Snakes and Earrings

To poo@cts.com

Subject: Your review of Snakes and Earrings

Dear Lolita Lark of RALPH:

Reading your rather snub review of Snakes and Earrings, I can't but wonder where exactly you find the postmodern elements you refer to in your final remarks. In my head, statements about God, Gods or the possible absence of such, in either philosofical, or other, arguments are usually a distinctly modern trait. Nor is thought experiments about other worlds very PM,. look at ... say, for the sake of argument: Utopia.

Besides that you seem to be making rather harsh judgements on the books characters --- your disbelief confronted with an opaque psychology is, again in my mind, very crude: I quote you:

So they go to see Mr. Tattoo Man, Shiba-san, and guess what? Lui gets hot because he looks so deliciously cruel, what with his studs and whips and belts and other diverting instruments of puncture and torture. Lui also finds herself rather smitten with the idea of being half-strangled to death in the bed of love, the ultimate coitus interruptus.

I wonder whether you have ever read the Marquiez de Sadé or Leopold von Sacher-Masochs "Venus in Furs" --- these guys will probably help you into at least a theoretical insight of the games being played, and their attraction to the parts.

In your defense, I am not saying the Snakes and Earrings is in any way high literature. It is not, it is part of an, in Europe and America, old movement of realism, and humanism.