Gentlemen:
Concerning The Woman of Great Resistance what do you mean by great resistance? Does it mean that the lady is strong, robust, tall, muscular, that she can endure the worst, that she is hard as nails? And when you say that it was a gloomy day, should one understand that it was raining that day, or snowing, or thundering, I mean, you could have been more specific, after all it was an important day for history?
I do not wish to sound too nit-picky, but in the second paragraph (if one can call paragraphs those curious blocks of words in which you enclose your meaning) does nameless mean that the two protagonists in question do not have a name, or have forgotten it, or do not wish to reveal it, or else shall one assume from the deliberate vagueness implied here that the authors are afraid to reveal the names of those two poor souls who are about to be extinguished?
And that’s not all. No, that’s not all. In the same paragraph, thieving trash-hackers fucking worthless, do you really think it is necessary to accumulate adjectives to such a degree in order to indicate the character of the two bums? Wouldn’t one or two of these adjectives suffice? After all the situation in which the two bums find themselves calls for a touch of restraint and decorum.
I hope you do not find these comments impertinent, and that you will accept my questioning of this piece as a gesture of genuine interest in your work. Speaking of which, in the next paragraph, I get the sense of olive trees, it’s obvious, but frankly I cannot make heads or tails of what you are trying to suggest with skulls.
Need I go on? It’s a pity that you could not control your language, you are working with such a splendid subject, and it gets worse on the second page. There the ambiguities are so flagrant that, to tell you the truth Gentlemen, I had great difficulty forcing myself to read on to the end of the piece, though I must admit that the final two lines moved me to quiet reflection.
Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved
Do not presume, one of the thieves was fucked
There is a certain something in these lines in spite of the obscene last word, a kind of roundness, a symmetry of syntax, an equality of terms which I personally greatly appreciated.
Well, I hope these few critical remarks will be accepted with grace. I could not prevent myself from expressing them.
Yours truly
The above letter was received by the authors of THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUMS on October 1st of this year. It was not signed, and no return address given on the envelope, although we suspect from the handwriting (yes the letter was handwritten with lots of elegant swirls) that a woman wrote it. We are reproducing it here verbatim, that is to say exactly like the original. The words in bold are, of course, from THE WOMAN OF GREAT RESISTANCE which can be found on page 29 of this volume. We feel that it is important for us to make our readers aware of such goings-on.