The Coolest Things

My students were reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 last week, and I asked them to come up with their own illustrations of the muted post horn that pops up repeatedly throughout the novel, and to think about what the horn was symbol for.

Perhaps the coolest version they came up with was a drawing of a clarinet, or something that resembled a clarinet, playing into a microphone that was wired into a speaker system that fed three separate sets of headphones.

The group's point was how the post horn seemed to be symbolically significant in a different way for each group who encountered it. Smart. This observation led us to a discussion of how Pynchon frustrates symbolism as it's typically understood.

You get a bunch of people in a room, give them something complicated to engage with, and ask them to think about that thing in an active way, and they'll almost invariably say the coolest things.