Comments | wwidsith: "Virgil is not a bad writer.."

wwidsith

"Virgil is not a bad writer.."

Sep 10, 2009 17:30

While I love LibraryThing (being the sort of person who takes great pleasure in arranging his bookshelves by subject and alphabetical order of surname), the reviews posted there can sometimes send me into seething fits of frustration. Here are some that I have been subjected to this week, to give you an idea of the level of analysis some reviewers ( Read more... )

wearing the old coat, idiocy

Comments 12

commonpeople September 12 2009, 06:51:43 UTC

I use GoodReads, which is a similar type of site, but with a better caliber of reviewers I think.

dcozy September 12 2009, 09:44:32 UTC

You commented on my LJ about Fowles's A Maggot. Here's what one of the scholars at LibraryThing made of it:

"2007 A Maggot, by John Fowles (read 27 May 1986) Reading this book was a mistake. It tells a stupid story of a London prostitute taken on a trip by an English nobleman. The story is told mostly in questioning by the nobleman's father's lawyer of the persons who knew of the events of the trip. It is all so stupid and pointless."

wwidsith September 13 2009, 17:44:07 UTC

Excellent, perceptive analysis. Maybe he could write the introduction to the new editions.

(The comment has been removed)

wwidsith September 14 2009, 05:52:22 UTC

Yeah, that kind of combination of ignorance and smugness is pretty hard to take.

hazel_shea September 14 2009, 20:08:41 UTC

Oh my goodness me. That last one is particularly galling. I have always argued that use of the comma is down to a person's individual writing style, up to a point, but this person just abuses the comma and makes me reconsider my whole opinion on the issue.
And 'we watched the movie instead'? In a literature class?! No wonder some people think my degree was a total doss.

weofodthignen September 24 2009, 13:21:40 UTC

ROFL. This - and the need to genuflect before such abominations of Surtr as Henry James - is why I avoided teaching lit.

But seriously, never attempt to plumb the depths of ignorance and stupidity. That way madness lies.

Do you happen to remember Gary Hart, who was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 1987 and was caught on the yacht Monkey Business, umm, monkeying about with a chick the day after he challenged the press to find any evidence to support their allegations that he had a wandering eye? Well I had a student whose research paper draft turned a news report on that into "Gary Hart was a murderer who killed his wife and committed suicide." Political suicide, that is . . . this person probably now edit-wars on Wikipedia.

M