quoth Morris: "all those shitty essays"

[pynchonoid]

Well what have we here?  Plug in "shitty essay" at the
pynchon-l search engine and you get:

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0506&msg=96404&keywords=shitty%20essay

Seems to be "Morris" complaining about "all those
shitty essays" 

Surprise, surprise!  Seems that "Morris" is the liar,
, if this is what it looks like, and a smelly old
hypocritical polecat to boot.  

Here was long-suffering hard-working Dave Monroe
talking about trying to start a discussion of
Pynchon's non-fiction - including his Intro to Slow
Learner, NYTimes essays & etc. - and there's "Morris"
calling them all "shitty" and, incidentally,
demonstrating just how many years he's been spouting
this sort of insightful Pynchon criticism, looking
back as he does here to an earlier moment when he and
a couple of others were trying to derail a discussion
of Pynchon's essays because they were, "Morris" sez,
"shitty". 


What I wrote awhile back still stands:

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0305&msg=79235&keywords=shitty%20essay

[...]  PYNCHON-L remains the only venue I know
of where "shitty" is used to describe something
Pynchon has written -- accurate enough if applied to
describe the parts of his work where he writes about
shit, but inappropriate if "shitty" is supposed to
mean anything like "excrement to be flushed down the
toilet". 

[...]

I prefer what David Kipen had to say about the
Foreword in his SF Chronicle review the other day: 
"For the 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' intro, Pynchon returns
to his signature nonfiction voice: postdoctoral yet
cheerfully sophomoric, sad yet undespairing, as
expressive in its alternation of long notes with short
as an SOS. It's an instrument tuned and retuned in
more than 40 years of occasional essays, reviews and
liner notes -- forming, incidentally, one of the great
uncollected anthologies in American letters." 
-

You don't have to continue doing this sort of  stuff,
Morris. You could just stop it. Focus on the topic at
hand instead of worrying about me and what I'm
writing, and I'll do the same, OK?  I'd really like to
enjoy the next few weeks and months here reading and
discussing Against the Day without you constantly
accusing me of being a liar and dragging up old
arguments and whatnot.  Yeah, sure, I mentioned
"shitty essays" in passing, and you had a choice:  "Am
I going to let that pass, or should I pounce on this
opportunity to attack Doug, who hasn't even mentioned
me in what he's written here?"  So you pounce,
forgetting that, in fact, you're wrong and I'm right
this time, again. Better impulse control would serve
you well, amigo. Or, continue making yourself look
like an idiot, it's your choice.


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