Lisa Zeidner and John Allen Paulos

Dear John,

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Of course people are loath to admit that they have sex less than the national average of three times a week, any more than people rush to write in to their alumni magazines that since graduating, they've been living at home and earning minimum wage as clerks at their local video stores. We all know that averages are meaningless, and yet we all live under this brooding cloud--the fear that everyone else in the world (short of those people with houses on fire on the local eleven o'clock news) is doing much, much better than we are. Earns more, is happier, has more sex and more creative sex, sports a bigger dick or smaller ass, enjoys more loving Thanksgiving holidays with their extended families. That is the other reason we need fiction. It lets in failure. On the public stage, we just build people up and tear them down, over and over. All of the ironies are big, stark, oversimplified, No drama ironies: the child-molesting priest, Pee Wee Herman at the X-rated shop. Especially where sex is concerned. For all the obsession with sex in the media, you almost never get real sex, with real sex's messiness and contradictions.

Feels like I spend my whole teaching life reiterating this axiom: Not Either/Or. Both/And.

You talk about the drug-company lobbies. You know what I fear? People are officially hip to the egregious influence of special interests. People will tell you in a flash that most things are rigged--by the NRA, the tobacco industry. We all know that newspapers mostly get things wrong. We are cynics to the last man, officially suspicious of all rhetoric, all information. Yet it seems to me we're more gullible than we've ever been. We're so automatically cynical that cynicism becomes valueless, indiscriminate--and thus useless.

"As always," as you close (Always what? Well, I'm not going to sign my letters "Love" if you're not going to sign your letters "Love." Perhaps I have been slatternly in my affections. Shall I retreat to "Best," or "Cheers"?),
Lisa

P.S.: I did actually read the paper today. Soon maybe we can mouth off more specifically?

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