(np - Melville - was Re: The People's History & the Cold War ) equity? who ever heard of that?

[Michael Bailey]

he sleeps with counselors and kings

appositely so, if he is a conscience...

also, if he embodies the spirit of Chancery, then at least in America
kings have been phased out too and counselors aren't what they used to
be...


...and in a spirit of Christmas generosity,  I give you Porn Bartleby:
he, like, *sleeps with* counselors and kings.  He munches on nuts.
What is he doing undressed in that office all by himself on Sunday
morning?


But which Syracuse bank are you talking about?  I searched, looking
for a big scandal involving such ------
Did Melville, like Eliot, work at a bank upstate? (well Eliot wasn't
upstate, but he was at a bank, there was a passage in Hemingway's _A
Moveable Feast_ about how everybody was taking up collections or
something, trying to get Eliot out of the bank...) --


On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:58 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, Astor, the model of the 1%, is quite an important allusion here.
> And, we should not understand the allusion without a good deal of
> digging into the business that Bartleby, much like Jacob Marley,
> directs our narrator to weigh and measure, invest in, both in equity
> and debt--and we should recall that it is land, mortgaged land, and
> tenements, that snug business, still the largest and most powerful on
> Wall Street, that our narrator does business in. What has this to do
> with Washington Irving and the Devil and Tom Walker? Land Banks and
> mortgages? Ahab (from the Book of Kings)? The Preface to the House of
> the Seven Gables? Judge Pyncheon? The balloon L Frank Baum and a
> Syracuse Bank and the Chums? Well, that is a tale.