Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening

[Dave Monroe]

I need to read that.

On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 2:46 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l