Rent

[ish mailian]

Young Pynchon's penned a brilliant short story, "The Secret
Integration", and at the heart of the tale's conflict is redlining,
blockbusting, the civil rights act of 1866, the stresses that produce
the fair housing act of 1968, a homeless Black musician, a childless
Black family that moves into a "Lily White" Republican neighborhood,
resembling the one Pynchon grew up in, where his father was a big shot
in the Party. The author's interest in Real Estate may be quite
personal, as RE is critical to the economies of Long Island,
Manhattan, and in the California and PNW communities he's lived and
worked in, and remember that P's ancestors are the subject of one of
the most important real estate novels in the American cannon, _The
House of the Seven Gables_.

On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 10:51 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Real estate generally is pretty big in Inherent Vice and Bleeding
> Edge, but maybe that's just a reflection of the times, or P's later
> home-owning ways? In IV the supposedly countercultural free-livin'
> idealists are still pinned within a system that ultimately owns them
> (you gotta pay the rent at the end of the day) and in BE this extends
> to the internet, which is an anarchic frontier at first but later
> becomes a heavily surveilled shopping mall.
> Can the relationship between renters and landlords be extrapolated
> into a broader existential dynamic? It's worth a thought.
>
> On Fri, Jan 6, 2017 at 2:25 PM, Chase Carnot <chase.carnot at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "[...] Crocker Fenway chuckled without mirth. ‘A bit late for that, Mr.
>> Sportello. People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay
>> anybody rent.’"
>>
>> When I saw PT Anderson's IV, this line jumped at me for the first time. In
>> the novel, it must have just washed over me. Anyway, I've been thinking
>> about diving back into the novel sometime soon with an eye toward rent as a
>> central theme. I felt vindicated when a reading app I use cropped the IV
>> 'Last Supper' poster... it left the center...
>>
>> https://goo.gl/photos/zaJops8hNHUrju2u6
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