They're either losing their grip on their constituency and having to escalate the verbal violence to retain their attention -- or they're losing their minds.

Maybe both.

As a Jew, let me assure the anonymous cockroach that I'd never organize anything that stupid. I leave that to the likes of you. Now, why don't you bugger off and poison some wells?

It's your vote, your ideology, and your rationalization.

This Harvard-trained second-wave feminist -will- proudly vote for Clinton if I have the opportunity while you argue ideology in your nice Senior Common Rooms.

You remind me of the people who helped throw the popular vote -toward- Bush because -they- were pure, -they- were voting for John Anderson. Pragmatism? Not for them; they were idealists.

And so we got 8 years of George Bush.

Here's a Gedankenexperiment for you. What would you say if Huckabee, for example (declassee, I know, but this -is- a thought experiment), made THE HANDMAID'S TALE a reality with his talk about gracious submission? That's set at Harvard too.

This country is overdue for some centrism, in my opinion. Why don't you go back to your tofu, your footnotes, and your ideological purity and let the rest of us duke it out?

Yes, I know: stereotypical of me. Guess where I learned it. Whether or not they call it the Radcliffe Institute, I hope you find your stay in the bastion of the academic patriarchy instructive. I sure did.

I'm apologize for the error of fact regarding Nader's candidacy. Careless of me, and invalidating.

At the same time, if there's a "pure" fringe figure, it's Nader -- the Harold Stassen of the privileged part of the left wing.

First, LW, congratulations on how much you've accomplished thus far, coming from a dysfunctional background and coping with depression and cutting. If you and your therapist and psychopharmacologist are satisfied with how you're doing, "too long in therapy" isn't an issue.

Right now, it sounds as if you're going through some growing pains. I hope you're discussing them with your shrinks. You may want to dig out the works of Otto Ranke (hope I've spelled it right), who was a psychoanalyst who did extensive work with creative people. I worked with a Rankeian whose view was that the neurotic was a failed artist: get the artist in touch with her art, and integration occurs.

Even more important, however, is integration with one's life. I speak as someone who's published a number of books and pieces of short fiction, who holds a demanding job in a high-pressure industry, and who is going it on her own, with the shrinks, for longer than it's not embarrassing to admit.

If you're one of the people for whom long-term therapy seems sensible, it's an astonishing privilege that I refer to as graduate school for the soul. Regardless of whether others regard it as self-indulgent: -you- are the one who has to make that call.

I agree with Amerigo that it's early for you to go part time. The writer who suggested working in a journal makes sense, especially if you take public transportation. So does the writer who suggests writing regularly and writing -more-. At least, get an outline of that novel done before you go part-time: novel-writing is solitary, and you're already sounding ambivalent about not pulling your own weight.

Jobs don't define you. Writing doesn't define you. If you need a lower-stress job, you seem able to find work easily -- a great advantage. You can only do so many things at once.

Right now, after 30 books, I'm on sabbatical. I'm between publishers, studying for a financial certification (when I get time), and seeing every opera in town. I've given myself permission. Give yourself permission to enjoy what you have and believe you'll get to keep it and to prioritize. Good luck!

I've never understood the cult of the Sacred Monster, especially one posing as a public intellectual.

Camille Paglia strikes me as performance art and a bad case of the Emperor's New Clothes. No one wants to say, not that the Emperor is naked, but that the clothes are in appalling taste.

At least, however, I've gotten a good example of what Ortega y Gasset referred to as "penitential art."

Now that I've seen it, can someone please archive it, then lose the archive? Ms. Paglia's polemics and hatemongering have been given more bandwidth than they deserve for entirely too long. And amateur psychotherapy is irresponsible from anyone, even culturally exempt sacred monsters.

Speaking as a 58-year-old feminist, I really have to object to your "no genuine feminist" comment.

Feminism is supposed to be a big tent, at least, the sort I've lived by.

The other things you said were cogent, whether or not I agreed with them. But that comment takes me back to the days when feminism was sometimes mistaken for a fashion, dietary, or lifestyle statement. Hell, I was dissed for wearing a pantsuit to the November 1969 Moratorium, where I was a marshal on the Potomac Bridge.

There's no -one- way.

Your letter didn't make sense the first four or five times you posted it. Why are you repeating it?