Selected Letters from Readers

 
 
 

Author’s Reply to Letters Regarding “Outrageous Dieting: The Camp Performance of Richard Simmons” (PMC 6.1)

 

In response to a number of letters regarding my article on Richard Simmons, I would like to say that it was never my intention to condemn Mr. Simmons. In my opinion, noting someone’s gayness is in no way an insult. My article was a piece of criticism that looked at Richard Simmons and his diet empire as a cultural phenomenon. Mr. Simmons’ personal life is, indeed, of absolutely no interest to me and I would not presume to discuss it. I was interested in his publicperformance, for he is very much a performer. While I think it it marvelous that Mr. Simmons has helped so many people, praising his dietary ideas was not, however, part of my article. Of course I take seriously the difficulty of losing weight but my article was not, I repeat was not, ever meant as a discussion of weight loss methods. As for the reader who suspects that I am a “skinney [sic] bitch”–I can tell you that you are mistaken on both counts.

 

Rhonda Garelick
Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature
University of Colorado, Boulder

 

PMC Reader’s Report on “The Slow Apocalypse”

 

Thank you, Andrew McMurry.

 

Your article is important and provocative. I will not forget it and will certainly reread it and share it with my friends. I am troubled by its veracity. I have two sons and am compelled toward hope. I remain hopeful but it is not a hope born of materialist sensibilities.

 

Anyway…

 

thanks

 

Chris Franocvich

 

These comments are from: Chris Francovich
cfran@micron.net

 

New Criticism Underground?

 

[The writer refers to Joe Amato’s review of Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum, PMC 6.3]

 

I read the bit quoted from Rasula about the New Critics being now “underground” and came straight to the comments page. If I could e-mail Rasula directly, I would, so if there’s an address to be had I would welcome it.

 

Fact is, the heirs of the New Criticism are NOT underground at all. I did an MFA in poetry at the University of Arkansas, from which one Miller Williams will soon be venturing to DC to deliver the inaugural poem.

 

First let me say that I am glad for the 4-year, 60-hour MFA program I undertook. I learned more about “the tradition” in western-world poetry there then I could have anywhere else, if for no other reason than the time given me in the form of a 4-year TA.

 

I recognize now that along with the in-depth and thorough study of poetry past and present what I got was a straight and narrow (and I mean narrow) course on new-critical analysis. Like I said, I am grateful to at least know what that is all about. I could scan the tag on your jeans from 80 yards.

 

But lately I have come to realize (unless it is unique to my experience having done UA) that the majority of current MFA recipients/”certified” poets are/were taught by the direct descendents of the NC’s. In my case, my teacher-poets at UA, aside from circulating in a somewhat closed but expansive group of like-minds in the south and mid-west, are also the running mates of the likes of Wilbur, Justice, Taylor, et. al. and these people still wield influence ABOVE GROUND, if not directly, then through the hundreds of students they’ve had who are now teaching.

 

Please correct me if I am wrong, but the sheer fact of the poets’ entrenchment in the academy has provided an entire generation with the tools and the leisure to perpetuate a poetic that would have been dead 20 years now were the poetry teaching and poetry reviewing left up to scholars instead of poets themselves.

 

As a result, it seems to me anyway, the “experimental” writing out there is still in a state of reaction rather than one of clearly defining its concerns and goals. When- ever I read Language poets I have a hard time seeing any- thing but “I am trying very hard to NOT BE a poem any NC would like.”

 

Look, I’m 28, fully versed in “the tradition,” and desperately trying to escape that beautiful and irrelevant mode for higher ground. There are a number of us out here, whose reputations extend about as far as our mailboxes, who are becoming rather fed up with the academic-fuck-post-anything attitude on the one hand and the self-righteous fuck-anybody-who-says-fuck-us attitude on the other.

 

Group A is holding fast to a sinking ship, and group B is sailing off for never-never land. As far as we are concerned, both Dana Gioia and Rasula can go to hell. Lately I’ve noticed that at least a few among this self-proclaimed post-whatever rebellion have joined the ranks of the tenured even before the old Vanderbilt-grads have died or retired.

 

To be honest, I just can’t figure out for the life of me what the hell is going on–it seems like one ORDER is being displaced by another ORDER which readied itself ahead of time for the big university buy-out.

 

But I rant, all apologies. Suffice it to say that for the young writers out here now trying to forge their way, few things would be more agreeable than if all the academic trenches on every side of any aesthetic had truckloads of grenades dumped into them tomorrow afternoon at 1:20, and were just left that way.

 

Thanks for your time, DT

 

These comments are from: daniel tessitore
daniel@tiu.ac.jp

 

Reader’s Report on “Biding Spectacular Time”

 

[The writer refers to A.H.S. Boy’s “Biding Spectacular Time,” a review of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, PMC 6.2]

 

Making the “point” (shall we say the “accent”?) on Debord’s theses Boy reconstructs the background of a thought that accompanied a historical time of change and criticism of Modernity. That Debord is highly “postmodern” means that capitalism is still in its “representational” state where the “social spectacle” is not a stage of participation but one where the “Script” of Power introduces its “codes” through which the whole “reality” “as experience” is alienated and the human “thing” is not anymore a “spectator” but the object of social manipulation, i.e. a “channel” which “reflects” the “Order” of the Reality of the Codes of Power. This Code had reduced language to “behaviour” and “behaviour” into pure biological reflexivity identifying man with the object (the tool). The “scene” of the Spectacle as Society may be observed in the industrial and corporative model of Swedish “national” social democracy. The State and the Society are synonymous. You cannot criticise the State without becoming a social “pariah.” The notion of “persona” or individual” is replaced by “client” making Spectacle into a marketspace. Baudrillard is the hyperrealisation of the ideas of the most advanced Situationists. Postmodern Culture is one of the most valuable sites at the net.

 

Cveta Cvetkova

 

[Prof. Cvetkova is the author of Codes of Power: From Situationism to Seduction, Chartwell-Bratt Ltd (ISBN 0-86238-443-5)]

 

These comments are from: Cveta Cvetkova
socpoo@soc.lu.se

 

PMC Generally

 

I’m an (analytically trained) philosopher at Oxford. I’m sympathetic to what seems to be the political position articulated in a lot of the stuff here, but detest postmodernism as a theory of truth/reference/meaning. Where can I debate that issue (online)? Can somebody persuade me why I should give up the notion of truth, commonsensically conceived, as postmodernists appear to think I should? Please email me if you can help.

 

These comments are from: Tom Runnacles
thomas.runnacles@jesus.ox.ac.uk

 

A Reader’s Response (the reader is still alive!)

 

Don’t you think there has been just a little bit too much fuss already around the subject of p******ity/ism? But honestly, your magazine is the only site on the Web, which contains even a modicum of seriousness and so-called scientific or scholarly ambition. Please, more about the relationships between analytic aesthetics and deconstruction (if there is something worth writing on that subject)!

 

These comments are from: Samuli Hägg
shagg@cc.joensuu.fi