AtDDtA1: Now Single up all Lines

[Dave Monroe]

   "'Now single up all lines!'
   "'Cheerly now ... handsomely ... very well!  Prepare to cast her
off!'" (AtD, Pt. I, p. 3)

Cf. ...

"For it's said (and not without reason) that no sooner does a ship
like the Scaffold single up all lines than certain Navy wives are out
of their civvies and into barmaid uniform ...." (V., Ch. I, p. 3)

http://www.harperacademic.com/catalog/excerpt_xml.asp?isbn=0060930217

"Early tomorrow deck hands would come out in the bleaching glare of
the pier's lights and single up all lines for some of these green
berets." (V., Ch. XVI, p. 472)

"The Russians even had a guard posted on board for a while, till the
Anubian ladies vamped them off long enough to single up all lines."
(GR, Pt III, p. 489)

"The Ship's Landing ran well up into the Town, by way of Dock Creek,
so that the final Approach was like being reach'd out to, the Wind
baffl'd, a slow embrace of Brickwork, as the Town came to swallow one
by one their  Oceanick Degrees of freedom,--once as many as a Compass
box'd, and now, as they single up all lines, as they secure from
Sea-Detail, as they come to rest, none." (M&D, p. 258)

"... stumble back to the Ship, single up all lines, out once again
into certain Danger." (M&D, p. 260)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0610&msg=108300

   So begins Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day. Although the
lines in question belong to the airship Inconvenience, Pynchon's
opening lines carry a lot of weight in literary tradition, and this
one does not disappoint — it is simultaneously a self-directive and a
call to the reader; suggesting that Against the Day is a culmination
of his previous work, and also charging the reader to find meaning
within its twisting labyrinth. It may also be a sly, preemptive joke
on the book's initial critics, as the novel begins with the launch of
a bloated gasbag bearing a somewhat provocative name.
   Or at least that's my take so far ....

http://www.themodernword.com/reviews/pynchon_atd.html

... the narrative begins with the line, "Now single up all lines."
Already Pynchon's aesthetic of connectedness is beginning to work on
this reader. As ex- Navy, I recognize the naval terminology, which
harkens back to Pynchon's first novel, V. Ships are moored with ropes
which are "doubled" to adequately secure the ship to the pier. All
sailors recognize the command to "single lines," as the preliminary to
"casting off," at which point the ship is underway. Pynchon is taking
us on a voyage, a voyage through perhaps the most tumultuous period of
American and world history, certainly a period which is central to
understanding our relationship with technology and modernity.

http://researchmethodsprowrite.blogspot.com/

Recall ...

          chapter one

   In which Benny Profane,
        a schlemihl and
          human yo-yo,
              gets to
              an apo  (V., Ch.1, p. 1)

   "A screaming comes across the sky." (GR, Pt. I, p. 3)

   "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs ..." (M&D, Ch. 1, p. 5)

Hm ...

   "In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of
paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central
paintings of a triptych, titled 'Bordando el Manto Terrestre', were a
number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold
hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a
kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void,
seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and
creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were
contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world."  (Lot 49,
p. 33)

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


Cheerly

Cheerly means cheerily. Just as 'single up all lines' is used in
nautical context in V., so 'cheerly' appears on page 54 of Mason &
Dixon ("Cheerly. Cheerly, then, Lads...").

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25#Page_3