Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening

[Mark Thibodeau]

This person needs to read the collected Gaddis ephemera book, The Rush for
Second Place! The Player Piano stuff he collected for Agape Agape is
incredible.

MT

On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 10:46 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/catalogs/routledge_literature_research/1/10/
>
> The Academic Website of Justin St. Clair
>
> http://www.soundculturestudies.net
>
> These three audio technologies — the player piano, radio, and TV audio
> — all “aspire,” according to St. Clair, to the “condition of Muzak,”
> or music as “aural anaesthetic, sonic persuasion, (im)pure
> background.” Muzak is, in a way, the fulcrum of the study, as it
> perfectly exemplifies an audio transmission that is supposed to be
> heard rather than listened to, but that is far from innocuous. Thomas
> Pynchon is famous for interrupting his narratives with song lyrics,
> the equivalent of foreground music, but St. Clair devotes the fourth
> chapter to his background music, the “wordless melodies” and
> “out-of-frame audio that reverberates in the corners and pervades the
> margins,” from kazoo concertos to buzzing metronomes. In The Crying of
> Lot 49, Oedipa Maas reflects on the role of the Muzak Corporation’s
> massive social experiment in shaping the American soundscape, one that
> in a “subliminal, unidentifiable way” influences our behavior: one of
> their actual slogans was “Boring work is made less boring by boring
> music.” Gravity’s Rainbow, for its part, exposes the philosophies and
> strategies of the Muzak Corporation, whose project “seeps” and
> “contaminates” the soundscape in the same way that the Pavlovian
> “Mystery Stimulus” (which is, significantly, auditory) does. Pynchon
> transforms the mystery stimulus into a plastic named Imipolex G, which
> despite its powerful smell, “behaves in an audible fashion,” and into
> Soniferous Aether, a kind of of “audioanalgesia,” heavenly and
> ethereal as Muzak is supposed to be.
>
>
> http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/listening-to-the-novel-the-soundtrack-of-postmodernism
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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