What's wrong with Pynchon-L?

[Otto]

Q: What's wrong with Pynchon-L?

A: Nothing - it can even stand hocus-pocus like the post below.


Doug, what's wrong with Pynchon-L?
An old topic - future net historians will use these archives and they will
see that this was a very active list of people who tried to understand the
complex novels of TRP, helping each other where they could.

My impression is that in the past some people were of the opinion that
"P-list" is a synonym for flaming, which had become nearly become proverbial
for this list. My own perceptions are quite different.

I began changing from lurker to poster because this list isn't merely a
chatroom and it's not at all the way it is described in those net-articles
about TRP. I'm scanning through several lists but in my opinion this is the
only one worth posting. Take a lurk at the yahoo Pynchon-group and decide.

P-list not a chatroom but it isn't a literary seminar either. What it is I
don't know (yet) but it's very exciting and, I assume, has some addictive
potential. One can learn a lot here, even if it's only a word like
"obnoxious" which I had to look up in a dictionary.

In the last year I got much very useful information, many urls, opinions,
hints etc. from this list and I'm very grateful for it. I've "met" a lot of
nice, intelligent and funny people even if it's only electronically.

Contrary to what you write below two pomo-people like Jbor and me can argue
about the opening scream or child molesting (or not-molesting) and can stay
thinking different about this and that without calling each other fools.

Contrary to what you write below modernist Terrance and pomo-Jbor (sorry for
this primitive classification) can have long, reasonable and serious e-mail
dialogues. Why - because they are trying to read the texts in question and
the mutual mails properly. And in doing so they urge the same from us.

Again you are, as Terrance uses to put this (and as a soccer-fan I really
like the picture), playing the man instead of the ball like you are doing
for a long time now accusing Jbor of this and that.

Your mixing up of personal attacks with the pomo/decon-debate only proves to
me that you've not understood postmodernism, so you're inevitably misreading
Pynchon. It's not a theory embellished on his texts but a theory that was
developed alongside with his novels (and the texts of others).

In Pynchon Notes 42-43 there hardly seems to be an essay that is not based
upon this theory.
The same goes for those Oklahoma Law Review essays.
Among those Pynchon Scholars there seems to be no doubt that Pynchons novels
are pomo par excellence. This is taught at universities everywhere, even
abroad in this small-town Germany place where I live.

There wasn't much cabby-business the last three nights so I had the time to
read some great essays again. Now you're all sleeping and I'm awake. No
armchair psychology here - just an opinion.

For more consistency I would like to encourage everybody to set up his/her
own website on TRP, even if you keep it offline, just for your own pleasure
and to avoid copyright conflicts. It's easy to copy & paste your own mails
to any html-editor and it's much more fun than working in simple word-docs.

The sun is shining - seems as if spring finally made it here too.

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2001 1:50 AM
Subject: What's wrong with Pynchon-L?


> Yes, there used to be lots of spirited disagreements and even
> arguments on the P-list.  But that was generally because people were
> putting forward ideas and suggestions that they were trying to
> support, demonstrate, defend -- quite different from the non-stop
> deconstructive mode of discourse that has come to the fore, where no
> matter what anybody says a few of the same participants just pick it
> apart and turn it upside down, never holding any identifiable
> position, constantly shifting and slipping and sliding, sparking
> flames and fanning them all the while.  An example of PoMo discourse
> in action, perhaps, and sometimes even marginally entertaining, but
> it's no way to create community or foster dialogue, especially when
> as practiced by these few individuals here the deconstruction is
> interlaced with a large and steady doses of ad hominem attack. That's
> the big change I see over the past four years -- from identifiable
> personalities who argued (sometimes vehemently) from relatively
> consistent points of view, and who got to know each other (on and
> off-list, sometimes meeting in person) well enough to joke and play
> (sometimes quite delightfully), to the current state of affairs where
> anonymous posters spew at random and steadily tear apart instead of
> building up.  Matt Wiener of course made a speciality of picking
> fights just for the sake of picking them and consistently hitting hot
> button issues, and his behavior seemed outrageous at the time because
> he was the only person doing that while most of the other
> participants were maintaining the spirited and largely friendly
> conversation -- Wiener wouldn't have a chance to stand out in this
> crowd, now, however, because the style of discourse with which he
> disrupted Pynchon-L has become the standard mode of Pynchon-L's two
> most frequent and most obnoxious participants (and I'm not talking
> about Dave Monroe and Terrance).
>
> Meanwhile, all of the serious Pynchon scholars have departed, and
> Pynchon-L no longer serves the minimal professional function it once
> served, of letting the Pynchon academic community know about things
> more quickly than Pynchon Notes or other academic journals and
> meetings. I've continued to monitor the list in order to pass along
> the occasional tid-bit that will interest a Pynchon scholar friend of
> mine who no longer has time to read the list, and I've sent along
> exactly one item (the url to the M&D review that Otto posted not long
> ago) in nearly 2 months. Nobody here makes the effort to notify the
> list of new Pynchon-related academic publications, events,
> conferences, etc.
>
> The list is what people make of it of course, and will always reflect
> the contributions of the folks who post most frequently.  Dave Monroe
> and Terrance post in the spirit of the old Pynchon-L, they remind me
> a lot of Andrew Dinn in terms of volume and in their spirit of
> offering up material that can stimulate and feed conversation,and
> they stick to recognizeable positions the way he did.  A few others
> manage to interact in the same vein.  The deconstructors and
> in-your-face-eat-shit-and-die-motherfucker crowd (if it is indeed a
> crowd and not a single wacko posting under multiple names) know who
> they are, and I think the rest of us identify them easily enough, too
> -- they are the ones who are posting as often as Monroe and Terrance,
> and who are either telling people to fuck off or who snipe at the
> substantial posts with the death of ten thousand cuts.
>
> Jeremy:
> "I am, however, hesitant to ascribe the change in the mood to the
> infighting of late: for it seems to me like in the old, fun days
> there was quite a bit of same, and with some of the same participants
> too. "
>
> P.S.  Save your breath, "Morris" -- I already know you think I'm an
> asshole, and I could care less.  Save your breath,
> "rj/jbor/slothrop666/MalignD/etc.", I know that you're going to flip
> around whatever I say and assert that I've actually said the opposite.
> --
> d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>