answering Doug.3

[barbara100 at jps.net]

Doug, Doug, Doug! That's all you ever talk about!
Who's obsessed?
(And I still fucking wanna know what you meant when you said no writer comes
close to Pynchon in his treatment of women!  How many times do I have to
ask?!)
Barbara
Barbara
Barbara

----- Original Message -----
From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 4:14 PM
Subject: Re: answering Doug.3


>
>
> "barbara100 at jps.net" wrote:
> >
> > For God's sake! don't go look it up.  It wasn't but a minute ago you
said we'd all been wasting our precious literary time defending ourselves
against one another.  Let it go!  Get back to Pynchon, why don't'cha, and
and answer my feminist question. I really wanna know! If I'm full of shit in
my misogynistic reading of you, then tell me so! (But don't forget to
explain why.)
>
> I guess I should turn the other cheek and look in the mirror and see the
> beam in my own eye,  as Dave Monroe suggested. But there are some things
> in Doug's post I feel I need to address.
>
>  For a long time Doug applauded my posts. He had no difficulty
> understanding what I was saying. For the most part he agreed with me. I
> agreed with a lot of what Doug posted here. Doug's interest in Pynchon
> is almost exclusively  a political one. As I've stated, Doug's politics
> are not radically different from my own. I disagree with his methods
> more than his POV. When we discussed GR here, Doug commended me
> frequently, that is,  as long as I posted political stuff. Most of the
> political stuff I posted added textual support, inter textual support,
> secondary source support for Doug's superficial and thin posts. This was
> particularly the case with regard to the GR character Blicero/Weissmann.
> Doug's protracted and
> nasty fight with rj dominated the discussion. I was more in agreement
> with Doug than rj. For a while I focused on genre and I critiqued the
> postmodernist and deconstructist  readings of Pynchon. Doug applauded me
> even when he obviously failed to understand what I was talking about.
> Doug is not much up on Lit-crit, but this didn't prevent him from trying
> to use my posts as a  foil in his protracted holocaust fight with rj. I
> turned to religion. The resistance to reading Pynchon as a "religious"
> writer was here long before I got here. I found it almost impossible to
> argue my position. I didn't do a very good job. However, I attribute
> some of this failure to the resistance that was present here because of
> the way Doug had polarized and framed the debate on this issue. I
> complained that I was being squeezed into Doug's "religious writer"
> reading, but it was no use. We simply couldn't get passed the definition
> or characterization of what a "religious writer" in the postmodern epoch
> is.  Long ago, Doug gave up on discussing Pynchon's texts. He has not
> hosted a
> section of any novel since I've been here and he never provides much
> that is very useful and helpful for those reading Pynchon books. But I
> tire of revisiting the pynchon-l past. Who the hell cares. It's
> entertainment and this post is boring. There is nothing wrong with a
> good
> fight. Nothing wrong with a little jab, a little Ali shuffle. But Doug
> will toss
> sand in your face and kick you in the balls as he marches on for peace.
>
> One more point and I let it go. Doug is nearly obsessed with discovering
> the identities of anonymous P-listers, particularly rj/jbor and MalignD.
> They don't need me to tell them that they should guard their identities,
> anything personal and  private from Doug.
> Doug knows enough about me and my family to know that when he said the
> WTC was insured I would take it personally. He says he sent money to
> fund counseling for victims of the 9/11 attack. Why did we need to know
> that?
> This was a low blow, after the bell. And this is how low Doug will stoop
> if you disagree with him.