Finally, Some Letters to Post!

It took a little while, but I can finally give the mailbag its first real update.

Date: Sun, April 8, 2007 10:56 pm
From: "Paul" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Nice site

Good choice on starting a website and congratulations on being added to Rantlister! The sports section is a breath of fresh air.
Anyway, if you decide to keep up your ranting, you will have a tremendous amount of work ahead of you, but you should also know that there are people who appreciate what you do.

Thanks for the email. It’s always nice to receive positive feedback.
You’re right in saying that a large amount of work will be required to keep the site updated regularly with quality material. I know that for me, the worst part is getting through the tedious processes of revising and copyediting. My plan is to keep a steady pace of updating once per week, so I’ll have to see how that works out for me.

Date: Thu, April 19, 2007 11:04 pm
Subject: Pwnetry: Priceless
From: "Bagoda" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]

I just wanted to drop a line and let you know how much I enjoyed your piece on poetry. It came at a great time as I was writing a paper on poetry in which I completely tore it apart. I guess my professor agreed with me because despite the many grammatical errors I received a 100%. To quote my paper:
"I am a lazy person; I do not want to work hard to enjoy my literature. Perhaps a perfect example of this is “in Just-“ by E.E. Cummings:

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
licious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddiandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful (lines 1-10)

Huh? I’m sure that the poem is quite beautiful and meaningful to someone but I simply cannot get past the first ten lines. There is nothing there to grab onto. There is nothing to say “Hey this poem is important enough to finish”. By the tenth line I feel like a fool to have read so far. I’m sure that some would argue that that is the nature of art but I guess that’s why I can’t stand art either.
Anyways, keep up the good work man. Talk with you later.

Thanks for your email and I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed my article.
That poem "In Just" is another great example of what is wrong with poetry. Even if this particular poem does have some kind of deep message or is attempting to express some sort of experience, it does a poor job of showing it. As you have stated, the poem doesn't give the reader any good reason to finish it, let alone give it a second thought afterwards.

I did a quick search on google to see what other people thought about this poem and I read that some believe the poem may be mentioning things such as a Greek god, childhood, sexuality, intoxication, and pedophilia, among other things. Whether or not it actually does express any of those things I do not know, nor do I care to find out, because the poem is not enjoyable to read at all.

Also, you don't have to cite being a lazy person as an excuse for not wanting to have to work hard to enjoy literature. Assuming that you are interested in the subject matter that a piece of literature is discussing, the piece should be able to draw the reader in. If this fails to happen, it is most likely the writer's fault, in my opinion.

Perhaps you've read those emails and you're saying to yourself, "Tim, you asshole! You only posted those emails to make youself look good!" You would only be half correct.

The other main reason I posted these emails was to try and set a sort of precedent for what this particular mailbag is all about. I don't want this to be a forum where somebody sends me a real or fake piece of hatemail and then I try and come up with a funny way to insult that person. I want this mailbag to be more like that of a magazine where I can post what readers thought about certain articles and stories or an interesting anecdote that a reader submitted relating to one of the articles or stories. The second email on this page is a good example of that. I cannot promise that hatemail will never appear here, but it will certainly not be the focus.

-4.27.2007

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