CoL49 Group reading - The bust & Jay Gould

[Mark Kohut]

No, no one I've ever known...just Presidents at the White
House...(althugh a friend recently said he had
statues of Don Quixote around.....but fictional characters aren't quite the
same (except that real persons are
felt mythically in some way, right?)

Owning a bust of a beloved ancestor or historical figure can feel like
welcoming
them into your home, their presence weaving a thread of personal history
into the fabric of your space.

A guy on Reddit says a bust makes him feel the owner wants a dialogue with
their revered personage. He felt this after watching a John Adams
documentary.

Sounds right on to me....



On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 11:21 PM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I don’t know anybody who has a bust of anybody in their house. Does anybody
> here?
>
> Would you call it an affectation?
>
> Schroeder has a bust of Beethoven on his piano. Presumably for inspiration.
>
> The Schroeder character was introduced in 1951 - so this oddity could have
> been an inspiration for Pierce’s bust of Jay Gould.
>
>
> I’m not thinking of the bust of Jay Gould in terms of gnarly symbolism but
> just, like, wouldn’t you agree that it might be significant -
>
> “if this is who Pierce admires enough to have a frickin’ bust” in a
> position near to the frickin’ marriage bed because he wants, while
> sleeping, a-and while copulating, to have the bust nearby -
>
>  (ok, I’ve typed “bust” enough times, it’s starting to sound weird)
>
>
> I refreshed my memory of Jay Gould in Wikipedia.
> Fairly typical robber baron, n’est ça pas?
>
> 3 standout tidbits:
>
> - Tried to corner gold, screwed a bunch of people & businesses up for
> months, & didn’t even make a net profit after the lawsuits
>
> - Quoted (somewhere) as saying something about “he could hire one half of
> the working class to kill the other half”
> (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/10/29/hire-half/?amp=1 someone chased
> this down - pretty interesting - sounds like not a very accurate quote
>
>
>  - mentioned in GR in context of being the partner of Jubilee Jim Fisk in
> the “cornering gold caper”;
>
> (From _Gravity’s Rainbow_
> “It is gone where the woodbine twineth.” Exactly what Jubilee Jim Fisk told
> the Congressional committee investigating his and Jay Gould’s scheme to
> corner gold in 1869.)
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, May 4, 2024 at 7:19 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I learned Putin does not have a bust of Lenin
> > In his residence, but of Peter the Great.
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>