Death porn
Sex isn’t the only subject where people seem to have lost the ability to use discretion, discernment, and restraint. (Warning: you will not be wanting to have eaten recently before reading the linked post.) I can only speculate that the author felt it necessary to add such a gruesome passage to a description of a plague-era headstone inscription because he felt that sprinkling his text with such juicy (if you will excuse the analogy) items would entice movie-gore-jaded moderns to buy his book, which they might otherwise reject as another dry history tome; I can’t believe he simply wants to work up outraged compassion for people who died seven hundred years ago by using the same literary techniques used in tracts on modern-day atrocities. And I can only assume there are more passages like this; such people are never satisfied with just one. However, I have never read the book, and am now unlikely to do so (I don’t need dieting help that badly) so I leave it up to people who have actually read it to correct me if I am wrong.
(Via Ann Althouse.)
March 10th, 2005 at 11:00 am
I fear that there probably will be other…overwrought passages such as were linked, but still, it looks like an absolutely fascinating book. I probably will read it, but skip over the gruesom bits, since I also have a very low gross-out threshold. Just like I kept my eyes tightly closed during about 1/3 of “American Wierwolf in London”…
March 10th, 2005 at 11:46 am
I found the whole turgid description tedious.