AtDDtA1: Epigraph

[Will Layman]

Thelonious Monk was one of the weirdest cats in jazz, which is saying  
quite a lot.  Among other things, he was a bit of a mystic.  Which  
seems relevant here.

First, using an epigraph from a jazz musician seems fair enough for  
this novel.  Jazz, of course, was born at the start of the 20th  
century, the setting of AtD.  It certainly fits in with a variety of  
the book's themes -- particularly anarchy and iteration.  Jazz,  
compared to most prior American music (WAS there any prior "American"  
music?), is certainly anarchic in the idealistic sense -- allowing  
freedom from constraint and improvisation within a creative, positive  
context.  If anarchists could choose a soundtrack to represent their  
ideal, surely it would be some form of jazz.  Second the structure of  
almost all jazz performances is a matter of theme and variation, in  
which the melody is refracted and altered by improvisation.  Each  
chorus of each solo, however, is more than just a departure from the  
melody -- it is a new version of the melody that (typically) is based  
on the underlying harmonic structure.  These copies may not be  
Iceland Spar perfect, but they are successive iterations of the theme  
that reveal the nuances and truths of the original.

Thelonious Monk was a jazz revolutionary, no doubt.  A founding  
father of bebop, the rebellious music that tore the door off of swing  
in the early '40s and changed the way all jazz musicians thereafter  
would play, Monk rewrite the harmonic book on jazz.  He played in a  
variety of unusual ways -- for example, using a whole tone scale for  
his signature descending runs.  His style, eventually, would come to  
be seen as primitivist -- cats said he couldn't play because he  
stripped things down to a kind of simplicity.

Beyond the music, Monk was an oddball cat.  He frequently said off,  
mystic things, and his family seemed to take care of him like he was  
a little boy who didn't pay attention to the basics of adult life.   
Members of his band treated him similarly.  During performances, he  
often wore unusual hats, and he was prone to dancing around the  
bandstand while his tenor player soloed, shuffling and weaving like  
he was possessed by the music -- or my SOMEthing.

My take on the quote itself -- uh, who says it's not always night?   
One might note that, on Earth, it's always night SOMEwhere, right?   
Monk's statement is only factually false if you limit yourself to one  
place.  But BOY-O-BOY does AtD more around.  "Day" and "Night" are  
pretty damn relative -- just like velocity is according to Einstein  
-- and these kinds of alternate ways of thinking are pretty relevant  
to this book.

In some more general part of space, it seems to me, night is the  
default mode -- darkness, an absence of light.

But metaphorically, the quote would seem to suggest matters of  
morality that the book is playing on.  This will be a book in which  
characters wrestle with their obligations to do the right thing  
(Frank and Reef, certainly, Lake too, . . . shit -- who doesn't?) and  
in which the forces of darkness are always creeping around the  
edges.  In GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, of course, the cards seems stacked so  
outlandishly AGAINST light that things usually seem hopeless.  In  
AtD, things aren't (yet?) that grim, and so the "light"ness of tone  
is there more consistently.  The Monk quote suggests that moral  
darkness is where we start -- some kind of default position -- but  
that everyone will do their best to move the other way.  Like the  
blues pushing out against oppression, joyously, . . . like jazz.

-- Will Layman


On Jan 22, 2007, at 2:52 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> "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
>