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attempted to read - apparently about a prototype not even available yet. I don't normally post to criticize writing styles of reviews, but this makes Clark Johnsen seem like Hemmingway.
Follow Ups:
A LAUGHABLE first Paragraph consisting of a SINGLE sentence.
I can tell by looking at this persons 'reference system' or equipment used in this review that he has Very Confused audio goals.
The speaker selection ALONE, from Apolgee Stage (good planar) to both VonSchweikert AND Vanderstein? (please excuse spelling)
An Equally eclectic mix of electronics.
Can he make something good of this miss-mosh? I suppose and hope so, but his goals are not clear and he comes across as something of a name dropper.
I'm not standing in line waiting for whatever it was he 'reviewed' to appear in the local salon.
Too much is never enough
to an entirely new, obnoxious, mega-convoluted, unreadable level.Is that piece subtitled "The Exegesis of Jim Merod"?
Where are the footnotes (no way could,would or should I or anyone else have to go far enough ahead to reach them...)?
The IRS will soon be wanting his services to write tax code.
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" - Michael McClure
Edits: 10/19/14
And pretty much blasted them for allowing this garbage to be published. This is, perhaps, the worst review I've ever seen. But Srajan is not far behind...
-RW-
Edits: 10/11/14
but at some point, it can turn into an unruly and lacksadasical thought-fest :)
one hell of a run-on sentence masquerading as a paragraph. Where was the editor and who stole the guys Adderall? On the other hand, I should be the last to cast the first stone as I've written my share of run-on sentences. Let him live!
When was the last time an editor of an audio mag/zine actually 'edited' - line by line, or otherwise - the writing of a contributor?
and generally the conventions of good usage and grammar are followed. Certainly, when it comes to online sites, there is a great deal of variability encountered with the quality of writing and editing. Anyway, that's my take on it, FWIW.
Then how do you explain SP's former writer, Mr.Mejias, who I realize that JA thought was just wonderful?
Wasn't Mejias some sort of editor for Stereophile?
Perhaps Atkinson allowed Mejias to edit his own copy?
That might explain the mistakes :-(
Cheers,
Al
yes, unfortunately, he was "some sort of editor...", who has moved on to greener pastures in the cable world.
> When was the last time an editor of an audio mag/zine actually 'edited' - line by line, or
> otherwise - the writing of a contributor?
Yesterday. :-)
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
JA,
pleased to know that you are taking care of business.
Anyone who can find such dramatic improvements to sound because of a power conditioner is worthy of ridicule. Barring the dirtiest, most unstable, RF ridden power imaginable, placebo effect dominates these improvements. His writing is as atrocious as his findings.
Want a real power conditioner? Go get an APC Smart-UPS. Pure sine wave output, filtered, regulated, logged, and has battery back-up. You get brown-out protection from under-bias, I get 30+ minutes of runtime for both my amp and turntable when the power cuts out. Go show me on a scope something that gets past the APC that this silly power conditioner removes. Ugh! I hate BS.
I have long said this about Merod. Most of his "reviews" are largely unreadable. He strikes me as one of those people who just like the sound of their own voice, and grab any chance to impress anyone who will listen at cocktail parties.
Oz
Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.
- Winston Churchill
he probably doesn't get invited to cocktail parties very often, at least any more.
The host(s) probably can't afford enough booze to keep those he latches onto inebriated enough!
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" - Michael McClure
this place strikes me like a Bingo Hall.;)
Edits: 10/09/14
The following is just ONE sentence from that review! Absolutely un-readable!!
