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