This comment is intended for Lisa Donald, the author of “Bowling, Gender, and Emasculation in The Big Lebowski” (I didn’t see an email for her specifically).

Lisa,

I enjoyed your paper on The Big Lebowski, published on the Dudepages website. I’m a grad student in English at the University of Rochester, and I used to teach a freshman writing class on the films of the Coen brothers. When we covered The Big Lebowski, we talked quite a bit about the themes you discuss in your paper. It’s actually interesting to note that these themes tend to resonate with the ostensible inspiration of the film, The Big Sleep. I refer here to the book much more than the movie, where a lot of these things got removed due to decency regulations the film industry.

Also, since you say in your paper that you were only able to find one decent scholarly treatment of the film, I thought you might be interested to know that there’s actually quite a good scholarly book on the Coens that includes a chapter on The Big Lebowski that, like you, laments the cursory disregard that the film received from so many critics. The Book is called simple “Joel and Ethan Coen,” and the author is R. Barton Palmer (who is a medievalist, of all things).

So anyway, like I said, I liked the paper. Just thought you might be interested in those two tidbits, if you didn’t already know them.

Best, Dustin