Dept. of Correction: After this item was posted, my correspondent asked that he not be identified. Accordingly, I've deleted his name. For the record, I mistook his given name for his surname. He has my apology.

He also asks that I not understand him too quickly. (His way of putting it is that he feels he's being made a straw man.) He says he's as familiar with The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, Dissent, Mother Jones, and the New Republic as he is with The New Criterion and The City Journal. He reports that his only magazine subscriptions are for arts magazines: Art in America, ArtForum, ArtNews, Modern Painters, and Art & Auction, plus Architectural Digest, and Opera News (via his long-standing membership at the Met Opera). And he reads the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, every day.

Further, he says he has never joined a political party, though he did vote in a Democrat primary, for Paul Tsongas, in 1992. As to his political tastes, he says he has bought and read more books by Christopher Hitchens (two) than by Ann Coulter (none). He says he has never purchased any other books by political or semi-political authors and prefers to read fiction.

To complete his self-profile, he says he's a big fan of painters Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jackson Pollock. In music, he enjoys the occasional Messiaen piece. His favorite authors are Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and Robert Coover. He has also written Amazon.com reviews for books by Coover, Anne Carson, Ian McEwan, André Gide, Georges Bataille and Don DeLillo. And he wonders whether a Republican would have even read any of the books he reviewed, much less given them positive notices.

Frankly, I wish he'd told me all that in the first place. He doesn't say whether he voted for Gee Dubya Shrub, though, and I'm not about to ask. Even someone who believes he's been made a straw man (though I don't believe so) has a right to privacy.