Dear KayWWW: I wasn't going to write any more letters to this column (why give hits to a man who is either a smug liar or a moron?), but your response stirred something in me.

It WAS once fashionable for the politically correct (NOT liberals) to sneer at science as "cold" and inhuman. The attitude resulted, in my opinion, from a misguided conception that reason and imagination are opposites, not complements.

I am not a woman, but I am a poet--a poet with degrees in math as well as English and writing--and I well remember the scorn that was heaped on me in the late sixties for loving science and reason and even daring to write poems about them.

I am still a liberal. I am still a poet. I still love mathematics, reason, and science, and of course the Wingnut here is full of bullshit. Not writing to him, really. Waste of time. Just wanted to say that others have had your sort of experience, and thanks for hanging in there.

Was glad to see Skenazy mention Japan. Have been to Japan twice for extended visits, once to Nagaoka, once to Yamagata. Japan has its problems, but one of the most beautiful sights I saw was schoolchildren from five on up walking all the way across town unattended in their uniforms. No one would dream of harming a child. It wasn't something they thought about.

There are those of us who have trained ourselves to pay attention. We do not need these sorts of books. We have tried to describe the problem and tell how one may train oneself to attention, but nobody listens.

As one commenter said, it is not the internet particularly. It never has been. There have always been fragmented minds (although the commenter seems to mistake ADD for the usual run of life. I was born as poor as any, have had to work as hard as any, and I loved to read from a very early age, so it is not just the privilege of the rich. Who actually, on the whole, do not read as much as the rest of us.

Of course everyone's attention is scattered most of the time. We're talking about the ability to focus for an hour or two or three a day, not all the time.

Have you ever sat for an hour doing nothing? I mean, nothing? Extremely unlikely. It is anxiety that hustles people into scattered activities. The terror of blankness.

To Sunny Jim re the lack of teachers, especially math teachers: Don't hold your breath. I'm 65, have 3 degrees (math, English, and MFA in writing), I was a tenured full professor, and I was a damn good teacher. I didn't mock my students, put them down, tyrannize them, or any other such thing. I inspired quite a few, as they will tell you.

I knew the stuff and I was good. And now I cannot get hired. They hire the young. One cannot exactly blame them, but I could teach (and have) either calculus or formal poetry or how to write a novel. I know the stuff, and I have experience, and I am good, and I cannot get hired.

The educational system is busted. Maybe it is like the banks. They were busted a long time before the actual crash, but nobody would admit it.

I would like to have seen it mentioned that one cannot learn without the ability to concentrate. A few rudimentary things, perhaps, like not grabbing the handle of a hot skillet. But differential equations, computer programming, poetry, painting, the building of a good car--these things require concentration.

Love the moniker. Talk about waking up the brain. I would never wear a cavalier hat either, although, to jump more than a hundred years in slang, you have to admit they looked rather macaroni.

Have penned many sonnets, though. Mostly Petrarchan, or derivatives. Love Shakespeare, but the rhyme scheme of his sonnets is too boring--just three quatrains rhyming on alternate lines and a concluding couplet, which tends to force a lame moral or a restatement of the foregoing.

As for Marx and printing presses: I will fear the printing press when it is smarter and better with words than I am. For me, words in print are primarily a way of recording sound. Print offers other advantages, but I hear what I read and write.

Plato thought the Republic would be better off without poets. But here we still are. When will these boys learn? Never really been impressed by Plato, anyway. He got most of the good stuff from Socrates, and misunderstood Socratic dialogue entirely. The opponents in his version of those dialogues are straw men,their arguments silly, easy to tear apart.