Letter? I barely know her!
There are only so many hours in a day. Twenty, twenty-five? Somewhere around there. And we at The Reader Sucks have had pretty full schedules lately: watching Katrina coverage, wailing in impotent rage, looking for embarrassing pictures of Tara Reid online, and putting in a full day’s actual work. Yes, our meager stipends as staffers at The Reader Sucks have not been enough to support the lifestyles we’ve become accustomed to. So we’ve had to supplement them a little. For example, I now work as a duck salesman. Yes, that’s right: I sell ducks. Who on earth buys ducks? you ask. That is a very, very good question, and if you know the answer please contact me as soon as possible. There’s poop and feathers everywhere, and I think the landlord is beginning to suspect that the loud quacking noises coming from the apartment are not, as I have assured him, the sound of Nurse Bettina and I engaging in boisterous lovemaking.
Anyway, I am setting aside my duck sales work for the moment to return to The Reader. Specifically, its letters page.
Reader staffers are not exactly known for their elegant prose. But they rarely deliver up turds like those that float to the top of the Reader’s letters page on a regular basis. The oafish prose transcends political boundaries. On the right, you get this.
On the left, you get the letter from David Peterson in this week’s Reader, a response to last week’s cover story. Peterson starts off with a bang:
“After we introduce some controls over the pissing-match variable around which so much revolved in Jeffrey Felshman’s ‘Whose Holocaust Is It Anyway?’, what do we find?”
I imagine Mr. Peterson answers this question later in his endless letter, but my brain is still stuck on the whole “pissing-match variable” thing. Whaaaa?
Last week, a letter from Joshua Kilroy offered up a similarly baffling little nugget:
“I have always felt like the Reader existed in a slightly utopian space, where if we were just a little more tolerant of other people’s quirks the world would be a better place.”
And no, that didn’t make much more sense in context.
Want to buy a duck?
posted by spacecog at 7:56 PM
2 Comments:
I am Josh Kilroy and I am responding to your dig at me in your post. My understanding is that the Reader emerged from the alternative free press movement of the 1960s that gave space to perspectives on arts, culture, politics and sex that were shunted aside from the corporate media. This is the utopian space that I referred to in my letter. You can disagree with me, but to suggest that my rather straightforward idea is "baffling" is perplexing in the extreme.
If my math is correct, the 1960s took place MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
Actually, I'm pretty sure my math is a little off, but anyway, the present-day reader has about as much in common with utopia as North Korea or, I dunno, Berwyn.
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