Jules

[Kyburz at asu.edu]

Jules wrote one night, frustrated.  Maybe you'd like to hear him out.  I 
think he's been unjustly flamed to death.  God, it's a bitch to get 
flamed, isn't it?  A-and once it's begun, it's like this monster that 
feeds on its own disease.  I recall jumping right in, ready to flame . . 
. anybody!  Just let me bitch!  I'm not saying we don't often have 
something to bitch about, but usually, some sense of decency exists among 
friends, scholars, whatever.  Well, you've been preached to death 
yourselves, I notice, as I've been lurking about lately.  So forgive me 
if Jules' message is timed badly.  He actually sent it last week, but I 
was so conflicted about the whole thing--and this list (no personal 
offense intended, please) that I just let it be.  Now, I've just read 
another very touching letter from Jules and am sensitized to his 
position.  So, here's what he said:




October 31, 1996.

Tom Stanton <tstanton at nationalgeographic.com> wrote:

> [Early flaming experiences] My sainted wife finally pointed out [good advice about personal interaction, not always dominating center stage, etc.]

Are we married to the same woman? Does Anita have a secret communication going with this woman?

You can imagine what Chrissie went through. Not on the Internet. Right out there with sixty nitballs (nitballs, nutballs, whatever) in the redwoods. She's doing their laundry and cooking their meals, which are mostly paid for by my Playboy and Rolling Stone expense accounts, and they are attacking us as dilettantes! They were so fucked up they couldn't tie their own shoelaces (not a metaphor, but an actual fact in more than one case). We’re exploiting them.

When we split for Mexico the second time in 1973, I once asked her why she hated me: "I married a man in a Brooks Brothers suit who was writing cover stories on major rock stars for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. Mario Puzo, Bruce Jay Friedman and Thomas Pynchon all told me that we were going to be rich and famous because he was going to write best sellers. Now here I am in the jungles of Mexico with a crazy hippie artist and a worried baby. That's why."

Good point.

> I was also very touched to read your response about Tom's dad passing, and felt bad that it came across in such a callous way. 

I didn’t feel davemarc was callous. How else do you do it? I just fucking hate Wednesdays. The news of my father’s death came on a Wednesday. No matter how I try to break the pattern, it’s always a dangerous day for me.

> As much as this impersonal medium can, your sorrow came through loud and clear.

This is what I do. This is the essence of my art. I make impersonal media wake up singing or crying by putting myself 100% on the line. That's why they call me an egomaniac. That's why they complain about all the self-reflection. Do you want Microsoft Bob talking through the command line? Or do you want a living being? It's a Turing test. It wasn't just the immediate response, it was that you felt you knew me, that there was a connection to another human.

> I think the group has gotten very grumpy continually responding to the Werewolf (who was funny) and to being attacked as academics or idiots.

The group? Or individuals who do happen to act like idiots? I didn't say anything negative about academics that I recall. Chrissie made one very apt remark about the sterility of the questions. The flaming is no big deal. It’s kind of fun, actually, as the flamers are usually so inept that it's just a matter of letting the thing simmer for a couple of hours until I can figure out the squelch. It’s like learning a new program. Dinn must be *insane* at this. Talk about cultural clichés. Does this guy have the clipped British wit down fine? I am studying his technique. The Dancing in the Dark zing to my let it be, let it be: Not on this list.

I was, however, shocked by the lack of coherence and intelligence, the unfairness, and the bitterness of some of these responses, the personal attacks, the gratuitous vulgarity and crudeness. I can't imagine what it must be like to be in classrooms or offices with these people. In no way did it upset me personally, though.

By way of comparison, I sent the material on linguistics to a Russian-born American writer for review. He corrected my errors with a sense of humor. Not all Old Church Slavonic characters were removed. Statistically it's the third most difficult language to learn, after Chinese and Rumanian, apparently specifically because of the exquisite shading of meaning. Turns out that the expansion in translation problem goes both ways, only worse for Russian to English.

Can you imagine what it must have been like before they regularized it?  It was a pleasure to receive his response. From Pynchon-l, however, I rarely see the correction or clarification I request. Instead, there are these tangential flights of free-floating malice based on the authors' personal agendas, not what I wrote.

I'm sorry I don't suffer fools gladly, but if I did I wouldn't have written what some people have worshipped me for over the years. You invite someone like me to your tea party and this is what you get. I was invited, you know. I got in touch to complain about my copyright, then responded to Dinn's suggestion that I post some of the things I wrote him. I thought you guys wanted to meet an author, not correct my manners.  People wanted to know what we thought of Thomas Pynchon. Now you know. It's not our fault he's not Jesus Christ Superstar. Reading his books, where would you ever get the idea that he was?

I sympathize with the "too much Jules" responses. Sometimes I feel the same way myself. In the present instance, I really was trying to answer the questions. I can't tell you what Thomas Pynchon thought about Cornell and how it formed his writing style. All I can tell you is how I felt about Cornell and allow you to draw inferences. I can't identify his sources. All I can do is describe what Chrissie was like when Tom was writing Gravity's Rainbow. Since you are all in the process of a minute study of that book, you can see the correspondences, if any, with what I showed you. I'm not a Barron's Blue Book, nor am I a member of the Thomas Pynchon fan club.

