Hermenaut readers have been proffering their 2¢ for years before we launched the Wicked Pavilion. We hope you enjoy these Best Letters Ever, a selection culled from the sacks and sacks of reader mail we've received since we started publishing in 1992. Our criteria for "best" letters were as follows: Which letters introduced us to new friends? Which made us realize we were really on to something? And which letters most freaked us out? All editorial responses below appeared in the print magazine.

We've also published a more complete archive of The Reader Speaks: Letters to Hermenaut.Please take a look!

Fall 1993

An old letter from Sassy's "staff boy"

In addition to being excited to find my own name and favorite mag mentioned in print—and in such illustrious company as Levinas, Novalis, Nietzsche, and Billy of Melrose Place fame—I was also thrilled to death by "Hot for Nietzsche": like Pagan [Kennedy], I too nurse a certain tender spot somewhere between my loins for "the loneliest syphilitic." Anyway, send #s 1 & 2 to Sassy's Zine of the Month column... tell Christina I say "It's not just 'cause my name's in there that I luuuuv Hermenaut!" DO I count as a big slacker for writing you [this letter] instead of writing my paper on Philip K. Dick and Borges? Or are college and slack sort of mutually X-clusive?

P.S. [Upon reading "Smells Like Teen Reification, in Hermenaut #1,] actually, it would be much better for my upcoming tenure as Sassy cub reporter and staff boy if you don't send them your zine, if it's all the same to you.

Luv,
Ethan "Fat Boy" Smith

Dear Ethan, We'll make a deal with you: We won't send Hermenaut to Sassy if you don't send Sassy to Hermenaut.

A letter from Sassy

I'm writing a story for Sassy on public access television—specifically on how anyone can start up their own production and get it on the air. Someone at Sassy had a copy of your zine in which you reviewed the Pagan Kennedy [sic]. I'm extremely interested in getting in touch with her as there seems to be a dearth of females in the public access racket. And her show sounds like something our readers would find cool. I've tried calling Cablevision in Boston but so far they have been unable to find any listing for the Pagan Kennedy [sic].

Sincerely,
Maureen Callahan

We put Maureen in touch with Pagan, and although Pagan Fed-exed several tapes at great personal expense, they decided to write an article on How You Can Be A Star, using NYC's unoriginally-named Nico as an example, instead of anything about Do-It-Yourself women with TV shows (Sassy, October, 1993). I guess Phil Milstein's Shatner-esque rendition of "Losing my Religion," and Maggie Cummings' Hindi film fan club just don't do it for the Sassy generation.

Winter 1994

Dear Joshua Glenn

Kinko's of Minnesota, Inc. greatly appreciates the time and effort you spent in applying for the Customer Service position with our company. You were one of the many applicants and choosing among them was a difficult task. Although you were not among those we chose to interview personally, we appreciate your interest in pursuing a position with us.

We were impressed with your experience and hope you will consider our company again when future employment opportunities develop. Best of luck in your job search.

Sincerely,
Kinko's Of Minnesota, Inc.

Dear Hermenaut

Baby I dig your thing! I'm sending you some of my hard-earned load culled from the back-sides of The Pseudo-Men administering our Spectacular Pumps to the vigorous youth of the fully rationalized territories in order that you will a) honor your duty to deliver the next 3 to 5 editions of Hermenaut to my villa; and b) compel one of your unpublished essayist friends to take a few moments from their rigorous observations of the contemporary decline to prepare for me some photocopies of the first 4 editions of Hermenaut, have them sent to my private address, and have sufficient funds remaining that he or she might purchase one of our newly minted entertainments (for personal use only; all rights in the materials shall remain reserved; unauthorized use may be subject to prosecution.)

Perhaps Hermenaut will comment soon on "internet" phenomena, or the villainy of Camille Paglia, or the interesting klatsch of Bay Area sex brainiacs: Brenda Laurel, Susie Bright, Lisa Palac, Donna Haraway, or perhaps I will see Marcel Duchamp, or Willem Reich [is he related to Willem Defoe? —ed.], or McLuhan honored as hermenauts for their contributions to the verisimilitudes of youth culture.

Or perhaps not.

Yours,
Rich Jensen
General Manager, Sub Pop Records

Recently I wrote my first music article, for a music magazine, about Sub Pop's fabulous band Combustible Edison. I made some sort of joke in that piece about how Sub Pop should pay me more for my pains. Well, sure enought, I received $35.00 from Mr. Jensen shortly after the article appeared in print. Nobody ever send me $35.00 for a philosophy article. I must be in the wrong business.—JG

Spring 1995

England Dreams of Hatebath

We are in love with Slotcar Hatebath. He can come round anytime and mix us some martinis and erm, "bronze" awhile. We don't think you're paying him enough. He's showbiz. He's consumer-friendly. He's some kind of minor bar-room god. I bet he's great in bed.

Dean Talent
When I Grow Up I Want To Be Bobby Gillespie
England

Darcy Shuts Door

I usually don't write letters to magazines but Phil Milstein's article concerning the various steps to becoming a Guru of one's own cult prompted me.

