BtZ42 p.14 But the Firm is patient,

[Monte Davis]

Cf. also Oedipa's Tupperware party -- and "the marriage plot" from Austen
to James and beyond (meta-reflexively modernized in Eugenides' novel): does
one respond with

"OMG, here are women of great vitality and talent & perception, their
families and social circles,  all *utterly absorbed and obsessed* with
finding The Man of appropriate income, status, and stables. What a
strangling restriction and waste of human potential"...

or with "GIVEN that as the ambit allowed them in that time and place, look
at how vividly and variously every human trait and impulse and perception
plays out within it"

?

Both, natch. Flip... flop.

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 6:55 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> C'mon, Joseph....he wrote "many" NOT NO and it may be a very feminist
> remark---gawd, one such ambiguous remark makes him a sexist???---in that it
> shows awareness of how constrained by the iron cage of a patriarchal
> society women might have been. What could they do? we don't even know,
> especially if one lived away from a major city, perhaps.
>
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 2:37 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>> Pretty sexist shit. Really Keynes knew of no women who made meaningful
>> use of free time?
>> > On 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 / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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