The 'Waste' Law | Pynchon's genealogical influences

[Bryan Snyder]

Very interesting stuff that's been shared for sure.  I'm loving it.  Please
do not read the below text as if I'm trying to take away from the great
information being shared here.  Let me state that as a Pynchon fanatic, I
love it... I print it... I read it twice... I waste tons of trees (gone to
the blade for these posts!!) on this stuff and I think it justifiable cause
it all deals with my favorite author and all that good, fuzzy stuff.

Please... I don't want to seem like I don't appreciate the delving of
material here!!

so with that rambling of mine out of the way...

I would say that while TRP does place in his fiction a lot of his family's
history and his family's ties with thematic "winners and losers of the Great
Depression" (a lot like how GR deals with the winners and losers of the
carving up of Germany and the businesses that fragmented from that action) I
don't think that his own ancestry is central to the fiction.

I'm sure he enjoys the study of his own past ancestors and sees that his
family was very much at the center of that pre-Great Depression American
collective monetary war and these references I think are more a
manifestation in his literature of the fate that befalls all authors: the
insertion of themselves in their art.  

But when his letters do get released, I think we'll see a different force
that drove him to his works.

In one letter that was written about(in the NY Times I think... the article
dealing with the letters TRP's old publicist sold...) back before those
letters were promised to be kept from the public until his death, TRP says
himself (before GR, and in one of these letters) that's he's working on
three books and if they are anything like he envisions they will be the
"literary event of the millennium" and I just think that if he thought this
(and time will tell) then it must because of the snippets of ideas that we
all discuss that he can view as a larger and far more interacting-whole
(science, technology, philosophy, behaviorism, politics, economics,
engineering etc.) ideas that are far more important in an
onto-epistemological sense and FOR all of mankind than this
self-genealogical-study FOR his own personal demon-dealing.  

A-and (sorry, had to) if this meta-idea of his is to have any sort of
ability to tug at our heartstrings, then I think the use of his family's
history allows it to tug at HIS heartstrings which I would think would
provide him with a method for making us all feel the way he does.

Not to say at all that his family and its incredible history are not part of
his millennial-event causing ideas, but I just don't think he's as obsessed
with it as we are (and I am too... I almost bought a hanger made by Pynchon
& Co.  lol)

I'm down to read this stuff so please keep it coming!!

B

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 6:10 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: The 'Waste' Law

               grladams:
               I'd like to know if these postings by our good 
               Robinlandseadel and otherspiling up in the inbox, 
               if all these recent November mining up of google
               book items are recent discoveries by the 
               pynchon-list --or are these rehashings of 
               already known stuff? Am I witnessing a new angle 
               of discovery here??
                                         ---------------------------

               A little of both I think. The 'Waste" law---never saw it
before 
               but in retrospect it makes perfect sense--is about a week 
               old for me. Monte Davis notes the connection between 
               surveying [OBA's dad was a surveyor, there were other 
               Pynchon surveyors. Read a hunk of Mason & Dixon if you 
               haven't already, it's a great book] and the 'Traverse' sign 
               of the arm at a right angle. Charles Hollander's great and
               intense essays have a visceral influence on my postings.
               I guess what's different here is a matter of degree, enabled 
               by traversing that web, an option unavailable to previous 
               researchers and writers..

               This is worth looking into: http://tinyurl.com/28cxnc . 
               There's 1299 listings for 'Pynchon" in the the New 
               York Times between 1851 and 1942. I think that 
               the George M. Pynchon attachment to yachts and the 
               incredible amount of newspaper coverage he received 
               for his very expensive, some might even say 'inconvenient'

               hobby suggest to me both special pleading on his behalf 
               and plenty of monetary clout for TRP's ancestors who into 
               the stocks, or at least into the stock market.

               I suppose what's different about my tack and nearly 
               everybody else's so far is that most people, hypnotized 
               by Pynchon's erudition, assume that the explanation for 
               the principle of organization for his mammoth fictions 
               must necessarily be difficult to comprehend. I say it's 
               simple, the organizational principle at the heart of all 
               of Pynchon's fictions touches on and includes his family 
               history and in particular the History of Pynchon & 
               Company, a very large and influential brokerage house, 
               first in Chicago, later in New York City, that fell to pieces

               in 1931, accompinied by the simultanious rise of Brothers 
               Brown and Harriman. The BBH connection is central to 
               Gravity's rainbow, and it is one of the blackest chapters of 
               American History. Against the Day is centered on Pynchon 
               & Company, but so was the Crying of Lot 49. Gravity's 
               Rainbow deals with what happened in the wake of the fall 
               of the house of Pynchon, Mason & Dixon touches on 
               issues around property and TRP's strange and interesting 
               early ancestors, and to a certain extent TRP senior, the 
               author's surveying father. That would be Dixon, I believe. 
               But the specifics are not as important [right now, for me---
               check back later, will you?] as the gestalt. I don't know 
               exactly how all this will tie into V., other than knowning
that 
               there's plenty of overlap with the time period of Against the

               Day, so Pynchon & Company would probably central to that 
               novel as well. So much of what has confused people about 
               Pynchon's writing boils down to family history. And though 
               Charles Holander also has written on the subject, I really 
               want to see the subject opened up properly as it contains 
               one of the most important American History Lessons I 
               have ever encountered.

Original Message:
-----------------
From:  robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:00:02 +0000
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: The 'Waste' Law


The most obvious meaning for "The Crying of Lot 49" 
is the auctioning of property. Of course, under dust
 bowl circumstances. . . .

          Section 49. Who may commit Waste.

          Waste can only be committed by a person rightfully in 
          possetion of the property.. Under the early common 
          law only tenants of legal as distinguished from tenants 
          of conventional estates, were liable for waste. But the 
          common law was changed by the statute of Marlbridge. . . .

          . . . .Formerly in England, co-temant or a tenant in 
          common could not be held guilty of waste, but this 
          statute of Westminster II. In the United States 
          co-tenants are liable for waste, either by statute, 
          or independently of statutes.

Pynchon Vs. Stearns is mentioned on page 92 and 95, in the footnotes.

http://tinyurl.com/2gb8aa