Wednesday, April 25, 2007

ORIENTALISM

This just in from Mrs. Keyhole:

So, I need to read Dracula for one of my classes, and I bought a used copy. I just started reading it today, and it turns out the person who owned it before has written all over it — lots of underlining, and a few comments here and there ("superior attitude --> insulting people he encounters; bookish/learnish [sic] perspective } ORIENTALISM"), but it's mainly just single words copied from the text itself. I guess they're words the person didn't know (sometimes they have the definition next to them), but the weird thing is, even though they're written out meticulously — each letter looks like it was really carefully formed and all that — they're all spelled wrong. "Idolastrous," "polygot," "calèch" (should be "calèche" — he got the accent right, just couldn't bring himself to finish the word…), "volumptous lips," (to be fair, I think that one isn't actually in the text — Dracula's lips have a "remarkable ruddiness," but there's nothing mentioned as to the level of…volump they have), oh, and my personal favorite: "DRAUCLA."

I dunno, I guess the person's got dyslexia or something, and I should be nicer, but…c'mon!

1 comment:

Leon said...

an additional joke would have been to title the post "ORIENTLAISM."

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