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Dear Editor:

Alan Kaufman needed not apologize for his invocation of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has become a structural part of the human condition, as it is also a ubiquitous form of human behavior (Bosnia, Uganda, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Sudan). To some extent this was what Jules Feiffer was alluding to in Little Murders, i.e. the way in which everyday, quotidien events are impregnated with larger forces. Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" comes to mind in this regard because one would look at the decline of the man of letters and the literary mind as a form of evolution. At least that would be the excuse. I would argue that not all evolution is inevitable. Furthermore not all evolution from the technological point of view is evolutionary.There is faux evolution in which attacks on sensibility are stoically accepted in the name progress or inevitability and in which we march unresistingly to what? Our fate? What Alan Kaufman is talking about is also occurrring in music, very prominently in photography (where flat digital photography has all but replaced the resplendent images produced on film) and in both abstract and figurative painting where the grandeur and difficulty of digital techniques has long been under siege. Handwriting itself is on the verge or becoming a lost calligraphic form. Cursive writing and the handwritten note, with all their intimacy, have been damned by cybernetics. We are not willing to accept coastal erosion, why should we merely cave in to the decline of the beauty and power of the book, one of the great contributions of our otherwise worrisome and warrior like species?

Francis Levy

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