Mindless Listening Pleasures

[ruudsaurins at aol.com]

 I Salivate...
     ....like one of Pavlov's puppies....like Little Albert and the feather boa.....like the infant Tyrone and.....well, you's gets da idea....at all the speculation over upcoming cameos in Against the Day.  I cannot resist some mindless speculation myself.  
     If TRP's son is a guitar aficionado, he may have forced his dad to familiarize himself with the long proud legacy of Gibson guitars.  As I understand his biography, Orville Gibson sounds like a character straight out of a Pynchon novel.  A bit eccentric, to say the least, secretive, and evidently fond of striped pantaloons that seem to scream (across the sky) "Gay 90s!".  His instrumental designs went on to become cultural icons on a global scale.  Mandolins had recently become all the rage, and every community was expected to recruit and sustain a mandolin ensemble, and Gibson's company was planning to be the supplier of mandolin family instruments.   These instruments were embraced by european immigrants who were familiar with the mandolin from their homelands.  The mandolin lent itself well to klezmer orchestras, celtic sessions, slavic folk music, and had a well-established repertoire in the classical world, making it a welcome ambassador of good will between people with no other common language.  The popularity of the mandolin soon gave way to the banjo and ragtime, but reappeared in Bill Monroe's hands to help spawn bluegrass.  Bluegrass helped pave the way for Pynchon's beloved rock'n'roll (Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky" was the B-side of Elvis' first single).  I believe that Gibson died in obscurity in an asylum.
     Another musical character that seems straight out of a Pynchon novel would be Alexander Scriabin.  If Ives' Universal Symphony rings your bell (more saliva, now), you may get a kick out of Scriabin's sketches for his "uberwerk" which was to be called the "Mysterium".  It was to run for seven days, accompanied by theater pieces and a light show in which the frequencies of the visible spectrum were to be coordinated with the sonic frequencies of the composed musical score.   He dies of a lip abscess that evidently had extended into his sinuses, then into his brain, prior to his completion of the work.  He had been a concert pianist and might have been playing a concert in Gottingen while getting assistance with his calculations (light, music, theater, art, it is almost as if everything connects).
      So much of what we call our "modern" world has roots in the dramatic and global changes of the 1890s, with so many advances in all the sciences and colorful characters up the ol' wazoo....real Pynchon turf.  I recall reading an essay about how polymathic geniuses at the fin-du-siecle were declaring that science had learned "everything" that there was to be learned, and the twentieth century would herald the onset of an age of world peace, reason, benevolence, education, social advancement and enlightenment, and so on.  This clearly resounds with the kind of pseudo-intellectual pomposity that Pynchon parodies without peer.
                                                                    truly,
                                                                    ruud
 
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