January 1, 2004

Subject: Shane Neilson's response to TDR's John MacKenzie interview

Mr. Neilson,

I was ready to give some of the criticisms in your letter serious thought until I came to the phrase "tenditiously punctuated prose." Problem is, I can't find the word "tenditiously" in any dictionary. Perhaps you meant to use the adverbial form of "tendentious," which is generally understood to mean to be biased towards a particular point of view, or to support an unpopular opinion. But perhaps you didn't, since you say my responses were "cautious, vague, and boring" which pretty much rules out me being tendentious. Or perhaps you meant that my punctuation holds unpopular opinions -- I really can't be sure (particularly about how punctuation might be able to hold any opinions, unpopular, or not).

In any case, any criticisms you might have of the interview, or of the poems which appeared with it, are undermined by your apparent lack of command of the English language and your seeming obliviousness to that lack. Such carelessness is appalling in a person purporting to care about literary matters. Effective criticism requires coherently expressed thought. Carelessness destroys coherence.

John MacKenzie