I confess I find your charitable characterization of Odell’s supposed good intentions and naïveté rather more capacious than the facts seem to warrant. My own vituperative animus, as you put it, is directed less at Odell himself than at the peculiar species of devotional fantasy his admirers seem so prone to cultivate. There is something almost anthropologically fascinating about the manner in which his more ardent votaries impute to him profundity, benevolence, and discernment while he appears to regard them with the sort of benign condescension one reserves for a particularly enthusiastic audience. Your defense of his naïveté is therefore perhaps less an indictment of my contempt than another charming specimen of the phenomenon that occasioned it.