ANN ARBOR: Did Edward Said Like Mavi Jeans?

I'VE BEEN EXCHANGING E-MAILS with Jessica Coen after my post last weekend about her letter to the editor that was published in The Michigan Daily when I was editorial page editor back during my Ann Arbor days. From the letter, I thought that the article "Mavi Jeans so many varieties" was likely published in the Daily's Weekend, Etc. magazine. But Coen was convinced that it ran in the Daily's A section. Doing some additional archival research, it indeed ran in the Arts pages of the A section. I stand corrected.

But as an additional mystery, the Caitlin Friedemann Mavi piece has an accompanying interactive forum if you closely examine the archived webpage.

kindly accept my heartiest condolence of sad demise of professor adward w said a great thinker and also noble person of modern journalism. he was champion of palestini cause and always fight for democratic rights of people of all over the world....

Even the New York Times obit did not gloss over the fact that Edward Said threw a stone at an Israeli army outpost in 2000, which constituted an act of aggression, "symbolic" or otherwise, and for which he received much criticism from his faculty colleagues at Columbia....

So it is slightly unclear why the late Edward Said got tied up into the whole Mavi campus controversey sparked by Friedemann's article. Stranger thing have happened.