Ch 28 In which George Washington and his happy negro smoke dope with Mason and Dixon

[Smoke Teff]

There’s a lot more happening with the land than just who’s getting rich, and that question is one we mostly only get the most obvious and fragmentary answer to

Lots of attention to open, un/pre-enclosed spaces—the ability to see what is approaching—and the apparent psychic intolerability of this terror as it’s felt by the human beings of the day. 

Is this intolerability new? Is it manufactured by the forces of power?

And how does the enclosure of space in the horizontal realm—the Earth’s surface, though only really true in the abstract, the world of ideas—relate to verticality of the Great Chain of Being?

Cf. The bit, can’t find page number at the moment, about Jesus’s cross as a kind of collapse or zero point of these two dimensions of metaphysical space. 

Lovejoy says the Romantic era is born (around this time) out of a crisis of untenability of the great chain as an idea. Partly because the GCoB seemed on the one hand to be about the perfection of the world as cause—as past. But suddenly, perfection/God may be out ahead of us. It may be what approaches. 

Cf how interchangeably the sense of the approaching modulates between it being an approaching force of divine redemption and, perhaps more often, an unspeakable evil

> On Apr 6, 2018, at 10:18 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Company
> 
> https://www.amazon.com/Great-American-Land-Bubble-Land-Grabbing/dp/1578987784?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q
> 
> https://www.amazon.com/Fabulous-History-Dismal-Swamp-Company-ebook/dp/B004DEPF04/
> 
> 
>> On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 6:23 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Yes, GW, who, as I noted, kept very good records and ledgers, is
>> famous or infamous for growing his wealth through land speculation.
>> 
>> This is well known and well documented.
>> 
>> The history of land speculation in America and the bubbles  and the
>> banking and financial crisis they caused has been the subject of a
>> pile of fiction in America.
>> Pynchon has added to this  pile.
>> 
>> And it should not surprise us that Pynchon has included a satirical
>> scene on GW's interest in land in a novel that is, in part, anyway,
>> about the great American land grab.
>> 
>> Pynchon is well known for his research of real estate, wealth, and
>> corruption in America.
>> 
>> From what he calls his apprentice's effort, "The Secret Integration",
>> Pynchon has
>> examined how land wealth in America was built on racist ideology and
>> war, exploitative international trade,
>> surveyance and cartography, and in cheap labor, including slave labor.
>> 
>> A member of the Pyncheon family, the haunted subject of one of the
>> most famous land grab novels in the American cannon, Pynchon's work
>> can be said to fit, in part anyway,
>> the Gothic tradition, where land is haunted by the victims of real
>> estate wealth.
>> 
>> In his famous Watts essay, Pynchon, like Richard Wright, who, in his
>> famous _Native Son_ makes ghosts of white people, makes ghosts of
>> planes that fly over the Watts residents. The same planes Bigger, the
>> protagonist of Wright's "protest novel" sees at the start of the
>> novel.
>> 
>> As Oedipa slowly realized, the MIC was a real estate enterprise that
>> set up its productions, as the airport was set up, and as the highways
>> were set up, to give the "little man" a false sense of power or white
>> privilege and to give the Man authority and to keep itself protected
>> by the towers.
>> 
>> 
>>> On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 7:51 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>> One way and another George made a lot of money:This is  the Wall St.’s
>> Journal’s list of the richest U.S. presidents:
>>> 
>>> 1. George Washington, first president from 1789 to 1797
>>> -- Net worth: $525 million In office
>>> His Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon, consisted of five separate farms
>> on 8,000 acres of prime farmland, run by more than 300 slaves. His wife,
>> Martha Washington, inherited significant property from her father.
>> Washington made well more than subsequent presidents: his salary was 2% of
>> the total U.S. budget in 1789. ( only JFK was richer)
>>> 
>>> The following quote is from this article
>>> How Did Washington Make His Millions?  by Andrew G. Gardner  in an
>> online journal sponsored by The Colonial Williamsberg foundation.
>>> "Most of this wealth can be traced to Washington’s success as a land
>> speculator, an enterprise that grew out of his early career as land
>> surveyor. “
>>> http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/winter13/washington.cfm <
>> http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/winter13/washington.cfm>
>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Though farm land has proved a better investment than improved
>>>>> properties, property investment has,generally disappointed.
>>>>> 
>>>>> A good article on this, though not directly applicable to Washington,
>>>>> here-----> from  ROBERT J. SHILLER is Sterling Professor of Economics
>>>>> at Yale.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Why Land and Homes Actually Tend to Be Disappointing Investments
>>>>> 
>>>>> https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/upshot/why-land-may-not-
>>>>> be-the-smartest-place-to-put-your-nest-egg.html
>>>>> --
>>>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> 
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l