LPPM MMV "Trodden-On and Disaffected"

[Dave Monroe]

   "'I don't really know why I should be telling you
about this,' she began and it was as if she bad said.
'Bless me father for I have sinned,' because Siegel
often thought that if all the punks, lushes, coeds in
love, woebegone PFC's--the whole host of trodden-on
and disaffected--who had approached him with that
opening formula were placed end to end they would
surely reach from here back to the Grand Concourse and
a timid spindleshanked boy in a slashed necktie.
'Except,' she continued, 'that you look like David,
you have the same kind of sympathy for anybody who
gets kicked around, I feel that somehow.'" (MMV, p. 6)


"woebegone PFC's"

In the U.S. Army, Private First Class is the third
lowest enlisted rank, just above Private and below
Corporal or Specialist....

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Private%20First%20Class


"the whole host of trodden-on and disaffected"

Main Entry: host 
Pronunciation: 'hOst
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French, from Late
Latin hostis, from Latin, stranger, enemy -- more at
GUEST
1 : ARMY
2 : a very large number : MULTITUDE

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary&va=host

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0408&msg=92429

Cf., e.g., ...

Preterite
Calvinist/Puritan doctrine of the Elect (the chosen)
and the Preterite (the passed-over, the damned);
"second sheep" 3; "a new preterition abroad in
England" 15; Dodoes, 108-11; "But if [the Dutch
settlors] were chosen to come to Mauritius, why had
they also been chosen to fail, and leave? Is that a
choosing, or is it a passing over? Are they Elect, or
are they Preterite, and doomed as Dodoes?" 110; "men
you have seen on foot and smileless in the cities but
forgot" 136; at Rathenau seance, 163; coal-tars as
preterite dung, 166; "his poor sheep" 233; "the
multitudes who are passed over by God and History"
299; "In preterite line they have pointed her here"
316; "Elite and Preterite, we move through a cosmic
design of darkness and light" 495; "they dissolve now
into the swarm. . .of this dancing Preterition" 548;
"The successful loner was only the other part of it:
the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had
already been created by the Preterite" 554; Judas,
555; On Preterition, 555; "in their slick persistence
and our preterition" 590; "rubbers yellow with
preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding
preterite snot, preterite tears" 626; 667; 668; "the
glozing neuters of the world" 677; "the Humility,
among the gray and preterite souls" 742; See also Hand
of Providence/God; Puritans

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/p-q.html


"slashed necktie"

Recall ...

"the symbolic razor slash halfway up his black
necktie" (p. 1)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0408&msg=92383

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0408&msg=92386


"sympathy for anyone who gets kicked around"

Although Pynchon enjoyed a felicitous middle-class
upbringing, from his earliest writings his humanist
sympathies are repeatedly with the losers, the
victims, the disinherited of history and of his
stories....

http://www.vheissu.org/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm

Pynchon, concerned with history as he is, often writes
about the sadness, the tristesse, of the disinherited
....

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm


		
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