Personal Sh*t

[Steelhead]

Mascaro, the Polonius of the P-List, expectorates:

>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.

As long as you weren't "stuffing" it to the little girls, the feminists
won't give you many problems.

>For the record, I mentioned in a private note to redbug
>yesterday that I regretted having used the word.

Ah, a conspiracy of private posts between Mascaro and redbug. Then there
truly is a basis in fact for whatever paranoia one may or may not have felt
the first tingling touches of...

> 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.

Sorry to bore you with a retelling of the story about Hugo Spadafora's
assassination. The point was that Spadafora was killed for the "opinions"
that he held and that he expressed; that his behavoir was considered
"uncivil" and this "legitimized" his torture and execution to the
"authorities." As a post-modernist, you must understand that "civility,"
which you invoke so sacredly, is merely a social construct. In the context
of Panama in 1985, it was uncivil to criticize the government and the
penalty was death. The censorious situation in the States today is merely a
difference of degrees not kind. "Denmark is a prison," quoth Hamlet. These
days its pretty much Prison Planet. Read those counter-terrorism and
telecommunications bills lately? But even worse, much of the modern
censorship movement sprouts from, yes, university campuses in speech codes
and the like, and much of it originates from the so-called Left. If this
has some how passed you by, then I recommend to you Village Voice reporter
Nat Hentoff's brave book: Free Speech for Me, But not For Thee.

And how Jurgen Habermas of you to "legitimize" your own objections. Perhaps
you should have gone to law school instead.

>I was pushed over the edge by your cheap insult in reference to
>a brief and particularly pleasant exchange on Welles.

Then you *do* disappoint, Mascaro. I thought you had come running to the
defense of Diana and were exhibiting a rare act of chivalry. But it just
comes down to a bruised ego afterall.

>You offered nothing to the exchange
>and had no right to insult me--you started the invective, no?

Actually, I think I decimated your ill-informed opinion on Welles and his
movie in one line: Gregg Toland's cinematography alone ranks Citizen Kane
as one of the five best American films. Do we need to talk about deep
focus, the sepia tones of the film, the extraordinary use of lighting and
shadows, the camera angles with their subtle resonances of German
expressionism. There'd never been anything like it on American screen
before--and little to equal it since.

I had a right to disabuse your opinion, because you casually smeared a film
that I feel passionately about--that I can say changed my life somewhat
when I saw it 25 years ago--and you did it in a way that is typical of the
prevailing trends in scholarship, which is to blithely ignore the primary
source (in this case Welles's film or Mankiewicz's screenplay) and babble
on about the "criticism" of the film, about how it was "over-rated" or "it
was justly criticized" for its feeble narrative structure or whatever.

I might quibble with Larsson rating Kane behind Touch of Evil and Chimes At
Midnight in the pantheon of Welles's canon, but I love both of those films
too and might even stick in Lady of Shanghai. Besides, I know that Larsson
has watched the film, closely, many, many times. Understands how it is cut,
the originality of its camera work, the eerie brilliance of Bernard
Hermann's score, and the sheer audacity of its near libels on a living and
dangerously powerful figure.

>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.

You left out the totalitarism of the center, the enforcement of rules of
behavior and civility, like in one of your precious academic journals,
where non-academic voices are excluded like blacks and Jews from country
clubs and the  language is so harshly edited--or perhaps the tone is so
deeply internalized in the minds of the scholars themselves--that each
essay plods along in the same droning, novacaine-like syntax. Whatever
happened to academic critics like Jan Kott who could really write?

My friend Norman Solomon wrote a wonderful column a few months back on the
irony of the pundits in the mainstream press constantly harping on the
"biased" perspectives of the Left and the Right. But Solomon correctly
pointed out the more dangerous bias is that of bipartisanship, of centrism,
of the excluded middle--if you will--since this terrain often masquerades
as "truth" or "wisdom" or the "equitable" and "just" solution.

>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.

Thus spoke Neville Chamberlain to Churchill. "A-hem, Winston, you really
are quite the paranoid. Of course, their platform *sounds* threatening, as
it must, considering the...u-m-m...extreme economic and social
circumstances of the times. But I assure you once you meet Herr Adolf and
Field Marshall Herman face-to-face, as I have, you will find them to be
honorable, even civil men. The times call for firm measures to be sure. But
I have reasoned with them and they have, in turn, convinced me they have
the best interest of Germany, and, indeed, all of Europe at heart. Poland
and Czechoslavakia, are quite, quite safe. Let me assure you."

>I never said your journalism was at fault, only your behavior here.  I stand
>by that.

You are misquoting yourself. And if you misquote yourself, god knows what
you do to the texts you supposedly explicate.

>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.

Huh? Many of you doesn't equal all of you. Flip it around, maybe it'll make
sense, this Deep Philosophy. All of you doesn't equal you. Nah. Still don't
compute. Say, wasn't that a movie with Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin?
Figures.

