Re: irevulent

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Fri, 20 Aug 1999 22:06:55 -0400 

At 6:51 PM +0100 on 8/20/99, you wrote:

>     Vitality is, after all, the one really essential ingredient
>     of all good writing.  I think you may be starting to hit
>     your stride at last.  I hope you're appropriately grateful.

You bet, massa.  I'm still waiting for you to show me how to tie my
shoelaces, though.

Scottie, may the wind in your bags blow ever hard, but don't you
ever, ever take the tiniest shard of credit for improving anything I
write after having read your predictable crotchets.  That patronizing
remark doesn't rile me; it *does* make me wonder how long we would
last at that pub in Dublin without a lot of glass breaking.  And I
don't even drink.

And I say all this IN SPITE of a continuing fondness for your views
and your contrarian nature.

>     Incidentally, 'American' & 'Australian' *are* simple epithets.
>     Surely you don't regard the terms as pejorative?

When you use them?  How do *you* feel about your question, doctor?

>     And if we're to shun any discussion of religion I'm not sure
>     under which dispensation we've been allowed, up till now,
>     all this talk of the Jesus prayer.

I suspect you know (and are merely trying to nip annoyingly at the
heels of everyone) that I'm talking about the kind of discussions one
avoids at the dinner table to avoid homicide.  I would have to be a
fool to suggest we avoid discussing religion when talking about the
work of Salinger.

I am not a fool.

I come from a country where people kill each other over religious
beliefs, and so do you, and so do you live beside a continent that
does the same.

>     In light of Jerome's experience in the Hurtgen Forest
>     I should also have thought the pacifist element in
>     his subsequent writing was, at the very least, debatable.
>     Is no one permitted to say in that context that they
>     at least sympathise with the position & suspect what
>     his attitude might be - like that of other right-thinking
>     chaps - towards gun control?

I apologize; perhaps I missed your analysis of Salinger's wartime
experience and the inanities of pointless gun-control debate, as they
are related?  Hurling snide remarks at people, and discussing the
fine points of the effect the war had on Salinger and his
contemporary writers, are rather different approaches, I suggest.
You want to snipe about Heston and his merry men?  It's an unrelated
activity and seems something the manly men can do on their own,
without using the list as the forum; that was the simple point you
know I was making.

>     Or did that old comforting feel of the stock against
>     the shoulder lead you into a certain shamefaced sympathy
>     with the aims of the NRA?

My opinions about the NRA, like my opinions about religion and
politics, would probably cause a jihad here if I were to enumerate
them.  Please don't twist my words in directions they were not meant
to point.  If you wish to know how I shoot, let's get together at a
range some day.  If you sense shame in anything I've said, your
interpretive skills are rather off, and may need honing.  Religion
and politics?  I won't even touch them here.  You won't bait me into
that -- or into anything else.   I've said all I have to say on this
silly subject.

If nothing else, Scottie, you still amuse and entertain as well as
ever.

Cheers -- and, strangely, I mean it.

--tim