Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Foul Pleasures In "The Continuing Crisis" (July 1979) R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., said that men in modern Iran were shot down forscortatory engagements. I thought I practically owned...
...June 1979) seemed to me sufficiently irresponsible to demand a reply...
...Most of what Koenig says is wrong with the book I agree is wrong...
...An argument in support of natural rights may be sound, thus the conclusion that such rights exist true, without any widespread agreement about this...
...Novels ought to portray the thoughts and actions of believable, fascinating people...
...I'm on public assistance, but I figure if I do not eat on Mondays, I can probably afford your opinions...
...while it may not have had to be as long as it is, it is a book a reader must live with for a long time in order to understand the grim beauty of Malamud's relation with Dubin...
...I did not affix the title "Oh, Violence, Please, Violence...
...Cannot the same be said for Adam Smith, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., and Roger Starr...
...Tyrrell's Teeth R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., I like your teeth (and your "bite")-are they real...
...Well, yes, I felt distinctly older and colder when I finally got through it, but I don't think that's enough...
...Rhoda Koenig's "Oh, Violence...
...May Starr and you pass on with that accomplishment to your credit...
...I used the Malamud reviews to illustrate a situation we both know exists...
...In this debate between positivists and naturalists it must be stressed that the point of dispute is not whether anyone can agree to anything, but whether something is true or not...
...The "appropriate technology" rhetoric gets silly at times, but much of it stands up very well when compared on its merits to the alternatives...
...I can easily see why someone might not want to live that way or that long with the novel, which is clumsy and graceless in many ways, but I cannot think of another book that chillingly and rightly renders living through a long deadening winter as this one does...
...Charles fallen Jr...
...Let us remove all government supports and hindrances in the field of energy...
...I think that evocations of aging and winter are the business of music, painting, and poetry...
...I would request, however, that you keep Richard Nixon oft your subscription list indefinitely...
...There is, in fact, more rage in Starr's review than in a hundred pages of Karl Marx...
...It reeks with ornate profanity and fills the heart with glooms of Hell and the nose with the smell of brimstone-for example, Queen Margaret to Richard: THOU ELVISH-MARK'D ABORTIVE, ROOTING HOG THOU THAT WAST SEALED IN THY NATIVITY THE SLAVE OF NATURE AND THE SON OF HELL, THOU SLANDER OF THY HEAVY MOTHER'S WOMB THOU LOATHED ISSUE OF THY FATHER'S LOINS, THOU RAG OF HONOUR, THOU DETESTED...
...It is hard because it has lots wrong with it, as I said in my review (New York Review of Books, February 22, 1979) and as, I gather, others said in their reviews...
...Sale's original review, and I still don't know...
...I hardly think there is any question that too many reviews are overly favorable- the question is whether this is the result 6f corruption or stupidity...
...Sylvia Gray Political, Social, and Sexual Activist Chambersburg, Pennsylvania Socially Unacceptable Please be assured that I would not-send any money to have your garbage delivered to my door even if it were the last publication in the world...
...Swedenborg However, I am not surprised to find it in your prose...
...But Koenig either cannot read, or, more likely, doesn't want to read, so 6ne had better not feel the need to be gentlemanly in reply...
...I thought I practically owned that word...
...They were the creation of the charming but elusive gentlemen at The American Spectator...
...That dollar figure is lower than some estimates from respectable sources...
...It is much more fun, for me at least, to praise, to try to find the right terms for praise, to feel that one has been thoughtful and discriminating enough that if a book makes one want to praise it, then civilization has not altogether sunk...
...Van den Haag's positivism suffers as well if such great stress is placed on agreement...
...Morris Dembo Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...
...Please, Violence...
...And they may be consecutive issues...
...Almost any of those studies costs several times the $88,500 Bethell indicates the ACT '79 people scrounged from seven or eight federal agencies to promote their notions...
...Is Mr...
...Tibor R. Machan Santa Barbara, California Kapital Ideas I buy your journal from time to time here in Philadelphia...
...In short, f--k off...
...I am an academic, and at many moments I am glad to be one, but as a reviewer my aim is to be an amateur, a reader, someone who reads looking for books that make life seem more strange, or meaningful, or funny, or odd...
...The June issues of Harper's and the Atlantic also carried articles-albeit by the same man- deploring the fact that book reviewers are so often pushovers for big names...
...I don't think, however, that I would go to periodical reviews of new books for my major evidence in support of that claim...
...I could not figure this out from Mr...
...Some are afraid to take unpopular positions...
...in One mood I could take the intended insult as flattery...
