V-2 - Chapters 9/10 - Sferic Music, part two

[Robin Landseadel]

I suppose if I gave "V." as much attention as I've given to all of  
Pynchon's other novels there would be more postings coming from these  
quarters. But when I move back to the main body of "V." -- I consider  
Mondaugen's Story an outgrowth that later metastasized -- the language  
flattens out, again. I'm back on the street and I don't like it. The  
issue is the sheer quality of writing. Diving into Gravity's Rainbow  
last night underscores how much the author progressed from 1963 to  
1973. The concepts might be in place, but the language isn't.

Wonder what "V." would have been like with a wall-to-wall re-write? Of  
course, there is "Against the Day" to consider, right?

But, and in any case, there is a lot more in "V." that points directly  
to music than I recall from previous readings, much of it tied to the  
Music of Time, a visto offered up by the Zodiacal progression in  
Vera's artificial eye and Foppl's Planetarium. The transition from  
Chapter 9 ends with a Hottentot song that the young engineering  
student Kurt Mondaugen doesn't comprehend. The opening scene of  
Chapter 10 moves into the nominal "present" of "V." as McClintic  
Sphere scryes into the piano strings while he's taking a break from  
playing for an audience that clearly isn't connecting with him. The  
author's sympathetic magic connects McClintic's piano to Mondaugen's  
antenna. These themes get will be reflexed and multiplied later on in  
Gravity's Rainbow. The scenes that re-introduce us to Weissman and  
Mondaugen in Gravity's Rainbow will be explicit as regards the psychic  
aspects of this 'sferic music, taking us directly to a seance of a  
Herero ghost. But right now, Sphere's just idly scrying the strings of  
a piano:

		McClintic Sphere (whose horn man was soloing)
	stood by the empty piano, looking off at nothing in
	particular. He was half listening to the music
	(touching the keys of his alto now and again, as if by
	sympathetic magic to make that natural horn develop
	the idea differently, some way Sphere thought could
	be better) and half watching the customers at the
	tables.

There was a Steinway B manufactured in the thirties sitting in my  
living room back in 1993, I had a radio gig at the same time as well.  
We always had the lid of the piano open. It was a damaged instrument  
we were storing/playing for a my boss. Some studio musician spilled  
coffee into the instrument, damaging the felt hammers of the octave  
centered on A below middle C. The bottom four notes were FUBAR. You  
could say it was a variant of one of John Cage's "prepared" pianos,  
arriving pre-wrecked. The Piano fell off the back of a truck  
[literally, and it was most likely due to karma], there was a visible  
split on the tail of the beast, filled with wood putty. I looked down  
into that piano's harp a lot. There's a lot of potential for  
sympathetic vibration in the harp of this Steinway B -- sit down, hold  
the sustain pedal down, listen to the sympathetic magic. We had plenty  
of live music in the living room, dynamically unlimited sounds that  
really set off the piano's ghost voice.

I got into KPFA through the classical music door, exited via a door  
marked "World Music." There was a changing of the guard while I was  
there, born out of a desire to generate a larger audience [or perhaps  
a series of clandestine right-wing moves to derail KPFA altogether and  
sell the assets off, freeing up valuable bandwidth].

Charles Amirkhanian:

http://www.classicalarchives.com/work/92372.html

. . . the music director of the station when I arrived, was the most  
powerful advocate of 20th century "Out There" music I have ever known,  
with fingers in the pies of all the Avant-Garde classical music  
scenes, like WDR or Bang on a Can, producing recordings of Colon  
Nancarrow's insane piano rolls, getting involved with Zappa's  
"classical" music, Eno's ambient music,  producing Laurie Anderson's  
first record, steering a mutant army that was squeezing out a life of  
sorts on the margins of public taste and acceptance of the weird.  So  
there was always room at the station for Sun Ra and Henry Threadgill,  
Art Ensemble of Chicago, Lester Bowie . . .

