Dear Editor
Dear Editor Tyler Gus Tyler is one of the wisest, most insightful of all political philosophers I know. The Democrat Party would be well advised to listen to this most sagacious man. His article...
...This satirical epic is dedicated to Southey, and on top of that the introduction to the first Canto contains one of the most high-spirited and scathing attacks one poet has ever aimed at another...
...As for not taking "an interesting look at catastroph-ically sudden fame and fortune," one can only reply that the last 20 minutes of the film center on Melvin's vain efforts to validate the Hughes will and deal with the skepticism and the threats he must face...
...Hitler praises the Soviet practice of putting dissidents in mental hospitals"My God...
...Perhaps the essential similarity between the various definitions of lunacy is that in all of them acts of violence against others are condemned...
...this is indeed funny, and she might have gone on to mention Byron's masterpiece, Don Juan...
...I wish I had thought of that...
...Philosophers have repeatedly reminded us that the assumptions underlying statistics on such unquantifi-ables as "happiness" are either tautological or completely false...
...Boston Mary Clancy Sontag Even when he is agreeing with one of his victims, John Simon manages to sound vituperative...
...In her essay on Artaud, Sontag dwells on this and on the problems posed by an extreme case like Artaud-who was a great artist, but insane...
...In savaging Wordsworth Byron assumes the guise of a concerned critic anxious to discover the meaning of one of Wordsworth's poems, "in so far as it is intelligible...
...The movie's humor lies in the fact that Hughes is on screen only at the beginning and the end, and that Melvin carries on oblivious of the stupendous legacy that is eventually dangled in front of him...
...And economists like Kenneth Arrow are wont to observe, "There are no interpersonal comparisons of utility...
...Wrong...
...Massapequa, New York Walter Tuttle Numbers All the figures assembled by the Gradgrinds we call social scientists are a prime case of "suboptimaliza-tion," or as Samuel Johnson more pithily put it, "a foolish thing done well...
...Her theories about insanity are grimly exemplified in the very film by Hans Jurgen Syberberg discussed in the same book: At one point in that seven-hour work...
...This is the case even apart from the objections Lurie raises, e.g., doubting that a person is happy just because he says so to an interviewer...
...In his review of Under the Sign of Saturn by Susan Sontag ("From Sensibility to Sense," NL, December 15), he disputes her definition of insanity as that which may not be thought in a given society, claiming this implies "that to a shallow society profundity will appear insane, i.e., madness is context and the context changes...
...Psychological Man,'" yet he goes on to take the numbers gathered by the University of Michigan ("Measuring Our Happiness," NL, December 29,1980) at face value, as if they actually meant something...
...Far from being melodramatic, this tale of Melvin Dum-mar's gaga optimism in the face of his breadwinning's frenzied tedium, and his wife's chronic faithlessness, has something comically noble in it...
...Still, I am happy to know that Byron's gift for annihilating verse is not neglected in the new Oxford anthology...
...Most sociologists, of Campbell's stripe would not know what to make of Kierkegaard's observation that someone can be in despair and not know it...
...Yet even if there is something arbitrary about most prevailing definitions of madness, there is nothing specious about regarding acts of violence against others as dangerous, illicit and mad...
...If Asahina found the movie dull, the loss is his...
...Simon ought to give her credit for confronting the aporia inherent in any definition of insanity...
...What brilliance...
...Walter Lurie seems to recognize this when he chides the late Angus Campbell for speciously setting up "a titanic battle of straw figures:" 'Economic Man' vs...
...New York City Charles Cogen Past President, American Federation of Teachers...
...Chicago John Darcy Correction For the record: In Nathan Glick's review of Town-send Ludington's John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (NL, December 15, 1980), the reference to the " International Workers of the World" should of course be "Industrial...
...It is perfectly true that contexts change, and that in a shallow society profundity will appear insane...
...This is really bad faith...
...The imprecision, however, is inherent to the field...
...His article in the November 17,1980, issueof The New Leader, "Gauging the Republican Tide," is a prime example of why I always listen to him, and usually heed him...
...Washington Jack Valenti President, Motion Picture Association of America Disputed Film In lumping Melvin and Howard together with a number of forgettable films ("Marketing Lemons," NL, November 17), Robert Asahina does an injustice to a real gem...
...Social scientists are always promising to work the bugs out of their methods, and swearing that it is only a matter of time before they can tell us exactly how happy we are...
...You can't discover that from statistics...
...Lurie assures us Campbell acknowledges that "examinations of the perception of well-being, a wholly subjective matter, are still experimental and imprecise...
...Take, for example, Dabney Coleman's chilling Mormon judge, who justifies with apt quotations from Scripture his intention to "have a piece of your hide, Melvin, if you turn out to be a liar-which I think you are...
...What Asahina scoffs at as a "blue-collar soap opera" is actually an extremely funny satire of manners and working-a world one hardly ever sees in films these days...
...New York City Raymond Charnoff Satire In her judicious praise of the 19th century selections in Geoffrey Grigson's The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse, Phoebe Pettingell cites the "devastating cartoon" of Robert Southey in Byron's "The Vision of Judgement...
...Sontag has hardly been advocating insanity as an excuse for violence in her critical works, as Simon appears to suggest...
Vol. 64 • January 1981 • No. 1
