credibility of Jules' reports

[Doug Millison]

At 12:23 PM 7/17/97, Jules Siegel wrote:
>I will just shut up on the subject

....well, we'll see how long it is before he finds another opportunity to
defame Pynchon.

It's interesting to note that Jules' Playboy article contains favorable
comments, even praise for Pynchon, along with quite a few zingers. 20 years
later, in Lineland and on this list, Jules characterizations of Pynchon are
overwhelmingly, undeniably negative. I've decided that choosing not to
raise questions about Jules' assertions amounts to tacit approval of them,
so I choose to ask reasonable questions.

I won't be the last person to challenge Jules' statements and reports about
Pynchon, assuming that future biographers, scholars, historians take note
of Lineland and the pynchon-l archives. It's the kind of thing you often
run across in footnotes -- "X reported that Y sexually abused young boys,
but no independent evidence is available to confirm this statement; X also
tells us that Y had an affair with X's wife, raising serious doubts about
X's motives for making such a slur." Francis Parkman, for example, often
makes devastating judgements of the reliability of the primary sources he
has consulted in the research and writing of his "France and England in
North America" which I'm currently reading.

Cordially,
Doug







D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com