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BANG

                                                       January 13, 2006

  Is it possible to use
  exclamation points without
  seeming naively earnest?

  A case in point from
  the Bocris/Bayley               DIONYSIAN_SOAP
  Patti Smith bio:

    "Her take on the New York poetry
    scene was so negative that to
    overcome her paranoia, she             (Some pretty dubious mind-reading
    fixated in her mind the image          here... though Victor Bockris
    of the nineteenth-century              at least knew Patti Smith in the
    French poet Arthur Rimbaud,            early 70s... his 1972 interview
    who, when he was displeased by         is presented in an appendix as
    another poet's reading, would          her first interview, and there's
    climb on the table from which          a photo of him sitting next to her
    the offender was reading and           after they'd done a poetry reading.)
    urinate on his manuscript!"

                        --p.15

  I don't like the sentence
  much, but I *hate* that           This is a book that
  exclamation point.                can't make up it's
                                    mind if it's Objective
                                    Journalism, or the
                                    Gonzo variety, and
                                    that's a problem of
                                    many a Rock Bio.

         "Please Kill Me"
         does a nice end                But even worse, "No One Here Gets
         run around the                 Out Alive", a Jim Morrison bio.
         problem: it's all              The author refers to him as "Jim",
         quotations.                    and pretends to know everything
         There's no need                about what he was thinking.
         to choose a narrative
         voice.                             Absolutely nauseating.

         PLEASE_KILL_ME

                                       The disease of the rock biography,
                                       an omniscient narrator that speaks
                                       in the third person, but on a first
                                       name basis.




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