Josh, I regret giving you the feeling you were being criticized. Indeed, I suppose I thought I was only critiquing some positions you've been articulating. My sense was that I was laying into you only as much as I lay into Ron, Steve Burt, Jonathan, myself, and other white men of the poeticoblogosphere.

Reading your note I now see that I may have given you the impression I was coming after you -- whether it was by stressing that the poetics of The Hat is much more "Come on, now" than "Come off it," or that there are more ambitious subjects for attention -- and as you know, you have everybody's attention -- than the chronology of anybody's manuscripts, unless we're talking about memos being leaked out of London and Washington.

I notice that you set up an earnest/ironic dichotomy in the third sentence of your note. I am certain that in a drop needle test I would come across as the more scare quote ironic of the two of us. I mean, look, there's the word at the end of the post below. As it happens, I'm not sure what either of us means by earnest or ironic, but I do know that I've been writing for years about the inadequacy of that binary when discussing the work of our generation. I don't see what either of us gets from wearing those particular intramural t-shirts. (If we're playing badminton, though, you're toast.)

Anyway, thanks for your note.