Jules accidentally misleads

[Jules Siegel]

At 02:25 PM 05/9/97 PST, <MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu> wrote:

>> All of John Mascaro's observations had prior review. Andrew gave me his
enthusiastic carte blanche to use anything he wrote.

>I think he unintentionally creates the impression that Andrew's carte
blanche had my 
>name on it too.

This is a pretty far-out reading. Is this what they mean by deconstruction?
Obviously, I meant Andrew's own work, not John's. The reason that I
mentioned Andrew at all, is that he is actually the only person quoted in
the book whose work might have had any significant commercial or academic
value in the sense that Jester meant. That's why I specifically asked him if
it were ok to use his material and he gave me full permission to do so.

>Exactly at the point I was given *prior review* of a LINELAND galley I
asked not be in it.

The point in prior review was not anything having to do with legal
permission, which I did not feel I needed in Mascaro's case (for the reasons
that I have now repeated several hundred times) but as a courtesy. I felt
that he should be given the opportunity to clarify or correct his remarks.
He replied that it was all too much for him and he just wanted to be left
alone to cry quietly by himself. I told Dale to tell him that I was going to
have One-Eyed Louie come to UCLA give him a fat lip in front of all his
students if he didn't shit or get off the pot. Dale translated this into
several thousand pages of conventional English and John finally gave in and
wrote his essay and made some minor changes in his text.

Also, John is wrong when he says that he wasn't given the option of having
his direct remarks removed. He did get an option, but it wasn't one that he
wanted to exercise: I could have paraphrased his remarks. This would have
given me full freedom to burlesque them as I saw fit. I didn't want to do
that, not out of any sense of mercy, but because it was going to be a bit of
work and I was exhausted by having put the book together in such a short
period of time. Dale did tell him this and he can put the exact remarks on
line here if anyone wishes to see them. This is not a joke, but the exact
and literal truth and may God strike me down with a thunderbolt if I lie.

It would have been FUN! And the book would have been even more biting. And
John would be really annoyed, believe me.

I also suggested to Dale that we encourage Mascaro to sue and then blow it
up into a gigantic publicity smear: "UCLA Prof Sues to Censor Internet
Book." Dale said he didn't want to do this because he is a sissy. These were
his exact words: "I am a sissy, Jules, and I don't want to get in a fight
because Mascaro is a tough guy from East Phillie and he might spit on my new
bunny pajamas."

Failing this, I said why not just cut all Mascaro's statements and put a big
red crude stamp saying "CENSORED by John Mascaro" in each space with a
paraphrase of the offending text. Dale said to just leave it alone and John
would come around to our way of thinking because he would wear him down with
endless syrupy patience. He also said that if I didn't stop bothering him
with dumb ideas about how to make Mascaro even angrier, he was going to call
Anita and tell her to lock me in the bathroom until it was all over.

So as you can all see, I was the VICTIM of Dale L. Larson's conniving with
John Mascaro to keep Lineland from becoming something that MuddleWarped
would have been proud to have written in doo-doo on toilet paper. It's the
usual academic-industrial complex conspiracy to dumb down a great work of
innovative art and turn it something that can actually be sold in book
stores instead of being neatly stacked in odd patterns on the floor of some
abandoned sewage processing facility as installation art.

And now John Mascaro is FAMOUS! Newspapers are calling him up and
interviewing him about all this and he is going to get tenure at last. He's
also being considered for a role in the Heavy Metal comic book version. He's
probably going to be my best friend who comforts me by taking me out on the
town and introducing me to hot UCLA coeds while Pynchon and Chrissie are
fooling around in the bushes. What more does this guy want?


 

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