ABSTRACT
In a typically vulgar speculation from his biography My Shit Life So Far, misanthropic Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle supposes that “in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray would probably have raped and killed Andie MacDowell quite, really gone to town. Love is a “tormented circling” that is figured, in Groundhog Day, by a musical “earworm” that traps the amorous subject “in a sort of loop, a tight neural circuit from which it cannot escape”. Music feeds or provides the condition for love by transforming language into an alien form, a refrain stripped of meaning and purpose other than to provide a territory, a scene, for the speculative imagination. The audioligachaeta, or earworm, can fade, but once it has entered the brain, like love the heart, “a heightened sensitivity remains, so that a noise, an association, a reference” can set it off again.
