I prefer to send this stuff via email, but Allen Barra doesn't include his email address at the end of his articles on Salon any more, so what are you going to do?

Allen: let's take this one piece at a time.

First, I have to say that I think it's kind of disengenuous for you to say that the readers who view you as denegrating genre fiction are "pretend[ing] that the debate as to whether or not genre fiction is genuine literature started with me and this piece." *I* certainly wasn't "pretending" to do that, and I definitely didn't get the impression that anyone else was, either. Honestly, Allen; saying something like that makes it seem like you're trying to get yourself off the hook. You *could* have written, "Fleming's genius--although there are those who would argue that one shouldn't use that word with regard to a writer of genre fiction" or "Fleming's genius--although many critics disagree that a writer of genre fiction can be considered a "genuis"" or put it any of a number of other ways if you wanted to express the fact that many critics don't view it as possible that a "genre writer" can be considered a "genius." (I think that they are full of bilge; bear in mind Sturgeon's law.) But honestly, I don't think you're readers are accusing *you* of beginning the denigration of genre fiction. Quite the contrary; I would guess that the reason you have received so many vehement responses is *because* they know you *didn't* start the argument, but are adding fuel to the fire unnecessarily.

(I might add that it seems kind of silly to me that you--who spent a long time in the sportswriting game, a poor stepchild even so far as journalism is concerned--would take the side of "serious literary critics in the twentieth century" with regard to ghettoizing fiction. But hey, it's your life, man.)

Also, as a published author yourself, I'm surprised that you are defending the opinions of "20th Century critics" as regards to what constitutes "literature." I don't know about you, but I don't give a rip what the highbrow set thinks of particular books. I read reviews for one reason only: to find out *what a particular reviewer* thinks of a book. If it's a reviewer that I trust--in that their tastes are similar to mine, or that their reviews present me with enough reliable information that I can make a purchase based on them--then I read them. If not, I don't. (I hardly ever agreed with Charles Taylor's reviews, for example, but I *always* read them, because I understood his tastes and got good info from them.) But as for letting non-creative people be the arbiters of what is considered "great literature," or allowing the word "genius" to be applied to a particular writer because they happened to be shelved under "literature" instead of "science fiction" in Barnes and Noble . . . well, that doesn't seem very reasonable to me. (I mean, I enjoy Michael Crichton, but I wouldn't call his work "literature," would you? But that's where you find it at B&N.)

With regard to genres as such, I'm sure you're just as aware as I that they are a fairly recent invention, so to my mind shuttling off certain works into the ghetto of "genre fiction" is absolutely absurd, and *everyone* suffers. The Literary people suffer, of course, because they miss some excellent work, but the *genre* people suffer, because they skip something that they might really enjoy due to the fact that they tend to avoid stuff that the New York Review of Books set has annointed, and thus miss out on some good work themselves. I mean, these days, "Beowulf" would be labeled as genre fiction. (And how would you label "Maus?" BookPeople in Austin has it in their Graphic Novels section, but Barnes and Nobel has it under "Literature" *and* Graphic Novels. Or Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon," which *Stephenson* calls science fiction, but really has no science fiction in it *at all*? You get the point, I'm sure.)

Finally, and as I pointed out, what constitutes "literature" these days is, often, damn nigh unreadable. When the heck did it become fashionable for plot to be so de-emphasized that it basically disappeared altogether? (People must like plots, even lame ones, given how many romance novels are sold each year. If they didn't, *those* books wouldn't have any plots either.) If some one wants old-fashioned, plot-driven fiction, it's off to the genre sections.

In sum, you damn right a writer of genre fiction can be a genius. Why the hell not?