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In Reply to: RE: Jim Merod may be a nice guy & good engineer. Dunno. But damn, this may be the worst "review" I've...... posted by Rick W on October 06, 2014 at 08:41:34
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.
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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...
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