Here it comes, one of those phrases the post-modern critic must inject into
a conversation at least once an hour: "you conflate your obsessions with
the normative view of the world." Normative? *Moi?* Gotta laugh at that. As
much as you try, you can't help yourself, can you, Mascaro? Talk about your
N-Dimensional Mish-Mash. My obsessions are my own business. Why would I
want anyone to share them? You're the one that is "deeply
attracted" to the "shared language" of the list. Shared language, another
gem from the post-modernist hothouse--or is that hot tub?

>While  the radical opposition press thrives as it never has before?

The radical opposition press? Do you mean The Washington Times? They've got
lots of Rev. Moon's money.

>It's all a dead zone, pal

This kind of pseudo-hip fatalism is exactly why I wouldn't want people like
you teaching my son and daughter.

> >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?

Did you ever meet Stanley Fish? Harold Bloom? Or, for that matter, Allan
Bloom? Vendana Shiva? Garrett Hardin?  Robert Gottlieb (he's on your
faculty)? the not late enough Paul LeMan (another Nazi)? Susan Griffin?
That's a start.

Are you implying that I was buggered by my third grade teacher? Perhaps I
was. You know those repressed memories. If I just had access to one of
those dolls with the anatomically correct orifices, perhaps it would all
come screaming back. But, really, the Henry Adams tag was simply a grace
note, a finger pointing back to the Education (which does have some trivial
relavance to TRP), which is a wholesale indictment of the education
industry. Perhaps I should have quoted the even harsher paragraphs on
Harvard.

>Have academics done TRP a worse turn than ESQUIRE, or the NEW YORKER, or NEW
>YORK?  All those hungry journalists looking for a scoop.

The simple answer is far, far worse. How many stories about Pynch have
there been in the popular press over the past ten years? Ten? Not the
thousands of essays on Pynchon churned out by the academy. Take me, a
filthy journalist. I've come across Pynchon's address and phone number, but
you don't see me outing him--do you?  And, if you ask some of the people
who were misquoted in the New York magazine piece about how it came to be
altered before it reappeared in the New Statesman and other periodicals you
might hear an interesting story about what this asshole did for *them.*

John, most of the writers for Esquire, the New Yorker, et al  are far from
"hungry." Hell, a single story in the New Yorker these days is worth
$20,000 to $30,000. Nearly twice what I make in a year from writing. I make
more money editing other people's dismal prose than I'll ever make writing
original material. At least I hope. If I end up scribbling for the New
Yorker you know I'm up to no good. God, it's creepy enough being in this
month's Harper's.

> Do you even begin to
>understand how, say, writing a dissertation on P. might be considered a risky
>academic
>move?

Give me a break. Two of my best friends in college wrote PhD. dissertations
on Pynchon in 1979 and 1980. One of my teachers, the brilliant SF writer
Tom Maddox, wrote his thesis on GR, Rocket Blues, even earlier. They had no
problems, other than forcing themselves to finish the damn things instead
of turning their efforts to something productive, such as their own
fiction. It wasn't a "risky business" 15 years ago. And since then, Pynchon
has turned into a dissertation factory...TRP, Inc. I bet there are more MA
thesises and PhD dissertations written on Pynchon each year than on William
Dean Howells, Mary Anne Moore, or John Dos Passos combined. Certainly they
turn out more of this crap on Pynch than any other living American writer.
Too bad you guys who are making money off of Pynchon criticism don't give
the poor guy a cut of your salaries, they way many anthropologists now
reimburse native peoples for telling their stories.

>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.

I am far from ignorant about the academy. My father was a professor of law.
My mother remains chair of a health sciences department. I was practically
raised on campus. I spent at least 8 years bumming around various colleges
and universities, American University in DC, BA in English and History,
Reed College in Portland, writing seminar with Gary Snyder, Indiana
University in Bloomington, BA in anthropology, post-grad work at UC
Berkeley in philosophy and anthropology. I taught film and literature
classes for a year and a half at a small liberal arts college in Indiana,
before they loaded me up on the librium after that unfortunate encounter
with the Dean of Humanities.

Now *you're* being subjective. Admittedly, those scholars who "passionately
embrace his work" would tend to see Pynchon's writing as important or as
you suggest, "the Real Thing." But what about the other 97 percent? Eh.
Those who impose their own junk science theories on Pynchon's work just to
get published in order to garner tenure or improve their rank, whether the
topic be the relationship of chaos theory to Gravity's Rainbow (on the
second reading of the book, mind you) or the relative importance of
subliminal images of various iron-age goddesses in the CoL 49. Bullshit.

Then again I may be ignorant. But I bet I've read just as much critical
theory as you have. Certainly enough to know precisely how crude my
parodies may or may not be. In fact, I'll wager my understanding of
Jameson, Foucault, Adorno, Lacan, Deluze and even that awful Judith Butler
against yours any day, pal. Next time I'm in LA (Valentine's Day,
apparently) I'll take you out for what passes as beer in your ozone-sotted
town and we can quote elongated passages from the Prison House of Language,
see who passes out from boredom first.

>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?

Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader (Ralph's sister) calls that "coercive
harmony." No thanks.


Steely