Quail: "You won't even simply *give up* when asked. [...] stop lecturing me"

[Doug Millison]

There's the problem, Barbara:  Quail is upset  because you won't obey and
do what he wants you to do. Apparently he wants to do all the lecturing and
name-calling on the P-list,  that's obvious from what he's written on
Pynchon-L these past many days.  Just go back and read his posts, if you've
got the stomach  to work your way back though that swamp of limp-noodle
logic.

Here's my theory:  so thoroughly have people like Quail been co-opted by
the bitch goddess America, they can only react hysterically when it begins
to appear that this art object they venerate -- Pynchon's writing -- may
reveal uncomfortable truths about America.  They miss Pynchon's irony
entirely, it's beyond their ken that Slothrop or Pokler might represent the
kind of journey of discovery that each of us can take if we start noticing
what's actually going on in the world around us. What would happen if you
looked closely at the companies that manufacture the weapons used in the
current war, if you followed the money and saw how the same companies and
shareholders profit by supplying all sides in the current conflict, if you
investigated and learned to what degree we have created and nurtured and
sustained the enemy we now fight, if you came to grips with the
responsibility we share for the suffering by virtue of our support for the
leaders and institutions that carry out that suffering in our names, if you
confronted the reality that inside of us of us is a tendency to evil that
we can't split off and destroy no matter how hard we try, we can only come
to terms with it and learn not to let the evil tendency dominate our
behaviors. That's a scary line of thought.  In Pynchon's fictional setting,
coming to grips with that seems to blow Slothrop apart, and it crushes
Pokler.  It's threatening to the reader, too; this is subversive
literature, profoundly subversive.  so it comes as no suprise that readers
like Quail have got to keep Pynchon up there on the bookshelf and deny his
work is anything but "fiction", unwilling to admit that Pynchon might
really mean it when he talks about the "the criminally insane who have
enjoyed power  since 1945".

How do we respond in a world where the loonies are running the hospital?
Personally, I like Pynchon's response, he writes books that expose the
lunatics  for what they are.  You are right to focus on GR in the current
situation, a novel that begins in the midst of a terror attack from the
skies and which ends with a manned bomb falling to trigger what may be the
long-awaited apocalypse; in between those two pages Pynchon explores in
some detail  how we come to live in a world defined by such terror. I do
believe we might be able to learn something from this novel, and P's other
work, that could help us in the current situation (great literature often
helps people in their lives outside the book). Too bad that's not a welcome
subject here on Pynchon-L, it gets shouted down by Quail and his ilk each
time the topic surfaces, and they've become rather hysterical on this
point:  what on earth, they have asked repeatedly in recent days, can a
novel published 28 years ago have to do with the current geopolitical
situation? The intellectual bankruptcy that undergirds that question is
absolutely stunning.

The good news is, this handful of blowhards doesn't speak for Pynchon-L.
Nobody does. My voice, your voice, his voice, her voice. That royal "we" is
bluster, it doesn't mean a thing. Way more P-listers disagree than agree
with this groupuscule's effort to marginalize Pynchon, their wishy-washy
support of Bush and multinational corporations,  the nasty way they're
trying to stifle discussion on Pynchon-L. I hear from them offlist, and I
expect that you do, too.  They don't like to see the P-list dominated by a
handful of people whose political positions are so diametrically opposed to
the politics that Pynchon expresses in his work. But you don't see any of
us telling Quail and his cronies to shut up -- no, they arrogate that right
to themselves, with regard to the people they don't like to hear, these
good burghers of Pynchonville.  What hypocrites they are.



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