AtDTDA (43)---Mystery Girls /Defective forms of time-travel 940/946/963. . . .

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Part of my defective time travel through this book is in attempting 
to find passages that somehow did not get flagged the first two 
times around. Now I'm reading this doorstopper as though it's 
just another strand of the Pynchon multiverse. It's fun, but right 
now I'm looking for that passage with the love triangle landing in 
Bulgaria and some very witchy local warding. [here 'tis] On page 
946 Cyprian shows the townspeople "the map", causing a sudden 
warding off of any energies that might come off of it:

          At the fringes of these discussions, the good folk were 
          averting their faces, repeatedly and compulsively crossing 
          themselves, and making other hand-gestures less familiar, 
          some indeed quite complicated, as if overlain, since ancient 
          days, with manual commentary.
          946

Mind you, my filter would tend to point to:

http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/pentagram.html

While there is nothing in the text that explicititly points 
to warding with a pentacle the actions of the townsfolk
are clearly warding off something.

But much more to the point, this section of the book plows the "Mystery Girls" 
experience of the late 1980's/early 1990's into Cyprian's tale of trancending 
into female form. There is a dense overlay of Feminist/Goddess concepts in this 
section of the book. There are also many references in this section that make 
the most sense in the context of "Le Mystere des voix Bulgares." For some reason 
the recordings of  the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir were a 
sensation during the peak of the "Goth" era. That time was also the rise of 
Goddess culture as well:

      The first pressing of the Voix Bulgares album was the result of fifteen 
      years of work by Swiss ethnomusicologist and producer Marcel Cellier 
      and was originally released in 1975 on his small Discs Cellier label. Ivo 
      Watts-Russell (founder of 4AD) was introduced to the choir from a third 
      or fourth generation audio cassette lent to him by Peter Murphy, singer 
      from the band Bauhaus. He became thoroughly entranced by the music, 
      and tracked down and licensed the recordings from Cellier. The group 
      has since performed extensively around the world to wide acclaim and 
      were honored with a Grammy Award in 1989 for their second album.

      Three prominent soloists of the group have also performed together as 
      the Trio Bulgarka, notably on the Kate Bush albums The Sensual World 
      and The Red Shoes.

      In 1992, the choir divided into two: one for radio, one for television. 
      Bulgarian television signed a contract with the one half, which is the 
      Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir; the other half organized 
      itself as a collective, and now performs as "Angelite - The Bulgarian 
      Voices."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_State_Television_Female_Vocal_Choir

These recordings that started off as a labor of love for Marcel Cellier 
became a sensation for a brief moment. That moment happened to 
coincide with my involvement with Shira and Kitka.  In these passages 
of the novel, Pynchon drops little bits and pieces of info that help explain 
the [quite justified] devotion that performers and audiences have for this 
music. On page 940 there are references to banned musical modes, 
Orpheus, Pythagorean and Orphic teachings. Whatever is the cause of 
that intensity of emotion expressed by these transplanted mountain girls, 
there is an unearthly loneliness to it all, On 941 there's the classical 
songcatchers Bartok, Koldaly, Canteloube, Vaughan Williams, others 
much more obscure. The tradition of the "Mystery Girls" [Kitka's nickname 
for the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir] comes out of this 
era of song collecting. As noted on page 948, there is the fear that these 
sounds will disappear. While the work of arrangers like Philip Koutev
help to maintain these songs in some form, that form is a distortion of 
the original sound. On 943 there's an authentic Bulgarian call & response, 
the Pre-Philip Koutev,  pre-westernized authentic sound of the people and 
the land. Shira took a DAT recorder to Russia and Bulgaria, capturing 
the songs of the old women in the villages, a very dissonant and mournful 
sound.This ties in with the tale of the Kirghiz Light, of the warping and 
destruction of language, newer and more corrupt forms supplanting older 
and more traditional forms. On 946 it's Orpheus & Eurydice again, further 
on down there's a ruchensita wedding dance. And on 948, after Yashmeen 
promises to keep her ears open for Lydian material there is a gap in 
the musical continuum. . . .

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/kirghiz.html