ATD p356 Chinese Gong Effect

[Dan Hansong]

        Quote:

         Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 06:55:35 -0700 (PDT)
         From: Dave Monroe  <monropolitan at yahoo.com >
         Subject: Re: ATD p356 Chinese Gong Effect
                 > BTW: In this section, the white slavery show calls
                 > to my mind "Fu Manchu's Mask", a 1930s
                 > movie Pynchon heavily borrows in COL49....

         How so?  Genuinely curious.  Let us know ...

Dave, "heavily borrows" might sound an overstatement, but I am always
wondering whether there are more parallels between Fu Manchu series 
and COL49 other than a direct reference to this name on p.8/9. For instance, 
the stamp expert "Genghis Cohen" in COL49 is named after "Genghis Khan",
as TRP went out of his to verify in New York Times (17 July 1966), and Khan's
mask is a Holy Grail both the Oriental freak Fu and his Western rivals crave for.
More importantly, apart from Fu Manchu's many a doctorate he earned in Europe,
psychology is a field he specializes in. Fu Manchu devises so many exotic 
gadgets to tortue the rivals and eventually to control them in a mental way. 
As a result, his ex-prinsoners appear as normal as they should be, but they
are in fact no more than Fu Manchu's walking dummies. Like Fu, the Nazi,
as is revealed by Pynchon latern on in COL49, carried out a series of experiments
in order to tamper with the Jewish prisoners' mentality, or, annihilate this people
mentally, rather than physically. So-called humane extermination. Oedipa's shrink,
Hilarius, turned out to be a Nazi scientist at large, who worked in a concentration
camp and engaged in accousitic experiments which can elicit insanity artificially.
This back story isn't disclosed until Oedpia returns to her hometown in chapter
five. However, Hilarius' mysterious drug test, coded as "Bridge", starts in earnest 
from the very beginning of this novel. What a shrink does, as Pynchon lampoons,
is supposed to replace the role of priest in 1960s, a time of spiritual "NADA".
Yet the ex-Nazi prescribes LSD to save those who are undergoing existential crisis. 
Oedipa refuses LSD unwittingly, but her husband, Mucho, falls to the prey of Hilarius'
drug conspiracy. Considering the recurrent motif of "paranoia" in COL49, the allusion
to Fu Manchu in the opening chapter is probably apocalyptic and a tell-tale clue as
to Hilarius' secret.  

BTW: Fu Manchu as a TAT picture in COL49 is tagged as "37", the year of Japanese
invasion in China, a prelude to WWII. "Manchu" in Mandarin Chinese is ÂúÖÞ£¬where the 
last emperor of Qing Dynasty settled down. By that time, Manchu was in the firm control 
of Japan, a warmonger nation which would soon devastate Asia.




 
____________________________________________________________________________________


Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 15:05:07 +0000
From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Subject: Re: ATD p356 Chinese Gong Effect

         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

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 15:00:22 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
From: kelber at mindspring.com
Subject: Re: Speaking of anarchists

Re: Mongol Shuudan

They're not exactly overflowing with a love for humanity, are they?  Lyrics-wise anyway.  It's interesting that a body of folk-anarchist songs from revolutionary Russia has survived. A forgotten bit of folk history, at least outside of Russia.

Laura

- -----Original Message-----
>From: Ya Sam  <takoitov at hotmail.com >


>
>Maybe it's just as well, as some lyrics are pretty graphic. The music and 
>the overall style actually are pretty similar to the folk anarchist songs of 
>the time. Specially for you, here is a rough translation of The Black 
>Anarchist's Song (Ïåñíÿ ÷åðíîãî àíàðõèñòà):
>
>
>Fighting is all I need, it's my life.
>Stop! I said, stop, what's on your hat?
>And you have an officer's shoulder-belt!
>Get off your horse, you ugly-face,
>You are a saboteur, let's go to the edge of the village,
>Your red bow will be unsewed by a bullet.
>
>Refrain: The mother-truth is a dirty rag, cut it in two! (idiomatic 
>expression 'to cut mother-truth' - to tell home truth)
>
>The sky is blue, the sabre is new
>The plaits are red, the woman is naked,
>The woman is white, the woman is fresh.
>Drop down your pants, or I'll stab you to death!
>An apple burst open, worms crawled out.
>I butchered that woman, a commissar's widow, with a sabre.
>
>Refrain.
>
>I put cartridges into the barrels, here comes a stranger.
>I took away his Nagan, I don't know what's come upon me.
>I did him in near a wall.
>A boat steams down the Volga, there are girls in the saloon,
>Everything will belong to me, this is revolution.
>Hands off my stuff,  those who've managed to grab more than others are 
>attaboys.
>
>Refrain.
>
>
>Sounds funny in translation, but the original is pretty articulate.
>
>_________________________________________________________________
>Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE! 
>http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
>

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 14:29:36 -0500
From: "Dave Monroe"  <against.the.dave at gmail.com >
Subject: Re: ATD p356 Chinese Gong Effect

On 4/8/07, robinlandseadel at comcast.net  <robinlandseadel at comcast.net > wrote:
>
>          "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 was more asking about that "heavily" ...

------------------------------

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