Views from Medina Road

Well, so, comments are turned on, but they seem to only appear on the separate archived pages for each post, and not on the main page here. Clearly, I am doing something wrong, or else there's some problem with--well, surely I'm doing something wrong.

About reviews-- A couple bloggers recently have remarked about inappropriate review comments. Though I'm no doubt guilty in my past of a few stupid reviewer tricks myself, one of the basic tricks is to review a book not for what it is, but for how it isn't what the reviewer thinks it should be. Steve Johnson's blog has a good example, at http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000164.html, of a reviewer of Johnson's book Mind Wide Open, who found the book's 'autobiographical ramblings' by their very existence a flaw, without realizing, or attempting to understand, that they were deliberately part of the book's design. This doesn't relate directly to the other bloggers' examples, but it is another trick in the stupid reviewers' manual. (And the reviewer in question is Bryan Appleyard, which might not be a surprise to those familiar with him...)