My review of G. Xavier Robillard’s Captain Freedom appears in today’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, along with many other interesting pieces, including Mark Athitakis’s profile of Jesse Ball.
© 2009, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.
My review of G. Xavier Robillard’s Captain Freedom appears in today’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, along with many other interesting pieces, including Mark Athitakis’s profile of Jesse Ball.
© 2009, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.
I’m trying to be kinder and gentler online lately, but I can’t help myself. Dude. Think before you write. If you think you’re already thinking before you write, then all I can tell you is you need to THINK HARDER.
Your first sentence. We have an entire genre of novels which is somehow lost in an elderly haze. (Why is it elderly? Because you couldn’t resist a quibble on the prefix “super-” for no reason.) In spite of being very old and lost in a haze, this genre is also simultaneously chasing after the exhaust of the comic book industry.
The exhaust from this metaphoric vehicle, rather than being exhaust as we normally know it, is somehow both “bright” and “profitable”.
However, there is a problem. The dog/person is not as mirthful as a recent dog/person who chased the profitable exhaust. Insufficient mirth in an exhaust-chaser! What a dilemma!
In just one sentence, you manage to bungle about six metaphors. Superhero novels are like a very old, visually impaired, insufficiently mirthful dog or person chasing after a vehicle which is spitting out money and light instead of exhaust.
This is amazing stuff. I’m only surprised that you didn’t somehow work flying monkeys, Chechnya, space travel, fig trees or Bic pens into your metaphor. It was crying out for them!
albtraum: No, you simply lack reading comprehension. You’re very much into words fitting into austere Latin roots (you must be an embittered Engish teacher) and literal-minded interpretation.
A fact for you, Mr. Wordsmith: “Superannuated” also means out-moded or old-fashioned. (Examples of this are cited later in the review with Erik Estrada, Billy Crystal, et al.) And just think for a moment what you see when you see something in a haze? Or can you? You see, there’s this thing called imagery you may have heard about. Why you immediately assume that the exhaust is related to the haze? Might it not also be related to fatigue? Ah, but you can’t. Because you’re still trying to read a prose style that is often written to ferret out the literal-minded bores of our world and that you clearly despise. You lack the imagination to go the distance. The superhero novel is not a dog or a person. It is a novel. But you cannot fathom that it would be capable of settling or chasing. You cannot accept the possibility (as many writers do) that a novel is organic and that it might likewise take on these figurative qualities. God, it must be terrible for you to live such a banal and unimaginative life.
Mr. Robillard, if I am to judge him from the novel I’ve read, understands how these verbs apply to fiction. And in writing this review, I was trying to help him, while likewise informing readers what his book is about. I think he has talent, and I hope that he will do better. I was also deploying some lively and entertaining language.
My advice to you, sir, is to simply not read my stuff. You don’t care for what I do. And that’s your right. Just as I have the right to see your “critique” for the unhelpful balderdash and trollery that it truly is. You’ve appeared here numerous times. And I just don’t understand it. Why on earth would you bother to read me if it so offends your vanilla sensibilities when it’s just so easy to ignore my ostensible offenses to the English language? I mean, surely, there’s plenty of Edmund Burke volumes sitting on your lonely bookshelves that will permit you to get your fix. Be happy with the words you enjoy. Not the work you won’t get it and that you’ll never get. Although I’ve certainly attempted with this explanation to offer you a quick look under the hood. It’s a shame you’re too unimaginative to have fun with the sentences that I spend a lot of time thinking and crafting with very specific purposes in mind.
Well, at least I apparently don’t have to worry about hurting your feelings with my criticism – you seem very optimistic.
I keep commenting on here because of a contradiction I’m trying to grapple with. You seem to have relatively good taste in literature in some ways, but are yourself apparently unable to write two sentences in a row without a mixed metaphor or malapropism. It’s kind of fascinating. I’ll try to stay away if I can in the future.