My 'clarification', clarified

[John Carvill]

Apologies for teh scrambled text on Friday. Not sure what happened.
For anyone who's interested, here's a hopefully unscrambled copy of
what I wrote.

<< John has as much right to complain that Robin is coming off as an
arrogant jerk as Robin has to be one. >>

Heh. Yeah, and as Keith just pointed out, it's kinda rich for Dough to
cry about how I have no right to tell people what not to post, which
is in itself his way of telling me what not to post.


Let me summarise a couple of the 'points' I was trying to make:

1. Pynchon & Dope

It's obvious Pynchon has enjoyed smoking dope, taking LSD, etc. There
are huge swathes of his books, generally and really specifically,
which surely show the influence of drugs, stoner culture, etc. Hey, I
personally like drugs! I'm not against them.

I just think the idea that Pynchon wrote, say, Gravity's Rainbow,
whilst stoned and/or tripping is absurd. Yes he probably did a lot of
acid and weed during the months/years he spent writing GR, of course
he did. My point only relates to the very specific, hoary old claim
that when he sat down at the typewriter (or took his pen to his
quadrille paper) to work on GR, Pynchon was tripping and/or stoned on
marijuana. Personally, I would dispute the possibility that such a
work could be written in such a state. But that's not the point. To
me, the more important point is that, if we allow the Siegelish
suggestion that 'Pynchon wrote GR stoned' to mutate and become
received wisdom, then it trivializes Pynchon's art. And Pynchon,
unlike such revered mainstream authors such as Roth or Updike, needs
more, not less, serious recognition from the literary 'establishment',
and less - not more - of a reputation as a reclusive stoner. Allowing
the general public to think of Pynchon as some guy who gets ripped on
various drugs then spews out big, long rambling 'druggy' books like
GR, does Pynchon a disservice. That's all.


2. Doc & Dope

Like everyone else, I initially bought the idea of Doc as a habitual
weed smoker. And yeah, he smokes joints in the book. All I ever wanted
to do was to raise the question of, well, is he really so stoned all
the time as we migh initially assume? Maybe he is. Maybe not. There
are a number of occasions when he pointedly does not smoke a joint, so
as to keep his wits about him, for example.


3. Pynchon & Chandler

I don't discount everything that Robin says, by any means. I read his
posts. He often raises interesting points. But it has become very
wearying, having the same thing said over and over, that Chandler is
'crucial' to IV. How could Chandler not be pertinent to a work of this
sort? Equally, are there a number of *specific* ways in which certain
passages/characters from certain Chandler books seem to be directly or
explicitly referenced, in some significant way, in IV? Not that I am
aware of. I just get so tired of someone who appears to have given
himself a crash course in Chandler studies, coming on here and telling
us p-listers, people who probably already knew a fair amount about
Chandler, nothing very much new on the matter. Maybe other people
don't feel so irritated by that. Ok.

Then, tying it all together, there's the way people make an argument,
then someone replies with a counter-argument, and instead of either
conceding the point, or coming back with a further counter-argument,
they just ignore it and move on. Example: Robin says well, wasn't John
Lennon tripping when he 'constructed' Strawberry Fields Forever? Eh?
Whaddya say to that, Mister I Don't Think Pynchon Ever Touched A Joint
In His Life? And when I say, well, first off that's a fairly specious
comparison, GR versus Strawberry Fields Forever, and anyway Lennon was
not tripping when he 'constructed' that song, what response do I get
from Robin? Zip.

As for Doug, him and me had a fall-out earlier this year, because he
got really irate when I questioned his 'reading' of Chandler's Marlowe
as a 'brute', but then we resolved our differences. Now Doug
re-surfaces, specifically to snipe at me, laud Robin's Chandler posts,
and cosy up to his former nemesis, the Playboy Interview sceptic 'rj'.
Really, this is all a bit much. But so what? We can all agree,
everyone here - me, Doug, Robin, hell, even 'rj' - we all have an
equal right to post our thoughts etc.

Doug taking our OFFLIST correspondence and posting it to the list,
however, that's in a category all by itself.