Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins

[alice wellintown]

He walked in, it was long before Alice's Restaurant and Hair, another
generation, maybe great or greater, maybe the greatest, who knows, but
it was the same place; they wuz handin out slips of paper and this kid
walks into him, sez something like, "whatcha got?" After waggin his
head a bit like he just drew a short straw or something, he shows the
kid his. USA, and they swap. He getz an MC. The Marines. So down in
Miami after basic he gos out to the base but there aint nothing there
but a guard tower. They send him to the Hotel Jesus where he meets
this boy whose daddy's money couldn't or wouldn't buy him out of the
draft but bought him everything and anything, and he gets a job,
stenographer. That Stuyvesant education was good for something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r39BZr-7l3I

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 8:35 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Anonymity.......the anonymity of 'take any t-shirt in the pile; closest
> you'll ever get
> to genuine anarchism'.....probably not exact quote from AtD but close
> enuff.......
>
>
>
>
> From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Sent: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 3:26 PM
> Subject: Re: Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins
>
> What is privacy?  The ability to do whatever you want, unseen by others.
>  What Pynchon and others who are famous (whether or not they're rich) really
> want is anonymity - the ability to be out in public without being accosted
> or noticed or treated differently than other people.  It's a relatively new
> concept, and peculiar only to large cities.  People in rural communities or
> small towns or villages don't have the option (though they may have
> privacy).  Pynchon actually has a fair amount of anonymity in NYC.  Few
> people, other than his avid fans or people who are specifically looking for
> him, would recognize him.  If he started showing up on TV or the lecture
> circuit, he'd still have privacy within the confines of his Upper West Side
> apartment, but his anonymity would be hampered.
>
> Laura
>
> (blathering, by way of procrastination)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Kohut
> Sent: Jan 4, 2012 4:06 PM
> To: rich , “pynchon-l at waste.org“
> Subject: Re: Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins
>
> and he's wanted privacy since he was 'poor'....and when being personally
> public might have made him more money.......
>
> I say in Pynchon's vision he wants privacy for all, not just for
> the rich.......
>
> An egalitarian right to be left alone to just live.........
>
> From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
> To: "“pynchon-l at waste.org“" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 2:28 PM
> Subject: Re: Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins
>
> the only thing, the only real thing the rich covet is privacy, thats what
> they're buying into, an exclusivity of privacy. guess what? Pynchon is pbly
> among them
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 2:15 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I think pynchon has a vision of human 'privacy' as a fading (or lost) right
> in our world. From Teflon
> with his camera while Benny was 'doing it', he shows us the invasion of our
> human privacy
>
> His work, his books, are of course as public as a woodworker's creations or
> housepainter's--only
>  different.
>
> Yes, he resists celebrity totally; refuses to be "owned".
>
> I do not, therefore, see him as a "successful public presence" but as a
> successful visionary writer who publishes
> his best work.
>
> But this may be just a semantic difference between us, since the root of 'to
> publish" is to
> make public.
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> To: Pynchon Mailing List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Cc:
> Sent: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 12:16 PM
> Subject: Re: Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins
>
> Does Pynchon promote privacy as a vision or a personal right. He is widely
> published, and is a successful public presence as an entertainer and
> literary voice. He defends his own personal privacy and that is admirable.
> But what he appears to be resisting is the cult of celebrity and the cult of
> news as noise, and the culture of image. He refuses to be owned.
>
> OWS protestors are addressing the exclusion from the public awareness of
> major shared issues of genuine public concern. They have drawn attention to
> the massive fraud of modern capitalism and away from the endless forgettable
> celebration of advertising that is all that seems to reman of  public
> debate. Their voices and issues, which clearly have support from 35% to 55%
> of citizens and ahave many articulate spokespeople, have been deliberately
> excluded from major arenas of public discourse. There have been no
> celebrities or exhibitionists to emerge from or dominate  this movement.
> The dominant images are the reaction to them, pundits, politicians, media
> hacks, and cops with 30 pounds of body armor and pepper spray.
>
>
> On Jan 4, 2012, at 9:06 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>> Could be a defense of Pynchon's vision of privacy, yes?
>> Nice.
>>
>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 6:26 AM
>> Subject: Re: Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins
>>
>> > Maybe not educate as much as expose.
>>
>>
>> Haven't we enough exposure? Is not the Public too much in the public
>> eye; we have become a nation of exhibitionists & voyeurs, a nation of
>> sloganeering revisionists who call themselves historians, a nation of
>> Jersey Shore Yahoos subjected to the analysis of Jerry Springer arm
>> chair psychologists, a nation of Margaret Mead's peeping in on
>> Polynesians life over the trailer park fence, a nation driven by the
>> primitive intinct to reach out and touch and groom clansmen, but a
>> nation that has fallen in love with shadows of narsisisstic
>> communication.  Expose this. Expose what? Expose yourself. It is not
>> capital or the system that makes automatons of free people. It is
>> exposure. The extra ordinary human contact,  that humans need, it's
>> that private investigation. The Inherent Vice, our peeping and
>> exposure, while a natural vice, has evolved at an un-natural speed and
>> has grown to big brother proportions. Look at me. Look at you. Look at
>> what they are doing now. Surely we need to expose bad government, bad
>> history, bad business, bad education... But exposure, the camera is a
>> gun, the mob is a statement, protest is a position, has inherent vices
>> that we must guard against. Exposure is a limited means not an end.
>> And it is hardly the only method people can employ to resist tyranny
>> and corruption and all manner of abuses of power. The sit-in, the
>> staying put at the work station, but stopping or slowing down or
>> sicking-out production, is a form of control. Give it with exposure
>> and new forms of control will relace it. see Zinn PHUS
>>
>>
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