Pynchon on P-list Day

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

*Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon!*


/"We were outside trying to hail a cab, and out of nowhere Dotty said 
something like, 'The enemy most to be feared is as silent as a Mayan 
basketball game on television.' /(Bleeding Edge, p. 442)

/More and more, these days of angelic visit and communiqué, Carroll 
Eventyr feels a victim of his freak talent. As Nora Dodson-Truck once 
called it, his "splendid weakness." It showed late in life: he was 35 
when out of the other world, one morning on the Embankment, between 
strokes of a pavement artist's two pastels, salmon darkening to fawn, 
and a score of lank human figures, rag-sorrowful in the distances 
interlacing with ironwork and river smoke, all at once someone was 
speaking through Eventyr, so quietly that Nora caught hardly any of it, 
not even the identity of the soul that took and used him. Not then. Some 
of it was in German, some of the words she remembered. She would ask her 
husband, whom she was to meet that afternoon out in Surrey---arriving 
late though, all the shadows, men and women, dogs, chimneys, very long 
and black across the enormous lawn, and she with a dusting of ocher, 
barely noticeable in the late sun, making a fan shape near the edge of 
her veil---it was that color she'd snatched from the screever's wood box 
and swiftly, turning smoothly, touching only at shoe tip and the creamy 
block of yellow crumbling onto the surface, never leaving it, drew a 
great five-pointed star on the pavement, just upriver from an unfriendly 
likeness of Lloyd George in heliotrope and sea-green: pulling Eventyr by 
the hand to stand inside the central pentagon, seagulls in a wailing 
diadem overhead, then stepping in herself, an instinctive, a motherly 
way, her way with anyone she loved. She'd drawn her pentagram not even 
half in play. One couldn't be too safe, there was always evil..../ 
(Gravity's Rainbow, p. 145)


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