ATD p356 Chinese Gong Effect

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

         Dan Hansong :
         BTW: In this section, the white slavery show calls
         to my mind "Fu Manchu's Mask", a 1930s
         movie Pynchon heavily borrows in COL49....

         Dave Monroe :
         How so?  Genuinely curious.  Let us know ...

         "Hilarius only made a face at her, one he'd made before. 
         He was full of these delightful alpses from orthodoxy. His
         theory being that a face is symmetrical like a Rorschach 
         blot, tells a story like a TAT picture, excites response like 
         a suggested word, so why not. He claimed to have once 
         cured a case of hysterical blindness with his number 37, 
         the "Fu-Manchu" (many of the faces having like German 
         symphonies both a number and nickname), which involved 
         slanting the eyes up with the middlefingers, pulling the mouth 
         wide with the pinkies and protruding the tongue. On Hilarius 
         it was truly alarming.
         COL 49 pgs 8/9

I would hazard that the "Chinese Gong Effect"---the Chinese Gong would be 
the Tam-Tam---would be to drown everything out with pure volume, as a 
Tam-Tam can drown out a Symphony Orchestra performing at full tilt. This 
I know from experience. Of course, there's also "Kicking the Gong Around", 
a reference to smoking Opium from "back in the day" .

         Kick the gong around is first found in the late 1920s. 
         It is based on the earlier (1915 or so) gong and 
         gonger, both meaning 'an opium pipe'. The origin 
         of these words is not clear; gong could be a 
         shortening of gonger or the inspiration for it. It it not 
         known whether gong is the same word as gong 
         meaning 'a large bronze disk that produces a 
         vibrant tone when struck', which is a borrowing 
         from Malay or Javanese, presumably of imitative 
         origin. Opium pipes do not have any disk-like parts, 
         but the relationship (if any) could simply be that both 
         gongs and opium are associated with East Asia. None 
         of the early writers on the subject suggests an etymology.

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19980211