Ch 15

[Dave Monroe]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Does anyone else feel that this is Pynchon's most musical novel, some
> parts having the feel of jingles, TV theme songs, some like torchy singers
> from movies,  folky ballads, soul, a few lonely jazz improvisations, lotta
> rock and roll, lotta blues.  CH 15 particularly sings, riffs, dirges and rocks.

"For the commercial propagandist, as for his colleagues in the fields
of politics and religion, music possesses yet another advantage.
Nonsense which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write,
speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational
being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual
conviction...."

--Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1959)

http://webserve.govst.edu/pa/Advertising/ABCs/jingles.htm

... but rather than simply musical, perhaps, most televisual instead,
inc. nonstop sdtk. ...

"If the normal flow of TV worlds is a good scale-model or
mise-en-abyme of postmodernist ontological plurality, then the
heightened, intensified flow produced by zapping is that much better,
a model with even higher visibility and sharper 'resolution.' ..."

--Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (1992), p. 133

http://www.routledge.com/books/Constructing-Postmodernism-isbn9780415060141
http://books.google.com/books?id=KBxNCnpGB9IC

"Television time is no longer the linear and uniform commodity it once
was. Not when you have instant channel selection, fast-forward, rewind
and so forth. Video time can be reshaped at will. What may have seemed
under the old dispensation like time wasted and unrecoverable is now
perhaps not quite as simply structured...."

--Thomas Pynchon, "Nearer My Couch to Thee" (1993)

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html
http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/sloth.html

> One of the major themes that runs through M&D CoL49 and Vineland is civil
> war....

In re: Lot 49, see, e.g., ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=58495
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59129
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59185

Cf. as well, say, yr Shakespearean history plays ...

> But Pynchon shows a country where the dream of some kind of final
> solution to deal with the dissidents and troublemakers begins and ends
> as a TV fantasy ...

http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/0.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xns67AVkOeI