I cringe at the overwhelming stupid.

I am reading a novella (MY FINAL FOR THE YEAR, OH HAPPY DAY, OH HAPPY, HAPPY DAY) called Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt. More specifically, I'm reading the assigned second half of the novel, a modern take on Victorian seances called "The Conjugial Angel."

Your trivia for the day follows thusly: "conjugial angel" was originally coined by the Christian mystic/philosopher Immanuel Swedenborg (yes, you may know him through Blake, who revered him). The term refers to the Swedenborgian conception that angels in Heaven's innermost sanctum were composed of a conjoined man and woman - so the angel, then, was the ultimately liminality of male/female, ultimate androgyne/asexual/ultrasexual... You get the point. This stuff interests the heck out of me.

Anyway. The story itself deals with a Victorian seance - Mrs. Papagay has lost her husband at sea and wants to call him back to say hey, so to speak. She's accompanied in her seancing (if seance can't be a verb, I just made it one) by a girl named Emily. Now, most people don't give a flip who Emily is, but it becomes a masturbatory frenzy for literature scholars when you realize that the Emily in "The Conjugial Angel" is, in fact, the Emily who was engaged to Arthur Hallam, Alfred Lord Tennyson's best friend who is memorialized for eternity in Tennyson's "In Memorian." Emily's involved in the seance because well, after Arthur kicked off (and she received a pension from Arthur's father who assumed she would never marry again because of her broken heart) she not only married, but kept the pension, too. The lost loves of these women, and the attempt to get them back, compose the crux of "The Conjugial Angel."

Now I said all that to say this. I was poking around online for articles and etc. about this book so I could get a handle on the criticism, and came across one of those good old Amazon book reviews. Although Angels and Insects was received well, "The Conjugial Angel" takes a lot of hits for being too obtuse - or, as my friend Dave put it, "a literary wank for literary wankers." Be that as it may, this was from one of the reviews I read:

"I don't understand why literature people feel so high and mighty all the time, or why authors get off on appealing to only a small elitist crowd who will understand the rest of what's really going on. The language in this book is overdone and Victorianish, and the author's way of saying "hey, I'm only for a few people, the rest of you are to stupid to read this. Well, let me tell you what, I'm a smart person and I was not intimated by this book."

I have to agree. She may not have been intimated by the book. I can honestly say that I have never been intimated by a book. But if you're going to rail against the established literati, and you don't want to be dismissed in a storm of contemptuous mockery and spiteful laughter, then proofread what you write.

I'm just saying.

And yes, I've made typos in my blog before. But in my blog I'm not in the middle of giving the metaphorical middle finger to an established group of people, I'm not trying to make myself look as smart as everyone else, and I'm not spewing embarrassingly ridiculous vitriol.

Proofread always, especially when you're ripping on something. Words to live by, kiddies.

- b.