Merry Christmas in Pynchonland!

[Ya Sam]

V.

"Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, 
sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia."

"The week between Christmas and New Year's Day was spent drunk enough to 
know that's what they were. Nobody in the house seemed to object hen they 
all moved in."

"Like tinsel suddenly tossed on a Christmas tree, the merry twinkling of 
switchblades, tire irons and filed-down garrison belt buckles appeared among 
the crowd in the street."

"The Christmas before last, he called it the Christmas of blood."

"You remember the old Christmas song, which is a linguistic joke. Perdrix, 
pear tree. The beauty is that it works like a machine yet is animate. "

Lot 49: Not Mentioned at all

GR

"And the people who might have been asleep in the empty houses here, people 
blown away, some already forever . . . are they dreaming of cities that 
shine all over with lamps at night, of Christmases seen again from the 
vantage of children and not of sheep huddled so vulnerable on their bare 
hillside, so bleached by the Star's awful radiance? or of songs so funny, so 
lovely or true, that they can't be remembered on waking . . . dreams of 
peacetime. . . "

"Then for another moment it seems that all the Christmas bells in the 
creation are about to join in chorus—that all their random pealing will be, 
this one time, coordinated, in harmony, present with tidings of explicit 
comfort, feasible joy."

"The time of year makes it even worse. Christmas. Bwweeeaaaagghh, clutching 
to his stomach. Jessica was all that made it human or tolerable. "

"He'd never told her, he avoided telling himself, but that was the measure 
of his faith, as this seventh Christmas of the War came wheeling in another 
charge at his skinny, shivering flank. . . ."

"On the Tannoy a BBC swing band is blaring hotly syncopated Christmas 
music."

". . . often above sounds of melting snow, winds that must blow not through 
Christmas air but through the substance of time would bring her those 
child-voices, singing for sixpences, and if her heart wasn't ready to take 
on quite all the stresses of her mortality and theirs, at least there was 
the fear that she was beginning to lose them—that one winter she would go 
running to look, out to the gate to find them, run as far as the trees but 
in vain, their voices fading. . . ."

"A beautiful Christmas gift," he confessed to the resident on his ward, 
"it's the season of birth, of fresh beginnings."

"Their cheer and songfulness, this lot, is genuine up to a point—but as the 
days pile up, as this orgy of Christmas greeting grows daily beyond healthy 
limits..."

I give up, too many Christmases in GR!!! :)

M&D

"This Christmastide of 1786, with the War settl'd and the Nation bick¬ering 
itself into Fragments, wounds bodily and ghostly, great and small, go aching 
on, not ev'ry one commemorated,— nor, too often, even recounted. "

"As the day darkens, and the first Flames appear, sometimes reflected as 
well in Panes of Glass, the sounds of the Stables and the Alleys grow 
louder, and chimney-smoke perambulates into the Christmastide air. "

""See thee at Christmastide, Charlie.”"

""Eeh.. .it's been Christmas, hasn't it...?""

"After a Christmastide truce, with the rest of the winter waiting them, 
perhaps more of it than any can imagine themselves surviving without at 
least one serious lapse in behavior, the Surveyors decide to travel to 
Lancaster, perhaps in hopes that the imps of discord will fail to pursue 
them 'cross Susquehanna."

"English church?" she accosts Revd Cherry-coke. "You could not find this 
even in Bethlehem at Christmastide."

M&D ditto. Very Christmassy I should say.




OK. Merry Christmas everybody, Happy New Year, Keep Cool but Care!!!

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