...I find The American Spectator graphically backward, morally irresponsible, politically naive, and socially unacceptable...
...I agree with Mr...
...So why should anyone take it seriously...
...By all means challenge Marx, but do it in terms of his key concepts like alienation or surplus value and not in terms of his illegitimate child, whose mother lies buried in the Marx family plot in Highgate Cemetery...
...Fred D. Baldwin Carlisle, Pennsylvania Tom Bethell replies: I am delighted to hear that the "economic case" for solar energy is so good and look forward to Mr...
...There's violence in it, there's even violence in the New York Times Book Review-I even have a couple of reviews Koenig might call violent in recent issues of it -but I'm afraid I don't think violence is a virtue, though I have been accused often enough of being a combination of Richard III and Hassan the Assassin...
...It is not as if writing something in a book thought by van den Haag and many others to contain the laws settles the issue of what are (positive) laws...
...On the contrary, I find Tyrrell to be a childish egomaniac only interested in superficial criticism and self-aggrandizement...
...Sale, on the lofty plane of the New York Review of Books, unaware of the sort of reviews published in magazines and newspapers around this country...
...He gives us another categorical imperative ("one must take [it] seriously"), an advertising slogan ("a real book"), and Greenwich Village oratory ("raw slabs of awkward life...
...This paper of yours-The American Spectator-how much is it, honey...
...Baldwin's exposition of it...
...Fortunately, his argument is invalid and undermines neither natural nor positive law...
...Van den Haag keeps stressing that people disagree about human nature, natural rights, etc., but no one disagrees with him about that at all...
...At one point Koenig says it is a book "that's not too hard to write about," bat in fact it is, especially within the confines of a brief review...
...You two were made for each other...
...You have an astonishingly rough and tumble vocabulary...
...I think it cheapens your entire presentation...
...In Iran these days various people assert that their edicts are the laws of Iran...
...I found no such person in Dubin's Lives...
...On the subject of energy subsidies, the real thing, he should read a 1978 report by Battelle, Pacific Northwest Laboratories, "An Analysis of Federal Incentives Used to Stimulate Energy Production...
...But, meaning to be thoughtful and discriminating, one feels obliged to say that there is much in Dubin's Lives to reward a reader willing to slog along with it...
...I hear that the Flat Earth Society is well and flourishing somewhere in England...
...and found the following entry: SCORTATORY-a rare word-un-findable in American Dictionaries- O.E.D...
...unabridged) only-: pertaining to or consisting in fornication or lewdness: Shakespeare in London: Twenty years he dallied there Between conjugal love and its chaste delights And Scortatory love and its foul pleasures...
...Entrepreneurs should already be making a nice profit in the marketplace, in this case selling solar panels to a host of customers...
...I turned to my personal journal for 12 October 1971, nearly eight years ago...
...Recent work is only a little more realistic, but that's the kind of stuff the government has been using to decide whether solar energy is economical, compared to other fuels...
...as I say in the very sentence Koenig quotes to show I'm just another slushy gentleman...
...Some review the author's intentions, thus aligning themselves with the author, rather than with the poor, dumb reader, who can only judge by results...
...to my piece, nor the subtitle, which called for "malice...
...Bethell is correct in saying that wind energy makes little sense on a house-by-house basis, but it can make a useful contribution to electrical utility grids...
...What is there left to intellectual debate if such a powerful achievement as Das Kapital is to be conceived as a "rationalization" and "extenuation" for personal aggression...
...I know why I am- do you...
...Coal also looks good, except that bad things happen when you decide to dig it or burn it...
...In the interim, we all might ponder the following: When something is economically viable, there should be no need to make an "economic case" on its behalf...
...Sale says he agrees with most of what I say is wrong with Dubin's Lives, i.e., that it is boring, pretentious, silly, and vulgar...
...The one place where I am totally in agreement with Koenig concerns the deadening effects of academic criticism on literary commentary...
...Millbrae, California Is Violence a Virtue...
...indeed, one of the things I like about the New York Review is that it can remind me of that which I'm altogether too easily tempted to forget, namely, that there are good reviewers in this country who are also academic people...
...there are issues of the New York Review, for instance, in which I feel there's not one good piece of writing, and others which seem a dazzling collection of commentary...
...they" "could stop being so gentlemanly...
...Sale that violence per se is not a virtue: Books deserve better...
...This letter is prompted by dismay at Roger Starr's assault on Karl Marx ("Marx's Lust,"July 1979...
...What makes it hard to write about is that what's so very right about the novel is hard to convey without lots and lots of quotation...