Getting closer to the the V-note and environs, there were concerts  
recorded by the KPFA crew of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman & Anthony  
Braxton and going back into the archives you would hear the ghosts of  
'Trane, Eric Dolphy or Albert Ayler, often late on a Saturday  
afternoon on Jim Bennett's "Forms & Feelings." Every now and then, in  
some of my "free-form" slots, I would go just a little further back,  
once broadcasting a Charlie Parker show in a "Classical Music" spot  
and given grief for that, being told by management that they already  
had slots for that sort of music.

The time zone of "V." has a "present tense" that begins in Xmas of  
1955 and that present soon moves towards the Village. So there must be  
"Bird Lives" graffiti all over the place. Bird died March 12, 1955. I  
still listen to Bird, he still matters. This week I played an old,  
gnarly sounding aircheck featuring Bird, Bud Powell and Fats Navarro,  
with Curley Russell on bass and Art Blakey scaring everybody else in  
that smoke-filled NYC club, May of 1950. There's lots of spots in this  
session that are turning towards the outside, much like the stage in  
musical history where Debussy and Mahler stretch the boundaries of  
tonality without breaking them, though every now and then things sound  
pretty breaky. There's a future in the soon-to-be-dead trio headlining  
this session, McClintic Sphere is that future. Having "Sphere" in the  
name should be a clue of sorts, or we wouldn't  need the light. Monk  
managed to keep on working in spite of everything, electroshock and  
all. "Sphere" himself doesn't seem all that healthy --

		Half an hour later he was in Harlem, in a friendly rooming
	(and in a sense cat) house run by one Matilda Winthrop, who
	was little and wizened and looked like any elderly little lady
	you might see in the street, going along with gentle steps in
	the waning afternoon to look for spleens and greens at the market.

		"She's up there," Matilda said, with a smile for everybody,
	even musicians with a headful of righteous moss who were
	making money and drove sports cars. Sphere shadow-boxed
	with her for a few minutes. She had better reflexes than he did.

That "better reflexes" issue reminds me more than a little of why  
Anthony Braxton drives me batty. Back to the V-note:

		This was last set and it'd been a bad week for
	Sphere. Some of the colleges were let out and the
	place had been crowded with these types who liked
	to talk to each other a lot. Every now and again, they'd
	invite him over to a table between sets and ask him
	what he thought about other altos. Some of them
	would go through the old Northern liberal routine:
	look at me, I'll sit with anybody. Either that or they would
	say: "Hey fella, how about Night Train?" Yes, bwana.
	Yazzuh, boss. Dis darkey, ol' Uncle McClintic, he play
	you de finest Night Train you evah did hear':

	An' aftah de set he gwine take dis ol' alto an' shove it up
	yo' white Ivy League ass.

Again, we have this unbridgeable communications gulf, like Kurt and  
the one-armed Bondel. Many of the opressor/opressed relations remain  
the same as, but we are updated, "things have changed." Again, it's  
useful to underscore the importance of the Civil Rights movement in  
the early sixties, why these particular themes appear in the author's  
novels at this particular time. What happened in Mondaugen's story was  
a demonstration of a way of life that took the total de-humanization  
of Blacks all the way out there. But the parallel story of the Black  
experience in America is, if anything, worse. Considering Pynchon's  
small circle of friends as of the time the Novel was published, the  
Civil Rights Movement must have been on all of their minds, Northern  
Liberals, one and all.

We also have a funny little grievance, the Author covertly bitching:

		Soon he was telling her about the week, about the
	kids with money who used him for background music and
	the musicians from other bigger groups, also with money,
	who were cautious and had mixed reactions and the few
	who couldn't really afford dollar beers at the V-Note but
	did or wanted to understand except that the space they
	might have occupied was already taken up by the rich kids
	and musicians.

Poor little Pynch', could've stayed for another set if it wasn't for  
those $1 beers and all those mean, nasty musicians.