The letters below were compiled from several issues; all concern Issue 14: Anorexia/Technology.

Anorexistentialism
I liked the anorexia issue, but I'm sick of hearing "Society does this to us." Are we free or not? Dame Darcy ["Death in the Maiden," issue #14] is right that anorexia amounts to female castration, but we do it to ourselves. When I was twelve I stopped eating for no apparent reason and dropped down to sixty pounds. Maybe I was somehow unable or just terrified to carry that secret female power, but I was never a victim of "the ideal of thinness über alles" ["Confessions of an Anorexic Wannabe" by Michelle Chihara, issue #14] which I think is mostly a superficial excuse for the self-annihilation of anorexia... and a lame one, as a couple of your writers pointed out. It's more like the horror of having a body at all, when the anorexic feels literally like nothing. She can feel the abyss opening up inside her, taking over, and she's got no strong self to resist or balance it. Starvation is a way of joining it. You could say that lack of self is a psychological defect, or you could agree with Simone Weil ["Hermenaut of the Month" by Joshua Glenn, issue #14] that it's closer to the way things really are: "Once we have understood we are nothing, the object of all our efforts is to become nothing" is the perfect description of anorexia (although what it actually feels like is a nauseous nightmare worse than anything Sartre could ever come up with).

Rachel Wakefield
Kittery, Maine

Equilibrium or extremism?
As usual, Joshua Glenn's intro to the topic at hand ["Anorexia/Technology Introduction," issue 14] is insightful, well-conceived, and clearly drawn out. However, I must ask: Do you really think it's possible to strike information equilibrium via Gelassenheit? My personal experience of becoming a techno-anorexic has been much more of a violent and extreme process than the "gentle" and "non-technological" approach to the world that Heidegger suggests is tenable.

When I first got access to the Internet, I scrambled for hundreds of hours trying to organize my little world of information by making rather useless Web pages with multiple links. At a certain point, I realized that I had more of a compulsion to order disparate information than an actual concern over what the information itself conveyed. For me, hitting the middle road occured by suddenly realizing I existed in an extreme state of information consumption, and that I wasn't happy being a human search-engine. Like the protagonist in "La Bombe au Chocolat"—a recent film short by Canadian director Sylvie Rosenthal—I also had "to accept that I couldn't know everything. So I started a diet with a reduced information intake." The protagonist of the film, however, only allows acceptance of this intake reduction after going overboard and literally eating a book. Only after this extremity is she able to regurgitate the text and allow her stomach to settle, as it were.

I think this is how most people grapple with new media (if they struggle with it at all, that is), and that maybe it's through extremity that we're better prepared to conceive and discover limits to the age of über-information.

C.K. McCabe
Brooklyn, NY

Rachel and C.K., you are this issue's Hermenaut T-shirt winners!—ed.

Po-mo pathologist prescribes cultural cosmopolitanism
Although it saddens me each time I encounter cases so far gone, the opportunity to examine a specimen so fully self-flayed and intact is always instructive. Clarke Cooper's narrative "My Life as a Wookiee" [issue #14] presents a protagonist who has clearly succumbed to the American strain of retromodernism, in this case leading to a morbid sclerosis and constriction of the afflicted Weltanschauung, probably fusing the articulable joints of the entire cosmology in the process. Embedded in the text-flux is of course the classic contagious irony: the subject's delusion that pop-cultural productions like Star Wars are more toxic than the subject's own noxious retromodernist flux, which is of course a primary vector for the naturalization of this tragically alienated (and alienating) sociocultural stance.

It is interesting to note the postmodernist accretions of this particular mutation of the strain: the disarming overlay of a casual, regular-guy linguistic register; the fast-and-loose references to pop culture; the apparent earnest concern for what is actually being dismissed as idiotic: all serving to create that postmodernist illusion of "populism" while reinforcing an underlying modernist snobbery. I have often wondered if the paranoid fear of cultural contagion—typically an early-stage symptom of retromodernism— itself leads to or is only indirectly related to the later-stage symptoms of noncommittal, apparently frivolous (even nutty) displays of lighthearted detachment whereby the patient tends to deflect and evade all topics which threaten to touch on the profound. Observing this pathological tic in action has always been the most disturbing stigmata of this disease for me: the convulsions of coyness; the flat jokes; the desperate, soulless eyes.

This case is probably beyond responding to treatment and one can only wonder if the hydrophobia-like symptom peculiar to the American variety of this affliction-the mistaken aversion to cultural relativity (one of the better vaccines available) due to conflation with the philosophical relativism so reviled by pragmatists and their ilk-influenced the narrator not to get any form of inoculation against this common but little understood disease.

You're probably going to think I'm some sort of namby-pamby political correctionist for championing such déclassé notions. But as Frederic Jameson said, "we all, in one way or another, dimly feel that not only punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it."

But the thing that really caused me to write was the notion, embedded in the piece, that one just can't even begin to communicate meaningfully with those people who espouse/appreciate/consume that trash (fill in the blank), because those people are, for all intents and purposes, not our kind. I do not deny that this can be a very compelling response when confronted with someone with an outlook/cosmology/Weltanschauung/whatever fundamentally divergent from one's own. And I grant you that cultural relativism no longer enjoys the glamour it once did as a theoretical principle, and that it suffers from limitations and facile oversimplifications, etc. So how about simple, old-fashioned cosmopolitanism? Or a basic interest in humanity, even if some of humanity doesn't speak exactly the same language as one's self? And what are the implications of rejecting a cosmopolitan (or cultural relativist) ethos?

