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In This Issue

• Celebrate Our Appendix!
• Alternative Motherhood
• Gossip and Nudity: Interview with the Gossip
• Letters to the Feditors
• The Colombia Spectador
• Yowie! How the Brazilians do bikini wax
• Making Waves
• Am I Naked or Nude?
• Marauding Interviewer: Dwarves Fascinated by Own Pants
• Big Nudity Exam
• Point – Counterpoint
• ‘Is It Cold In Here?’
• News Briefs
• News Quiz: Do you know about the important events going on in your world?
• Eight Situations In Which I Am Naked
• Get Your Hands Off Me You Damn, Dirty Apes
• Naked Haikus
• Naked Horoscopes
• This is Not a Naked Santa
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 16.8

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION: Some time ago, I contributed a piece entitled “Orgo Night and Revolution” to the opinion pages of the Spectator, Columbia’s most recyclable daily. The piece contained this author’s usual dirty tricks as entertainment, including links between the daughter of a prominent Columbia College dean and the Greek musical entertainer, Yanni, and some throwaway lines about “sloe-eyed Hollywood wench Julia Stiles.” Two days later, am impassioned 500 word reply appeared in the Spectator from Miss Stiles. I was startled she took it seriously; name-calling is what I do, and hyperbolic is my preferred tenor in which to do it. Name-calling is a sort of theoretical physics for the short, bespectacled Jewish man with no talent for theoretical physics. In practised hands, the adjectives get so good that the subject becomes immaterial; the only thing necessary to make “sloe-eyed Hollywood wench” comedically perfect is for Miss Stiles to have, as she indulgently does, the necessary sloe eyes. In the course of an intellectual dispute a little while back, I called an old friend an unwashed small-cocked martinet. It was intemperate; I really don't know about the Wee Willy Winkie in question. But the line was well-phrased — and that is -why he forgave me, treating me to a guest meal at the John Jay Dining Hall crowned with a pork loin almost as tender and delicious as it was free.

Miss Stiles, from her fierce words, has not forgiven me. Many of my friends took her side, even as I assailed them as sniveling no-nuts Platonist aesthetes. My aunt, a professor of English literature, took Julia Stiles' side; she thought that the intense Shakespeareaness must have been most wounded by the epithet 'Hollywood.' At least my friends in the labor movement stood by me. But I didn't know what to think. I was torn, like a Siberian husky-German shepherd mutt at the battle of Stalingrad. I decided to have it both ways, writing the following letters and vetting them with the young men who have affixed their names before sending them to the Spectator, which declined them both. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did attempting to pass them off as the work of others.

Ben Letzler

I was moved by Julia Stiles' searing critique of the sordidness of campus journalism ("Enough Is Enough," February 22, 2001.) Though I have admired his prose style in the past, Ben Letzler was mean, little, and petty in what he said about Miss Stiles.  She is not a "sloe-eyed Hollywood wench," and her tuition is not "paid by Twentieth Century Fox," as that smear-job artist writes. She is a great actress, and her tuition is paid for by millions of adoring fans, like me, whose lives get a little brighter when she appears up on the screen for us. She does not have to apologize for what she has said about Columbia on television, Julie Stiles is a star. And if you are reading this, Julia, can me.

Yours sincerely,

Luke "the Chef Donatelli
CC'04

To the editor,

I was appalled by Julia Stiles' recent op-ed piece, "Enough Is Enough," writing about herself. Since when does this paper give space to baby celebrities to bellyache about their media reception? Op-ed writer Ben Letzler called Julia Stiles a "wench" and attacked her vehemently for calling the John Jay serving folks "mole people." "Mole people"? These are hard-working folks. I mean, come on; as my North Carolina daddy would say, that just ain't right. Maybe Letzler was wrong to call her a wench, but then again, she did have her midriff showing on "Save the Last Dance" posters at every bus stop in the tri-state area. And why does she get space to whine? Why not me, too? Are celebrities better than the rest of us?

Regards,

Daniel G. Fulton,
CC ‘04