Ch 15

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Henry Musikar" <scuffling at gmail.com>
To: "Pynchon Liste" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 8:50 AM
Subject: RE: Ch 15


> Fol-de-rol, and fiddle-de-dee!  Nonsense! Huxley was right.  In the quoted
> passage, Huxley was not suggesting that novels are pure, but only that 
> music
> could be absolute, sheer "nonsense," and still be enjoyed and even
> respected.  And in my opinion, movies and TV are not too far behind in 
> that
> respect.
>
> Na-na-na, na-na-na, hey-hey, goodbye!
>
> Henry Mu

A new novel I'm reading "The Song is You" by Arthur Phillips takes much the 
same viewpoint.

Consider the following passage:

Julian plugged his iPod into the studio's sound system and felt a physical 
relief as the day's silliness was replaced with a sense of purpose. The 
soundtrack effect, as he had learned decades before: music could inject the 
quotidian with significance, lyricism, uniqueness. The third song, a female 
voice: "'I'd sooner die' she said, she said, and she almost believed it, her 
little drama." The music swept through the cubical black room: the 
embarrassing idea of believing too much in one's own little drama penetrated 
everything, here quickly like solar wind, there slowly but relentlessly as a 
line of ants.


I would highly recomment the novel to people who need their iPods with them 
every moment of the day.

P


> http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: 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...?
>