heinrich Georg Barkhausen (1881-1956).  German physicist best known for his 
discovery of certain properties of magnetism known as the Barkhausen 
effect."  (Grant, A Companion to V., p. 117)

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=13539

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?idxref=146721

There is much online on this, esp. in German, but I'll see what I can do to 
follow up and report back (hm ... cf. the etymology of "theory").  But ...

But it occurs to me, "atmospheric radio disturbances," "disturbances," 
"basic distrust of the South," "War," "mirror-time," "South-West Africa," 
"what had once been a ... colony," "he found the idea of defeat hateful" (p. 
230),  a postwar ("1922") context with yet another (possible, at this point) 
war impending o'er the horizon, a steady undercurrent of racial unrest, in a 
story told in 1956, in a novel published in 1963 ...

http://www.radomes.org/museum/

http://earlywarning.westgeorgia.org/

http://www.bwcinet.com/thule/index.html

And, of course ...

http://www.wmich.edu/politics/mlk/

"Mirror-time," North(America)/South(Africa), 1956(1963)/1922.  Of course, 
both the Jacobeans and the Gothicists often set their works in the 
((decadent) Catholic) South so as to comment on the ((normative) Protestant) 
North.  Much like contemporary science fiction, for example, uses the 
future, or the extraterrestrial, or the allohistorical to comment on the 
present, the earthly, the historical (and I'd suggest comparing the 
so-called "flatness" of Pynchon's characters with that of the postwar SF 
Pynchon admires ["Luddite"], or, for that matter, with the Jacobean 
satirists, like Jonson--it's not necessarily about "characters," now, is 
it?) ...

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com