...It is about entering the age of aging, and Malamud convinced me, at least, that there was no other way, no other way for him at least, to do this without slogging along with Dubin...
...It has been a long time since anyone has called my manner gentlemanly...
...The real basis for indicting the "teepee-dwellers" is that they distract conservatives from how good the economic case for solar energy is, particularly if you take into account the effects of price controls on oil and gas and federal subsidies to nuclear energy in making comparisons...
...The replacement of one form of technology by another, so ardently sought today by solar advocates, can only take place when the all-important messages of potential profitability "signalled" to the marketplace by price are not blurred or distorted by government intervention...
...If under such free competition solar energy replaces fossil fuels, then I will be delighted-and surprised...
...As to Malamud's novel...
...I read his piece and reathed for a fat study written in 1976 by the Department of Energy that used $16 a barrel as the "high scenario" price by 1985, well under what it is already...
...The fact, though, that Koenig was bored by a novel that some reviewers liked is hardly enough to build a case that book reviewing in general is soft...
...Roger Sale Seattle, Washington Rhoda Koenig replies: Although Mr...
...She didn't like the reviews she's read of Bernard Malamud's Dubin's Lives, among them mine...
...The best he can do is say that the book evokes growing older and living through the winter...
...Society can ignore the crazies in cut-off jeans who think we should live in wigwams, but we're paying a high price for the fuzzy thinking of the crazies in pin-stripe suits who project electrical demand to make it seem that we actually need a trillion dollars' worth of new power plants by 1990...
...I don't think most academics read in that spirit, write in that spirit, or, quite often, willingly tolerate those who do...
...It is true that price controls on oil and gas disguise the potential competitiveness of alternative energy sources, but then tax credits for the installation of solar panels artificially support solar's frail status in the marketplace...
...If your cistern of invective ever runs low turn to Richard III-a great adventure and murder story...
...some reviews get better, others get worse...
...But they also deserve better than meaningless, insipid praise...
...He was one of those fortunate men who died with a permanent place in the hearts of those dearest and closest to him- his predeceased wife, his children, Engels, and the housekeeper herself...
...Utilities can send "educational" materials to the public schools and often get away with putting the cost in their rate bases, so they don't have to set up tents...
...As for Mr...
...It is raw slabs of awkward life, often not written about except awkwardly, but it is a real book, life is lived in it that one must take seriously, and it is a rare book, as Koenig or any other reader of reviews of mine knows, that makes me feel that way...
...Her presence there is, of course, the best possible refutation of Roger Starr's verbiage...
...It's not easy to do, and a reviewer can't do more than quote a passage and allege that it succeeds, at least for that reviewer...
...I think it is usually sentimental to imagine that once things were better in this regard, at least within Koenig's or my lifetime...
...Some simply haven't a clue...
...I had complained that reviewers often sweep away large, glaring faults in a work by rumbling and sputtering that we must, we really must, consider it a great book...
...By his own argument, then, positive law crumbles too...
...What I consider important is that van den Haag never shows why it is crucial to his side of the debate that no widespread agreement exists on such matters...
...The Black Panthers in the late 1960s denied that the laws of the U.S...
...were laws and claimed that they were rules announced by their oppressors...
...I want to see if you are as nasty/nice as I am, and WHY...
...A little more thought would be nice, a little more discrimination," she would like...
...A Very Natural Thing Professor van den Haag's imaginary confrontation with Ronald Dwor-kin ("A Dialogue," June 1979) does suit van den Haag's purpose of discrediting natural law/natural rights theories, but only because Dworkin never defends his naturalism (he simply asserts it...
...Sale, whom I greatly respect, finds me irresponsible and a willful illiterate, many of his comments restate my own case...
...Some reviewers pay off past favors...
...Sale's charge that my complaints about reviewing are founded on the reception of one book -oh, come now...
...If I am more pleased than I should be by reviewers who call a spade a spade, it's because I'm so fed up with reviewers who claim they have never seen one...
...Byron Bart Slawson Bloomington, Indiana Pin-Stripe Crazies As much as I admire Tom Bethell's eye for phonies, I think he let the scruffiness of some of the participants in the Appropriate Community Technology Fair, ACT '79, put him off his aim ("Capitol Ideas," July 1979...
...Going to the library and looking at books published by university presses does not make me feel that way...
...It adds up the tax and direct R&D subsidies to fossil and nuclear fuels to a multibillion-dollar total, and makes the equally important point that large bureaucracies exist to promote the use of one or another of these energy sources...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
