I always read this, “A Christmas Childhood” by Patrick Kavanagh, and the church choir passage in “Gravity’s Rainbow” on Christmas day.
Interestingly, Pynchon evidently had “The Dead” in mind for that passage, since it features this section:
> Tonight’s scratch choir was all male, epauletted shoulders visible under the wide necks of the white robes, and many faces nearly as white with the exhaustion of soaked and muddy fields, midwatches, cables strummed by the nervous balloons sunfishing in the clouds, tents whose lights inside shine nuclear at twilight, soullike, through the cross-hatched walls, turning canvas to fine gauze, while the wind drummed there. Yet there was one black face, the counter-tenor, a Jamaican corporal, taken from his warm island to this (…) From palmy Kingston, the intricate needs of the Anglo-American Empire (1939-1945) had brought him to this cold fieldmouse church, nearly in earshot of a northern sea he’d hardly glimpsed in crossing (…)
It weirdly mirrors a discussion around the “dark-complexioned” tenor, Bartell D’Arcy, just before Gabriel’s speech, and Freddy Mallin’s observation that a black tenor he’d heard in the Gaiety Theatre was the one of the finest tenors he’d ever heard. Just in case you wanted an obscure and tenuous tidbit in relation to your post 🙂
I think this is my favourite paragraph in all literature.
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Ever see the movie?
SHUT THE FECK UP!
I always read this, “A Christmas Childhood” by Patrick Kavanagh, and the church choir passage in “Gravity’s Rainbow” on Christmas day.
Interestingly, Pynchon evidently had “The Dead” in mind for that passage, since it features this section:
> Tonight’s scratch choir was all male, epauletted shoulders visible under the wide necks of the white robes, and many faces nearly as white with the exhaustion of soaked and muddy fields, midwatches, cables strummed by the nervous balloons sunfishing in the clouds, tents whose lights inside shine nuclear at twilight, soullike, through the cross-hatched walls, turning canvas to fine gauze, while the wind drummed there. Yet there was one black face, the counter-tenor, a Jamaican corporal, taken from his warm island to this (…) From palmy Kingston, the intricate needs of the Anglo-American Empire (1939-1945) had brought him to this cold fieldmouse church, nearly in earshot of a northern sea he’d hardly glimpsed in crossing (…)
It weirdly mirrors a discussion around the “dark-complexioned” tenor, Bartell D’Arcy, just before Gabriel’s speech, and Freddy Mallin’s observation that a black tenor he’d heard in the Gaiety Theatre was the one of the finest tenors he’d ever heard. Just in case you wanted an obscure and tenuous tidbit in relation to your post 🙂
I think this is my favourite paragraph in all literature.