ATDTDA p 552 Ukulele

[Monte Davis]

Cometman writes:
 
> "...the widespread contempt in which ukulele players are
> held... Our perceived reluctance to leave the timelessness of 
> the struck chord has earned ukulele players our reputation
> as feckless, clownlike children who will not grow up."
> 
> speaks, maybe, to a Pynchonian theory of poiesis?... 
> Confounds those who wish to trace a single line or theme 
> in a novel

Fer shure, and arguably both harsher and more indulgent to himself than Wood
or anyone else. His career is one long, sustained offense against the
unities. No -- I mean many and varied offenses... 

> reinforces the Iceland Spar refraction of light with a similar 
> application to sound.

Keep in mind one geeky but crucial distinction: for light, unlike sound,
there is no time.

Sound travels in time and space in the same sense that a boat or train or
plane or V2 does: starts at one place and time, arrives at another place at
a later time. And you can (in fact or _gedanken_) ride along, using the same
clocks and yardsticks they use at the origin and terminus.  

But when you ask Einstein's adolescent question -- "what would I see if I
could ride a beam of light?" -- and pursue it with enough rigor, the answer
is: all time would shrink to an instant, all space would shrink to a point.
Close enough to the mind of God.

102 years after Weird Albert saw the light, we still think of all that as a
weird optional asterisk appended to the common-sense way things really are.
It isn't; as far as we can tell, it is *required* to make coherent
mathematical sense of the slower-than-optical illusion we know as the
c-s.w.t.r.a.