Pynchon on P-list Day

[Danny Weltman]

And we're a year away from this being the perfect birthday quote:

Here's to the great, Octuple boys! the
Mon-ster Cheese of fame,
Let's cheer it with, a thund'rous noise,
Then twice more of the same,-
Oh the bells shall ring, and
The guns shall roar,
For the won-derful Octuple Glo'r...
Aye, all the Lads, who push and who-pull,
Ev'ry Master, ev'ry Pupil
Single-ton and married Coople,
Eye at Win-dow, Door, and Looph'le,
Ev'ry minim, dram and scruple
Of their Praise is Thine, Octuple!

On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 10:12 AM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Would've been the perfect birthday quote 50 years ago, had it been written:
>
> "'Twenty-nine's Fell Shadow! O, inhospitably final year of any Pretense to
> Youth, its Dreams now, how wither'd away...tho' styl'd a Prime, yet bid'st
> thou Adieu to the Prime of Life!...There,--there, in the Stygian Mists of
> Futurity, loometh the dread Thirty,--Transition unspeakable! Prime so soon
> fallen, thy Virtue so easily broken, into a Number
> divisible,--penetrable!--by six others!'"
>
> [Mason & Dixon, p. 118]
>
> LK
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> Sent: May 8, 2016 4:33 AM
> To: pynchon -l
> Subject: Re: Pynchon on P-list Day
>
>
> "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)
>
>
>
>
> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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