pynchon-l-digest V2 #2214

[Doug Millison]

Jaybore, I can see it now,   just like Perry Mason strutting in front of
the jury, me on the stand. James has just had his turn to testify, you got
all jowly and serious:  "Just to clarify. You say that you received the
offlist message from slothrop666 *before* the identical message from Doug
went to the list?"  And James, helpful as always, says, Yes.  I do think
you can see yourself there, too, can't you?

Now you haul that paunch 180 degrees around to face the jury and turn your
back to me on the stand.

"And where were you Sunday, October 07, 2001 at 12:05 A.M., when the email
in question was dispatched to James Kyllo?"

Your eyes drilling those lady jurors, you just know their panties are
getting wet, and even the guys are starting to feel a tingle, oh yeah.  You
hold that pause just a moment more for melodrama's sake...but, w-where's
your private dick, he was supposed to be here with the surprise witness,
the definitive piece of evidence, proof positive of the criminal's fatal
mistake? He slinks in the door at back of the courtroom, damn! he won't
even make eye contact, just sorta shrugs, and right about then, here it
comes.... Well, no need to go all scatological or anything.  Suffice to
say, the jury looks puzzled, then they all LAUGH OUT LOUD.  And then I
start laughing, too.  AT YOU. No, hold up-- I just chuckle. You know, those
chuckles that you love so much.

But then, I was thinking about it yesterday evening, when I was driving to
pick up my beautiful and loving wife at the BART station after she rode the
train home from her high-paying and super-fulfilling job over at the
University, and on the way back to our wonderful home up here in the El
Cerrito hills chatting in Chinese about our Honor Roll son working out with
the swim team after his piano master class to help him prepare for the
concerto competition next month, the sunset all pink and gold and San
Francisco Bay blue -- and it hit me: jaybore, you're not really the Perry
Mason type.  Oh, I know, Raymond Burr had that little boy fetish that
echoes your thang for boy-fucker Blicero,  but, I mean, hell,  it would be
in such poor taste to try to make anything of that, I can just hear that
dogpack howling!  Mean old Doug, he's at it again, tormenting pore ole
jaybore!  And you know, they'd be right.  That would be in poor taste.

And then I got to remembering the last time you were on a mission --
remember, how you were out to prove, conclusively (and, b-boy were you
certain that time! Emailing just about everybody, the Pynchon-L list owner,
prominent people in the Pynchon scholarly community, b-boy you name it!
What a caution you were!), that Charles Hollander and I had somehow hacked
into your PC down there in, Australia is it?, and those rumors you were
spreading about us hacking into the P-list archives, too.  Yeah, that
investigation sorta fizzled, didn't it?  That was a real shame. No kidding.
(And I guess you finally had to admit that Hollander and I weren't the same
person, too, despite the claims you and your dogpack made back then -- just
as you had to back away from your accusation that Dave Monroe and I were
the same person.  Funny, isn't it, how you keep having to crayfish away
from one then another set of  ridiculous allegations.)

Then I thought,  you're more like Inspector Clouseau, but even that's a
stretch, because there's an actor who knows he's acting the fool.  You're
just an ordinary, downmarket sort of clown, the truly sad kind who doesn't
even know he's a clown.  Oh golly, I'm weeping again, and why would that
be? Clowns are usually so funny.  I really shouldn't empathize so deeply, I
know, but I just can't help it.

Thank goodness for Kleenex.

Anyway, I guess the funniest thing is -- you have read those slothrop666
posts in the archives, right? I hadn't really looked at them until
yesterday, except for your so-called incriminating ones (don't you wish) on
October 6 and 7, and there are so many of them! and  they're all over the
map! you really ought to take a look at them again-- and I was thinking
about how you always seemed to get so irritated the way Chuck would put
forth his ideas about the sub-text that Pynchon weaves into his prose, and
you seemed to really get it, how Pynchon just keeps tantalizing the reader
with the promise of this or that meaning, how it seems to slip out of the
reader's grasp just when you think you've got it ... and it occurred to me,
the really funny thing is that I think that you think you really can FIGURE
IT OUT, get to the bottom of this slothrop666 thing, you're going to pick
up a clue here, rewrite a little there, fudge the time sequence if need be,
ignore all those posts that go after all kinds of people that I never had
an argument with on Pynchon-L, hell there's at least one that dumps on me
at
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9906&msg=836&keywords=Slothrop666 (a
nd there's a really good one at
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9810&msg=453&keywords=Slothrop666 th
at I sure wish I had written),  but, darn it, you're going to prove, beyond
a shadow of a doubt -- the way you keep trying to prove that the Dora
inmates in GR aren't Holocaust victims, and that you aren't anti-Semitic --
that I'm slothrop666...

There I go again with the chuckles.  You're a real crack-up, man.


best wishes




Doug Millison - Writer/Editor/Web Editorial Consultant
millison at online-journalist.com
www.Online-Journalist.com