On-line interview with ?

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

This interview thing is fascinating, if confusing.   I don't quite understand if this is 
an open conversation or who's exactly talking to whom, but that's never stopped 
me from blundering in before, so I would like to protest that this--drug theory--of 
P.'s work is preposterously reductive and mechanistic.  It completely smears over 
the individual response to chemical interaction.  You seem to tar P w/ that brush 
in your PLAYBOY article too, which I haven't reread in years, so maybe I am 
misremembering.  Aren't you (if it is Mr. Siegal I am addressing) the source of that 
infamous statement about his writing GR while being totally wasted?  I don't think 
I have ever read P. himself attest to this anywhere.  Actually, in case I am wrong 
about the source, does anybody know the source of that assertion?

But the idea that Dangerous Drugs actually--wrote--Thomas Pynchon, well, it's 
downright Rushdian.

john m


>
>The over-elaboration of detail is often an expression of acute anxiety.
>One sees this when over-dosing on amphetamine, which creates a similar
>effect, including the paranoia, I think because it is similar to
>adrenaline, which produces similar symptoms. The acutely anxious person
>produces many stress hormones as part of the attempt to mediate the pain
>by performing miracles. Overstimulation leads to injudicious actions,
>too. When you crash, you experience a profound paranoid depression as
>you review your errors rather than your triumphs. I see this tone of
>deep regret in much of his work. His story "Entropy," is as much about
>regret and depression as it is about physics. So is Gravity's Rainbow,
>from the little of it I skimmed.