LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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Dear Editor,

If a book is

superior to its reader, the reader may in a defensive and cowardly moment call the work incomprehensible. If the reader is Peter Campion, he may turn to glib reductions that wallow arrogantly in their own comfortable confusions. Instead of addressing Jeff Clark's Music and Suicide ("Ten Takes," November, 2004), Campion redresses the author with baffling hostility. In his one-page review, Campion wastes no time unleashing his roster of ad hominems; he likens Clark to "a computer program that translated French Surrealist poetry based on the neural feedback of a squid," Jeff Koons, a marine invertebrate, and Kim Jong-Il. Besides the obvious bad-joke quality of these analogies, Campion never comes up with any supporting evidence. He's too busy slinging empty, bitter guesses about Clark's intent and his publishing circumstances. Entrenched in the aura of gossip ("Various subcommittee members of the avant-garde are furious about all this"), Campion can hardly think for himself or do his own research. Let me set one record straight: Jeff Clark works as a freelance graphic designer for many presses, and his full-time work is not for Farrar, Straus arid Giroux. Campion squanders his chance to write a review in favor of passing off pernicious and trifling hearsay. Clark's Music and Suicide is an exacting book that embodies psychological struggles with whipsaw violence and erotic voluptuousness. Musically calibrated lines radiate from the vaporous places of dreams and trance. The resilient integrity of Clark's work has a life lexically tuned enough to outlast Campion's smug blusterings.