Meshugginah posts, and other things sundry

[Jules Siegel]

At 12:12 PM 07/8/97 -0400, "Monte Davis" <modavis at bellatlantic.net> wrote:

>Precisely. Chrissie was not there. In  fact -- are you sitting down? -- no
>flesh and blood person was "there"... no "persona" was there... only black
>letters on white pages.

So why does anyone get upset when we kid around about Thomas Pynchon's past
in black letters on white pages?

>So... granting for the sake of argument that a perceived relation between
>Chrissie and some characters in GR is in some way damaging to
>Chrissie... tell me again, please, whose writings have established and
>drawn attention to that relation, and continue to do so? 

My point is not that Chrissie was damaged but that she perceived herself to
have been damaged. He did do some damage to our marriage, in the sense of
manipulating her in ways that I felt were quite underhanded, but all's fair
in love in war.

I raised these points to defend myself against the accusations that we had
no right to publish our recollections of him. So did he then have no right
either? The answer seems to be that he presented it as fiction. But the two
people who were most affected by this knew what was fiction and what wasn't.

I'm not angry about any of this. I am examining the gaps in Thomas Pynchon's
craftsmanship to show you how it reveals his political biases, not to
denigrate his writing skills.

>Jules, you've gotten a  Playboy article and a short book out of a
friendship that's now, what, 25 years in the past? That's all it's worth,
and maybe a bit more.

The Playboy article was published 20 years ago. I didn't even know anyone
cared all that much about it or him until I found it online and joined this
list. I haven't seen any real money yet from Lineland. The book isn't even
in the stores yet. The friendship is in the past but the project is very
much in the present and it's only beginning.

>Time to move on. Or at least give vent to the obsession

It's hardly an obsession but more like a hobby. It's very entertaining and
amusing to see these doo-doo brains whap each other like the Three Stooges
in multiplex. I don't watch television and I hardly go to movies and, as you
may be aware, I can't get enough books to fill my voracious appetite. This
is my New York Times.

>on siegel-l at nonfictionnovel.org, rather than on pynchon-l. Or do some
serious research, and write a biography of the man. Or something.

Please don't be condescending. I have more than one writing project. I also
have a full-time graphic design business. You see a very small part of my
life that I am exposing to be in the public eye, mainly because I have a
book that's going on sale this summer so the subject matter is on my mind.

One "serious" work is called The Human Robot: Essays on the Emotional
Effects of Industrialism. My participation in pynchon-l partly helps me
generate material that I will probably use in publicizing Lineland but also
provides lots of examples of the kind of clear acting out I need to
dramatize the theoretical basis of The Human Robot. I'm active on two other
lists and read some others, none of which offer as rich a source.

>Because what you're interpreting as a defensive response by "cultists" is
>perhaps 10% that, at most. The rest is simply exasperation with *your*
>persona here: that of a literary parasite who persistently and
>self-servingly misunderstands the nature of fiction.

This is a very insulting statement and pretty much proves my point about the
cult.

I'm not misunderstanding fiction. I'm talking about how fiction forms
perceptions of history as well as current opinion. Think about it on the
micro level. Pynchon uses almost verbatim in his novel intimate secrets
stolen from his friends' lives. He thereby knowingly takes the chance of
further disrupting their lives. By disguising history as fiction he cloaks
himself in Art. He also withdraws from further personal contact in order to
avoid any confrontation with the friends he hurt.

Thirty years later, the objects of his aggression talk about him and get a
little bit of public attention that is professionally useful and personally
amusing. _They_ are dismissed as parasites?

Now extend this argument to the dope dealing scenes in Vineland and
Gravity's Rainbow. I say that these are very damaging descriptions. They
tend to validate the anti-drug propaganda and, in fact, present a picture
that varies little from the official myth. The very fact that the author is
revered as a kind of hipster makes the propaganda all the more potent. I
think this is a very legitimate topic of discussion and I think that
continuing to focus on what you very erroneously perceive to be my personal
motives is just a smokescreen for avoiding looking at what I am really
telling you.




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