My Closing Comments

It's good that I could take my time with this reply. The lynch mob I joked about can't even be called a lynch club, with only an anonymous coward rallying to Neil's side and posting over here.

Though this post will serve several purposes, one of the primary ones is to apologize to Lo Gallucio, who conducted the original intervew and was very patient with me up to its publication. In writing my post this past Saturday, I commited an action which was a violation of my own personal standards. I made refrences not to a public source but to a private email from Lo to myself.

After a single email before the weekend of September 30th asking Lo about the article appearing online, I received one reply from Lo; but later that weekend (with no prompting from me), there was another email from Lo explaining Neil's reservations.

Had I contacted her about it (and I never did), she would have explained to me, as she did on Sunday, that a lot of her articles are similarly delayed. This might have changed my outlook considerably before I went on gut emotion and a non-public source. All of this inevitably put Lo in the middle without her ever intending to be. You did not deserve this, Lo, and I'm sorry.

Equally unfortunate, however, is that McCabe has no problem keeping her in the middle, both in his comment and his Alewife post, making it seem like I have false information, unless I drag the correspondence out of my mailbox. I will not, and I don't have to. McCabe is generous with his commentary on my blog, offering insight into his more "nuanced" view, which doesn't sound too different from what I originally gathered.

My work, McCabe says, gives the terrorists cause to say "Amen" (what, no "Allah Akbar?"). Following that inane but popular twist of logic, the decades worth of scholars who have questioned America's decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, along with those who write history books detailing our own war crimes during World War II , would have caused the original Axis of Evil to rise again several times over.

Following that logic, all the government has to do is track down the three extra people who visited my blog this week, and the war on terror will be over! Rejoice!

I won't comment anymore on this subject. To take McCabe's comments at face value, let alone give them more attention, leads one to believe that he can't be taken seriously either as a critic of poetry or a representative of the world of journalism. I suspect part of the reason behind McCabe's inane arguement, which totally ignores the legitimate, mature arguement he could have used against me (re: my poor treatment of Lo's correspondence, the usual time her articles are uploaded, etc.), is to insprire me to argue and link his site even more. That, aside from my side link, ends now, and I stop playing.