May 7, 2004

Subject: Shaun Smith's letter on TDR interview with Michael Holmes

Dear TDR:

If you guys would, please pass on this apology to Mr. Smith. 

Shaun, I'm very sorry I offended your polite, most reasonable sensibilities. You're so right, language like mine has no place in an important, serious discussion of matters literary. 

It's not TDR's fault--they're just blindly following old and outdated journalistic chestnuts. You know, the ones that maintain freedom--of thought and expression--is a good thing. 

Again, TDR wasn't calling The Big Ragu (as some of us affectionately refer to Mr. Starnino) an assclown. I was calling him an assclown.

Shaun, I'm duly chastised. I lost my head. There's no room in CanLit for this kind of thing. Wrestling and literature surely shouldn't mix. 

Imagine, without your intervention I might have been allowed to hurt Carmine's feelings. Please let me know how you would describe his "self-aggrandizing ad hominem attacks on other, more accomplished writers and thinkers"; his "Palaeozoic allegiance to the most parochial, chauvinistic tenets of high modernism"; or the "unmitigated gall" of his attack on "the poetics of Al Purdy as a way of making his bones when Al was gallantly living out his life's course." I'll defer to your wise counsel.

Thank you,

Michael Holmes