Subject: Re: Cravenhearted.
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Wed Feb 20 2002 - 15:53:17 GMT
First of all, there’s the simple lack of manners of someone
who so self-absorbedly slams out onto his reader’s plate
those great, grey turds of print. What a cheek. That’s no
way to get my attention, buddy. Or, even, Buddy.
And the wordy pretentiousness of little smart alecs is a joke
of real but decidedly limited potential: enough to sustain
a paragraph, or a page maybe – but certainly no more. For
that really is all there is to it. To try to elevate the whole
enterprise into a kind of borstch circuit bildungsroman won’t
wash; that only brings us back to the Salinger Sunday school
where tiny tots learn the meaning of goodness from Mom
(in her various guises – other holy children, saintly Russians,
dead brothers.)
But of course the reason I truly loathe the story is the way it
reminds me so much of myself: my younger self at around,
OK not seven, but say thirteen when I started editing the school
magazine. Or, much MUCH worse, myself nowadays when
the night watchman has dozed off & my real self emerges
from the sewer. There’s the same preening, the same banal
pseudosubtlety, the same hyperadjectivitis, the same – oh Jesus –
drollness.
The same...
I can’t go on.
Scottie B.
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