January 11, 2006
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
Dear Asshat,
I see you've gone through this entire library book making notes &
jotting down your thoughts. It's nice you did it in ink, so your
wisdom is preserved for the ages. It's so easy to remember the
characters since you keep writing their names in the margin, sometimes
with garbled family trees. I especially like your essays
on theme &
conflict, which are completely idiotic & show you have no idea what the
fuck you're talking about.
I'm also staggered by your copy editing skills. Never mind the book was already edited by a professional, clearly it was just waiting for your pen to add that certain je ne sais quoi. I'm pretty sure you drive a Honda Civic, & probably have a cat. Obviously, you weren't swept away by the story, otherwise you wouldn't still be doing genealogies on page 311 & inscribing your profound drivel.
I believe it was Kafka who said, A book is an axe for the frozen sea within. Note he did not say it was a Post It for you to jot down your witless claptrap. You are an ass. Sorry, but I really like this writer, & checked out the book thinking it contained one novel, not two.
Your friend
Jeff
Posted by Jeff at January 11, 2006 05:55 AM
Comments
Well, I find basic copy editing errors in books all the time. Though those are usually near-throwaway polemics and not actual literature. Besides, it's still better than this person actually thinking she can write a book (like Washingtonienne).
Posted by: Josh at January 11, 2006 03:04 AM
Jotting helps some people think.
What are you? against free expression???
I thought so. Typical Republican.
;-)
Posted by: Rightwingsparkle at January 11, 2006 06:23 AM
Yeah! And I'll bet he even used it as a bathroom book...
Posted by: agent bedhead at January 11, 2006 08:18 AM
What kind of ghetto rat gets their books from a library?
Posted by: Bill from INDC at January 11, 2006 08:39 AM
This wasn't that chunk of Star Jones effluvium, was it? I'll bet that thing was rife with typos.
Posted by: utron at January 11, 2006 11:11 AM
The nitwit was copy editing things that weren't typos!
Posted by: beautifulatrocities at January 11, 2006 12:38 PM
I take exception to the possibility that the person owns a cat.
These days such people own little dogs, like P. Hilton does.
Posted by: Jeff at January 11, 2006 12:55 PM
Speaking of P****, can't we start some kind of campaign where all the bloggers on the web agree that she's way too far in the red on her 15 minutes? It could be used as a time of healing where people from both the left and the right can agree that we all have this one enemy in common. I think that even if she does something to warrant her celebrity status, she still owes us for the time she's stolen from us.
Posted by: slug at January 11, 2006 03:41 PM
When I was a student, I'd borrow tonnes of books from the Uni library that were literally covered in scribbles, annotations, that sort of thing. Weird stuff, too - it ranged from copy-editing to bizarre Freudian interpretations and historical notes about the life of the author. I went to Australia's oldest uni (Sydney University) so they had some pretty old books in the collection. Interestingly, some of the oldest books escaped this kind of note-taking, while others didn't. I guess it reflected their popularity.
Sometimes you wished that the notes would be more interesting - people exchanging gossip, swear words, graffiti - but it never was. Once I tried making those sort of notes, as well, in one of my own books; but it didn't work. It got distracting. So much easier to, you know, read them than to take notes.
Posted by: TimT at January 11, 2006 06:36 PM
What's a li-berry? Is that where people used to get their information before there was the internet?
=darwin
Posted by: Darwin at January 12, 2006 10:18 AM
BWAAHAA!
Posted by: Steve at January 12, 2006 03:49 PM
I worked in a library for almost 20 years, and I say it's better than buggers!
Posted by: pepektheassassin at January 14, 2006 10:30 PM