V--2nd, Chap 9 sferics

[Robin Landseadel]

	Disagreeable as I find "Low-lands" now, it's nothing compared
	to my bleakness of heart when I have to look at "Entropy." The
	story is a fine example of a procedural error beginning writers
	are always being cautioned against. It is simply wrong to begin
	with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then
	try to force characters and events to conform to it.

	SL


A thought bubble here, not some close examination of the seams and  
joins of "V." but a riff off of one of Modern Literature's recurring  
leitmotivs.

There's a lot of interweaving of musical and literary concerns in  
"Modern" era literature. Hesse's "Glass Bead Game" and "Steppenwolf",  
Aldous Huxley's "Point Counter Point" and Thomas Mann's "Dr. Faustus"  
all come to mind, novels where music is a central concern. New sounds  
and new music are central to "V."  In "V." we have McClintic Sphere  
early on and more than once. In addition to Pynchon's new lyrics for  
old songs there are many references to music on the radio, off records  
and so on. Chapter 14 is a parody rendition of the infamous première  
of Le Sacre du Printemps. McClintic Sphere is, more or less, a parody  
rendition of Ornette Coleman. Of course, the inclusion of "Sphere " in  
the name directly alludes to Thelonious Sphere Monk, who might as well  
been a Pynchon character all along together with Professor Irwin Corey  
and Spike Jones. Pynchon gets much more specific and detailed about  
the technical changes in musical language in Gravity's Rainbow, with  
the Roseland Ballroom scene of Yardbird's "Chinese Music." Pynchon's  
lucid description of the particulars is one of the author's great  
cadenzas;

	Follow? Red, the Negro shoeshine boy, waits by his dusty
	leather seat. The Negroes all over wasted Roxbury wait. Follow?
	"Cherokee" comes wailing up from the dance floor below, over
	the hi-hat, the string bass, the thousand sets of feet where
	moving rose lights suggest not pale Harvard boys and their
	dates, but a lotta dolled-up redskins. The song playing is one
	more lie about white crimes. But more musicians have
	floundered in the channel to "Cherokee" than have got through
	from end to end. All those long, long notes ... what're they up to,
	all that time to do something inside of? is it an Indian spirit plot?
	Down in New York, drive fast maybe get there for the last seton
	7th Ave., between 139th and 140th, tonight, "Yardbird" Parker is
	finding out how he can use the notes at the higher ends of these
	very chords to break up the melody into have mercy what is it a
	fucking machine gun or something man he must be out of his
	mind 32nd notes demisemiquavers say it very (demisemiquaver)
	fast in a Munchkin voice if you can dig that coming out of Dan
	Wall's Chili House and down the street-shit, out in all kinds of
	streets (his trip, by '39, well begun: down inside his most
	affirmative solos honks already the idle, amused dum-de-
	dumming of old Mister fucking Death he self) out over the
	airwaves, into the society gigs, someday as far as what seeps
	out hidden speakers in the city elevators and in all the markets,
	his bird's singing, to gainsay the Man's lullabies, to subvert the
	groggy wash of the endlessly, gutlessly overdubbed strings. . . .
	So that prophecy, even up here on rainy Massachusetts Avenue,
	is beginning these days to work itself out in "Cherokee," the
	saxes downstairs getting now into some, oh really weird shit ....

At the same time that the center of Western Music's core values were  
abrading against the creative impulses of the best and brightest,  
science, ever moving forward, manages to elicit sounds never heard by  
sober white people before.

Mondaugen's on a "Ray Race", he's chasing after sounds that are  
entrancing him while managing to freak out all those around him who  
manage to overhear the young engineering student''s strange new audio  
discoveries -- the intrusion of another world into our own. The locals  
are picking up on the new strange sounds, playing their own riffs on  
the new timbres. Interesting how Mondaugen's story contains, in  
embryo, many of the themes found in later books. There is the "Ray  
Race" and general observation and cataloguing of antique radio gear in  
"Against the Day." Mason & Dixon's observation of the Transit of Venus  
at the Cape of Good Hope echos both in circumstances and outcome with  
Mondaugen's persuit of Gaia's song, the music of Earth's Magnetic  
Field. And then there is Belgium and the Congo in Against the Day, and  
God only knows how close a relation to the events that unfold in  
Gravity's Rainbow.