Being interested in American Victorian culture as I am, I discovered something linking the psychology of that time to this (it being the turn of the century of both eras as it is). People in general look for guidance in higher powers as the end of the century draws nigh; they feel as if it will all end soon just because the end of the section of a hundred years in which they were born is going to. So the turn of the century is a hot bed of fertility if you wish to start a cult. Last turn of the century Aleister Crowley, Rudolph Steiner, and Joseph Smith ran rampant (ask me about Mormons, I can tell you a mouthful, but not in this letter thank God). People also went nutty about all kinds of psychic phenomena such as palm reading, card reading, automatic writing, consultation with the dead, tea leaves, star gazing, and reading the lumps on any seeking person's head with a prong.

It was a booming and very profitable industry. Add to this that sideshows never were more profitable with their strange phenomena constantly being "proven" right before your eyes, and why not? The end was near, anything could happen, so it did. Mind you I kept this clearly in mind when I decided to market my palm reading abilities I have exercised since the tender age of ten, and perhaps I'm blowing the lid off the whole deal by recognizing that I understand the psychology behind the whole thing, but I think it is nonetheless true and existent. I am, in fact, practicing the act of telekinesis, which is getting better with each practice to the point where I shut my assistant's door the other day using only these means. It is documented on video, not a very Luddician form of documentation I agree, but a documentation nonetheless.

Dame Darcy
Meat Cake
New York City

Teen Debater Buys Magazine

I am a high school sophomore who is an active Lincoln-Douglas debater. Due to our relience [sic] on philosophy, I was extremely interested in the thought of a philosophy magazine for teens. My friend, a less serious debater, saw Hermenaut: The Digest of Heady Philosophy for Teens profiled as Zine of the Month in Sassy. For the first time in my fifteen years, I bought the issue of Sassy. I would be interested in seeing a sample of your publication if possible.

Melanie Sandy
Canal Fulton, Ohio

Spring 1996

RFK pees on Ed

My name is Ed Porter. I was born on Staten Island in 1946, and these are the events of my birth: Joseph Kennedy found two families who were willing to mate their children and sell him the offspring. Mary Murphy was artificially inseminated with two of Her own eggs and she mated with Thomas Sullivan. Twin Boys were born out of Wedlock, myself and my brother Michael. These people and the Kennedys are Devil Worshippers. They belong to a "World Wide" cult that worships satan. Joe Kennedy officially changed my name to Ed Porter and he also changed the date of my birth to October 29 to coincide with the anniversary of "Black Monday," the day the Stock Market crashed [...] In the summer of 1953 I was Black Massed. Joe Kennedy, Rose Kennedy, and their Sons John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and the rest of the Kennedy family were there. I was molested by Joe Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and urinated on by both of them [...] In 1981 Caroline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, Jr. paid an Osteopath to shrink my bone structure, I lost Sixty pounds...my purpose now is to expose both the organization and the Kennedys. I wish to enlist the support of the American People in my efforts to make the Kennedys pay for what they have done.

"Ed Porter"
New York City, New York

Winter 1997

Punk philosopher purchases publication

I'm very glad people exist in the same realm as I do... [Is he referring to us?—ed.] I'm an average Joe from the working class who wants to be the authentic Nietzschean superman. My throwness [sic] and facticity is that of a do-it-yourselfer who is caught in the dualism of the "punk" ideology: The "scene" that surrounds me creates a perturbing feeling of angst, and to take it seriously I would simply be living in "bad faith" [... ] I'm an undergraduate in philosophy as well as in mathematics; I've studied Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Malebranche, Liebinitz [sic], Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Kirkegaard [sic], Sartre, Heidegger, Derrida, Loytard [sic], and many more [including Bodriyard and Kamus?—ed] Philosophy is real to me, and that is what I am, real. I'm not a scholar, but I am passionate, this is all I need to live. So enclosed is ten whole dollar [sic] for the "will to power" which I discover [sic] in the rather mainstream zine CAKE. (Sorry for the negative reaction, but I'm always caught up in my throwness [sic] and facticity, that of a punk!)

Andy Gordon
Brookhaven, New York

"Thrownness" is one of those concepts I'm not ashamed to say I still don't get. We'd suggest, however, that Mr. Gordon practice "thoroughness" instead, because he did not, in fact, enclose "ten whole dollar." Or is that a punk thing?—ed.

Feminist favors Phyllis philosophy

I think Hermenaut #10 is fab. I especially enjoyed the section on Phyllis, and the way that Ernest Pascucci uses Lefebvre to set up the contrast between Phyllis's interior and exterior lives, which I think mirrors the opposition between a woman's (often) unpleasant experience of being looked at in public space (whether in real life or a media event), and the popular perception of a woman's being looked at.

I completely agree with you that we can keep ourselves "intact and autonomous" even while consuming popular culture, and that, in fact, since the only way to avoid that consumption would be to go live in a dark cave somewhere (and how much fun would that be?), we'd better find ways to critique what we see without insulting anyone's intelligence or just becoming complicit with the faux po-mo pop culture dreck that's out there. Bitch is my contribution, I guess.

