Meshugginah posts, and other things sundry

[Jules Siegel]

At 09:50 AM 07/7/97 -0800, millison at online-journalist.com (Doug Millison) wrote:

>We can't know "what Chrissie actually told (you) to put into Lineland"
>because we weren't there when she told you. Most of what Chrissie says in
>Lineland is reported by you indirectly ("paraphrased" as you say), not in
>direct quotes from her. That's what I call putting "words in her mouth".

Your are quite inaccurate here. Most of what Chrisie told me was taken down
as dictation and appears as her direct quotes. I read them to her before
putting them online. A small portion of the Werewolf section consists of
paraphrases. She saw this too before it was published. Chrissie read the
manuscript and the galleys corrected anything she felt was not fairly
paraphrased.

I mean is this your whole case, that I am either a liar or incompetent? If
so, it's a waste of everyone's time.

>And in fact you do claim that you and Chrissie had a big impact on
>Pynchon's writing, as I previously noted:
>"I also feel very strongly that she had an influence on Tom's writing
>style, in the sense of bringing out his visual scene-setting skills, which
>I remember as being notably absent from V....I imagine the more concrete
>visual style that I perceived in what I read of Gravity's Rainbow was
>mostly the result of his maturing as a writer, but I suspect that she had
>an important influence."(p.77)
>"Bianca, obviously, is based on Chrissie." (p. 76)

These are hardly sweeping claims. I am specifically describing the precise
impact I think she might have had and using the word "suspect" which is
hardly much of a claim to "big impact." I say that Bianca was based on
Chrissie. Big deal. If you want to get into it, we can discuss how Jessica
Swanlake and Katje resemble Chrissie, and what specific scenes are taken
from things that happened between Pynchon and Chrissie. You might then
examine how Roger Mexico felt about Jessica Swanlake and her husband-to-be,
Jeremy, and then decide for yourself what impact Chrissie had on Thomas
Pynchon. Even so, it's still merely a subplot with subcharacters.

You are making a fool of yourself with these claims and ridiculous
accusations. You reveal your unrelenting favoritism for your cult hero,
while dehumanizing those who present his mortality. This is human robot
behavior. You reason according to a program, not according to the data,
whose existence you deny.

>Also, if I understand correctly what you've written in Lineland, you were
>the intermediary for Chrissie's answers to online questions from p-list
>participants. In Lineland, Chrissie notes your paraphrasing tendency, too:
>"She said she never said anything at all to me about him as a lover and
>that I made up that paragraph in my article. I told her that I had
>paraphrased what she said and that I put it there because I was trying to
>be nice to him. She didn't want me to be nice to him. I made her look like
>an imbecile." (p. 74)

She did not like seeing it in print, but it was essentially what she said.
She did not deny this when I pointed it out to her. She just said I made her
look like an imbecile and didn't want to be nice to him. I still don't think
I made her look like an imbecile. She's quite touchy and hypersensitive
about what people write about her. Some of what I paraphrased was actually
directed also at Pynchon, but it was too hard to sort out at the time and I
didn't want to get her further enraged by tugging that nerve.

Do you think she liked seeing her Shirley Temple routines linked to Bianca,
of all characters? Was she supposed to like the possibility that some people
might think Katje was somehow based on her and assume that the shit-eating
scene was also? Do you think that someone with her kind of mind liked seeing
her physical description and some of the details of her love life attached
to Jessica Swanlake, who is hardly a mental giant?

As I pointed out in Lineland, I do think that Chrissie was resentful of what
Pynchon did with her persona in Gravity's Rainbow. Despite this, she was not
harsh in her descriptions of him. She poked a little fun at him at worst. No
one bothered to ask her what she thought his work meant. They just wanted
the gossip. That's another reason she was so annoyed. She's read all his
work. She knew him when he was writing it. I mean she was there in the
apartment when he was at the typewriter. Instead people ask why he joined
the Navy and does he like junk food and who are his characters based on and
so on.

>It's difficult to assess the credibility of what you do offer that wasn't
originally in the Playboy piece.

I think it was Playboy's job to assess my credibility, since they would have
been liable for damage I might have done to his reputation, not to speak of
theirs. If anyone is aware of a single successful libel, slander or
defamation lawsuit against Playboy, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
Playboy is not Time or People, you know. It's the only 100% honest
publication I know of and I have dealt with almost all of them.

At the time the article was published, Candida Donadio was Pynchon's agent
and did a lot of business with Playboy, as well as being socially friendly
with Arthur and Patricia Kretchmer. Don't you think she would have had
something to say about all this? She was one of the most powerful agents in
the world at the time and I can assure you that no matter what Arthur felt
about me as a friend, he would never have publsihed me again if there had
been any significant squawks from Candida Donadio, much less even the threat
of a lawsuit.

>Listening to uncorroborated, scurrilous gossip without questioning it's
>veracity -- that's what would make me feel "guilty" in this or any other
>encounter where somebody talks trash about somebody else who isn't there to
>answer for himself.

Here you again go beyond the limits of civilized discourse. I haven't talked
trash about Pynchon in any way at all. Most of what Chrissie and I say is
quite affectionate. As far as his work is concerned, I am telling you that
he isn't omnipotent as a writer and that, in fact, his failures are just as
interesting as his triumphs. To me, they are more interesting in some ways
because they reveal more. 

He has his copy of Lineland and if it were a fraud he could have said so on
CNN. It's not a fraud and neither am I and either is Chrissie. You are
attacking us from a position of complete ignorance.

More than that, Pynchon did talk trash about Chrissie in Gravity's Rainbow
and she was not there to defend herself. He also talked a lot of trash to
her about me in order to disrupt our marriage. Some of the things he said to
her appear in Gravity's Rainbow. Where was she to defend herself when this
was published and who will listen to her now? It's classic, isn't it? If she
complained, she'd be dismissed as resentful or a liar or both. If she talks
about him affectionately, she a self-promoting groupie. But what he might
have done to her or about her was merely his right as a Great Artist. Sounds
like the Bowman-Kennedy rape case, doesn't it?

Chrissie has no rights, of course, because she was the object of a Great
Lord's attention and should be thankful he saw fit to note her
characteristics in his field book of butterflies collected.

I have no rights, of course, because I am a dope-addled hack.


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