But the book hustle roundhouse did split my face in half. That common criminals were more deserving. The presumption of bad faith. The jealousy of my good fortune. Ignoring the value of the reciprocation I offered. Skipping over the fact that we would donate books we didn't want to a local institution. What a horrible dose of that ignorant American self-righteous Puritananical meddling that I have hated all my life. They just feel they have a God-given right to judge others need and human social value. The Elect. 100% Yankee do-gooder poison.

I work with a young Mexican graphic designer who is my business partner. He’s really soothing. He pretty much handles the clients. You can imagine my reputation here, but I have some problems getting around, too. I was so bad today that I couldn’t go down to my office -- three flights down, too much of a walk -- because I had been up most of the night just seething, so he came up and found me on the bed waiting for Anita to finish making lunch. I told him what was bothering me. He said in Spanish, "Just fuck those people. Remember who you are. Tell them you don’t want any fucking books, that you’ve got plenty of dough, you’ll buy your own. How much do you need for these books? I’ll get Pedro [his rich friend] to get them for you."

I said, "Never. I just laid out where I was at to them. I'm not ashamed. Let them feel ashamed."

It was just the whole sickness of America pouring through my heart. People have been really good to us here, except for the occasional business maggot. Anita and I have watched no more than a few hours of television a year since we met in 1977, and not much more in the years before that. It’s been fifteen years since I had direct contact with anything like that, except for an occasional snippy exchange with Playboy Editorial Director Arthur Kretchmer, who acts like a chick I ditched: "Why should we pay to keep you there?" -- verbatim quote. I don’t know, I kind of thought you were buying my writing, not subsidizing my lifestyle.

Kyburz at ASU.Edu wrote privately:

> Can you explain the dearth of books?

The Hotel Zone sells only awful trashy thrillers and romance paperbacks at absurd prices. Cancun itself is a post-revolutionary development in a post-revolutionary society. Print is superfluous. They come in from some remote Yucatecan town with a palm-thatch school room and they go directly to computer school. Books don't like the humidity, either. Cockroaches eat the paper and the glue.

This is the Third World. Underdevelopment applies to information as well. There are hardly any libraries here and the only English books they do have are those left in hotel rooms and then donated by the hotels. I can't afford to buy books by mail. So we are just going crazy for lack of reading material that doesn't talk back direspectfully and unexpectedly bring news that yet another revered elder has fallen.

Try to understand my situation this way: suppose Tom Stanton looked into the Velikovsky thing and came away convinced that this was all an unfortunate tragedy, that the man had some serious questions to ask about the conventional time-line. Then he started talking about this and tried to get it published in National Geographic. When this failed, he went public and told the whole story in other media -- including mordant observations about why the editors scorned his desire to give Velikovsky a fair hearing.

How long would he last at National Geographic? Could he then go to work at Smithsonian?

I wrote about cutting edge social and political issues. I made important hidden enemies. Because of my political connections and the general esteem in which I was held by young, influential editors (whose careers were advanced by the response to my work during a major prolonged thaw), I was given even more liberty to speak out clearly in defense of reformist ideas that threatened the existing class structure.

When Ronald Reagan was elected. Timothy Leary -- considered a government agent by many in my intellectual community -- came to feel me out about becoming a good boy. I blew him away and went on to expose a really significant state secret prejudicing America's relationship with one of its most important allies.

To Pynchon readers, "They" are, perhaps, a literary metaphor. Not to me.

Understand why I can't afford books and why I asked people not to put anything odd in my mail? As a result of yesterday's e-mail, I feel I should have a lawyer friend go to the postal authorities with a notarized letter informing them that I will be receiving mail from strangers and want everything to be officially examined before delivery. It’s that bad. I have to think that way. I would never compromise Pynchon’s personal security by revealing his address, if I knew it. That part I understand very well. I just feel I have no obligation to protect his image as well.

Meanwhile, thanks for the comforting remarks. I feel very blue today. The news about Tom's father was like a skeleton tap on the shoulder, coming in the middle like that. Despite my tolerant remarks, I think flaming is infantile bullshit. These people are uncivilized boobs. I think that sort of thing should be squashed on the Internet by the sheer force of fully expressed social disapproval, even if some would consider this repressive. Never mind PC. Let’s just have some common courtesy.

Tonight is the eve of Día de Los Muertos. You're supposed to honor the faithful dead and make jokes about death. I'll try.

As always,

Jules

--
Jules Siegel http://www.caribe.net.mx/siegel/jsiegel.htm
Mail: Apdo. 1764 Cancun QR 77501 Mexico
Street: Green 16 Paseo Pok-Ta-Pok Zona Hotelera Cancun QR 77500 Mexico
Tel: 011-52-98 87-49-18 Fax 87-49-13 E-mail: jsiegel at mail.caribe.net.mx  
--
Jules Siegel http://www.caribe.net.mx/siegel/jsiegel.htm
Mail: Apdo. 1764 Cancun QR 77501 Mexico
Street: Green 16 Paseo Pok-Ta-Pok Zona Hotelera Cancun QR 77500 Mexico
Tel: 011-52-98 87-49-18 Fax 87-49-13 E-mail: jsiegel at mail.caribe.net.mx