Personal Scatologies

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Steely responds with the argumentum ad miserecordiam.  No sense that maybe he should 
have listened to those folks he claims gleefully joined in to pillory him.  For what, Steely?  
Just for the sake of bashing you?  Talk about personnal paranoia!  Not because perhaps 
there is something you should attend to in what I said?  I do apologize for  calling you a 
shit.  It was late in the day and I had been wearied by stuffing all those lies into schoolboy's 
heads all morning and afternoon.  For the record, I mentioned in a private note to redbug 
yesterday that I regretted having used the word.  But maybe I shouldn't.  You are 
unregenerate.  Please note that the tragic story you relate, a story I already knew a little of 
(not your personal part, of course) is completely irrelevant, and in fact is an exploitative 
move on your part, a cheap distraction trick that trivializes the tragedy you relate as well 
as my legitimate objections to your behavior.  I have never taken well to bullies, and you 
sir are a schoolyard bully.  I was pushed over the edge by your cheap insult in reference to  
a brief and particularly pleasant exchange on Welles.  You offered nothing to the exchange 
and had no right to insult me--you started the invective, no?
I deeply enjoy the shared language of this list.  For my money, you create a pornography of 
Pynchon discuission.  Totalitarianism of the left is as reprehensible as othat of the right 
and in your dealings with me and others on the list you evince a completely fascistic need 
to control all terms of the discussion.  That is my objection to you.  You insult people, and 
professions with no justification except that they are guilty of the sin of seeing things 
differently from you.  You seem to lurk, waiting to pounce on those who express 
*incorrect* views, while accusing them of intolerance.  And turning this issue into a 
referendum on the holiness of your journalistic commitment is another cheap distraction 
trick.  I never said your journalism was at fault, only your behavior here.  I stand by that.
A few points:
>Do you really not understand the seething hatred of academics
>held by many of us in the Other World?
Many of you doesn't equal *all* of you (a false division if there ever was one anyway, this 
us and you and other worlds).  Typical of the demagogue, you conflate your obsessions 
with the normative view of the world.

 >Over the fact that the campus, once
>a powerful force for social change and justice, is now a dead zone (been to
>Berkeley lately?)
While  the radical opposition press thrives as it never has before?  It's all a dead zone, pal 
(oh, except for your bright corner).

 >populated by smug elitists who detest and despise their
>students, who proclaim that Texts have no reality, no instructive purpose,
>theory being the only thing.
I know hundreds of academics and have never met one who fits this description.  Who is 
he/she, Steely?

 Don't you see how many of us who have been
>reading Pynchon for more than twenty years revolt at what the academics
>have done to him
Have academics done TRP a worse turn than ESQUIRE, or the NEW YORKER, or NEW 
YORK?  All those hungry journalists looking for a scoop.  Do you even begin to 
understand how, say, writing a dissertation on P. might be considered a risky academic 
move?  Do you know that most academics who care for P. passionately embrace his work 
as the Real Thing?  Your crude parodies and caricxatures reveal only your own ignorance.

>Enough. That's your gig and you're welcome to it. 

That's another lie Steely, positively fourth street,and you know it.  You don't welcome 
me to anything.,  Why don't you just ccome out once and scream it?

> But I'm not *that* kind of journalist.
And I'm not that kind of academic.

I really hate to fight Steely, and I don't want to provide any voyeuristic cheap thrills for 
lurkers.   But I won't be bullied either, ever. Let me know where you stand.  Do you weant 
to keep this up, or shall we set an example of HUMAN understanding and try to negotiate 
a mutually acceptable peace accord?

john m