Robin Skelton objects to my use of "Twelve" rather than "XII." " In fact, both forms of the name are used in my hook. My stylistic technique in writing Brother Twelve was to sculpt the events of this man's life into a narrative that would make him live for the reader. I have taken no liberties with fact. Since much of the material was from private files (including the files of Brother Twelve's lawyer, Frank Cunliffe), footnotes would have been tedious. I incorporated the source of quoted material into the body of the text itself wherever possible, and included instead of a bibliography - a list of numerous books dealing with theosophical history for background information.

John Oliphant

Vancouver

IN RESPONSE to Robin Skelton's letter about Brother Twelve, the earlier McIsaac-Clark-Lillard book was not included in my review precisely because it is rather slim and not thoroughly researched. John Oliphant's book is based on extensive original, unpublished research. There is no bibliography mainly because, except for background books on theosophy, the reliable published sources are simply not there to draw from. The typed transcripts from the numerous interviews for the book, as well as lengthy court transcripts and letters, provide sources that only Mr. Oliphant has, and allow him to verify the parts of the story from Bruce McElvie, Robert England, and so forth that Mr. Skelton questions. Mr. Oliphant spent almost 10 years sorting out fact from fiction and getting at the characters and the spirit of the enterprise, before skilfully weaving the facts into a damned exciting narrative. Too exciting, apparently, to be believable to Mr. Skelton. But, nevertheless, true.

Erich Hoyt

Edinburgh, Scotland

I TAKE EXCEPTION to "Personally Speaking" (December), Jim Christy's review of The Thinking Heart: Best Canadian Essays, a book that includes my "Zen in America." His apparent weakness for essays whose themes are "timelessly" personal and pastoral has blinded him to the real focus of George Galt's selection. The pieces that Christy reviles (by Blaise and Salutin, for example, but there are others) are in fact among the best: sensitive and challenging attempts to confront the current cultural crisis, to come to terms with issues of boundaries and identities, to explore the pull between regionalist and continentalist visions of Canada.

Christy's "country gentleman" posture, that of a man living above and outside the tainted politics of his time, suggests the kind of elitism that refuses to engage in anything so messy or complex as a debate about our future. This is his choice, but it doesn't give him the right to dismiss those who do.

Ann Diamond

Montreal

OH MY, Alec McEwen is at it again, doing the two things that blinkered, prescriptive grammarians are always happily reduced to, the two things that language snobs everywhere delight in hearing about.

Two: insist on making distinctions between words that are gradually becoming synonymous. Mr. McEwen's examples are precipitous and precipitate: he would confine

the former to meaning hasty or rash, and the latter to meaning steep, in spite of the authority of English usage and "many dictionaries." Mr. McEwen reminds me of Saddam Hussein during the last days of the Gulf War, overwhelmingly beseiged but still declaring victory and asserting his leadership in the face of all the contradictory evidence. Again, the same arguments apply: language changes, and there are no inviolable meanings or usages of words.

Mr. McEwen's old-fashioned whining about right and wrong is out of place in an otherwise hip and progressive magazine such as Books in Canada. Please drop him and give me a call.

Wayne Jones

Ottawa

I'M NO DECONSTRUCTION expert, but it seems to me Antanas Sileika's letter ("Doctor in the House?," February) could use a little. Starting with all those violent images: giving John Metcalf "a good clout on the ear," sicking the cops on me, and how about his description of my rebuttal to Metcalf's plea for the abolition of arts grants to writers, "I saw Susan Crean lumber out of the deconstructionist alley armed with brass knuckles and her' different concepts of excellence."'

Sileika complains of being drowned in the sea of mediocre Canadian books, of having to leaf through so much "dross" in his search for small-press books to review that he can only assume the writers were related to the publishers or paid their way into print. Are we meant to take this as serious criticism? Are we supposed to accept such overheated opinion as evidence Canada produces more dross than other countries, and go on to debate the issue of how truly inferior we are as a literary culture? How do we know this isn't just plain old colonial-mindedness talking? How do we know this isn't Chuck Cook talking?

Two points need to be made about Sileika misrepresentation of my piece. When I wrote about excellence, I was referring to the problems created when cultural policy is based on absolute notions about quality and single definitions of excellence. I argued for an approach that recognizes cultural diversity. When I wrote about competition, I wasn't obviously, commenting on the systems of grants, prizes, and publication that put writers into competition with other writers. I was talking about the attitude of reviewers like Antanas Sileika who take as their role in life to pass judgement on books rather than to appreciate them, to rate writers rather than to explore their work, whose effect is to turn the discussion of literature and ideas into a horse race.

How about a little enthusiasm for what we have achieved, some encouragement for the task that lies ahead? Or is that too much to ask of a man whose thoughts turn to fantasies of physical violence when someone suggests that the Academy discriminates?

Susan Crean

Toronto

Author Speaks

IN HER blistering review of my book, A Mirror to Nature ("Bodily Harm," October), Heather Menzies dismisses, with breathtaking ease, this cross-section of my life's work as shallow, sensational, and devoid of originality or insight. And she does so suffocatingly, without even once permitting my words to speak.

Oddly enough, others have found a measure of merit in at least a few of the items in this admittedly "uneven" retrospective aimed at chronicling my metamorphosis as a science writer.

For example, "Matanza," a meticulously documented and previously unpublished account of the massacre in 1982 of an entire Mayan village, a story still largely unknown to the general public, has received praise from scholars and honours from the Mayan refugee community in Canada.

Sheldon Krimsky, a leading American historian of the recombinant-DNA debate, has called the final essay, "Blaming Crime on Chromosomes," the single "best presentation [of the famous XYY controversy] I have found."And Genethics, the book in which it originally appeared, won acclaim from the London Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, and other publications around the world.

I can only assume that Menzies would, in similar tones of ideological certainty, also condemn these voices to the same dark dark depths of perpetual ignorance to which she seems to have so impatiently condemned mine.

Peter Knudtson

Vancouver

WITH REFERENCE to the ungrammatical aren't I? that Alec McEwen discusses in "Technical Corrections" (Last Words, February). My Irish wife, her Dublin family, and all their friends have always used the contraction amn't I? - the short form of am not. But then, the Irish were ever more grammatical than the English.

I thought you'd like to know.