(no subject)

[owlectomy]

I will not slog through French sources for a paper for a class where I'm pretty much guaranteed an A for showing up. I will not slog through French sources. I will not slog through French sources. I will--

Well, not unless all the other books on the subject are godawful bad.

Goodness, this is why I do not try to write flavorful prose. I have the greatest dread that this is how it would come out:

This becomes the riddle of his youth: His mother's illiteracy is both the source of her degradation and the source of her power. With her spells and her prayers, she is in touch with the mysteries of the universe, or so it seems to the boy. The forces of life and death join in mumbled incantations. It is as if fate thrusts Jean Francois toward his mother's illiteracy, tormenting and goading him to fight back. And he does fight back: fiercely.

(The Linguist and the Emperor, Daniel Meyerson. It's like that ALL THE WAY THROUGH.)

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Did you read all the way through to find out if it was? How uhh admirably professional of you.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I read about half of it--the parts about the linguist, not the emperor--only to find out, when I looked at my other sources, that the scholarship was worse than the prose.

One wonders how these things get published.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

People who don't know the difference between fiction and non-fiction? I can see a sad story about some editor who always wanted to do novels but found themselves working in an academic publishing firm and who pushes scholarly works that *sound* like novels.

Or was the work originally in French? That would explain a lot. (/snotty)