Just to make sure that you get these words of thanks,I am also sending it to your other this e-mail address as well to the address for unequivocal. Hope you don't mind. Sorry if you do.

Dear Unequivocal:

Thanks for the free publicity. A friend of mine keeps up with how my books are doing on the various out of print online booksellers (don't ask me why. I guess she doesn't have enough to do with her time) and she got me to look at your web log. I was quite pleased to see that a few lines, not really even a passage, from BLAKE HOUSE--an mostly unread and now forgotten "pulp" novel, a decade out of print (and deservedly so, in your view)--could produce any reaction at all, let alone one as strong as yours. As you seem to realize, even a negative response is better than no response at all. It is, in its own perverse way, as satisfying to be on someone's ten worst list as it is to be on someone's ten best; being on no list at all is what is to be feared. And, in my humble view, any book that can get anyone to think, no matter what the thought, has proven itself worth the trees killed to print it. You have no idea of the compliments you have bestowed upon me, which makes them all the sweeter, since there can be no finer compliments than those paid unconsciously and unintentionally.

I would love to know the names of the other nine in your top ten list of crappy novels--maybe I'll find one or two of my top ten best among them--and what place I occupy in the list. It is human, I suppose, to want to know the names of one's associates, and one's place in the pecking order. I would also love to know the meaning of the initials "asdf," which is what you named the previous entry.

By the way, given the tone of your entries, have you ever thought of renaming your site: UNEQUIVOCABLY UP YOURS? I think that name would be so much more suitable. Anyway, just a thought.

Then again, since you proclaim that nothing on your site is to be taken seriously, maybe none of your statements, good or bad, are in the least bit true. Or maybe you've reversed your meanings so that the bad statements are good and the good statements are really bad. Or maybe ... or maybe ... infinitely, in the ultimate mindfuck of the man who says "I am always lying; nothing that I say is true." Which is the koan that will one day bring artificial intelligences to Satori, turning them into Buddha computers. But true or not, I don't care. It was still a bit of free publicity, and you even managed to spell my name right, so once again I thank you for it.

Now, I must be off. I have a busy day ahead of me: all morning in remedial dialogue, atmosphere and plot class; and then off to work--writing bumper stickers and mendacious high concept descriptions for movie producers and deceptive sound-bits for politicians, reducing complex ideas and multi-faceted realities to short, single sentences carefully crafted to produce responses not in keeping with the facts they distort.

All Best,