What, Do we have cooties?

Bob Price is Right

Bravo! to the City Paper on its reporting about Bob Price, the unemployed steelworker (“A Millwright’s Tale,” City Folk, Dec. 12). Finally, a story about an intelligent workingman with insight about the state of American labor and real ideas about what needs to be done about the Sparrows Point plant. What we don’t need is another Disneyland, a Six Flags amusement park, or if our politicans-for-hire have their way, a Grand Prix raceway. I applaud Ed Ericson Jr. of the City Paper for his refusal to stereotype workingpeople as just so many Homer Simpsons with nothing to offer—something not to be found in “mainstream” media (read: Rodricks of The Baltimore Sun) which pushes the ridiculous myth that manufacturing jobs are being shipped overseas “because Americans don’t want to do such work” or other nonsense such as importing more cheap labor from south of the border is necessary because “Americans don’t want to do such blue-collar work.” What next, another rigged referendum catering to the misguided minority that manufacturing is no longer necessary in our new-and-improved casino economy?

Pete Selavi

Baltimore

What, Do we have cooties?

As a Baltimore native and a writer myself, I love to pick up City Paper when I’m at home in Baltimore. But I was profoundly disappointed to see your top ten of 2012 issue (Feature, Dec. 12), which included ZERO females in the list of top ten fiction books and only three in the list of nonfiction books. City Paper, a publication that I’ve always thought of as progressive, can and should be doing more to lessen the persistent and archaic gender disparity in the publishing and literary world. This is not a case of “men writing better books” or “we chose the books we liked the most”; there is, and has been, overwhelmingly excellent writing published by women for years. Is there a reason you left out critically acclaimed novels by females in 2012, including fiction by Zadie Smith, Sheila Heti, Gillian Flynn, Lauren Groff, Jami Attenberg, and more? What City Paper has done this year is privilege the work of men and ignore the work of women, thus reinforcing the extreme lack of attention and acceptance that women writers receive from the establishment in the writing world, be that The New York Times, literary magazines, or a simple alt-weekly. I invite you to visit VIDAweb.org (vidaweb.org/the-count) and learn why gender disparity in the writing world matters. Perhaps you’ll think twice before publishing another biased and myopic list like this one.

Carrie Murphy

Alexandria, VA

Corrections: The photograph of DJ Landis Expandis in Hey DJ (Dec. 12) should have been attributed to Theresa Keil.

In “Christmix” (Music, Dec. 19), we mistakenly referred to the title of the album Holidays Rule.

Though we correctly printed the winners of our annual poetry prize in the body of the paper (Feature, Dec. 19), in the introduction we transposed the second and third place winners. City Paper regrets the errors.