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The Reader Speaks: Letters to Hermenaut

An Archive of Reader Mail

Letters about Issue 10: Popular Culture

Idler interested in imaginative ideopath
Hermenaut #10 is much appreciated and, as usual, fucking excellent—I like the way you can do Bruce Lee as a Hermenaut without a trace of a smirk. SERIOUSNESS is an embattled virtue these days. Not to imply that your mag is solemn at all, but there is a certain note of grave inquiry in it which beats all that postmodern shit hands down.

All from Issue 10

Letters about Issue 11/12: Camp

Heston haunts Hermenaut
I don't know if Hermenaut fills me with hope or further confirms the oncoming apocalypse. Did you know that Chuck Heston ["The Giants of Philosophy" review by Susan Roe, issue #11/12] was granted a "Q" clearance by the U.S. Energy Department (its highest security clearance—Oppenheimer, et al.) in the early '80s?

All from Issue 11/12

Letters about Issue 13: Vertigo

Baudelaire who?
Dan Reines' "Pure Evel" was definitely my favorite feature in Hermenaut #13: eye-opening! I always figured the stage name was just for show but now I've come to the conclusion that the man is in fact an Evil Evel. The Baudelaire essay was great too, I learned from that one. I'd never even heard of him before! Good stuff.

All from Issue 13

Letters about Issue 14: Anorexia/Technology

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 [...] Thanks, David, thanks, Hermenaut: I'll never look sideways at anything the same way again.

All from Issue 14

For the lazy or hurried