inducing the same kind of instinctive squirming empathy one might feel watching a
slippery fresh-born goat or foal struggling to gain its wobbly legs, then frustration, and
ultimately, downright boredom. Actors who can't act, who just don't have ‘it’ in them
but still lust for the limelight all the same, tend to overact, emote too strongly, lack
subtlety, nuance, timing, etc, and end up as hams (better to be looked over than
overlooked, said the ugly piglet to the Hollywood producer)...Sadly, in your case, the
‘victim’ is writing; and until the day you toss out the window everything you ever
learned in the halls of academia, stop ‘borrowing’ so heavily from truly sourceful
authors and texts, stop strangling words of their meaning before they've even had the
chance to express themselves, then torturing them into some inanely incomprehensible
‘critical mass’ (mess, more like), you will continue to write drivel, like a stale and tired,
but dogged, plebian rote-learned borrower, the eternal apostle, hamming it up as a
psuedo-intellectual, a pseudo-sage, and fooling no-one but yourself. I've had some
experience with the likes of you before—among them, my own tedious, gormless,
humourless German-Jewish father, who was the epitome of the intellectual ‘groupie’ of
his generation, with all the trappings and demeanor of the stereotypical ‘intellectual’
(the beard, the walking stick, the pipe, the corduroys, the rumpled tweed jacket, the
elbow pads, the thick glasses, the books under the arm, the distant, mysterious gaze, all
the ‘props’) but with nary an original thought (let alone a snappy quip, nor a little
devilish levity, pun intended) between his hairy ears! And that's before I got to university
myself, and groaned at the lead-weighted buffoons and dullards staffing the supposed
"halls of learning", like some ghoulish legion of walking-dead civil servants shuffling
towards ‘clock-off’.
Your ‘pieces’ in The Advertiser held some potential in their general trajectory, but
between the ooh-so-obvious ‘cut-and-paste’ excerpts from your own under-grad
efforts, and your sad attempts at flippancy and cerebral élan, they deserved only to be
hung on the inside of the toilet door, and not for the reading either—except perhaps for
the