Property Values

[Dave Williams]

"There was no foreclosures or mortgages, no protested notes,
no bills  payables, no debts of honor in Typee; no
unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on being paid; no
duns of any description; no poor relations, everlastingly
occupying the spare bedchamber, and diminishing the elbow
room at the family table; no destitute widows with their
children starving on the cold charities of the world; no
beggars; no debtor's prisons; no proud and hard-hearted
nabobs in Typee; or to sum all in one word--no MONEY!"

			--Melville


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.
                            
                           --Pynchon

Speaking of unreliable narrators and duel-protagonists and ghosts. Bartleby, one could say, is our lawyer-narrator's humanity lost to the inanimating forces of property values.  




--- On Fri, 9/10/10, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: Property Values
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Friday, September 10, 2010, 4:00 PM
> On Sep 10, 2010, at 7:39 AM, David
> Morris wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 9:02 AM, Robin Landseadel
> > <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> wrote:
> >> 
> >> The Lot is crying, the land is crying. All along
> we ignored the extent that Pynchon was writing about the
> land as a living thing being conquered by developers. As
> clear as that notion is expressed in all his books, it's not
> a topic brought up so often. But this Gaiaian notion of the
> Earth being sentient is a major thread/theme in Vineland.
> > 
> > "Yeah, You Right" as they say down here in NOLA.
> 
> Remember Doc's Acid Trip? L.A. flooded? Echos of Atlantis?
> Lemuria?
> 
> The Big Uneasy.
> 
> And, considering the author's well documented propensity to
> bi-or-trifurcate his meanings, think of all that property
> going "Underwater" [fiscally speaking] throughout the
> country.
> 
> I think it all goes back to:
> 
>     "Section 49. Who May Commit Waste."
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/2ujga9o
> 
> &
> 
> http://lsr.nellco.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=duke_fs
> 
> Getting to particulars, the following can also be
> considered as background reading for the House of Seven
> Gables:
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/28zyt6e
> 
> . . .and the modern expression can be illuminated by
> reading:
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/2wjw4qr
>