Dear Larry:
      Thank you for your wisdom; I couldn't conjure up her name because I've
always considered her a pedant (and, though some might argue, Brooks is
too).
      My mentor, Joe Feeney, a Jesuit who started out in the tremulous
waters
of American literature but is now mostly focused on Gerard Manley Hopkins,
told me once that the beauty of American literature is precisely that the
complexity of our national vision (if that could be a phrase) is so tangled
up in
itself.
     We have the Gershwins and Berlin and Kern and Porter and Sam and all
these other tangy presences. We have, too, a popular culture based on greed
and
phony accomplishment that has no room for artistry.
    Hence the sentimentalism. Hence the idiotic projection Andy Hoffman made
eight years ago by projecting 20th century psychological standards on Sam
sharing a bed with another man.
    Talk about warped!

Kathyo