7/28/01 Letters to Fengi usually point out typos, broken links or to say "I did/didn't like this poem" - very useful, but not material to print. Reader responses to the Real World essay were longer and more colorful.

Here are samples the types of letters received. These are brief excerpts, as there were many many pages of this stuff. Letter writers have been kept anonymous, just to be fair.

Some letters touched on a variety of topics, from experiences watching the show, Real World history, analysis of the validity of the protests - essays, really. Some samples from the best one (by a Chicago resident):

"I've watched The Real World (RW) since the second season when an alumnus of my theater school made it on the show...At the time, I was still the same age as many of the cast members. I could have actually auditioned. My interest waned with the constant rebroadcasts.

"When Burnim/Murray Productions (the actual producers of RW and Road Rules) chose Seattle, I was interested again. I had lived in Seattle prior to moving to Chicago and had several friends there...I tuned into an episode [of Real World Seattle] that changed my whole perspective on the show. On this episode one of the cast gets a phone call from her brother informing her that her best friend had committed suicide. Both myself and the friend I was watching it with have had people close to us kill themselves. There was no warning label preceding the show and the devastation on the girl's face and her raw grief exposed to the world affected me deeply. I turned the TV off and was shaking with rage. How dare they spring that on their audience? I had lived in Seattle when Kurt Cobain took a shotgun to his head and was keenly aware of the sudden increase in teenage suicide after Kurt's demise. MTV's exploitation was so incredibly wrong and painful that I was in complete disbelief. I expected an outcry and there was none.

"MTV regularly showcases that episode as a ground-breaking "issue" episode. I had finally woken up to the evils of reality TV. Showing human tragedy for ratings was changing the world. It was fast becoming clear that Stephen King's The Running Man was the new Big Brother.

"...It's hard to say why I watch it. There's a part of me that grew up with Real World. There were times when I first moved to Chicago and didn't know many people that I felt my situation was shared by these people giving up their lives to go live in front of cameras for several months. I age, but the cast doesn't, so it keeps me in touch with what the kids are up to these days. It's always slightly embarrassing to be caught watching the show because it is truly a guilty pleasure. Plus, it's not even a pleasure most of the time, I feel dumber for having watched it. I can say that it is the only thing I watch on MTV these days. Once, MTV was a mind-blowing luxury. It was the shit.Now, it's the Gap and Starbucks.

"...The events of the past week surrounding Chicago RW may only play into MTV's hands. They've got marketing experts to spin and editors to cut and paste another "issue" episode. By the time the show airs, they'll be long gone. Chicago's mayor seems more concerned with tourists, rather than residents, and I've no doubt that the artists and radicals and activists will come off looking like asshole apples out to ruin everyone's good time. Then, as if by magic, it'll all fade away...

"From cast members testimonies I know that they are aware of what goes on in the outside world...Some cast members have kids now and some are married. When you're 20 you think you know that you can handle the consequences of your actions, but it's not until you're 30 and looking back that you realize just how naive you were back then.

"...I've seen far worse examples of performance art...People watching. It can certainly pass the time."

"i just relocated to chicago from st louis about two weeks ago. however, i have been back and forth to chicago to go to shows at Empty Bottle (my fave) and the like for the past 4 years. this weekend i happened upon the real world fiasco on the way to a friends party around the corner. i was delighted to see the mayhem and mess directed towards "the 'real' world" establishment. i pretty much moved here as gas, housing, and general living costs (unfortunately for my nearly broke ass) are on the drastic upward slope and i am sickened to see that the real world is here too."

"...congratulations on being an asshole to someone who's visiting your city. It always makes one feel better to be a smart-ass and unfriendly. I guess I would've respected your arguments about the RW (even if I might have disagreed with them) if you hadn't been a jerk to someone who I think didn't deserve it. It would've been nice if you had sincerely welcomed the guy to your city which I'm sure does include some nice, friendly people. Nah, better to be hip and elevate yourself by putting someone else down. Good job!"

"I am writing to express my utter disgust for that pointless essay written by Greg Gillam about the Real World. I have never in my life seen such an unsupported argument expressed on paper by anyone other than an elementary child...

"...Mr. Gillam is so enraged by his own emotions and bitterness that Wicker Park was being "gentrificated" that he fails to acknowledge photo journalists and cast members as artists, like he claims to be. When in fact, I argue that allowing one's life to be photgraphed and recorded and produced as a voyeuristic artform is in fact art...

"...Mr. Gillam is a bitter attempt at art, and allowing his rambling rhetoric on your popular site unfortunately tarnishes your image as well...encouraging protest, mob mentality and vandalism exhibits the kind of poor logic - and literature, I might add - that contaminates millions of young minds who think they need to express themselves in the pathetic manner that your own Greg Gillam has.

"While too lazy myself to formulate a strong case in favor of the Real World..."

Finally, one resident of Chicago articulated a deep, cutting ambivalence:

"...Having been a resident of Logan Square for five years, in the late nineties, I used to party in Wicker all the time. I threw a rock at a window of a building they were pasting up and I hated all the yuppies who were gentrifying the place. Of course, I was drunk off my ass and unemployed and angry and I had nothing better to do that night.

"Like everyone else, I've seen it morph from a funky-chic place into outdoor, urban shopping mall full of mostly unimaginative drones.

"After years of being underemployed and unemployed, I have finally become financially soluble and reside in Ravenswood. This is what I have found out here. There are older residents who have resided in this neighborhood for 40 to fifty years that have pranksters spray-painting "die yuppie scum" on the sides of their houses and I walk by a sign daily that is posted in front of an apartment building listing the name and number of that building which reads has "die yuppies" scrawled on it.

"But who am I to judge these struggling artists...after what I did? I just view it differently ...frankly I'm more concerned about where the country is going as a whole, and what Bush is doing now."