The above is the opening sentence of the first-ever blog by infuriating-to-many and icon-for-some, the late Norman Mailer (), who had once opined, “If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.” Which only added to Mark Twain’s sarcastic remark, “Journalism is the one solitary respectable profession which honors theft.”
Now that you know my own propensity for (mis)quoting famous people, here are a few hints for … (well, myself if you like).
To Whom It May Concern,
You seem overwhelmed. You are exerting yourself way above and beyond the call of duty. You have been commenting about almost every post on this site for quite a while now; sometimes more than once, and sometimes with more than one voice. Your comments have become stale and prosaic, your video clips worn out. There is not much novelty – let alone originality – left in either. You have rearranged, reformatted and repeated your comments, ad nauseum, and still they are not taken seriously. You sound like a broken record. You should be exhausted.
Your reactions are Pavlovian, triggered by a touchy word here, or an annoying phrase there. Some of your comments have no connection to the subject of the main post; you either wrote them before reading the text, or after glancing at the first few lines, or god forbid you had read it all to the end but couldn’t digest it. They are boilerplate. It sounds a cliché, but you seem apt to judging a book by its cover. Have you ever read one of your earlier comments? How do they sound to you, afterward?
You are intellectually depleted. Your rendition of history is delusional. Your posts are a collage of disjointed verbiage and video, many of which you have repeatedly used before. They’re passé. I noticed you are borrowing – rather liberally – ideas, concepts even terminology from other writers; some of which you seem not to even connect with. I am not accusing you of plagiarism, though. I am just saying when the singer and the song are discordant, neither one sounds worthy – a Karaoke singer you are not.
A few words about ventriloquism: (1) the funny and entertaining one is usually the dummy. The one who is sober – and appears somewhat embarrassed by the other – is the puppeteer, not the other way around. (2) To avoid confusing the audience, puppeteer and dummy should use distinct voices. (3) During a conversation between the two, the puppeteer must keep his own jaws immobile when the dummy ‘speaks.’
About multiplicity: One needs to possess the acting talent of Michael Keaton (in Multiplicity) to be able to play more than one character in the same scene, without forgetting one’s different roles – and mixing up in the middle of a performance. Multiplicity is not for amateurs.
As always,
HS
