July 4, 2004

Letters

ositively Fourth-Rate
To the Editor:
As one who has always found Dylan the singer charmless and rasping, Dylan the poet sophomoric and obvious, and Dylan the composer banal and unmemorable, I did not have my feeling changed by Jonathan Lethem's review of Christopher Ricks's book ''Dylan's Visions of Sin'' (June 13). Lethem's complicity with the author in equating Bob Dylan with Blake and Picasso, no less, must embarrass even Dylan.

Yet assuming he is right (though what is ''right'' in such matters?), Lethem has not one word to say about the music; when he says ''music'' it's as a synonym for ''lyrics.'' Since ancient times songs sink or swim on the quality of the music to which the poems are set; but Lethem has no opinion, much less an analysis, of how the tune and harmony and instrumentation relate to the text. As for the giggly postscript by Lucinda Williams (''Love That Mystic Hammering''), she does refer to Dylan's ''sweet beautiful melodies,'' as well as to his influential ''sweet-ass attitude,'' but such notions are meaningless in responsible criticism.
Ned Rorem
New York

Radio Cure
To the Editor:
In his review of Greg Kot's ''Wilco: Learning How to Die'' (June 13), Joe Klein writes about alt-country, ''In New York . . . only Fordham University's excellent WFUV-FM plays this music.''

This is quite incorrect. WFDU-FM (89.1), where I am a producer and host, plays this music, along with many of the musicians Klein has written about -- Wilco, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and a bevy of old and new artists.
Bill Hahn
Teaneck, N.J.

He's No Ann Coulter
To the Editor:
In his review of Thomas Frank's ''What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America'' (June 13), Josh Chafetz partakes of a rhetorical maneuver fit only for blackguards and illiterates.

It goes like this:

Ann Coulter is a vitriolic right-wing pundit. (Examples of Coulter's notoriety are likely to pop to the forefront of the reader's mind: averring of Muslims, ''We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity''; fantasizing about the incineration of The New York Times Building; accusing those she disagrees with of treason.)

Tom Frank is a vitriolic left-wing pundit.

Q.E.D.: Tom Frank must be like Ann Coulter.

He isn't. Frank did something Coulter never, ever would do -- something no conservative ever does: patiently, respectfully, he sat down with people he disagreed with and listened to them. That he did not prefer what they had to say -- for reasons he illuminates with a sustained, subtle and learned argument, something Coulter has never managed to do -- is a writer's prerogative. It is not, however, a reviewer's prerogative to invent a case for guilt by association.

I suppose Tom Frank is vitriolic: ''bitter, scathing, caustic,'' reads my dictionary. But he is also a responsible intellectual, careful and thoughtful, and deeply humane. Nothing in his book is unsupported by evidence and logic, disagree with it though you may -- including those ''dry statistical studies'' for which Chafetz ''searches his book in vain.'' The book groans with them. Search not in vain, Mr. Chafetz: one of them, from the Center for Rural Affairs, is cited in the first paragraph.
Rick Perlstein
Chicago

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