taking Jules to task

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

My erratic summer schedule makes my reading even sketchier than usual. 
 But I come back  singing, along with the great Sun-Ra:
 Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday America
Happy Birthday to you.

To find Andrew telling me to read about 1000 books in the next hour
 and get back to him on that finite-but-unbounded universe thing.
 Andrew, why are you always dropping names  faster than Armand's
 duck can fly?  Esp. that TRACTATUS which LudWitt repudiated later 
in life?  Obviously you're trying to show how much more au
 courant you are w/ analytical philospohy.  A-and I guess you're 
right!  But it still doesn't give your writing that sense of dash and
 elan we get from the likes of dear Jules, who's come back w/ a
 vengeance (is there any other way for Jules?) to tell us all.
Including these  gems from his recent posts:

>I lived in the culture of crime all my life.

er, is that missing adjective *intellectual* or *moral*?

> No writer is more scrupulous about reality than I am.

I missed the joke that this punchline follows, could you repeat it?


 >My position is that Thomas Pynchon was a poser. He was someone off
> on the edge peeping in and he never had any kind of real engagement
> with the time or its people. When I look at his works, I
>see a kind of political cartoon in which I can recognize certain faces,
>among them loved ones. They are drawn in a cold, grotesque style that tends
>to ridicule rather than reveal their best qualities. Am I supposed to like this?

Good insight! The only thing wrong w/ this comment is the substitution of the
name *Thomas Pynchon* for *Jules Siegel* ( a substitution you'd be only too happy
 to effect, generally)

> Mascaro took me to task for even mentioning drugs when
>talking about Pynchon's work. He felt this was politically uncool from the
>drug using perspective.

I took you to task, Jules, for implying that Pynchon owes his creative vision
 to his drug use.  I say the two have no necessary connection. Whether one gets
 high or not has no connection to one's creative abilities.  You got high a lot, 
and look at what it did for you! One can  take a lot of drugs and be a really
 bad writer, or vice versa. I take you to task further for showing only the
 most minimal grasp of Pynchon's technique coupled with a 
really twisted obsession to diminish him for personal reasons, which are by
 now so pathetic and clear  that they don't  need detailing. 
 I'd take you to task for being manipulative and dishonest too,
 but then you'd just act all hurt like some big bully
 was attacking you.  I take you to task for sleazily twisting out of
 every attempt by others on the list to show you the absurdity of your
 misunderstanding of Pynchon's work by claiming that
 the writer is obviously gripped by hero-worship.

If you understood even a scrap of what, say, M & D has to say about the
 relationship between *facts* and *history* you would  cease 
your mindless nattering about who really knows how drug dealers talk.

I take you to task for being an idiot too, as here (this speaks for itself):

>To me, Thomas Pynchon is the literary version of People and
>uses pretty much the same techniques.

Except there are even more print ads in a Pynchon novel!

 
These things I take you to task for, Jules.  You meshugginah you. 
 Certainly no mensch.

john m