Letters to the Editor
dactylomancy
Published Letters: 4 Editor's Choice: 1
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Boycott
[Read the article: I was conned by JT Leroy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]i agree with those urging a no-click, no letter campaign (which unfortunately i have to write a letter to endorse). the one and only way that professionals say you can neutralize the narcissist is to ignore her. negative attention is just as much, if not more of, a "narcissitic supply" than positive attention. It's called "NO CONTACT" and it requires discipline (since narcissists are such a cunning and perversely fascinating "show" ... unless you actually have to live with one).
i, for one, am instituing my own personal "no contact."
and i agree with those who say Salon has just deteriorated shamefully. in a world where reasons for true outrage are sadly, profoundly ubiquitous, and genuine journalistic critique so vitally needed, the new chick-blog and bourgeois mommy articles and so on and so on are just a disgrace. withheld body armor, secret wire-taps, diabetes epidemic, darfur, rampant political corruption, the worst president in history, the iraq quagmire, and so on and so on. and we here endlessly, instead, about offensive diet ads and erotic mommies. pathetic.
i give the editors the rest of my premium membership to show me that they are more than just Us Magazine. i will miss Cary Tennis, the War Room, and Sidney Blumenthal, but i'll live.
funny that a much better place, these days, to see serious discussions with serious people about serious things is on The Daily Show. they get better while Salon gets worse and worse. and it's free.
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Neither "Vegas" is entirely real
[Read the article: Killing Jared]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I live in this neighborhood. I ride my bike or drive my car past Silverado High almost every day. I shop at the very two grocery stores from which these kids took beer. I probably also work out at their gym. And, coincidentally (given the scuffle going on the message board), I am an English teacher. So I know these kids (not, of course, THESE kids) and this place very well.
I say all this in part because I find it all the story's details quite uncanny and creepy: I've never heard about this case at all, and I suppose it was happening right in my midst. But I also say it because I think it gives me just a *little* credibility to say that, regardless of its stylistic merits, this article repeats a version of Las Vegas that is almost as much of an imaginative fiction as the stuff of "Casino" and "Fear and Loathing." That is, I have read so many very tiresome articles -- they seem to be a regular staple of the New York Times, for example -- about how hardscrabble and tough and ugly and soulless the "real Vegas" is. This genre has an embarrassingly shallow pool of cliches, and I see them every time: "with the glittering Strip just a few miles away, but a world apart ...," "they came to start a new life, in this strange oasis in the desert, but the promises were just a mirage ..." Okay, I'm making these up, but you get my point.
The writer of this article focuses on the Taco Bell, but fails to mention the gleaming Whole Foods down the street; she dwells on the supposedly prison-like schoolyard, but apparently didn't see the huge, pristine park just a block away.
Vegas is both more and less than any of these fictions. It is a real place, like most other real places I've been to or lived in in this country. Full of real people, like those anywhere else. Yes, my neighbor manages a strip club, but she is very nice, has grandkids and dogs, takes her trash out on trash nights, and cooks on the weekends just like most people. She is most people. Maybe she finds it just as strange to live next door to an English professor.
So, yes, Las Vegas is very weird, but it is also utterly normal. This is the story I almost never hear outside of the confines of the local press. It gets so boring after a while; what is truly fascinating about Las Vegas, in my opinion, are the ways in which this utterly strange city actually functions, how life here -- for many kinds of people -- actually functions. What would genuinely shock me, more than any of these supposed exposés relying on either version of the tired Las Vegas myth ("Casino" or murderous "Casino" wannabes), would be a story than comes even anywhere close to getting this place right.
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got the ending wrong
[Read the article: "Sopranos" wrap-up: Uncomfortably numb]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I like your analysis, but i think you misinterpreted the ending. It seemed to me that Tony's drugged, superstitious-gambler's revelation after winning big -- "he's dead" -- is euphoric. Even if he is in deep denial. As if his big curse has been lifted (remember, he's been flamboyantly losing these last few weeks) and getting Christopher out of his life is, as he says earlier in the dream with Melfi, a "relief." It is the eruption of the unconscious, what could only be said to Melfi in a dream, and coupled with the gambling subplot and Tony's magical thinking about it lately ...well, I thought it was bone-chilling, but definitely not in the way you say.
That reaction is monstrous, as Tony was monstrous throughout the episode -- cheap and soulless and disgusting. And it was in Vegas, so of course it was, metaphorically speaking, Tony's descent into the underworld. Added to that Tony's cliched peyote-induced sunrise-in-the-desert-with-a-hooker revelation, "I get it," the two statements serve to make Tony seem profoundly cold, clueless, spiritually dead. Despicable, perhaps, so we're neither so sorry nor so surprised to see what awful end awaits him.