For Dave Monroe, always for Dave, every Christmas Eve. Dave, someday i'll get to Milwaukee and sit in that seat. Keep resting in peace, heart eased.

[Mark Kohut]

Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levies, suede jacket,
> sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.
> ......
>
> Every night is Christmas Eve on old East Main,
> Sailors and their sweethearts all agree.
> Neon signs of red and green
> Shine upon the friendly scene,
> Welcoming you in from off the sea.
> Santa's bag is filled with all your dreams come true:
> Nickel beers that sparkle like champagne,
> Barmaids who all love to screw,
> All of them reminding you
> It's Christmas Eve on old East Main.
>                                        ----V. Thomas Pynchon.
>
> A reminder of its anti-Puritanism: ...."too much unregulated joy"
>
> "What is Christmas, anyway? For those who don’t celebrate the birth of
> Christ yet still trim a tree on December 25, it’s…well, complicated.
> Christmas is, after all, a specifically Christian holiday, albeit one
> briefly banned by the 17th-century Puritans (too much popery and public
> drunkenness), and at which the neo-puritanically inclined and the
> chronically grinchy persist in looking askance (too much unregulated
> joy)."--Terry Teachout, WSJ yesterday, 5 years ago.
>


> You want to know something amazing about Christmas Eve in 1955, when
> Pynchon sets V ?
> It was the night that Sears & Roebuck published the Track Santa hotline in
> the paper to their store for PR purposes
> .....but there was a typo.
>
> The call went to NORAD Headquarters. Who played along.....
>
> V could have been set almost anytime in the 50's......PYNCHON knew, we
> believe.
>
> As *Gravity's Rainbow* begins with "A screaming comes across the sky"
> .....one of the most famous beginnings ever.
>
> Always a cosmic background, even if hidden to be found out later in V......
>
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