Dear Editor
Dear Editor Kudos Of all the reviews my book The Serial has received, I found Ruth Mathewson's ("The Whole Gestalt Catalogue," NL, August 15) the most gratifying: witty, literate and above all...
...in the evening, they interface over a glass of white wine...
...New York City Irving Ross Fractured Steven Madoff's review of John Berryman's Henry's Fate ("To Terrify and Comfort," NL, August 15) inadvertently explained why the poet will soon be forgotten...
...It involves a continuous overdose of mock seriousness, extravagant flamboyance, or glaring travesty, well beyond the degree the subject can bear...
...Montreal Gary Lewine TS Returns I was interested to read, shortly after receiving your issue with Russell Warren Howe's profile of Tongsun Park ("Tongsun Park: The Man Behind the Smile," NL, August 15), that at a news conference in Seoul Park had declared he was never an agent of South Korea...
...Kansas City, Kans...
...It sounds odd./It came twenty minutes ago...
...Across the street from where 1 live is an apartment building housing Kate and Harvey's relatives...
...Curtains being unpopular among them, a glance from floor to floor, through the ever-present hanging plants, reveals the same chrome furniture, the same redbrick walls, the same natural-wood floors, and the same metal-framed posters...
...Merely that some poet thought a fractured self demanded fractured grammar, a fallacy subscribed to by countless illiterati...
...There is, first of all, the matter of technical proficiency: "I'm reading my book backward...
...New York City Bert McIntyre Camping Out Reading John Simon's comments on The Importance of Being Earnest ("Wilde Off the Mark," NL, August 1), I had a peculiar feeling that something wasn't quite right...
...Only Swinburne could match that sort of metrical flat-footedness...
...Only there resides a living voice/which if we can make we make it out of choice/not giving the whole thing up...
...The lines of nature & of will, that's impossible...
...Mill Valley, Calif...
...By midnight, presumably as actualized as they will ever get, they totter off to sleep...
...Then there is the question of grammar and syntax...
...only their names and addresses differ...
...That seems to me to be a description of much the same thing Simon lauds Wilde for (without ever, by the way, mentioning the playwright's sexual preferences)the "anti-human," "destructive," "less utilitarian, more amoral" nature of his wit...
...Any given region's lifestylists are like form letters...
...Whatever else they show, Parks' protestations add one more neurosis to the list intriguingly provided by Howe: compulsive lying...
...Howard Jacobson...
...Park also strongly denied having given money to any member of Congress even though a number of U.S...
...What does it mean...
...I hunted through my NL back issues, and discovered that Simon had criticized camp A common resource of homosexuals for "defusing maladjustment and anger into caricature, irreverence, outrageousness...
...Above all [it is] useless...
...Dear Editor Kudos Of all the reviews my book The Serial has received, I found Ruth Mathewson's ("The Whole Gestalt Catalogue," NL, August 15) the most gratifying: witty, literate and above all perceptive...
...In the morning, they don their Adidas to lope around the nearby park...
...legislators have publicly acknowledged receiving cash gifts from the Korean, and even though his name is listed as a contributor on at least seven official campaigns finance reports...
...Cyra McFadden Lifestyle Upon Ruth Mathewson's recommendation, I read The Serial and discovered she was completely correct...
...Every writer longs for such a reader And to have such a reader for a reviewer strikes me as remarkable luck...
...It is an excellent, intelligent and hilarious dissection of Marin County, whose gaucheries are being more or less repeated throughout the land...
...The hell with God...
...After a few moments' reflection, I realized what it was: Simon was praising Wilde for qualities he had previously downgraded specifically, in a New Leader piece on homosexuality a few years back ("Homosexuals in Life and the Arts," October 28, 1974...
...Washington, Chicago and New York suffer just as much, if not more, from conspicuous consumers...
...it's all they have...
...Poets should be kinder to the language...
Vol. 60 • September 1977 • No. 18
