"Every night is Christmas Eve on old East Main"

[ish mailian]

Yes, inconvenience, a word Pynchon employs with great lexical dexterity

I don't think the word inconvenience makes  an appearance in Moby-Dick.

But the word is critical to other Melville texts.

In Melville's sentences, as often in Pynchon's, inconvenience means
the opposite of Charity or Grace.

So, reading the Merry Christmas chapter of M-D, it's worth paying
attention to Charity.

Melville's story of the inconvenient Bartleby is about, well, it's
about Work, the Good Work or Charity, of Grace. Grace is something, at
least in Melville's conception of it, that Humanity tries to reject,
finds an inconvenient force that, well, it is convenient to pay off or
appease with charity, with good christian charity, but Charity with a
capital C, well, that's an Inconvenience that we would rather not
face. We can never quite turn it to our convenience, to our wide gat
through the eye of the needle.

On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 11:24 AM, Seymour Landnau
<seymourlandnau at gmail.com> wrote:
> I happen to be right at that moment in the book.  Not right now, now.  I
> didn't stop midsentence and check my email.  Two days ago.  Ishmael is now
> meeting the second owner of the Pequod.  They sail shortly after that?  Once
> again you have dashed my experience of a novel's riches.
>
> I wonder if I would have noticed that they sail on Christmas?  So the book
> begins on....the Solstice?
>
> Inconvenience.  There's a word, like grace, that pops up all the time.  I
> wonder what the Author means by it?  The opposite of grace.  I am reminded
> of Reef's first experience with explosions as a child.  Something about
> clowns and dynamite.  Hysterically inconvenienced.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 5:31 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Have you all forgotten, as I had, that the couple-three days
>> Ishmael and Queequeg spend together, sleeping together,
>> sharing their respective religious traditions
>> before the Pequod sails are the days before Christmas,
>> most interestingly Christmas Eve?
>>
>> The Pequod sailed on Christmas day.
>>
>> Ah, Herman, you sly wonderful genius.
>
>
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