The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Literary Peanuts

5.25.07 @ 12:01AM

COOGLER CARTER III
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s The Worst Book of the Year:

Winning a Coogler is not a trifle. Winning two Cooglers automatically catapults the lucky writer into a pantheon bordering on the mystical. Winning a third is genuine top of the mountain stuff. Surely something besides the publicity of the feat should be afforded the hapless former prez. How about The American Spectator buying up all the remaindered copies and selling them to interested magazine subscribers as a sort of subscription bonus. Surely the whole lot of them could be purchased for cents on the dollar. The Spectator would appear magnanimous -- at least generous -- the recipients would have fishwrap aplenty, and Mr. Carter would have access to the reading public to an extent he could have only dreamt about.
-- J.C. Eaton
Chetek, Wisconsin

Perhaps the members of the Gordon Coogler Prize Committee should come up with a "Lifetime Achievement Award" along the lines of the Motion Picture Academy's Lifetime Oscar. "Jimmah" would be a shoo-in for the inaugural award.

James Earl Carter, Jr. is a small-minded, smug, sanctimonious, vituperative, nasty little twerp -- and those are his good points!
-- Gretchen L. Chellson
Alexandria, Virginia

Jimmy Carter has written 21 books? Of former Presidents, only Bill Clinton has exhibited more energy!

Some where, some time, some graduate assistant is going to have to read every one of those books. I pity that student.
-- Dan Martin
Pittsburgh

Instead of just dismissing Jimmuh from future Coogler Awards, this third recognition deserves a Lifetime Lack of Achievement Award or Emeritless status or some such thing as the committee deems appropriate. Something to hang next to his Nobel Prize. He is only deserving of the best (or least as the case may be).
-- GM Strong
Media, Pennsylvania

Mr. Tyrrell uses the following sentence to describe Jimmy Carter's literative essays:

"The books have all been insipid and occasionally remarkably bad."

Mr. Tyrrell's choice of words provides pure morphological and phonological delight to this reader.
-- David Shoup
Grovetown, Georgia

REMEMBER THE TALIBAN
Re: Christopher Orlet's None Is Less:

Felix and Susan Williams should be lauded not condemned. The Modernist style was the ultimate fad in architecture that was interesting for about a year. It is not a style to last the ages and is getting the fate it deserves.
-- Donald Parnell
London, United Kingdom

Welcome to America! Land of Freedom. You own it, you do what you want with it, unless the larger community finds an overriding reason to stop you, i.e., public purpose as in Amendment V. The fact that some crackpot pseudo-journalist thinks the house should be preserved because his favorite architect designed does not constitute a public purpose in the mind of anyone who is rational. Why you publish this drivel is quite beyond me.
-- C. R. Melton
Arlington, Virginia

I read Christopher Orlet's recent piece on the loss of "great" architecture to soulless McMansions. While there is a part of me that can share his lament at the loss of these "significant" architectural examples (it is true that many of these homes are beautiful), as I read the piece I had to remind myself that I was reading the Spectator and not some leftist rag. While there is value in preserving these homes as living and functioning pieces of architectural art, I am afraid that Mr. Orlet has taken the preservationist mindset to its leftist extremes. It was as if I were reading National Geographic or some such where the only acceptable position on just about anything is "How much we are preserving?" "How much of the forest is protected?" "How many of old ways of doing things are we saving?" "How many of history's artifacts are protected?"

Unfortunately we cannot freeze the world in a particular state or era. Societies develop and change. Old ways of doing things are replaced by new ways of doing things. Old artifacts are swept aside for new ones. Some things will be saved. Most will be eventually be lost. Sometimes some of the things that were lost should have been saved. Sometimes the old way of doing things was better. It is all part of the process of the growth and development of a society.

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