By the way, my sister's a grad student in Classics, and I'm sending her a copy of that 90210/Greek gods piece for her to use in the myth class she's teaching this semester.

Lisa Jervis,
Editor, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture

Although we like Bitch, we're confused as to what a woman's often unpleasant experience of being looked at in a media event is, exactly.—ed.

Summer 1998

Humorist hates us

Thought I was going to like Hermenaut, until I saw the review [in Josh Glenn¹s "Camp: An Introduction"] of Might's Cheese book, in which it was called "utterly worthless." Didn't like that description so much, unless it was meant to be—what's the word the young ones are using?—ironic. Let me know, and we'll go from there. Believe me, I used to love it when people would poke fun at Might. But the tone you use when talking about the Cheese book and Glasgow Phillip's camp essay was, I don't know, a little snide... And besides, calling a humor book "worthless" is kind of missing the point, no?

David Eggers
New York, NY

Eggers, who chivalrously defended actress Madeleine Stowe's honor in a recent Esquire centerfold, is a former editor of Might magazine. We understand that Might (despite having gone out of business) is planning a second humor book, called The Death of Camp. True?—ed.

Pierz really gets it

A.S. Hamrah's review of Melrose Place novelizations provides a useful lesson in engaged criticism. Beyond the myriad attempts to find meaning in "silent" objects which most critics require of themselves, Hamrah allows himself to be forced instead into taking the even bolder step of confronting "meaningless meaninglessness." It is in this confrontation that criticism faces one of its boldest challenges—the challenge to take a position with regard to the bankruptcy of language.

Although Hamrah clearly finds it daunting to be confronted by the "nebulous irreality" of these seemingly innocuous books, he convinces himself to read not the books, but his own function as a critic, "against the grain." In spite of the utter simplicity of "criticizing" his object—which is by default always a way of giving it meaning—Hamrah chooses instead to negate it. This negation, in the spirit of Adorno, denies the object meaning—a heretical action within the exegetical atmosphere that has come to surround criticism in modernity ("post" and otherwise). In a fashion much more productive than the reiteration of possible meanings, however, Hamrah grapples instead with the possibility that meaning only appears within the context of human relations—that meaning is found in the making, not made in the finding.

When Hamrah reports "the idea that not everything can be explained does not exist [in these books]," he blurts out the shared ideology of most modern criticism, along with the objects it claims to expose—that is, that everything must have a justification. Refusing to take the bait, however, Hamrah instead stumbles onto something more like the challenge that Samuel Beckett (to whom the review refers more than once) extended to modern readers—to end literature's long wake. The ripple which Hamrah detects at the very edges of literary culture certainly originates from its center.

As Hamrah sees clearly, at least it still takes real people to make a terrible television show. Not so for so many of its cultural "betters." Hamrah's essay reminds us all that beyond "meaningful meaninglessness" there lies an even more meaningful despair.

M.J.B. Pierz
Brookline, MA

A.S. Hamrah responds, "But I did read the books!"

Winter 1998-99

Cheese epiphany

I very much enjoyed the "Camp" issue [#11/12], perhaps my favorite Hermenaut to date. I was especially taken by the letter in the back of the issue [from Ernest Pascucci, author of "Leather and Lace: My Closet," in that same issue] defending the Village People. The Village People's song "Go West" has always struck me as poignant for the promise of a gay Utopia it held out. The all-male chorus sounds almost like some Air Force choir, so it would not be an exaggeration to say that the song has often seemed vaguely patriotic to me. The loss of that fantasia is a sad thing indeed.

I once played "Go West" on an overnight radio show here in Minneapolis, and put forward my thesis on the air, launching a tangle of words into the sleepy void of daybreak. I think there was a fine mist coming down over the West Bank—and the phones, as ever, were dead. I felt glad after having done so that I had articulated, if only for myself, what it was about the song that had always affected me in some inchoate way. Reading Hermenaut, then, and discovering that someone else had had the same experience with the song, yielded one of those rare moments when pop culture brings us closer in more than a superficial way.

Michael Tortorello
Minneapolis, MN

Tears of a clown

I enjoyed the "Camp" issue, even though I'm not a great Wilde fan. He's a fascinating character and I love how he performed his life, but his writing is often, well, just clever. Wilde reminds me all too much of our own times, I suppose. Camp is a great send-up of the real and present, but in the end it leaves nothing to replace what it plays upon. It's always struck me as unbearably sad—sort of like Wilde himself.

As for the "Vertigo" issue [#13], I really like Josh Glenn's "Vertigo: An Introduction." Glenn is right on with his observation that the abyss is no longer something to fall into, leap over, be afraid of or learn from. Instead it's something we wallow in, blissfully collapsing into a groovy po-mo world with no belief. (Meanwhile, of course, the system that dares not speak its name chugs merrily along in all its meta-narrative glory.) Keep it up.

Steve Duncombe
New York, NY

Summer 1999

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.

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.