$2.4 million for Kerouac scroll

[Doug Millison]

"Between Franklin's hectic aphorist, Poor Richard, and Melville's doomed
scrivener, Bartleby, lies about a century of early America, consolidating
itself as a Christian capitalist state, even as acedia was in the last
stages of its shift over from a spiritual to a secular condition. [...] By
the time of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853), acedia
had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now an offense
against the economy. Right in the heart of robberbaron capitalism, the title
character develops what proves to be terminal acedia. It is like one of
those western tales where the desperado keeps making choices that only herd
him closer to the one disagreeable finale. Bartleby just sits there in an
office on Wall Street repeating, "I would prefer not to." While his options
go rapidly narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and substance, is
actually brought to question the assumptions of his own life by this
miserable scrivener -- this writer! -- who, though among the lowest of the
low in the bilges of capitalism, nevertheless refuses to go on interacting
anymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the interesting question: who
is more guilty of Sloth, a person who collaborates with the root of all
evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a paycheck and a
hassle-free life, or one who does nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow?
Bartleby is the first great epic of modern Sloth, presently to be followed
by work from the likes of Kafka, Hemingway, Proust, Sartre, Musil and
others-take your own favorite list of writers after Melville and you're
bound sooner or later to run into a character bearing a sorrow recognizable
as peculiarly of our own time. [...] Unless the state of our souls becomes
once more a subject of serious concern, there is little question that Sloth
will continue to evolve away from its origins in the long-ago age of faith
and miracle, when daily life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and
time was a story, with a beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense,
engagement deep and fatal. The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth --
defiant sorrow in the face of God's good intentions -- was a deadly sin.
Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems
increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow,
despite technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our heads in
virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable
fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old
days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains
of the Acedia Squad."
http://www.libyrinth.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html

-----Original Message-----
From: Swing Hammerswing

" [...] P hates capitalism as much as
Teilhard, is not even as complicated about it as Melville,
more like Dickens critique of Mill & Co. in Hard Times,
but do note that P goes after capitalism in the Sloth essay."