Rent, paid in pages turned

[Joseph Tracy]

In John Crossan’s “The Historical Jesus” he spends much time on historical and cultural context. One evangelical myth he dispels has to do with being a carpenter in one of the cities along 1st Century Galilee. There is this picture in many minds of the carpenter as independent contractor and respected builder/craftsman(This image shows up a lot in Christian art and sermons). 
But at the time of Jesus most carpenters were building luxury homes for the wealthy Romans and Merchant class and they were mostly  former small landowners  displaced by the Roman occupiers who seized the best farmland. These carpenters were like day laborers with no bargaining power, lousy wages, forced into renting cheap housing and paying high taxes. 
   
This colonial structure is both economic and culltural. It comes from deep in our history  and is key to prevailing arrangements and disputes today. Home owning is part of the American dream, but most home ownership looks a lot like rent. The power of real estate dreams and developers appears everywhere in Pynchon’s work.

It seems quite clear to me that the divide described by rent in the Crocker Fenway quote runs like an archeological rift through Pynchon’s work. A reat deal of what he does is excavating into that rift, speculating on its story line  and holding up fragments from the dig while channeling voices from the past like a  one man gathering of dope-smoking professors, stand up comics, and preterite souls. -
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l