Ch 15

[Joseph Tracy]

On Apr 13, 2009, at 12:03 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:


> "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)
>


I find this a bit snobbish on Huxley's part, since novels  often  
serve the same propagandistic purposes, and nonsense is foisted in  
every medium. My POV would be that the problem he describes is more  
about the different motives behind art  or commercial  
entertainment.   Kinda weird that Huxley has this classical wariness  
of the ecstatic, but ends up writing a book length commercial for  
mescaline.

televisual is the obvious comparison and tool Pynchon is working with  
and I don't know how strong a case I could make for  the musicality  
of VL.  But part of what I sense is that feel good flow that Huxley  
is talking about. A kind of upbeat rhythm and jaunty riffing.  
Dangerous? OK but I love it.  Certainly both of these cultural forces  
of TV and Music are competing for the attention of youth in VL.  P  
seems to show the TV as more sinister, corrosive, in league with  the  
powers but...?