" . . . everyone agreed that in there someplace was earth's magnetic  
field . . ."

Charles Dodge is an early composer of music for Computer. His best  
known work is "Earth's Magnetic Field" of 1970.

http://vimeo.com/1466494

It is essentially a continuous  unfolding of the Spheric telemetry  
data, transforming the numerical values into musical scales. I've  
still got the LP, it's entrancing in a proto-new wave fashion. I find  
that Pynchon expressing similar ideas a few years before Charles Dodge  
demonstrates how "Great Minds Think Alike" -- the author displays  
awareness of developments in electronic music in just about all his  
books. There's a memorable citation of Stockhausen in CoL49:

	The Scope proved to be a haunt for electronics assembly people
	from Yoyodyne. The green neon sign outside ingeniously
	depicted the face of an oscilloscope tube, over which flowed an
	ever-changing dance of Lissajous figures. Today seemed to be
	payday, and everyone inside to be drunk already. Glared at all
	the way, Oedipa and Metzger found a table in back. A wizened
	bartender wearing shades materialized and Metzger ordered
	bourbon. Oedipa, checking the bar, grew nervous. There was
	this je ne sais quoi about the Scope crowd: they all wore glasses
	and stared at you, silent. Except for a couple-three nearer the
	door, who were engaged in a nose-picking contest, seeing how
	far they could flick it across the room.

	A sudden chorus of whoops and yibbles burst from a kind of juke
	box at the far end of the room. Everybody quit talking. The
	bartender tiptoed back, with the drinks.

	"What's happening?" Oedipa whispered.

	"That's by Stockhausen," the hip graybeard informed her, "the
	early crowd tends to dig your Radio Cologne sound. Later on we
	really swing. We're the only bar in the area, you know, has a
	strictly electronic music policy. Come on around Saturdays,
	starting midnight we have your Sinewave Session, that's a live
	get-together, fellas come in just to jam from all over the state, 	
	San Jose, Santa Barbara, San Diego"

	"Live?" Metzger said, "electronic music, live?"

	"They put it on the tape, here, live, fella. We got a whole back
	room full of your audio oscillators, gunshot machines, contact
	mikes, everything man. That's for if you didn't bring your ax, see,
	but you got the feeling and you want to swing with the rest of the
	cats, there's always something available."

A favorite album title -- Robin Hitchcock's "Groovy Decay" -- seems to  
resonate with Pynchon's take on the intrusion of what was once  
considered "noise" into western music, particularly post WW II.

But there also seems to be a touch of the horror show in the  
proceedings here, more than a little bit of Joseph Conrad as well. In  
earlier Pynchon there is more of a concern/obsession with Entropy.  
I've already suggested elsewhere that the author started out with the  
usual level of fear concerning the bomb. By the time he got away from  
Bomarc News Service, he must have just about as freaked out at the  
prospects of nuclear annihilation as anyone on the planet.  Of course,  
Pynchon already knows that the history of Bomarc is intimately tied to  
the history of young German engineers such as Mondaugen -- here lie  
the seeds of Gravity's Rainbow. The attachment of the "Heart of  
Darknesss" horrorshow with Moundaugen's explorations of songs of the  
upper atmosphere appear as an anarchist miracle. There is a sense that  
another world has already intruded into our own, and the mess that  
results is not good.

On Oct 11, 2010, at 5:49 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> p. 230 sferics  =  It's in the air; it surrounds; it's--the
> disturbances--everywhere. Could he have found an
> more literal metaphor, yet still a metaphor and original?
>
> Argument gambit: p. 230 "In there someplace [as affected] was the  
> 'earth's
> magnetic fields' "...
> another bit of evidence for TRP's self-found Gaia vision?