English Major Bugaloo

The Professor has been on the road this week and is suffering from that bleary-eyed jet lag that is a special bonus to international travel. So, Book Crazy might have been a bit too much for me to take on this week. But, that's why they pay me the big bucks.

Early on in my schooling I thought that I should be an English major. All the most interesting (hot) girls were studying English and it seemed that all you really needed to do was smoke too many cigarettes, read some books and occasionally wax poetic about the metaphors in Joyce's "Ulysses". I would be willing to wager a month's wages, particularly now that I'm unemployed, that the author of Book Crazy has spent far too much time in the English Department of some liberal arts school. Most of the posts read like a college junior's term paper on existentialism.

Now, after a couple of years as an English major, the Professor came to the realization that there was a limited market in the workplace for people that could compare and contrast (at great length) Jean Rhys' and Virginia Woolf's views on feminism and moved on to a different discipline. So, I'm not really qualified to critique the writing here. As far as I can tell, it's fairly competent pseudo-academic deconstruction of some existential philosophers and novelists. Not my field, not my thang. What I can say, as a reader, is that with titles like "A Useless Passion, Condemned to be Free - Sartre’s Definition of Man" and "Albert Camus - The Absurd Hero" you've left most potential readers scratching their heads at the door. It's a standard academic mistake - the sin of exclusion. If you want to get something across, if you have something to say, you have to say it in a way that people will understand. Pitch it too high and nobody is going to pay attention.

And then there's the poetry. God, I hate blog poetry. Most of it is naff and self-indulgent tosh in a self-indulgent medium. One of the advantages I found in giving up my English major is that I no longer had to try to suck every possible interpretation out of a William Carlos Williams' poem. But since you've thrust it upon me, generally your poetry seems like a lot of the other writing on your site, pedantic and lacking in personality.

But every now and then something personal comes through - your Harry Potter post is a wonderful example. It's wry, self-deprecating and accessible. You recognize the absurdity of your pseudo-intellectualism. That's what I want to read when I'm reading a blog. I want some personality. That's the biggest problem with Book Crazy, a complete lack of personality. There's not much on the "About" page to tell us about you, even whether or not you are qualified to be writing all the existentialism and absurdism bugaloo. Who the hell are you? Why should I care about what you have to say?

Beyond the content, the appearance is standard Wordpress blah, nothing special, nothing annoying. You don't need three columns and you don't need all the tat. You give the impression of wanting people to take you seriously so get rid of some of the junkity-junk on the sidebars and that is more likely to happen. I do like your use of images in your posts - very effective. But, you need to sort out some of your tabs. Auroville Diary, for example, what the hell is that? You jump into the middle of some travelogue without preface or explanation. I read the first couple of paragraphs, felt like I had joined a story in the middle, and promptly clicked on to your Book List - where there is nothing. Dead links piss me off. Fix it or get rid of it or else you're just a lazy bastard.

Now you may think, Book Crazy author, that I'm about to lay the H-bomb on your Gauloises smoking ass. That would be a fair assumption, as I've spent a lot of time slagging you off and for good reason. But despite all that, I like you. I like you for the same reason that I liked my ratty-bearded English professors who used to hold their classes under an oak tree on the quad. I like you because as a recent academic escapee I understand the struggle to get people to listen to your drivel. And, hell, it's probably pretty good. What I could understand seemed fairly interesting. BUT, and this is a big ass bold italic but, I would be unlikely to ever come back to your site as it is now. You've either got to do something to make your site more compelling or be satisfied with the few sophomore English majors that are reading you now. Most people submit their blogs here because they want to increase traffic a little bit and pick up some tips. Oh, and there are the crazy fucking masochists like George. So, my advice? Let some of the human behind Book Crazy out and release some of that passion that you purport to have for books. For now, be grateful for this lone star: