I really don't see how calumny slander abuse and lies can go unanswered.
Ignoring them doesn't simply make them go away. A failure to respond is
tantamount to approval of such behaviour, and I cannot see -- no matter how
pleasing it may be to the shit-kickers involved (for that is perhaps how
they see themselves?) -- that any useful purpose is served by NOT replying
to AD and TF, though Lawrence Upton obviously thinks it merely serves their
ends ("This is not a good idea. There are 2 offenders and both would enjoy
receiving personal letters").

This whole business is very alarming, and smacks strongly of the sort of
vicious and malicious yellow or worse journalism of the old _Blackwood's_
days (in the eighteen-teens) where the customary puffing of one's friends
and witless nasty empty headed lying scurrilous slanderous attacks on one's
enemies fed into a whole series of different political and class prejudices
much to the DAMAGE of (among others) Hazlitt, to say nothing of Keats,
Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and others (and led, more or less directly, to the
death 27 February 1821 of the great editor John Scott as the result of a
duel). No one wins in a slanging match, and the sort of thing AD and TF are
reported to be doing and to have done is (if I read it aright, malign and)
dangerous (pardon my pomposity) to the public weal. I'm not one for
perpetuating what Jonathan Williams rightly calls stodge, but I am one for
preserving and improving the levels of public discourse. That's what is at
stake, it seems to me.

So I'm on Lawrence's side in this, this is NOT a private quarrel (was it
ever?). But of course there's a problem. I need some facts, some data, some
hard stuff to go on. And no one in her or his right mind wants to repeat and
spread the poison -- to do so, perhaps, might be seen to be giving it
credence, and to repeat it on this list might, in the view of some, run
counter to the interests of those the list attempts to serve (including
lurkers like me). But it's absurd to be paralysed by such scruple, no?

I've sent Lawrence some stamps so he can send me information. But this
strikes me as a terribly toilsome and cack-handed way of doing things.

Peter
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                             Peter Quartermain
                              846 Keefer Street
                                  Vancouver
                                     B.C.
                                 Canada V6A 1Y7
                             Voice : 604 255 8274
                               Fax: 255 8204

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