BE -- "death wish for the planet" why the internet?

[ish mailian]

Well, he is **transfigured** in the ancient **Trinitron** glow while
watching that obscure Marx Brothers opera. (top 418)  The Sony Tube, a
technological wonder, now junk, stacked curbside, shipped off to
China, where the salvaging of heavy metals is exchanged for the Rare
Earths Horst is speculating on. Remind anyone of Oedipa and TV & God.
Nothing but light comic commentary. Right? But Oedipa will get
entangled in a Revenge Tragedy. Murder. Not so funny.

So Thomas says we need an opera expert to get at P's use of Mozart and
the Marx's here.

Mark, you recently did an extensive study of Shakespeare, so I hope
you can help us till the expert shows up. The scene with the
transfiguration is important because it includes Pynchon's playful
commentary on the 11 of September and the use of
comedy/tragedy/conspiracy in artistic responses to it.

To get at it we can use Wiki on the Opera and how Mozart characterized
it, made us of comic and tragic modes.

But before we do that, we should turn back to the first piece of music
that sets the scene and gets the action going and it is, not Mozart
but Rota,  from The Godfather. The composer used this piece for a
comedy called Fortunella (1958). Nina Rota was fond of, well, some
say, palimpsests, others say, theft (an interesting topic as P notes
in SL), even of his own material and so he could not get the AW from
the Hollywood idiots because technically the score was not original
but stolen from a comedy and thrust into a tragedy. That's putting it
simply. Italian Wedding Fake Books aside, the horn blaring the theme
down Broadway wakes our protagonist from uneasy and fitful slumber and
she wanders through the home of her father till she finds him in front
of the Trinitron watching the Opera.

Gotta go







On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 5:13 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> I remember thinking: P keeps it so...open-ended. " Geezer nostalgia" might also mean some old glow for when conspiracy theories were conspiracy theories.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>> On Mar 7, 2016, at 12:18 AM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>>
>> Ernie actually makes the connection between the JFK assassination and 9/11:
>>
>> "'Same thing happened when JFK' was shot,' Ernie belatedly trying to defuse things with geezer nostalgia. "Nobody wanted to believe that official story either. So suddenly there were all these strange coincidences.'" (BE, 325)
>>
>> Love the "geezer nostalgia" -- remembering the good old times when the President's brains were blown out.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l