coldhearted scientist وداد

…in the book review I am currently writing [details have, of course, been duly and heavily disguised]:

These are the overheated scribblings of a professor desirous of promotion, who has been up too late at too many Cultural Studies reading groups composed of scholars slightly more intelligent than he, and whose prose has been infected by the faltering English of the several dissertations he read too quickly last week.

Given its topic, it is a shame that the book pays no attention to gender. It is amateurishly overdocumented, and the author namedrops incessantly for no good reason. Evidently he does not know how to paraphrase, so he peppers his pages with awkward quotations instead. His thesis that the fantastic, which he defines ovebroadly when at all, is necessarily counterhegemonic, is somewhat questionable, and his inability to use standard technical terms correctly is deplorable. His copy editor, furthermore, must have been drunk when he worked with this manuscript, to judge by the number of typographical errors and ungrammatical sentences there are on almost every page. I am surprised indeed to see that the press which bills itself as the premier university press in this field, allows its books to come before the public in such a state.

The book was, however, inspired in a very good insight, and the research that has gone into it is solid. It is worth reading for these reasons, and the ground it breaks has not been covered before. It is really too bad that the author (or his staff) did not have time to get it in finished shape before publication. It is also unfortunate that he did not have a really honest critic, or one who could afford the time to go over the manuscript with him in detail. All of this merely bespeaks the wretched state of modern-day academia, where promotions depend on one’s book actually being in print, where everyone is so pressed for time that there is no time for real study, and where nobody dares speak the truth lest s/he later be bludgeoned withal.

Above, dear sir, please find my parody. My favorite word for today is withal.

Axé.