"The Lord of Audio Doom, hereby my witness—absolving us all from the authority of annual surveys of "most wanted" components whose fine print declares this or that speaker pair in Class B or C to be inadvertently flawed with plump midrange information and possibly lean bass along with (gulp) somewhat underwhelming dynamics, even though it's an honest-to-Jehovah bargain at a price only a decimal less than a new Kia automobile—the following sonic observations are objective in their subjective transcendence: a/ the party of the first part agrees with a hip subset of the other party: to wit, most so called HIGH-FI (or, "high-end") sound systems, frequently expensive and over-the-top, often water their footprints with yellow liquid because insurmountable items of audio majesty yoked into line for their equally insurmountable "wow" value fall short despite {note: because of} a genuine absence of reference to, and knowledge of, the complex seduction of acoustic music delivered in the naked reality of ambient environments; b/ the all purpose Yiddish term, ZAMAGAZUNT, is the "transcendent" authority cited above; c/ like the useful rubric "suck" and/or "sucks"—(cited everywhere, including James Joyce and Graucho Marx)—the above-cited Yiddish admonition stands in for far more blasphemous desecrations that, ultimately, serve angelic functions: e. g., no extreme contempt rendered in blunt or poetic language; no imaginative freedom with untrammeled verbal filth; no power to defend one's sacred spirit from sequester; no bad words (Petrarchean complaint; Faulknearean lament; no fey Buddy Rich-inspired blistering invective; no Shakespearean rhetorical acrostic {see John Milton for corroboration} has ever succeeded in undoing the damage of sustained acoustic suck out; d/ a final digression: disappointment, disgust and disavowal, seldom listed in scholastic lexicons after the Grand Cognitive Burgeoning launched by Samuel Johnson's elaborately cloaked misanthropy, augmented by Jonathan Swift's farcical truth-telling and inverted by Coleridge's higher verbal consciousness, seldom earn adequate privilege to indicate the joy and simple possibility of focused aesthetic appreciation; e/ therefore, global audio illiteracy..."
-RW-
...sentence
Probably won't win. See this statement from the website:
"Sentences may be of any length but we strongly recommend that entries not go beyond 50 or 60 words. Entries must be “original” (as it were) and previously unpublished."
Clearly, Merod would find it *impossible* to pen such a terse missive...
-RW-
Not to mention that he managed to find some illiterate to PUBLISH it!
Too much is never enough
Merod may have amused himself by writing an audio review in a parody of James Joyce's style, but it's clear from the opinions here that the piece is an utter failure at its real purpose.
If Merod's intended audience was literature, comparative literature or critical theory professors or graduate students, he really blew it. If his intended audience was himself, then his column was a grand success. Is it not a cardinal rule of professional writing to 'know' your audience"?
Where was Merod's editor, lost at sea? asleep at the wheel"? Or simply agreeable with Merod's joke? Perhaps his editor should be the recipient of our complaints.
As a former reviewer I can certainly understand the impulse to play around with the form. Just before Listener's owner killed the magazine, I told Art Dudley about a wacky idea I had for a review. When he stopped laughing, his only concern was how did I intend to describe the sound of the device under review. He didn't object to an unusual format for a review as long as it succeeded as a review . Nor do I think audio reviews can't be intellectual. Jim Bailey, one of my former Listener colleagues, is a professor of philosophy. He wrote a brilliant review (of a Spendor speaker I think) that began with a concise discussion of two philosophical schools of thought and then segued into describing aspects of the speaker's performance as each philosophy would see it. Jim's novel approach did not detract from the review's purpose, to evaluate and describe a piece of audio gear. That's where Merod failed. Whatever useful information about the component might be in his article is obscured by the impenetrable prose.
the "Dickens/Descartes review" of the Neat Vito speaker in Jan/Feb '02 Listener? That is very readable due to Jim explaining at the outset exactly where he was going, no (smug) "cleverness" intended.
My copies of Listener are in a box in the basement so I can't easily double - check you, but that sounds like the review I remembered.
Listener was blessed with a number of truly gifted writers.
It's not like I have any great memory: the other day I just happened to be looking through some of the last issues of Listener for their reviews of cheaper bookshelf-type speakers (not the Neats!) and vaguely remembered scanning that article, so I easily pulled the issue...
He certainly decided to reinvent the run-on sentence. He needs to go buy some periods.
Jim Tavegia
nt
Dman
Analog Junkie
you actually want me to read it? How about at least a paragraph synopsis from you for me to have as a base? I didn't feel like investing the few minutes it looked like it would take to read. Especially after seeing another high end power conditioning unit with a shitty 15A IEC.
ET
I got to this part, "Since, of course, dreams and nightmares are covert codes of Freud's invaginated cerebral inebriations".
At that point, I rolled my eyes, hit the back button and thought about other things I could have done with the last two minutes of my life...
Some people might LOVE this stuff. I however, do not.
Dman
Analog Junkie
nt
Perhaps a Spark would light the fire..........
ET
Nt
...that's the way I like my women, not my audio gear!
Why is this necessary? Besides it makes my head hurt.
Willis
Silly me!!!
Clark is actually a very sweet individual in person, and his knowledge of 78 rpm and early LP discography puts mine in the shade--especially pre-Cold-War-Thaw pianists mere mortals know only as names in footnotes.
It was at Clark's that I had one of the most memorable musical listening experiences of my life--archival recordings of Leonard Bernstein's rehearsing the BSO in Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie in 1949.
