By the way that's a cute hat, and a smile so hard to resist...

[Dave Monroe]

The Thomas Pynchon Connection

Thomas Pynchon (1937 - ) is a contemporary Amercian
author of the first rank, creator of several
marvelously intricate novels. Pynchon also seems to
have spent some time listening closely to jazz in the
late fifties, and the inclusion of allusions and
echoes of that jazz scene provides additional
enjoyment for those of us who also know jazz.

Pynchon's first novel V (1961) includes a minor
character named McClintic Sphere. Pynchon introduces
him in a remarkable section (page 47 in my Bantam
edition) with a whole series of links, allusions,
echoes, and satirical reflections of the late 1950's
and Ornette Coleman's legendary Five Spot appearance
in Greenwich Village....

http://home.att.net/~dawild/oc_pynchon.htm

Does McClintic Sphere in V. stand for Thelonious Monk?

Wily coyote that he is in V.(1963), Thomas Pynchon
adorns McClintic Sphere with a "hand-carved ivory
saxophone," getting us to think Sphere is somehow a
stand-in for jazz great Ornette Coleman. There was, in
the civil-rights era of the '60s, much ado about
Coleman's "new sound" and his "new" white plastic sax.
Like Coleman's group, Sphere's group in V. features
"no piano," plays music vaguely expressive of "African
nationalism," but (the narrator tells us) Sphere is
wrongly viewed as a "kind of reincarnation" of Bird
(Charlie Parker). A minor figure who drifts in and out
of the narrative of V., Sphere is often led by Paola
Maijstral's maieutic (O.E.D.; maieutic = Socratic)
intellectual midwifery, through some laborious
dialogue, until he delivers what has come to be taken
as the novel's motto: "Keep cool, but care." (V.; 366)
To whom does he speak? For whom does he speak? To
properly answer these questions, we should figure out
who he is.

Arguably the musician McClintic Sphere most recalls is
another esteemed figure in jazz history, pianist
Thelonious Monk....

http://www.howardm.net/tsmonk/pynchon.php

--- Keith McMullen <keithsz at mac.com> wrote:

> I agree that he is an amalgam (character-as-
> concept), but with a heavy dose of Ornette Coleman. 
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/yxk3hf
> 
> On Dec 10, 2006, at 7:54 PM, Will Layman wrote:
> 
> Always seemed to me that McClintic wasn't any one
> musician -- more an amalgam....


 
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