This is a comment on the whole thing, and my last word, for the moment.
Some of the structure works for you (the marginal comments are probably the best part), but the central part of the structure, your choice to address the album song by song, is overly restrictive. You are establishing a set of connections, but while some of them are clever, some of them are almost too easy, and other (Lemon Meringue) hardly seem worth the bother. It would have been better to focus more, to find a handful of songs you could talk about not only in relationship to the book, but to each other. It's also curious that the way you present this (in spite of the great opening quote) is as if Poe is picking up on her brother's work, but never the other way around.
How about, for instance, the sometimes strident feminism of the novel? Is there a response to the persistent (although not total) chauvinism of the book?
Moment to moment there is much to admire, but you miss opportunities to go deeper, and don't follow your own best thoughts to their implications.
1 comment:
This is a comment on the whole thing, and my last word, for the moment.
Some of the structure works for you (the marginal comments are probably the best part), but the central part of the structure, your choice to address the album song by song, is overly restrictive. You are establishing a set of connections, but while some of them are clever, some of them are almost too easy, and other (Lemon Meringue) hardly seem worth the bother. It would have been better to focus more, to find a handful of songs you could talk about not only in relationship to the book, but to each other. It's also curious that the way you present this (in spite of the great opening quote) is as if Poe is picking up on her brother's work, but never the other way around.
How about, for instance, the sometimes strident feminism of the novel? Is there a response to the persistent (although not total) chauvinism of the book?
Moment to moment there is much to admire, but you miss opportunities to go deeper, and don't follow your own best thoughts to their implications.
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