Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Ripple effect.

Frank Ciccone, a really nice guy in my writing class who sends me these long critiques, wrote and distributed to my entire class last night a literary criticism essay analyzing the layers of meaning in ... the essay I gave them all the week before. This move, which I discovered earlier today since I was not in class, is very flattering.

I will now excise movie-ad blurbs from Frank's essay, titled "Ben's Essay," about my essay, "The Last Worthless Evening."

* "One of the most talented writers in our class ... "
* "His style is compact and clean, his humor infectious and immediately obvious, but, most of all, he has an uncanny ability to take mundane experiences and hit universal themes."
* "Every time I reread one of his essays, I seem to see a different layer within the structure of a simple story."

Frank actually goes further in his own essay with themes that he got from mine, which I found impressive. (I mean, he mentioned monks and Jesuits, which weren't in my original piece about Longhorn Steakhouse.)

Still, it was very flattering to read what he'd done. In a way, he made me prouder of my own work.

Anyway, Lupo, upon reading those blurbs, wanted to add one of his own.

"Benjamin's modesty is by far his greatest attribute, even more than his emotionally honest, engrossing writing and his preternatural gift for Wildean bon mots. Why look, he doesn't even use his own name on his hilarious yet touching blog!"

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