V-2nd C4 The Eternal Drama of Love and Death

[alice wellintown]

Can't very well have it both ways, can he? Is it Ok to be or not to
be....? It is your life, take it if you want to. It is your life, your
life, take and use it or lose it. Nothing wrong with a record or a
photograph. I can listen to music I would never hear without
recordings. I can sit here and see a photo of Castro; I'll never meet
him. The world is flat, the world is hot, the lexus and the olive
tree. It is all a matter of "IF" or perhaps or, as Tanner discusses in
his essay on M&D, the subjunctive. Is it OK? That is the question? Of
course, koans have no answer. Romance, is about the sublime and the
paradoxical. Pynchon, it seems, would have made a very good catholic
priest, but he read Adams and Marx and Edmund Wilson, and Chardin,
although he seems to have a thing or two against Jewish gals with
daddy money sports cars and  5 towns negro maids and  pushed up Norma
Jean D noses, Farina must have hated them, he does  like the world
between her thighs.
On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 3:45 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Dave's quoted one of my (many) favorite passages from the book.  Here's the bracketed section:
>
> [given life by vibrating air columns and strings, having taken passage through transducers, coils, capacitors and tubes to a shuddering paper cone,] (p. 97)
>
> Pynchon's cites a syrupy piece of music conveying human emotions, then digs down to find its inanimate core.  We don't listen to music on the radio (or our high-tech sound systems).  No matter how pure the fidelity, between the creative impulse and the listening ear is a lot of inanimate junk.  What's wrong with that?
>
> Evan Godolphin, after the allograft of inanimate matter to correct his facial deformities:  "Take a long look.  It won't be good for more than six months." (p. 102)
>
> By recording music, filtering it through so much ephemeral junk, are we dooming it to be cheap, commercial, short-lived?  Maybe I'm reading Pynchon wrong here.  But we know that he has issues with not just sound recording, but photography, film, and even the written word [hypocrite!].  In the long journey through all those vibrating tubes and electronic devices, some of the original gets sloughed off, deposited as waste, never to be recovered.  The objects that impart perfection to Godolphin's face now, will cause it to cave into something monstrous and inhuman later.  Inanimate doesn't mix with human.
>
> Of course, this isn't really fair.  The music reaches more people when it's (first) played out loud and (second) recorded.  And Godolphin's face was going to look pretty hell-ish anyway.  But these quibblings will get lost in the shuffle as Pynchon starts to move from dissing the inanimate to dissing the industrial, and the military-industrial.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
>
>>
>>"Captured in the score's black symbols [...] the eternal drama of love
>>and death continued to unfold entirely disconnected from this evening
>>and place." (V, Ch. 4, pp. 97-8)
>>
>>
>>"fewer traffic lights"
>>
>>http://www.mta.info/nyct/maps/busman.pdf
>>
>>
>>WQXR
>>
>>http://www.wqxr.org/
>>
>>WQXR-FM (105.9 MHz) is a classical radio station licensed to Newark,
>>New Jersey and serving the New York City metropolitan area. It is the
>>most listened-to classical music  station in the United States, with
>>an average quarter-hour audience of 63,000. On the air since 1939,
>>WQXR-FM is also one of the oldest continuously operating FM stations
>>in the world.
>>
>>[...]
>>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WQXR-FM
>>
>>
>>"Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture flowed syrupy"
>>
>>http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=sBf1O4Mbieo
>>
>>http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=xaqp6e4ru8k
>>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet_%28Tchaikovsky%29
>>
>>http://www.barbwired.com/barbweb/programs/tchaikovsky_romeo.html
>>
>>http://imslp.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet,_overture-fantasia_%28Tchaikovsky,_Pyotr_Ilyich%29
>>
>>"The 'syrupy' quality of the music and the cliche implications of its
>>title reminds us that love is rarely treated without either irony or
>>pessimism in the novel" --Grant, Companion, p. 61
>>
>>http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/companion_to_v/
>>
>>
>>"a faceless delinquent"
>>
>>The United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency was
>>established by the United States Senate in 1953 to investigate the
>>problem of juvenile delinquency.
>>
>>[...]
>>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Subcommittee_on_Juvenile_Delinquency
>>
>>The Senate Investigation
>>
>>http://www.crimeboss.com/history03-1.html
>>
>>Transcripts
>>
>>http://www.thecomicbooks.com/1954senatetranscripts.html
>>
>>Cf. "delinquent wilderness" (ibid.) ...
>>
>>
>>"Cries in Spanish ....  A report ...."
>>
>>Cf., e.g., ...
>>
>>http://www.johncage.info/workscage/radiomusic.html
>>
>>
>>"Captured in the score's black symbols"
>>
>>http://imslp.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet,_overture-fantasia_(Tchaikovsky,_Pyotr_Ilyich)#Image_Files_.28Scores.29
>>
>>Cf., e.g., ...
>>
>>N.T.A.
>>
>>339; New Turkic Alphabet; written language imposed on Central Asia by
>>Russians; 341; Cyrillic NTA, 354; plenary session, 355; "first Central
>>Asian fuck you signs," 355; See also naming;
>>Routinization/Rationalization of Charisma
>>
>>http://www.thomaspynchon.com/gravitys-rainbow/alpha/n.html#nta
>>
>>... but do note that "captured" as well--Pynchon contra symbolism,
>>representation, mediation?
>>
>>
>>"given life"
>>
>>"... the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."  --2 Corinthians 3:6
>>
>>http://bible.cc/2_corinthians/3-6.htm
>>
>>
>>"vibrating air columns and strings"
>>
>>http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/sound/soucon.html#c1
>>
>>
>>"having taken passage through ..."
>>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudspeaker
>>
>>http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/audio/spk.html
>>
>>
>>"the eternal drama of love and death"
>>
>>"The fact that the drama is 'given life' by the inanimate workings of
>>the radio system and that it is 'entirely disconnected from this
>>evening and this place' suggests that Esther's journey is taking her
>>to an assignation without any promise of real human connectedness."
>>--Grant, Companion, p. 62
>>
>>http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/companion_to_v/
>>
>>... but also, note said "drama" "captured in the" novel's "black
>>symbols" as well ...
>
>