Thanks for the satire. It's no news that print publishing is dying. The presence of these preposterous farragos on the best-seller list is merely further confirmation.

One consolation: When you commit a book, you put the character of your thought and response in the public domain. It is there, irrefutably, for as long as people read. Societies change, and the forces that temporarily buoy these cretins will not always obtain. Posterity is not infallible in recognizing true merit, but the dreck always falls away. What remains is that which is true and beautiful from nearly any social viewpoint, what is truly human and useful.

Beck, Malkin, and the other opportunists will be remembered eventually only by scholars, who will use them as laughable examples of the stunningly awful. Even Bulwer-Lytton was not a fool on so grand a scale.

The rightwingers may seem successful now, but they cannot control history, and they expose themselves permanently as liars and fools.

To any real writer, this is a shudderingly horrible fate. I think hell is an extremely stupid concept, but I do hope there is an afterlife, so that these frauds can contemplate for many centuries the mockery with which they are rightly regarded.

I read the Krugman piece. My main puzzlement was why anyone would take an economist seriously in the first place. Economists have mistaken the model for the actuality, and are surprised when actuality proves capable of behavior not in the model. In fact, some of them seem peeved, as if they feel reality had no business behaving in ways they did not predict.

Very few good thinkers would be surprised at such a disparity, however. There is a method that works a little better. One observes the behavior of the phenomenon under study, and when the model does not account for that behavior sufficiently well, the model is changed. Scientists have used such a method to fairly good effect for centuries.

I suppose this demonstrates that one may be skilled at mathematics without having any genuine wit--another disparity which will not surprise many good thinkers.

I lived twice in Clinton, Mississippi (home of Mississippi College, that bastion of Southern Baptist believers, where the students cheered when JFK was murdered). I went to Clinton High School for four years and graduated from it. My father was founding pastor of the Morrison Heights Baptist Church.

None of that is relevant, I suppose, but I can't help noting it. My question is this: By what standard is Crystal Renn "plus"? She looks like a healthy, normal (and gorgeous) woman to me. Does "plus" mean anything over size eight?

I'd really like to know. My standards won't change, but it will help me understand what others are talking about.

Tend to agree with you about tarring all Mormons with the same brush used for the lunatics. The theology IS batshit crazy, but so are many theologies, perhaps most. The people, like any sizable assortment of people, include quite a few decent, humane, and thoughtful types (Romney excluded on one or more points). It seems obvious, more's the pity, that reason and theology come from entirely different sources, and that reason is pretty well dominated, in most people, by the theology.

One tiny point: You mean "Let's say it all together . . ." "Let's say it altogether" means "Let's say it in the nude." Which would not necessarily be bad, but might alarm the tea-baggers even more.

Thank you. I would not have seen the movie without this review, having little interest in the opinions of scriptwriters on what makes good poetry. It will be nice to see a film in which the art is not presented as the province of the talentless, the emotionally adolescent, the angrily neurotic.

Just a few weeks ago some moron was quoted in one of the Sunday supplements as protesting the fact that "his" tax money was spent to pay the poet laureate, since "nobody reads poetry any more." Such stupidity cannot be usefully addressed, not even by pointing out that our tax money is spent to pay the salaries of the military, an incredibly more expensive arrangement.

Good poetry is actually one of the finest and most sensible endeavors possible to humans. It requires intelligence, eloquence, nimbleness, truthfulness, and appreciation, among many other admirable qualities.

It is not the fault of poetry that so few humans are capable any longer. What those who spurn poetry cannot understand is that, as Rilke put it in "On an Archaic Torso of Apollo," they do not judge art. Art judges them.

Keats, as magnificent as half a dozen of his poems are, had the overly-gorgeous style of a young writer (today it would be the overly-repulsive style, since it is received wisdom that only the ugly can be true)--but then, he never got the chance to be anything else. Imagine what he would have written if he had lived as long as Yeats.