Abstracts - "Hacks Britannica: Reviving the Olympic Tradition of Crapness"

(Background: An article published yesterday in The Paris Review by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Managing Editor at Harper's Magazine, which you can read here. Disclaimer: I have not seen the Opening Ceremony nor, apparently, will I thanks to the IOC)

Abstract

Using a blend of historio-contemporary dialogues of my own devising and interpretation, a close reading of a visual event, postcolonial theory & cultural studies, I will: demonstrate my robust yet still somehow vapid multiculturalism while employing a tempest of pedantic and exhausting jargon-filled run-on sentences to obfuscate even the simplest of my points (because an over-long parenthetical aside that uses ad hoc foreign language colloquialisms does more than suggest I'm supremely well educated, it means you too have to be supremely well educated in order to understand, respond to, or even contend with me. And because sometimes I may appear to leave a sentence or thought unfinished); I will then suggest that Danny Boyle is a hack, an over-hyped, over-diverse director of international superhits who decided, not to challenge China, but to reinvigorate the questionably loved tradition of producing a crappy opening ceremony. I won't suggest I could've done a better job, but the pomp implicit in my language will. Obviously.

I will then end my article with a clichéd, remembered image of Bill Clinton at the '96 Atlanta Games, precisely because I remembered it and nobody else did.

Suck it. 

Abstracts: A New Game

So I may've just developed a new writing game -

Read an article from a literary journal. Any of them really, though The Paris Review produces and recommends some excellent ones (more on that to come). The more scholastic the article the better.

Because -

After you read it, you write an abstract for it. Yes, yes I know, it sounds awful. But here's the twist:

Write the abstract in the author's voice, but with your reaction to the article!

It's a double-bias!

The effectiveness of your abstract depends on the authenticity of two things:

1.  Your pantomime 
2.  Your criticism (whether constructive or deconstructive). 

An effective abstract should, for now, also prompt the reader to continue on and scan the original article because, like all things academic, a critical response should be weighed against the original subject by an informed (preferably objective) third party. So... really, this is more of a game for the writer not the reader... And I apologize for that self-indulgence (though all are invited to join!). But please know, as I'm soon to post my first attempt at this game, it's meant to be entertaining. And, if it's wildly successful, will do what so many critical responses do nowadays -

Erase the need to read the source. (<-- kapow!)

Or, it'll do what too few do: Inspire it. (<-- that's the big one)

Let the social commentary begin!