Rent

[ish mailian]

This idea of colonizing through eviction and building is a standard in
the American novel, but so is, and this is more important and true of
Pynchon's characters, the characters who  don't want to stay put
anyway. There is America a push and a pull. Its people were pushed and
pulled to its shores and pushed and pulled on others, both those here
before them and those on the way in. But for Pynchon, a typical
American Novelist in this respect at least, it is the immature
American male who won't grow up and settle down, is restless to be on
the road, so having your house of the seven gables appropriated after
you are accused of (witchcraft, communism, anarchism, socialism,
spying for the enemy....etc.) is not at the center of the works. Sure
Dixon and Mason can see what is happening as the line is extended West
as the Natives are pushed, but the focus is clearly on these men who
wander and wonder. Now they may consider, as Scott Fitzgerald does,
how once the country looked to Dutch sailor's eyes, but that
consideration or reflection is commensurate  with their sense of
wonder and that, that is the real work of the novels. The
subjunctives, not the real houses that were razed to erect parking
lots, but he paradise lost that we no longer dream of.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any
lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the
Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to
melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that
flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the
new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for
Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest
of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have
held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an
aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to
face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his
capacity for wonder.

On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 9:58 AM, Chase Carnot <chase.carnot at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some of us like it :-P
>
> And you can't talk about rent without talking about eviction...
>
> Tariq Khalil's old turf on Artesia Boulevard being bulldozed for Wolfmann's
> new Channel View Estates.
>
> A paranoid U.S. Government evicted the Japanese from the same area during
> World War II. They were 'relocated' of course.
>
> "The long, sad history of Los Angeles land use: Mexican families bounced out
> of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium, American Indians swept out of
> Bunker Hill for the Music Center ... and now Tariq's neighborhood, bulldozed
> aside for 'Channel View Estates.'" (p. 17)
>
> A tectonic shift evicts Lemurians too, sinking their homeland to the bottom
> of the ocean. Some escape to California and make a home with all the other
> exiles.
>
> More broadly, Americans moving westward (some evicted from the east, nearly
> all evicted from the Old World prior to that) to fulfill their Manifest
> Destiny, a grandiose euphemism for the eviction of Native Americans.
>
> On Jan 7, 2017 7:34 AM, "Mark Thibodeau" <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Every time I see this goddamn discussion thread re-appear in my inbox,
>> I get nervous all over again.
>>
>> Jeez with the RENT crap already!
>>
>> ;-)
>>
>> YOPJ
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 6:35 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Or even, thinking of the lifelong power/ domination theme, all about "
>> > structured subjugation", a phrase I like learned in an essay on
>> > globalization, which is not, or not just, " everything solid melting into
>> > air" these days, something Pynchon also knew in his (only) pre-modernity
>> > novel, Mason& Dixon.
>> >
>> > Sent from my iPad
>> >
>> >> On Jan 7, 2017, at 1:33 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Isn’t the relationship of landlord to renter a rather obvious mirror of
>> >> the more universal Pyncon theme of colonizer and colonized?
>> >>>
>> >>> 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
>> >>> -
>> >>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>> >>
>> >> -
>> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l