Check out this Amazon review

[Jason Menard]

Check out this Amazon review, specifically the last one by Natasha. I wonder how long it took her to come up with that.

[Paul Sturrock]

Is that a review, or her thesis?

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Let's all chip in and buy her some newlines.

[kayal cox]

Amazon should open a section for us to post reviews on reviews.

[Mark Spritzler]

Me no understand words. Me no get it.

Mark

[Mark Spritzler]

I think I own that book.

Mark

[Jason Menard]

Originally posted by Mark Spritzler:
I think I own that book.

Mark

Is it any good? I've been playing since I was 11 or 12, done the band thing and all that, but haven't played much in the last 10 years or so. I've been getting the itch to get back into it hard and wokr my skills back up. Unfortunately, last time I really played, hair metal was still cool.
[ June 07, 2005: Message edited by: Jason Menard ]

[David O'Meara]

Perhaps melodic minor, but specifically unconventional tonality, is a hyperdimensional shift of sonority far removed from the ubiquity of homogeneous major/minor scales.

Check to see if she also reviewed her brand new thesaurus.

[Jim Yingst]

Yeah it's pretty clear she's got a thesaurus. However I think she may be in need of a dictionary, to figure out what those words really mean. :roll:

As I think about it though, I believe we may be judging too harshly. I note the name "Natasha" suggests a probable Russian origin. I've noticed this sort of style in others - not just Russians, but many fairly well-educated persons whose first language is not English. In fact I've experienced the same thing (to lesser degree, probably) when trying to render my own thoughts into a foreign language (Italian). You may have a perfectly appropriate, well-thought-out but not-overly-pretentious thought that you wish to express. The problem is, when you consult your trusty interlingual dictionary, odd errors and distortions appear. The dictionary may try to tell you the closest possible word or phrase to the concept you wish to express - but it may neglect to tell you that this specific word is rarely if ever used by normal people, even if they're reasonably well-educated. An "exact" translation may well sound clumsy or pretentious, because the translated words don't match up well with commonly-used idioms in the new language.

So - if Natasha is a native English speaker, then I'm all for making fun of her review, as it sounds quite pretentious to my ears. But if she's not a native English speaker - I'd say, cut her some slack.
[ June 08, 2005: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]

[Nick George]

Don't have the energy to read the whole thing, but the melodic minor isn't really unconventional, just to correct any misinformation that review might have disseminated throughout this forum. And as long as it's open season: apostrophies are like thesauri. They can look good where they belong, but look rather foolish when thrown in at random places.

That's words from the thesaurus, not the the thesaurus itself.
[ June 08, 2005: Message edited by: Nick George ]

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by Jason Menard:


Is it any good? I've been playing since I was 11 or 12, done the band thing and all that, but haven't played much in the last 10 years or so. I've been getting the itch to get back into it hard and wokr my skills back up. Unfortunately, last time I really played, hair metal was still cool.

[ June 07, 2005: Message edited by: Jason Menard ]

I'd like to know if it's worth getting as well. I haven't been playing as long as you Jason, probably about 8 years. It's more of a hobby but I'm always looking to improve.

[Frank Silbermann]

Aside from pidgeonholing music into a few dimensions of mutually agreed upon broad categories, verbal descriptions of music are pretty useless. It's sort of like asking a composer to render a portrait of the painter's child using music.
[ June 08, 2005: Message edited by: Frank Silbermann ]

[Stan James]

I avoid reading about music because reviews and articles never seem to give me any clue whether I'd like it or not. Reading about movies and books seems to do me a lot more good.

[Mark Spritzler]

Originally posted by Jason Menard:


Is it any good? I've been playing since I was 11 or 12, done the band thing and all that, but haven't played much in the last 10 years or so. I've been getting the itch to get back into it hard and wokr my skills back up. Unfortunately, last time I really played, hair metal was still cool.

[ June 07, 2005: Message edited by: Jason Menard ]

Well, I think my reply is based that I bought it but never really read or looked at it. I tend to do that with music books. I have one from John Petrucci, that I barely read, and one on Fretboard logic that I haven't looked at, but I have had them for years.

Mark

[Mapraputa Is]

Jim: The problem is, when you consult your trusty interlingual dictionary, odd errors and distortions appear. The dictionary may try to tell you the closest possible word or phrase to the concept you wish to express - but it may neglect to tell you that this specific word is rarely if ever used by normal people, even if they're reasonably well-educated. An "exact" translation may well sound clumsy or pretentious, because the translated words don't match up well with commonly-used idioms in the new language.

Agree absolutely. When I composed my first text in English, my teacher asked: "Where did you find all these words? In the dictionary of rare and poetic expressions?"

Here is another interesting phenomenon. Like a foreign person has no feeling for words, she apparently has no feeling for grammatical constructs either.

This is a summary for the book (in Russian) about American literature. I don't know why they decided to provide the book with a summary in English, usually it's done only for scientific literature.

"The book "Part of the World" is an examination of a number of texts of considerable import to the formation of American literature and, in broader terms, of the American cultural experience. The latter is treated by the author in its fundamental partiality irreducible to any of the attempts at presenting it in the form of the universal."

I suspect the author of this summary wouldn't express herself quite like this in her native language
[ June 10, 2005: Message edited by: Mapraputa Is ]

[John Smith]

Here is another interesting phenomenon. Like a foreign person has no feeling for words, she apparently has no feeling for grammatical constructs either.

Are you refering to Natasha? Except for a few typos and one fragmented sentence, I didn't notice any grammatical violations. She does seem to have a chronic "it's instead its" problem, but otherwise she is in full control of the language. Readability is another thing, of course, and her review is quite remarkable in that respect.

Microsoft Word has a little known and rarely used feature, called "readability statistics" (go to Tools|Options|Spelling&Grammar, check "Show readability statistics", click OK, then hit F7. It reports the results of the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test. According to the test ran against Natasha's review, you must have at least high schoool diploma to understand it.

The Russian intelligentsia has a passion for expressing themselves in long, convoluted sentences, generously sprinkled with the obscure words. It's their trademark, a password of sorts for identifying themselves and the people with whom that they come into contact. In America, the social structure is defined by money, but in the old communist Russia where everyone made the same wages, the language was the currency. By that definition, Natasha was a millionaire in her motherland, and it's not easy to give up the wealth. For an American, the equivalent would be to go from the mansion somewhere in Miami to a hut in Siberia and waiting in lines to get milk.

Now that she is in America, I feel happy for her, but I would appreciate if she stepped in and explained what she meant when she said:

Perhaps melodic minor, but specifically unconventional tonality, is a hyperdimensional shift of sonority far removed from the ubiquity of homogeneous major/minor scales.

I play guitar, too, and I had my share of memorizing the quotes by Lenin and Marx, but she is clearly crossing the line here.

[Jason Menard]

If she plays guitar like she writes, I would have to guess that she has a passion for complex phrasing.