Dear Jack,
Thanks for your letter of today, June the twenty-1st. Things here in LA are going quite well; you fellows in New York have us by the balls on drunken carousing, but we compensate somewhat with our relative riches on hot tubs and tar pits. Glad you’re enjoying my magazines – please continue to do so. I have not yet seen Napoleon Dynamite but expect I will presently based on your strong feelings of love towards it.
I think your strong and apparently appropriate feelings on the subject of David Denby might be mitigated if you considered the facts of this molasses-brained halfwit’s life, as exposed in his autobiography, “American Sucker.” I quote from Publisher’s Weekly, a reputable thing: “[Denby] sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into the NASDAQ . . . [he] nearly suffered a nervous breakdown when his wife of 18 years left him . . . [he] brutally details his decline, from a night of impotence to an affair with a married woman, then a six month obsession with Internet porn.”
If the poor fellow’s only gratification these days comes from snarkery in the pages of a magazine filled with mediocre comics (I hope you haven’t forgotten / given up on the several excellent ideas you and I had for these) and pretty good articles that are sometimes about things I care about, like silver thieves and Antarctica, perhaps we should cut him just the slightest bit of extra rope.
Further, your own writings have in the past reached their highest pinnacle when you chronicle and participate in the ups and downs and degradations of the human condition, the unique puzzle of having a superior apparatus for spiritual and philosophical examination and consideration locked inside a body that demands hilarious primate gratifications (as I write this, at least one of my associates is known to be masturbating within minutes of making a pretty insightful argument about how dumb people are at making business decisions). So I imagine you might give Mr. Denby the slightest bit of mercy if you knew that he, too, laid bare his comical disgraces for all to see.
That said, the man’s a side-grinning titty-pants, and should I see him I will indeed give him your remarks.
Cordially,
SC
