McSweeney's Open Letters

Although The Corsair lives in the right part of Brooklyn, he isn't allowed to play reindeer games with those hip folks at McSweeney's. Yet. But I'm drinking milk ...

Anyway: The McSweeneyites have a new feature in which they allow people to write open letters to "people or entities who are unlikely to respond." Mine would begin something along the lines of:

"Dear Naomi Campbell:

"Although I am not a dangerous multimillionaire Chechnyan rebel, I harbor terrorist longings in my heart, for I believe that you are tha bomb! "

Something along those lines. The McSweeneyites put more thought into it, though, as Anna McKerrow of the UK shows us in her open letter to Yuppie Mummies (Yummies), which begins:

"Dear Yummies,

Upon the groves and the park walks of the city, the greener pastures, you trundle lightly with your streamlined and turbocharged buggies. You talk languorously on your video-mobiles to other yuppie mummies, clad exclusively in Dolce & Gabbana loungewear. You do not have infant-sick on your jeans or bags under your eyes. You are pristinely gorgeous and rich.

"Yuppie mummies, you drive your small, precocious offspring to Montessori schools in Land Rovers totally inappropriate for London roads before heading off to the gym for a few light stretches. You have a health-conscious overpriced lunch in a designer caf�. You arrive home just in time to berate the housekeeper for misdemeanours real or imagined.

"I wish I had your lifestyle, Yummies, but I think I would still feel the emptiness. With the necessity to work removed, does the light shine harder through the mesh of your everyday existence? Is it harder to fill the days? Your children are the joy of your life, but is their presence at a removed distance dimmer, more hazy, as satellites to the (regained) body beautiful?"

You get the picture. The Corsair especially likes the open letters to centripetal force, alcohol and Louis XIV.