Jacqueline Howett is having her Warholean fifteen minutes. Even that soupçon of fame was unlikely, but she had the temerity to attack a blogger for a negative review of her self-published Amazon Kindle novel, The Greek Seaman. The subsequent Twitter-fied scrum lit up the Internet for—oh, fifteen minutes—and then subsided.
She deserved every brickbat tossed at her stinker of a novel. She cannot write. She cannot construct a sentence. She cannot spell. The free sample opening chapter from Amazon is a treasure chest of literary shortcomings. The Greek Seaman slurps, heaves, and wallows about on an oily swell of mangled syntax, skewered grammar, and misspelled words. Whether there is any story lurking amidst the flotsam and jetsam is beside the point. Unfortunately, her book isn’t so astoundingly rotten as to acquire a certain compensating grandeur. The Greek Seaman is just bad enough to offend, not bad enough to delight.
The reader reviews on Amazon—over one hundred by now—drip with vitriol. Some take a witty approach to vilifying Ms. Howett’s writing. Others point out her many errors, hardly a sporting proposition given their number and severity. Minimalist approaches along the lines of “this book sucks” are common. But several other reviews hail her in gushing superlatives. Oddly enough, those reviews tend to sport precisely the same sophomoric shortcomings as the novel itself. Alas: Ms. Howett isn’t fooling anybody. She wrote those reviews, or enlisted somebody to act on her behalf, and none of the Amazon commentors are having any of it.
Her approach to this hailstorm of negativity seems to be a pride-stuffed stance in regards to her hopelessly amateurish efforts. Her ego, undoubtedly bruised and smarting from the pounding it was taking, flamed out into a shrieking fit as she attempted to cut the offending book blogger a new one. Alas, she wound up performing the surgery on herself, looking ever more ridiculous with each posted howl.
I suppose we all have our blind spots. Parents who think of their sociopathic brat as basically a good kid, just kinda restless. Balding guys who comb that one long lock of hair over their shiny bare pates. Dads with hi-def videocams who fancy themselves to be Peter Jackson. Blah people who bore everybody silly with endless stories from their enervatingly uneventful lives.
So one can sympathize to some extent. Ms. Howett may be blissfully unaware just what a hopeless hack she is. Or, brought face to face with the ugly reality of her incompetence, she adopted a defensive posture of defiant bravado. It’s clear from her shrill ranting that she lacks perspective. Sometimes people just can’t see what fools they are making of themselves.
I had a teaching colleague who, like Ms. Howett, tended to go over the top with his blatant self-promotion. Unlike Ms. Howett, he was actually quite good at what he was promoting. But I almost lost it when I discovered that he had built a shrine to himself in his faculty office, starting with a wall-filling dedicated bookshelf devoted to his set of music-appreciation videos, complemented by a life-size cardboard cutout of himself in what might be called a dynamic teaching posture, complete with gushing press statements in extra-large type.
I looked it over for a bit. Then I remarked that he was welcome to borrow my twinkly Christmas tree lights; we could line the bookcase with them and watch them go dinka-dinka-dinka all round the edges. I might even have enough for your cardboard figure as well, I added.
If looks could kill, I wouldn’t be here writing about the incident. But they don’t, so I am. Like Ms. Howett, he lacked a sense of humor about himself. That’s too bad, because finding our own absurdities funny is a great way to keep ourselves tickled on a regular basis.