answering Terrance

[Doug Millison]

Terrance,

You are not a fascist,
and you're not the Pynchon-L moderator, either.

Somebody -- it may have even been Musikar -- said on Pynchon-L a long time
ago,before you got here, when somebody -- it may have even been me --
complained that other P-listers weren't sticking to the topic, that this
forum represents different things for different people, something to the
effect that for some it's a genteel literary discussion focused on Pynchon
and for others it's a balls-out drunken party for people who love Pynchon.
In the past nearly 5 years, I've come to see the truth in that.

Take, "Morris" for example, a great example of the P-list as a place to
spew obscenity and provoke argument with insult, along with our darling
Malign-- Pynchon-L seems to be a place where "Morris" can come home after
too many drinks (that's often his excuse, isn't it) and crow about the
bombing and tell anybody he wants to to get fucked, probably because his
wife and his boss have his balls in such a clamp he's got no place else to
spew when he's drunk.  There are a few, very few, who seem to see Pynchon-L
as a stuffy sort of literary discussion, politely ignoring what's happening
in the world outside, tossing around lit-crit cliches, elaborating and
articulating rules for how to demonstrate this or that with P's texts,
carrying on tedious arguments about genre classification of Pynchon's works
and the like, and avoiding at all costs relating the political/historical
content of Pynchon's work to the world in which he writes.  There are some
P-listers who use Pynchon as a springboard for all manner of comments, and
who form a kind of loose-knit email community based on a common interest
(Pynchon) even if everything they talk about here isn't  exclusively or
even very often about Pynchon, and who sometimes even get together in the
real world.  And people shift from group to group. Of the dozen or frequent
posters, I believe you will find it difficult to name one who doesn't fall
into two or more of these categories, including yourself, non-fascist
Terrance, and including me, from time to time.  Interesting stuff emerges
from all of these groups, of course, and stupid nonsense as well.

I'll continue to read Pynchon and when I see something worth responding to
on Pynchon-L regarding his texts, I will; frankly, for my money you haven't
made a cogent or compelling point yet in the discussion of Mason & Dixon,
but then you've rarely done that no matter how much Melville and Aristotle
and undigested chunks of PhD. dissertations you regurgitate without
successfully relating them to anything concrete that you have to say about
Pynchon,  but I expect you have a different opinion of what you're writing,
and welcome to it.   I don't exactly see a stampede to elaborate on the
comments you do make. Feel free to ignore my posts if you wish, or answer
them as you will, I really don't care what you do. At one point I did care,
I held your hand when you telephoned me one night to complain about the way
rj/jbor/rjackson and "Morris" and kai and just about everybody else was
calling you names and blasting you for posting gibberish to the P-list
under multiple names, and I took the heat from that dogpack when I spoke up
and told them to stop it.  You could look it up in the archives if you've
forgotten that but of course you haven't you ungrateful wretch.  I'll
continue trying to make sense of your posts when I care to take the time
and make the effort, but I'll probably continue to ignore most of them
because you so often fail to make sense. You are a hypocritical whiner,
quick to demand this and that, just as quick to perpetuate the same kind of
foolishness you complain about in others. So, as far as I'm concerned, good
buddy, and this goes for the rest of your whole sick anonymous crew --
"Morris", Malign, "rj/rjackson/jbor/?", Fester, Scratchit, Dingleberry and
the rest of you wankers --  adopting the kind of Navy diction I'd expect
from Bodine, blow it out your homesick ass.

Cordially and post-post-ironically,
Doug "You Are Not A Fascist" Millison