Too bad. There was a very intelligent comment placed on one of my posts on The Awakening but for some reason something didn’t seem quite right about it. Perhaps because of its length, its overall focus on the theme and irrelevance to the post itself, its excellent vocabulary use–rare in a quick comment, and most obviously, its spoiler in disregard of the fact that I had only gotten halfway through the book, I bothered checking stats. These showed that the comment was getting plenty of hits both from the commenter and others but with no further discussion beyond my own reply to the original comment.
Hmm, something fishy here.
In backtracking, I located the area on http://epinions.com where the same commenter had the same comment lodged as an entry on book reviews. Someone there was also surprised by the professionalism of the comment. Somehow, Harold Bloom’s review of Chopin came into this and while I don’t have the desire to follow this all the way through, I strongly suspect that the commenter merely plagiarized Bloom’s opinions.
I’m not absolutely positive that this is the case here, but it seems to point in that direction. If I’ve offended an intelligent commenter, I apologize, but I’ve removed the comment from my post. If I’ve caught someone in an elaborate attempt to either use bandwidth or self-aggrandize, at the very least, I’m not allowing them to use my weblog to do it.
People. Bah!
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology