Pynchon on P-list Day

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"We will buy it all up," making the expected arm gesture, "all this 
country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, 
where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast 
our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to 
build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their 
miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by 
the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, 
gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in 
top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money 
will be paying to build for us. When the scars of these battles have 
long faded, and the tailings are covered in bunchgrass and wildflowers, 
and the coming of the snows is no longer the year's curse but its 
promise, awaited eagerly for its influx of moneyed seekers after 
wintertime recreation, when the shining strands of telpherage have 
subdued every mountainside, and all is festival and wholesome sport and 
eugenically-chosen stock, who will be left anymore to remember the 
jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names, false and in any 
case, have gone forever unrecorded? who will care that once men fought 
as if an eight-hour day, a few coins more at the end of the week, were 
everything, were worth the merciless wind beneath the shabby roof, the 
tears freezing on a woman's face worn to dark Indian stupor before its 
time, the whining of children whose maws were never satisfied, whose 
future, those who survived, was always to toil for us, to fetch and feed 
and nurse, to ride the far fences of our properties, to stand watch 
between us and those who would intrude or question?" He might usually 
have taken a look at Foley, attentive back in the shadows. But Scarsdale 
did not seek out the eyes of his old faithful sidekick. He seldom did 
anymore. "Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, 
but money will beget money, grow like the bluebells in the meadow, 
spread and brighten and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is 
simple. It is inevitable. It has begun."

Against the Day, pp. 1000-1001


On 08.05.2015 08:07, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
> *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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