In the old days you could read something and right a comment on it and get that comment accepted right away and published

 Nowadays, presses have enormous staffs whose job is to delay, thwart, fiddle around, pass the buck, have another cocktail, snooze.

I had wanted to show the relationship between textual scholarship and theory--to show that you could not build a strong theory without scholarship. Here was a perfect opportunity.

CRITICAL INQUIRY was waiting in Delaware on 3 July 1983 when I returned from a trip to California.

I received the Summer 1982 CRITICAL INQUIRY  on 22 June 1982. I read the article on "Against Theory" in the next days wrote the reply to it between 28 June through 8 July 1982 and mailed it on 8 July 1982 and received an acceptance on 19 July 1982.--and the June 1983 issue was at my house in Wilmington when I returned on 3 July 1983.

So between 8 July and 19 July the article had to go to Chicago and someone had to like it and the acceptance letter reached me 19 July.  This is how scholarship should go.