The White Whale

When I initially looked at the Bernhardt and Wysocki documents, to the surprise and disgust of those around me, I began cursing loudly on the first floor of the library. Whatever, I don't care what they think. These two articles are long, and I was distressed. Those people think they're better than me because they are polite and use appropriate language in public places. Let them think that; I say fuck 'em. I was upset. All I wanted to do tonight was grab a cup of coffee and Melville's Moby Dick and spend my evening in a cushy armchair devouring the adventures of Ishmael and Captain Ahab on their journey to defeat the Great White Whale, but no. Instead I had to turn my attention to the two seemingly endless articles assigned for my reading (dis)pleasure. And let me tell you something...

The reading was actually quite interesting.
And I LEARNED SOMETHING. Kind of. I guess.
Holy shit.
What a good; no, what a GREAT feeling.

Let's talk Bernhardt.
Bernhardt, with all of this talk about
visual gestalt
AND
development
AND
partitioning
AND
emphasis
AND
subordinate relations
AND
coordinate relations
AND
linking/transitional/intersentential relations
AND
sentence patterns,
barely employs any of the techniques he stresses in this text in his actual writing. Not that this really matters, but I personally think it might have really driven the point home. Instead, he chooses to write in the traditional essay format, apparently disregarding his studies of "actual texts as they function in particular contexts," completely ignoring the notion of "an improved understanding of what constitues appropriate, effective strategies of rhetorical composition."
Yeah, yeah. You could probably argue that his study of the wetlands text does this, but I'm not buying it. I wanted this guy to have
IMPORTANT TOPICS HEADLINING IN BOLD FONT
and I wanted this headlines informatively displayed over
-related
-pieces
-of
-informataion
-bulleted
-in
-perfect
-little
-groups
and I wanted dramatic breaks in the page,




just big white spaces




allowing the reader to plunge deeper into the text without ever really realizing what is happening. Shit, these things draw me in. These things keep me interested. If Bernhardt had done a little more of this in this particular text, I might have actually had some semblance of fun while reading it. But he instead, in a writing about "seeng the text," chooses to "ignore the increasingly visual, localized, qualities of information change" and gives us the kind of quasi-intellectual "conventional essay format [that] allows little attention to visual features.
Oh, the irony.
I apologize for only getting Bernhardt's hypocrisy out of this text, but fuck it. I'm a pessimist, or something like that. Whatever. The glass is half empty, Bernhardt is a hypocrite, I'm bored and picking apart this guys hard work for no apparent reason.

Yeah...so...onto The STICKY Embrace of Beauty. I figured before I even began reading this if Wysocki's choice of the word "sticky" would have any sexual meaning, and I was pleased to find that the entire article is about an adverstisement for a compilation of sexual and erotic photographs, and in the background of said advertisement is a woman's ass.
Fuck yeah, you've got my attention, Anne.
And then...
Damn it, she wrote about intellectual stuff. I guess I need to put my thinking hat back on. How unfortunate. Oh well. Despite not being the sexually driven article I had initially hoped for, Wysocki is able to effectively communicate the advantages and disadvantages of specific forms of visual text presentation. Through the usage of blah, blah, and blah, I'm bored and Queequeg just threw his dangerously sharp harpoon and struck me in the eye, out of the open pages of Moby Dick, which is sitting ever-so-innocently on the table in front of me. Damn you, Queequeg. Your aim never fails.