Cooper's deflective or reflective social strategy of not engaging those "other people" (e.g.: "remove yourself and your views from the field of consideration; replacing yourself with your amiable opponent and encouraging them to talk about their own incorrect analysis will earn you extra friendliness points") seems to me a classic postmodern tactic, like "the way in which the [mirrored] glass skin [of postmodern buildings] repels the city outside, a repulsion for which we have analogies in those reflector sunglasses which make it impossible for your interlocutor to see your own eyes and thereby achieve a certain agressivity toward and power over the Other," as Jameson once put it. In other words, Cooper's reactions seem to be very much a part of, and active reproduction of, the problem he has with those alienating cultural productions "false consciousnesses are made of."

Cooper's attempt to pass off an essentially modernist aesthetic attitude—that is, an academicist, self-referential, inward-looking orientation which distinguishes the real, Fine Art appreciated by the initiated, cognoscenti-elite from the noxious, popular stuff produced for the masses-as hip-and-now postmodern sophistication is, then, pathologically disingenuous. This is precisely what Nike does in its profoundly successful advertisements. So Cooper is infected with the very virus he is so terrified of contracting, through sociocultural contagionism, from Star Wars.

Yours falsifiably,
Dr. Ludwig Benway
Allston, Mass.

Clarke Cooper replies: I'm afraid I don't quite follow you. I think I see a misunderstanding, however, clarification of which may render all this moot: "Popular" is not the same as "crappy." Democratic ideals are not at odds with revulsion against ulteriorly motivated products of big-media panderers; it's not elitist to call a turd a turd.

Paint vs. plasma
David Rothenberg's "The Thin Machine" in Hermenaut #14 now haunts my daily grind, ironically because of the "haze of chance" he tentatively decries. The J&R Music World catalog on my desk has fallen open to a page that features the Philips 42 PW 9962 42" FLAT TV Plasma Television. Plasma. Dig it: "Can be hung on the wall like a painting." Like a painting. A plasma painting. Such a striking merger of thin tech and aspirational micro- rhetoric. TV, which it can be argued has killed painting, wants to ape painting, likes the idea that it dangles there from the wall with a painting in mind. Of course, the painting is always a painting, so that plasma TV only hangs "like" a painting is telling: A painting lacks plasma, but it's always on; the FLAT TV, by contrast, is often blank. Thanks, David, thanks, Hermenaut: I'll never look sideways at anything the same way again.

Matthew DeBord
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Linda lives
Thank you for Ingrid Schorr's eloquent testimonial/confessional "La-La-La-La-La-La-Lovely Linda" [issue #14]. Schorr's personal assessment of and emotional connection to the McCartneys is at once amusing, thoughtful, heartwarming, obsessive, sad, lucid... and-ultimately-redeeming. Schorr's obsession with these otherwise unreal pop idols, which eventually becomes tangled up with the grim reality of her own breast cancer, is particularly sobering to read about. Preferring to reach out to a pop star over any prolonged involvement with a local support group or fellow patient, she adopts a truly modern, truly alternative therapy. She says she picked Linda because "she was absurd but real." I guess our heroes are where we find them.

Shawn Wolfe
Seattle, Wash.

Foulmouthed fan finds faith
I ran across your Anorexia/Technology issue a couple of days ago. I read it cover to cover, and would like to thank you for creating and producing an intellectual vibrator of refreshing relevance. It's nothing short of fantastic when a thorough evaluation of the PRESENT can provide such unnatural pleasure. Hermenaut is the first magazine/journal I have had any desire to READ EVERY WORD OF. It fucking rocks my world. It renews my faith in the collective intellectual life of the nation, and renews my faith in other similarly lost but thoughtful people out there. Here's 20 of the best spent dollars of my young life. Sign me the fuck up.

Ameni Rozsa
Williamstown, Mass.

Fillet of white soul
I much enjoy your-all's publication. Kierkegaard & Nietzsche would probably hate the ass-tight bores to whose journals they are conscripted today. I wish there were a million magazines that contained one true thought a month.

Because: Philosophy, life, alchemy, chemicals, lovestyles need to be mixed and matched. Krishnamurti never talked about "Hot Sex on da Plate" and Tribe Called Quest never talked about the relationship between Time and Desire. Who the fuck doesn't need to know about both? And I'm not talking about some newveau highbrow/lo-brow cocktail... everyone feels dread and everyone wants to be a red-hot lover, why can't we get the shit under one roof?

So please, keep the faith and don't be afraid to take on critical thinking/ white irony itself, so many of our brothers and sisters are drowning. Take on God, take on the thorny pincers of white soul, self-hatred in the modern age, and of course, eventually we all have to talk about solutions. We have a lot of work to do, to make college more than just a battering ram, to remake the economy into something palatable. The odds seem insurmountable but remember everyone hates pain and loves love (don't they?). When we start getting it right, the results should sell themselves like punk rock and kickflips. The suckers will flock to jock.

Eben H. Carlson
Seattle, Wash.

Is this a business plan? Works for us.—ed.