outta here

[glthompson]

Hi, all--

I'm signing off. I've been one of the lurkers hereabouts, w/ a post here
and there. I also have an ongoing interest in the social dynamics of
listservs, so that's kept me around longer than I needed to be. But the
former P-list is getting just too redundant. There's an incredible
noise-to-signal ratio here, and just skimming the daily posts and
deleting requires an investment of 45 min. to an hour. I'm not really
interested in re-reading Mason & Dixon right now and consequently
wouldn't profit from the page-by-page glosses all that much. Watching
the innovative attempts to appropriate Gravity's Rainbow to a more
hawkish approach to the war has been entertaining, but it doesn't change
much over time.

It's a quirky list. I've stayed tuned as long as I have in order to get
the occasional gem in the shit, along with heads-up messages about
Nobels and alternative news sources. Like many of the relatively silent,
I suppose, I dislike all the squabbling, but as long as it's verbally
inventive I can skim and delete (assuming it's not pointed at myself . .
.) However, all the "you're lying!" "No, you are!" just gets boring
after a while.

For those who post under their real names and resent the net's
anonymity: deal with it. Text is all you have here, guys. (I'd guess
that "guys" applies to Barbara as well, though no one has a way of
knowing.) These messages add up to a representation of character. Doug's
has been highly consistent, as have Henry's, Malign's, and others we
have come to know and love to delete. But all this consistency is also
highly redundant. I wish the list could move on, but evidently it can't.

A recent entry, Eulenspiegel, reminds me a lot of the Dude . . . lots of
textual inventiveness, a few tricks of speech--anyone else notice this?
Maybe Charles Hollander isn't so far away.

I miss some of the posts by actual biological females on the list, e.g.,
Meg and Chris K. But it doesn't take a Pynchon scholar to see why they
wouldn't hang around.

So have fun. See you in six months or so, to see whether the SOS is
still going on. I suspect it will be.

GT