Letters to the editors

We encourage your participation in this project with your comments on the publication & its perspectives. While we will read every letter, we will usually print the most enticing & engaging. E-mail letters or letters sent on disk are appreciated.

Write us! at PO Box 6, Liberty, TN 37095, or 4632 Second Avenue, Detroit, MI 48201, or email FifthEstate@pumpkinhollow.net

Dear FE Detroit Collective:

I got the issue stating that you all are passing on the paper! Just wanted to thank you for your many, many years of this project. I can’t believe I’ve been reading the paper since 1976.

Over the years, it has given me lots to think about and challenge me. I’m not in the same place I was in ’76 (literally and philosophically), but I’m still glad to read each issue.

The Tennessee collective has big shoes to fill! I hope some of you continue to write for the “new” FE. Good luck in your future endeavors.

Patti

Winchester Springs, Mass.

Walker Lane responds: Thanks for being such a consistent reader and supporter all these years. Don’t worry, the old folks in Detroit aren’t being led out to pasture. We will continue to write, edit and do layout, however, most of the critical decisions and much of the work on each issue will be done by our friends in Tennessee. Also, I think they’ve shown with the last issue and this one, that they’ve already filled the big shoes.

Dear FE Collective:

I read with interest the poem about monkeys printed in the latest issue of Fifth Estate (“Monkey Shines,” by Guy Lockwood in Letters, FE #356, Spring, 2002). The writing paints an idealistic picture of monkeys in the wild, as in the lines,

“He doesn’t work for any boss,

Out in his forest, wild,

But shares his gain, likewise his loss

With kindred undefiled.”

Nice idea, but what I’ve seen during recent visits to several forests with monkeys in West Africa, is that the larger and more powerful males often intimidate the weaker of the species, and when coming across food, grab as much as they can carry and quickly run off with it, away from their “kindred undefiled.” Sound like familiar behavior?

qani belul,

Accra, Ghana

Dear FE Collective:

It is great to see that the Fifth Estate is continuing. I look forward to the next issue. Also, thank you for John Clark’s review of the first issue of The Utopian in FE #356, Spring, 2002.

His review was positive overall, while engaging himself with the various authors. Since then a second issue has come out, including further analysis of Marxism, anarchism and African-American liberation, and a discussion of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth. We have begun to work on the next issue. Our material can be accessed at our website, www.utopianmag.com.

Wayne Price