CofL49 Company sing-along

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Bailey" <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, June 01, 2009 10:09 PM
Subject: Re: CofL49 Company sing-along


> IBM songbook
> http://www.users.cloud9.net/%7Ebradmcc/ibmsongbook.html
>
> really really existed...they really really sang those songs:
>
> IBM COUNTRY CLUB SONG
> by Miss Viola M. Lee, Associate Member, IBM Country Club
> (Sung to the tune of "Annie Lisle," the Cornell Alma Mater)
>
> Verse:
>
> 'Twixt the Susquehanna River,
> and the hills so green:
> Stands the Club House white and shining,
> Fairest ever seen.
> Fields for sport and lawns for playgrounds
> Games when days are gray,
> Many hours of healthful pleasure
> Found there day by day.
>
> Chorus:
> Thanks we give to our great leader
> And we sing with vim,
> "Hail to Mr. T.J. Watson
> And the IBM."
>
> shades of the paternalism of some factory owners, who built towns with
> libraries and amenities for their workers...which is actually kinda
> nice...
>
> friend of my dad's from college who went into IBM, I remember visiting
> him with my Dad back in, oh, the early 90s or so.  As a retirement
> project, he was building a subdivision. Just sayin' that team spirit
> did have some payoffs...
>
> Mark Kohut wrote:
>>
>> p. 83 "To the tune of Cornell's alma mater"-----a bit of TRP 
>> self-criticism about his own role at Boeing? A--and, a first note in 
>> OBA's
>> later constant linking of the best universities with.....the 
>> military-industrial complex and, in ATd, with more...
>>
>
> well, the spin I'm taken with is the contrast to the Paranoids' song
> about the beach, lying on the beach, and the night creeping up and
> swallowing everything.  Your Dionysians and your Apollonians, I guess?
> (tho for Oedipa, neither one grabs her very palpably, if anything
> she's more in tune with the Paranoids at least to hang with awhile)
>
> a-and the tune is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VI3x1w1C4Y
> which sounds, um, a little bit like every alma mater I've ever heard...

A friend of mine whose two brother were at Cornell sang it this way:

Far above Cayuga's waters
There's an awful smell
Some will call it Alma Mater
Others say Cornell.

P.
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> "...no matter what you did to its edges the true Pacific stayed
> inviolate and integrated or assumed the ugliness at any edge into some
> more general truth."