All my viewers must be on vacation this week so I’m left to my own amusement and devices. I am still hand sewing, binding and sleeves. That reminds me I need to print a label for this too and soon.
I wrote off some pretty fine haiku in the past couple days and got some nice re-tweets: always a nice feeling.
While someone is trying to make some sense out of my admittedly mushy essay about Frankenstein, I read four by my co-students and was amazed and not so delighted. One was about War of the Worlds by HG Wells. Sort of a ramble-y essay but see, that book’s not on our reading list and HG Wells isn’t for a couple weeks yet… Two were all right, not over the top fabulous or anything but all right.
The first one I read I’m going to quote here just to amuse myself in the future when confronted with a need to laugh heartily over something ridiculous. It included:
They [the Shelleys] added language, giving the document enough physical weight and bulk to appear novel-like when sitting on the bookshelf, but failed to compellingly expand the story, metaphor or characters. They added weight with words lacking substance or purpose. Pages of monotonous monologue; heaped reams of repetitious rhetoric reeking of horse manure reinforced with the feces of swine failed to convert short story into novel. Limpid studies of minor characters and anecdotes inappreciably affiliated with plot distract from rather than contribute to the transformation. The primary narrator, Victor Frankenstein, exhibits one outstanding characteristic: self-importance. He endlessly assures listeners of his decorum, acumen and magnanimity but his actions betray an in-vertebrate quitter, unenlightened thinker and bad scientist consumed by narcissistic self-pity. Deep as a paper-doll, he describes with baroque excess his failure to resolve the singular situation set up by his creation of the monster.
I trust more people will have read and continue to read Frankenstein than will read the submitter of this gem. My response:
This is not an essay crafted “to enrich the reading of a fellow student who is both intelligent and attentive to the readings and to the course.” It is an emotional, rude and vicious book review that is useful only to your ego.
When my eyes arrived at: “words lacking substance or purpose. Pages of monotonous monologue; heaped reams of repetitious rhetoric reeking of horse manure reinforced with the feces of swine ” in paragraph two, I knew I would only need to quote your own words to summarize my judgement of this assignment. Thank you for wasting my time.
