Original smalltown librarian

[Jules Siegel]

At 10:49 AM 07/3/97, "Peter 13" <peter13 at usa.net> wrote:

>What could be more useless than to complain that a surreal work of fiction
is not an accurate portrait of a real event. Only somebody with nothing to
say about literature could come up with such an idiotic remark.

I didn't complain. I merely made a statement that more or less says what you
say in your first sentence. I did say that the false tone of the dialog made
it difficult for me to enjoy the work. That wasn't a complaint, but a
personal observation.

>By the way, has anybody noticed the following irony: In LINELAND the author
apparently enjoys implying that Pynchon has pedophile tendencies

I don't believe I did anything of the kind. Chrissie said that he had a big
thing for Lolitas and that this was why he fell for her.

Having a big thing for Lolitas is not pedophilia. Lolita was a sexually
active and aggressive pubescent girl who seduced Humbert and then abandoned
him for a bisexual writer named Quilty.

Anita and I talked about this today. She said that when she was thirteen or
fourteen she would have had no qualms about having had sex with an older
man, but she was too shy even to find one her own age. She later did have a
long relationship with her high school English teacher. She has very mixed
feelings about this, as the man eventually treated her quite callously, but
on balance she feels that he also probably changed her life for the better.
He was an oasis of sanity in a very insane bourgeois family and smalltown hell.

Pedophilia, which is about seduction of children, is not the same as sexual
interest in adolescent girls. In Western society pedophilia is considered
criminal behavior not merely by the authorities but also even by most
enlightened people. Sex with underage adolescents is, technically, statutory
rape, but I think that most enlightened people would want to know the
circumstannces before reporting a given case to the police.
 
>(see Jester's review) but in the article on who Thomas Pynchon is, the same
author admits to having pedophile tendencies himself. Kinda weird

Where did I say anything like this?

It would be helpful if you could actually read what I write and react to the
actual words rather than offering insulting remarks based on your distorted
perceptions.

As above, you consistently invent offenses which you then attribute to me.
You also continue to call me a liar without offering a single example of one
of my "lies" -- except for a self-protective sentence I wrote more than
twenty years ago and later corrected.

You never responded to my last correction of your false accusation that I
claimed to have had all these Playboy Bunny-type lovers. This, you asserted,
was evidence that I was a liar and therefore that anything I wrote lacked
credibility.

I answered that you were simply making this up or, in other words, lying
about me, and I asked what this said about your credibility.

Well?


--Jules Siegel Apdo 1764 Cancun QR 77501
http://www.yucatanweb.com/siegel/jsiegel.htm