BtZ42 p.14 But the Firm is patient,

[ish mailian]

BY the time of "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street"
(1853), acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and
was now an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of
robber-baron capitalism, the title character develops what proves to
be terminal acedia. It is like one of those western tales where the
desperado keeps making choices that only herd him closer to the one
disagreeable finale. Bartleby just sits there in an office on Wall
Street repeating, "I would prefer not to." While his options go
rapidly narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and substance, is
actually brought to question the assumptions of his own life by this
miserable scrivener -- this writer! -- who, though among the lowest of
the low in the bilges of capitalism, nevertheless refuses to go on
interacting anymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the
interesting question: who is more guilty of Sloth, a person who
collaborates with the root of all evil, accepting things-as-they-are
in return for a paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does
nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow? "Bartleby" is the first great
epic of modern Sloth, presently to be followed by work from the likes
of Kafka, Hemingway, Proust, Sartre, Musil and others -- take your own
favorite list of writers after Melville and you're bound sooner or
later to run into a character bearing a sorrow recognizable as
peculiarly of our own time.

On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 7:31 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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