JM
This guy writes a lot more like James Joyce than Hemingway.
Finally, another inmate notices. I think we can safely say Mr. Merod has found the worst context for literary parody in the entire English-speaking world.
I guess we'll soon find out what Samuel Beckett thinks of planar magnetic headphones.
I'm sorry, further reading shows you already mentioned the JJ "similarity".
[I display my thread entries in probably an atypical fashion, so I don't always see all responses and didn't notice your previous one until now...]
when COMPLETELY cranked out of their minds!
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" - Michael McClure
Edits: 10/19/14
No surprise there. But his attempt at literary parody apparently does not sit well with a lot of people here.
Coulda fooled me.How could literary parody cut it in such a deadly serious hobby?
Even JP Donleavy would be hard pressed to get a chuckle out of this crowd.
Must be some sort of polarity issue.
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" - Michael McClure
Edits: 10/19/14
Jim Merod has first rate undergraduate and graduate degrees as well as a distinguished career in academia. Check out his faculty web page. Notwithstanding his distinguished CV his attempt at literary parody was an abject failure. "So it goes...". Looking at his academic interests, I wouldn't be surprised if he is an astounding teacher.http://www.soka.edu/about_soka/staff/Faculty-Full-Time/Jim-Merod.aspx
Edits: 10/19/14
We will be waiting for Godot.
And I apologize for my snippy comment earlier. I guess I'm frustrated by our increasingly illiterate society. But throwing insults at people I don't know on internet chat sites probably won't help. ;)
~!
The Mind has No Firewall~ U.S. Army War College.
More laughing...
yes it was a true run-on sentence....
Try reading German and that sentence will appear to be of decidedly average length.
"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
"...mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars."
"My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years."
all by Mark Twain
Laughing...Jm was rolling.
I did like the prototype, though.
Let's keep it simple: Mr. Merod is 'putting us on'. Regardless, what is unforgivable is that he spelled Groucho, as in Groucho Marx,"Graucho", which displays and extreme limitation in knowledge. Did he intend to write Gaucho? Mr. Merod, polymath that he is, condescends to throw out a bit of Yiddish, poor soul. He failed to serve up 'schmuck'; that noun pretty much says it all. No doubt, Mr. Merod is a "nice guy".
But, hey, let's remember that his 'review' was intended to be a joke. Is the reader supposed to laugh?
Actually, the misspellings are intentional, as are the run-on sentences. He is likely parodying Irish modern novelist James Joyce, and in particular Joyce's famous novel Finnegan's Wake, that I quoted from in my first post.
You may not appreciate his attempt at humor, but why be so nasty about it? Low-level humor is very cheerfully accepted here, but apparently not the higher-level variety. Perhaps the only problem is the extreme limitation in your knowledge about James Joyce. ;)
...now I've heard everything - an audio reviewer writing a review as a parody of a James Joyce novel.
I have found both Joyce and his review to be unreadable.
I once wrote an equipment review of as a parody of a Joe Bob Briggs drive-in movie review in the late 1980s. It may not have been high-brow humor, but at least no one questioned what it was.
Do you think anyone but you got this one?
If no one gets it, can it really be considered a parody?
I would prefer Merod submit his high-level literary parodies to some musicology publication, safely away from my eyes.
I hear ya. Turns out there are amateur humorists in every walk of life. As one myself, I've learned it's better to keep it to yourself unless and until you are specifically asked for it. Otherwise, you catch the grief Mr. Merod is getting here.
Yes, I realized the review was a parody. Given Prof. Merod's teaching history, which includes, among other schools a stint at Brandeis, I stand embarrassed by my unwarranted, thin skinned, knee jerk reaction, and I offer my apologies to the Prof. I actually appreciate your slap across the wrist. I deserved it.
nt
.......pretentious asshole!
Cheers,
Al
Your line, "this makes Clark Johnsen seem like Hemingway" was funny enough to make me read the first sentence of Mr. Merod's review. I did not get past that sentence. Perhaps he was attempting to adopt the style of the writer quoted below. If so, he needs practice.riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
Edit: Aha. I read a few more sentences. He actually is parodying James Joyce, among other things. Guess this wasn't the best audience for it. ;)
Edits: 10/06/14
notext
...terribly pretentious writing.
Interesting product.
NOT!
The normal rules of reviewing wouldn't apply then, would they?
Daniel
although we audiophiles have to bear the brunt of his pent up disgorgement.
For 'disgorgement'.
Very nice.
"We are all in God's hands... and God is a malign thug."
-Mark Twain
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