On-line interview with jules Siegal

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Jules Siegal,

No, I am not w/ the DEA.  Are You?  No, I am not moralistically criticizing drugs.  I 
thought the moralism was coming from you, but you deny implying or asserting in 
your post that  you  see P.'s creativity as a--symptom--of his drug use.  I say 
you--are-- making the implication, and that in fact it IS a moralistic one, on your 
part.  I also wonder how you can chide me to read--your--posts carefully while 
admitting to having only skimmed parts of GR.  Pretty silly of you, isn't it?
I also think you ought to read your own posts carefully, because it looks like you 
contradict yourself twice; once when you write a paragraph about drug reactions 
and say it's not about drug reactions, and again when you say you are not the 
source of the Infamous Drug Confession, because P. told you himself (did I read 
that right?  is this what you are saying?} But of course you are the source of the 
Infamous Drug Confession, since I never read P. himself ever say he told you 
anything.  But, please, I am not being hostile, though I think there is hostility in 
what you write, especially about P. (and I always wonder--why?) , I was just 
welcoming you to the list in the spirit of true drug-addled anarchic flamethrowing 
fun.  Maybe you'll stick around long enough to decide it's time to actually read 
him.

john m

p.s If I told you how many times I have watched my dead grandmother crawl up 
my leg with a knife between her teeth, would you believe I have nothing against a 
little drug use?

jm

>
>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
>
>
>