Merry Christmas in Pynchonland!

[David Casseres]

Pynchon dearly loves Christmas, and the Advent season.  Advent seems to mean
everything from the approach of the Savior to Something coming across the
sky.

On 12/21/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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