What's in it for you, Jules?

[Jules Siegel]

At 06:20 PM 05/2/97 -0500, "Craig G. Bleakley"
<cgbleak at rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> wrote:

>What's your motivation for staying on the newsgroup?

I enjoy it, for one thing, although it does get very tedious replying to all
these pathetically inept insults, but my main motivations, at the moment, in
no particular order, are:

[1] I'm interested in the very intelligent and cogent observations that I
receive to my more serious postings, such as the political use of
anglo-saxon. Pynchon-l is one of the best-informed scholarly communities on
the Internet, maybe the best. I posted the question about Internet-derived
books to two other lists and didn't receive a single answer. Here, I've
gotten enough leads to create a very effective research document that can be
used to provide background for Lineland reviewers and feature writers.

[2] Lineland is inextricably associated with pynchon-l. As I said in a
message yesterday, pynchon-l is very much in the literary spotlight right
now because of the Mason & Dixon promotion. If Time, Inc., is looking at
pynchon-l and its archive, I want to be sure that my answer is there in the
record so that they will think twice before repeating some of these libelous
statements.

[3] My Playboy memoir points to pynchon-l and draws new subscribers who have
a tendency to start the attacks rolling again. I realize that I can't do
much about this, but I like to be aware of what they are saying and, if
necessary, reply.

[4] I now have lots of friend on this list, many of them silent, some of
them who do write to me and encourage me to keep posting because they find
me entertaining and informative. It's very lonely for me here in Cancun. I
have only my beautiful wife, Anita Brown, to talk with about Lineland and
Chrissie and so on. I'm sure that you can well understand that her tolerance
for these subjects, especially Chrissie, can wear thin. Yet there is no
escape from them for me.

Pynchon-l is my only outlet, and it is in many ways a very sympathetic and
caring one. Diana York Blaine's message today really lifted my heart. It
actually brought tears to my eyes, which I quickly wiped away with a
wisecrack. Most of you seem to have your schools and friends and jobs and so
on. I don't want to seem maudlin, but I don't have any of that, except my
little family and pynchon-l.

[5] It helps me write. I gave up writing because it was so lonely. It took
such a long time for the responses to arrive and there were so few of them.
Even when I wrote about Bob Dylan for the Saturday Evening Post I didn't get
all that many letters and most of them were for him. Samuel Johnson once
wrote, "Only a fool ever wrote for ought but money." I'm not sure if those
are his exact words. I say, only a fool ever wrote for money in the first
place. I write for the love of my own voice, principally, but also for the
sheer pleasure of creating these documents and sending them out in the world
and seeing the answers come back.

I have been much more productive since going online. I am not going to write
a sequel to Lineland because I don't do sequals. I don't even create new
works in a given genre. Each of my books is sui generis. They may resemble
other works, but they really aren't the same. Suffice it to say, that some
of what I write here you will read eventually in some other work in
different form, but I am not going to write about pynchon-l again per se
except in the context of promoting Lineland.

[6] I am a devil and I just love bopping ding-dongs with my verbal ball pean
hammer.

Despite this, I am once again putting in too much time on
pynchon-l at waste.org. I don't think I will unsubscribe, but I do think that I
get some people a bit hysterical and that Andrew and Murthy and all the
people comparing notes on Mason & Dixon could use a break. Dale has also
asked me to be more careful about how I expose myself as it causes public
relations problems for him. He has an important investment in me and in
Lineland and he has a lot of work to do to make it pay off. He'd rather that
I put any excess energy into helping him, not making trouble.

Is he an innocent fool or what?

Sorry, Dale. I love you, but I will never be anyone but Jules Siegel.

Next fish?

--
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