Q & A

[MalignD at aol.com]

<< Malign, there's no need to "correct" anything, I included the relevant 
posts and the urls so people could read the posts themselves.>>

I corrected your extensive mischaracterization of what those posts contain.

<<, but your revision of the rest of it doesn't stand up if you actually read 
the posts, so I wonder who's really doing the lying here?

"Lying" is your word.  I stand by what I wrote; as you say, the archives are 
there.

<<?  If you characterize what somebody else has written in a way that 
substantially changes what they say, then insist that your revision is the 
truth, is that lying? I really don't know, but it doesn't sound terribly 
honest to me.>>

Hence the need to correct you.

<< maybe you'd like to get it straightened out before you continue to call 
other people liars based on their rejection of your own falsification of 
their statements.>>

In fact I called no one a "liar"; I asked whether your characterizations 
might be considered such, asked where innuendo might be considered to have 
shaded into falsehood.

<< Fact remains, Derek objected to the taunts and identified them as 
anti-Semitic, and rj/rjackson/jbor/rob j/>>

"Taunts" is no more than your characterization; it has nothing to do with 
"fact."  Derek claimed to believe an anti-Semitic intent, a different thing 
from "identifying" anything as such.  The supposedly offending term was no 
more than Derek's own surname.

<<... your denial begins to look just a tad unhinged ...>>

Hmmm.

<< I'll grant you that I don't know for a fact that  rj/rjackson/jbor/rob j/? 
was really having _fun_ while he/she was taunting Derek, I was just giving 
him/her the benefit of the doubt -- it could be that the emotional 
difficultires that motivate him/her to drive one and then another Pynchon 
scholar out of Pynchon-L, to attack people like Terrance along with the many 
people who have showed up here and who have tried to join the discussion and 
who got pounced upon by rj/rjackson/jbor/rob j/?,  don't have anything at all 
to do with fun and more to do with compulsion and inner pain, and, in fact, 
back when rj/rjackson/jbor/? was accusing Charles Hollander and me of hacking 
into his -- rj/rjackson/jbor/?'s -- PC and hacking into the P-list archives 
and beaming radio signals into his brain and whatnot, I urged him/her to get 
some counseling. I guess he/she didn't follow that advice. Tragic, really.  
Such a fine mind, a terrible thing to get wasted, as our other Quail, Danny, 
once said.>>

This entire paragraph--outside of your admission of distortion--is irrelevant 
to the issue you raised.

<< I do understand that you don't see anything wrong with the anti-Semitic 
attack rj/rjackson/jbor/rob j/? and kai made on Derek, of course you don't, 
your entire existence on Pynchon-L is predicated on ad hominem attack and 
defense at all costs of rj/rjackson/jbor/rob j/?>>

Another distortion.  "[A]nti-Semitic attack" is your distorting 
characterization and untenable on the evidence.

<< are you slothrop666 at yahoo.com?>>  

No.

<<Quail/Mailign/rj/rjackson/jbor/rob j/? you all might want to check Derek's 
academic bonafides and especially his particular areas of expertise before 
you go out on a limb, unless you'd prefer not to contaminate your thinking 
with new information.>>

Also irrelevant. 


<>

He made no case; he made the single accusation that calling him by his 
surname was intended as a slur.

<<(Oh, Malign, where did we go wrong?  I can just see us now, you and I, 
threads of our earnest discussion of the works of Nabokov and Pynchon still 
hanging in the air along with feathers of cigarette smoke, as we lean back 
against the wall of a cozy bistro down in Tribecastan somewhere, listening to 
Ruben Gonzalez tickle the ivories....>>

I have trouble seeing us as you describe.  

Malignd