BtZ42 p.14 But the Firm is patient,

[ish mailian]

This is the Keynes essay NOB quotes at some length.

A key passage here:

Why, you may ask, is this so startling? It is startling because-if,
instead of looking into the future, we look into the past-we find that
the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been
hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race-not only
of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the
beginnings of life in its most primitive forms. Thus we have been
expressly evolved by nature-with all our impulses and deepest
instincts-for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the
economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its
traditional purpose.

Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of
life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I
think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of
the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he
may be asked to discard within a few decades. To use the language of
to-day-must we not expect a general “nervous breakdown”? We already
have a little experience of what I mean -a nervous breakdown of the
sort which is already common enough in England and the United States
amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many
of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional
tasks and occupations--who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when
deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and
mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing. To those who
sweat for their daily bread leisure is a longed--for sweet-until they
get it.

John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)*

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 7:05 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good to look into that _Life Against Death_ by NOB on this.
>
> The passages he quotes from Keynes are astounding.
>
> The Liberation from Bondage, from Laboring is Dread (like the Dora
> Slaves who find liberartion Dread)  But Brown, again, and we need to
> read that  Freud essay on Day-Dreaming (thanks again for posting it)
> rejects the fear of Bartleby and the Dora Slaves, for underneath the
> habit of labor is the immortal instinct to play.
>
> NOB also ties Mumford to Keynes and to Oedipa Mass, the dread of
> Virginia Woolf's granddaughters in America,  and the manufactured
> Feminist Mystic and the Mechanical Bride.
>
> Great Source for P that NOB.
>
> On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 6:27 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> committed to the Long Run as They are.
>>
>> "in the long run, we are all dead"....J.M Keynes
>>
>> http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/07/keynes_in_the_long_run_we_are_all_dead.html
>>
>>
>> Capitalizing Long Run here is a sure tipoff allusion, I would think. But we
>> haven't yet
>> talked about THAT quality of capitalization here, soon (enough) to ripen to
>> THE style of Mason & Dixon.
>>
>> We know easily why he does it with They and Them and The Firm, I think, but
>> why are other
>> terms chosen. [They and Them and The Firm get reified so abstractly but
>> perfectly this way, right?]
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l