On-line interview with ?

[Jules Siegel]

MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu wrote:
> 
> 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

Maybe it should. I will appreciate your reading the material carefully
before offering hostile opinions off the top of your head.

You are speaking directly with Jules Siegel, the author of the infamous
Playboy memoir about Thomas Pynchon. My ex-wife, Chrissie Wexler, is
visiting us in Cancun and she agreed to be interviewed on-line. She is
staying in a hotel about two miles from my residence and I am collecting
question to take to her. 

> 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?

You are wrong. He told me so directly himself. We usually smoked grass
together when I visited California.

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

I didn't say that drugs wrote Thomas Pynchon. I said that he himself
commented directly to me that he had to re-write quite a bit of
Gravity's Rainbow because he was so wasted when he wrote the draft that
he couldn't understand what he might have meant. 

> >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.

I am not speaking directly of drug use here, as obvious from the text,
but about the similarities among natural states of acute anxiety and the
various effects of drugs such as amphetamine. I am doing this not to tar
Tom with any brush but to communicate the state of mind I feel he (we
all) often experiences, whether writing or not. I don't know if he used
amphetamines. I do know that almost all writers of our generation
frequenty used large quantities of it and I would be surprised to find
out that he didn't. Are you with the DEA? Do you have some kind of
prejudice against drugs? If you want to understand the past thirty
years, I suggest you put aside your moralistic tone and try to empathize
with what we saw, rather than lecturing us about its social
connotations.  

-- 
Jules Siegel Website: 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