Lineland

[Dale L. Larson]

First, I apologize for my first post to the list on this subject being overly
heavy on the legal and philisophical aspect of this.  That wasn't the foot I
wanted to start off on. 

About deception:  I'm sure Jules didn't pre-meditate this. Lineland is
Jules's first major work published in the US since 1982 -- he's been doing
other things. It wasn't until somewhere late in his adventure on Pynchon-L
that he started thinking along those lines, and it wasn't until he was off
the list that he started approaching publishers.  IAM didn't start talking to
him seriously until 1997, though Jules was working on putting the book
together before that. 

About exploitation:  You may still feel exploited, but... I'm sure more than
half the words in the book (no, I don't know the exact percentage, it might
be closer to 75%) are written by Jules, Chrissie or myself. Several people
have spent the several months working on the book.

About the motive:  IAM is my company, founded three-and-a-half years ago when
I left corporate America so that I could work only on projects that I love,
with people who work on what they love. I very much understand the love/hate
attitude about Jules himself, but I still see him as a very talented author
and artist. I think he has contributions to make, and "Lineland" is a good
one.  I'm not in it for the money. Yes, I couldn't do it for free, but there
are many other things I could easily be doing to make much more money.  For
that matter, if Jules was simply in it for the money, he came to the wrong
publisher.  We're small, and we couldn't offer him a large advance.  He
decided to work with us because of our work on a previous title ("Torn Shapes
of Desire"), and his desire to have creative control at a level most
publishers don't allow. He had a vision of what he wanted to present, and he
didn't want a bunch of corporate types trying to tailor everything to the
highest level of commercial appeal. He probably gave up a lot of money. 

About the hurt feelings:  I know some people like being in the limelight, and
others don't. I do understand the feelings of wishing that you'd been told
sooner, preferably asked.  In a perfect world, I would have prefered to ask
the permission of everyone quoted in the book and to uninclude anyone who
didn't want to be included. 

(Ironically, the people not in the book seem to have more of a problem with
it than those who are. Of the many responses I've received to my private
email to those who appear in the book, most were positive or ambivalent, a
few were more negative, and one threatened a lawsuit.)

Unfortunately, sometimes we're forced to balance the good and the bad.  On
the good side, "Lineland" is a great book that a lot of people are going to
really enjoy. It will interest people who've never heard of Thomas Pynchon in
reading Pynchon's works (in fact, it already has), and it will be educational
and entertaining in other ways. The book itself even raises awareness of the 
issues we're dicussing here.

Since there is no legal reason Lineland can't be made without seeking
permissions, and there are some ethical arguments that permissions aren't
required, it comes down to a matter of being nice and polite.  I like being
nice (if not always polite) whenever possible. 

Alas, as a practical matter, the book would probably have come out a year
later (more likely not at all), if we'd tried to get every individual in the
book to give us his or her permission in advance.  Without showing a
near-finished version of the book to people first, it'd be hard to convince
them that it is worthy. That given, imagine the logistics of trying to create
the book (which took man-years of work after Jules left Pynchon-L), then
showing it to people who want changes, don't want to be in it all, etc.  Once
major changes are made, you've got to go back and show those changes to
everyone (because you may have needed to include more material from someone
else, or you were asked to paraphrase something someone said rather than
quoting it, or whatever). What about someone who says "OK,"  and then later
says "No, I don't want to be in it" (either because they change their mind or
the book changed as other people requested changes)? 

We tried to think of other ways we might minimize any hurt feelings. We
thought of possibly giving people psuedonyms, but since the Pynchon-L archive
is available for the world to see, that'd just make people go look you up. 
We thought about paraphrasing people who didn't want to be quoted, but felt
that nothing could be more fair than their own words. 

To the extent that the book is good art, is should be produced. The art would
likely be diluted by any changes or omissions requested by people appearing
in the book. Right or wrong, we made a difficult decision. We decided to go
ahead, and that the value of the art was higher than that of the hurt
feelings. 

I regret and apologize for any hurt feelings caused. 

dale