AtDDtA1: Epigraph

[Dave Monroe]

"It's always night or we wouldn't need light"

--THELONIOUS MONK (AtD, epigraph)


Jazz and particularly bebop seem to be a lifelong interest of
Pynchon's, appearing in some form in all his works and what
biographical snippets exist. As a college student, Pynchon "spent a
lot of time in jazz clubs, nursing the two-beer minimum," by his own
admission (Slow Learner, Introduction).

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25

The Loneliest Monk.

Everyone who came to meet his plane wore a fur hat, and the sight was
too much for him to bear, "Man, we got to have those!" he told his
sidemen, and for fear that the hat stores would be closed before they
could get to downtown Helsinki, they fled from the welcome-to-Finland
ceremonies as fast as decency permitted. And sure enough, when
Thelonious Monk shambled out on the stage of the Kulituuritalo that
night to the spirited applause of 2,500 young Finns, there on his head
was a splendid creation in fake lamb's wool.

At every turn of his long life in jazz, Monk's hats have described him
almost as well as the name his parents had the crystal vision to
invent for him 43 years ago - Thelonious Sphere Monk. It sounds like
an alchemist's formula or a yoga ritual, but during the many years
when the owner merely strayed through life (absurd beneath a baseball
cap), it was the perfect name for the legends dreamed up to account
for his sad silence. "Thelonious Monk? He's a recluse, man!" In the
mid-'40's, when Monk's reputation at last took hold in the jazz
underground, his name and his mystic utterances ("It's always night or
we wouldn't need light") made him seem like the ideal Dharma Bum to an
audience of hipsters; anyone who wears a Chinese coolie hat and has a
name like that must be cool.

(c) TIME magazine - 1964

http://www.howardm.net/tsmonk/time1.php

For most of sixty‑four bittersweet years jazz pianist‑composer
Thelonious Sphere Monk lived life as a legend.... Offstage and on,
Monk always wore one of his many hats from distant lands and performed
serious personal dances beside his piano when not playing or whenever
sidemen soloed. That was how he conducted and made sure the music
would swing. Monk's majestic manner, sometimes coupled with
bamboo‑framed sunglasses and a cabbage or collard leaf in his lapel,
kept most at bay, People coming close departed puzzled by his cryptic
monologues: "It's always night or we wouldn't need light." "Black is
white," "Two is one." "Hey! Butterflies faster than birds? Must be,
cause with all the birds on the scene up in my neighborhood there's
this butterfly, and he flies any way he wanna. Yeah. Black and yellow
butterfly."

http://www.monkzone.com/Profiles_interviews/Crawford1.htm

Does McClintic Sphere in V. stand for Thelonious Monk?

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

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

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.

The section starts with several of the New York cast arriving at a
Greenwich Village nightclub called the V-Note:

  1. V for the title of the novel and an elusive woman, object of a
novel-long search by one of the characters.
  2. V as in the Roman Numeral for Five = Five Spot. This famous club
featured Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane (1957) in a legendary
engagement; it was the nightclub where Ornette Coleman first opened in
November 1959 (and where he played a number of times over the
following years)
  3. V-Note. The Note = Half Note. Another Greenwich Village club, and
another venue at which Coleman played during the period

McClintic Sphere is playing onstage when the group enters. Sphere is
Thelonious Monk's middle name (Monk was a frequent performer in the
village at the time and as noted is closely associated with the Five
Spot)....

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