"Who loves ya, baby?"; was, sort of, 'Telly Savalas'

[rj]

davemarc writes

> Pleez, ixnay to all on all those "beating a dead horse" posts.  Unless
> there's someone on this list who still needs to know familiar folks's POVs
> on the intentional phallacy, anonymity... (snip the rest of the postscripted list, which points I have no issue with)

I'm going to have to take you politely to task on these two, davemarc,
though of course I have no axe to grind with you personally, you
understand. But not only are you trying to censor the subject content of
list posts, you have deemed two of *the* most important themes or
features of Pynchon's literary endeavour to be taboo topics. Sebastian's
remarkable and scholarly account of the historical precedents and the
relevance of Wicks's "Crime then styl'd 'Anonymity'" in _M&D_ is surely
a case in point; discussions around authorial presence (or absence) in
the various texts another. 

To me it seems somewhat hypocritical to fervently advocate respect of
Pynchon's privacy on the one hand, aggressively so in the case of the
anti-Slammin' Steve junta, and then to roundly condemn the same
expressed or implied desire for privacy when manifested by fellow
listers. It doesn't add up. And, all those accusations of flame-baiting
and pissing on the list, simply because someone has had the gall to
express an opposing point of view about some topic or issue, are
actually, and pretty transparently, rhetorical ploys: *they* are the
flame-baits themselves. And, I suspect, what generates them and what
they compensate for is a lack of substance in the accuser's own
arguments about whatever the topic at hand is; a less-than-graceful way
of closing a debate without ever having to admit error or loss. There is
no-one that I can recall who has contributed to the list for the *sole*
purpose of flame-baiting or attacking an individual, not in the last 6
months at least. And, even if that should happen to be the case, or even
if someone correctly or incorrectly *perceives* it to be the case, then,
what's wrong with the delete button?--- as many have pointed out. 

Though it's neither relevant nor good etiquette nor of much interest at
all imo, in the interests of equal time for opposing points of view on
the matter I'll weigh in here with one of *my* pet peeves, and that is
those listers who brandish their name tags like a big stick. You know
the ones:

Hi, I'm 

A R N O L D  S N A R B  [http://www.online-proctologist.com]
 
and I'm really really important and much smarter and better and prettier
than any of you lowlife scum-sucking AOL college losers who aren't me.

And so on. I find that sort of puff-chested self-aggrandisement to be
supercilious and irksome in the extreme, and it is something which is
undoubtedly anathema to Pynchon himself to boot. It's a territorial,
colonising instinct: standing there banners afly, fife and drum afife
and adrum, one foot astride a big brazen flag shoved into the e-turf,
pronouncing "I claim this list and all its ideas in the name of Celine
Dion and Huey Lewis and the News and..."

I deserve a barrage of self-righteous flame-lashings for wasting
precious bandwidth soapboxing my personal opinions on p-list protocol. I
do. And fair enough. But I'm sick to death of having it shoved down my
throat that just because an opinion doesn't have a concentration camp id
tattooed across its right wrist then it's somehow inferior to those that
do. You know that social security number that you guys have over there
in the U S of A which always eventually lets the little black
helicopters know where you are?--- well, in this country the same thing
(an 'Australia Card') has been knocked on the head quite a few times in
referendums and polls in recent decades because it is regarded by the
majority of us Auzzies as being an outright invasion of privacy and
basic civil rights. Gets m'ol' patriotic blood a-stirred, 't does.

And while I'm having a good old whinge about hypocrisy and prejudice and
tunnel vision, what about this little gem from our friend Frodeaux:

> This is America, live with it, speak English.

Yikes.

rj, no more mr (or ms) nice guy