vv (12): cultural grammar of time

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 "boisterous were the parties, lively the music, jolly the girls that had filled 
 foppl's baroque plantation house nearly every night since mondaugen's arrival, 
 in a seemingly eternal fasching." (pp. 230f)

turn back your pages to the beginning of the first chapter and you'll read as 
first song line:
                   "every night is christmas eve on old east maine" (9)


 both passages indicate a complete crack-up of time's cultural grammar; one is 
 about christian, the other about a pagan time-table. this decrease of the  
 religious orientation patterns perhaps signifies not only plane 
 "secularization" but a new mixture of the holy and the profane, which now are 
 not strict opposites anymore.    


    how does this relate to the complex temporal co-configuration of christian  
    and pagan feasts in gravity's rainbow? 


& maybe somebody out there has an idea how this fits to the twelve days which 
get lost in m&d.


  eventually it can be noted that a formulation like "eternal fasching" makes 
  the common genre-definition "picaro-novel" at least understandable.


kfl