Pointless rant.
As some of you may know, I am finishing up my thesis on some books by Chinese American children's author Laurence Yep. Remembering the marvelous "Look Inside!" feature on Amazon.com, I decided to check out the item profile pages for newer editions of his work, suspecting that my older editions might not contain certain epigraphs I noticed in other editions. Then I came upon this. Namely, the "Customer Reviews." And now I'm trying to reason my way out of a tremendous urge to vomit upon/pulverize/exterminate a large portion of the Amazonian (and even that would be sacrilege to true Amazonians--Amazon.comians?) readership. True, Yep was not without his foibles, but the sheer, gross accusations by these abusers of the English language is at best, laughable. Okay, okay, I realize making Dragonwings required reading for apathetic 7th graders won't necessarily generate the most kind or coherent "reviews" for the book. And they seem to be (and I most certainly hope they are in fact) the ones responsible for most of those unsubstantial attacks. I guess I can take consolation in the fact that all they're really doing is exposing themselves to immediate ridicule, betraying their bald ignorance and utterly (uncharming) lack of sophistication or decency.
In short, I was fire-pissing-mad at a bunch of thirteen year old hooligans spraying public cyberspace with their horribly tasteless thoughts on an insightful work of literature by a writer I greatly admire (who hasn't replied back to me yet on my request for an interview, forwarded by his agent eleven days ago, *teAr*). This is nothing short of graffiti. In fact, I'd prefer actual griffiti--it's much more rich in meaning.
I guess what I want is some more regulation, even if it means (gasp) censorship for these "customer reviews." Not that I'm going Nazi on y'all, me lovelies, but at least with something even as fluid as the Wikipedia regulating system. And we all love Wikipedia, don't deny it.
That way, I can prevent in the future, spending another twenty minutes of my precious life trying to reduce my mental/spiritual allergic reaction to tasteless juvenility/abused literacy.
In short, I was fire-pissing-mad at a bunch of thirteen year old hooligans spraying public cyberspace with their horribly tasteless thoughts on an insightful work of literature by a writer I greatly admire (who hasn't replied back to me yet on my request for an interview, forwarded by his agent eleven days ago, *teAr*). This is nothing short of graffiti. In fact, I'd prefer actual griffiti--it's much more rich in meaning.
I guess what I want is some more regulation, even if it means (gasp) censorship for these "customer reviews." Not that I'm going Nazi on y'all, me lovelies, but at least with something even as fluid as the Wikipedia regulating system. And we all love Wikipedia, don't deny it.
That way, I can prevent in the future, spending another twenty minutes of my precious life trying to reduce my mental/spiritual allergic reaction to tasteless juvenility/abused literacy.