Response to Ruskin:

The open letter seems, to me, to be a vehicle to show personality while also expressing viewpoints, in a way that one couldn’t in an essay or lecture. That was certainly my impression of Ruskin’s letters, because in addition to his social critique, he included so many visual descriptions of what he was seeing, which cemented his identity as an art critic. There was something strange to me about Ruskin’s letters, however: I feel that open letters often provide an opportunity for the writer to seem a little less preachy because he or she is talking to friends and can be a little more casual. Ruskin, however, seemed much more preachy to me. The scene on p. 326 where he criticized a Venetian worker for thinking about costs, and not about other people, seemed ridiculous when Ruskin himself was a foreigner and not a manual laborer and therefore, could hardly understand this man’s situation. It did remind me a little of Agee, in that Ruskin was imposing himself on a situation he couldn’t really understand but still felt entitled to make commentary about.

Response to Baldwin:

Unlike Ruskin, I think Baldwin’s letter is so intimate that it does not come across as preachy at all. It is always strange for a child to hear about their parents as children and given the gravity of the experiences that Baldwin describes his brother experiencing, I imagine reading this letter would have been a very intense experience for his nephew – which also makes it even more poignant for other readers. I also found Baldwin’s lecture so compelling because he included specific lived experiences, like being told to use back doors or realizing his Park Ave is not like the Park Ave downtown. I think that using the example for the Third Reich in the 1960’s would really resonate with the teachers that he was addressing as it frames the seriousness of this issue in a way that any person at that time could understand.