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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
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Henry, at The Occasional Review… …analyzes with some care the Columbia Spectator writer’s unimpressive prose. It was an analysis I didn’t want to do, though I saw the same thing, because I wanted to focus on the larger scandal of Columbia’s MFA program that the writer inelegantly describes. But Henry’s more or less correct that the writing illustrates how a writer can - while making assertions that are, for all I know, totally accurate - expose himself … thoroughly as a pompous jackass. And in a few hundred words! I also find it rather amusing that a professor who accuses students of being barely literate is such a terrible writer. Henry, like UD, also singles out the language that a “senior colleague” the writer quotes uses. But while UD had only a brief parenthetical comment to make about this colleague’s English, Henry goes to town on him: [Slouka] … provide[s] a thumbnail sketch from an unnamed "senior colleague," who has apparently been hanging out a lot in the 17th century: "How I wish I could believe there will be some surcease, some righting of the ship in the foreseeable [future]. Alas, I fear it will not be so." My stars, will there be no surcease? Alack, what poverty my muse brings forth - O, Gods, blame me not if I no more can write! This is cruel but funny. |