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I’m tired. No insomnia tonight, I’ve just been staying up to finish reading a chapter of Author Unknown. I am making notes on the 5″ x 7″ index card that I use as a bookmark (I tend to do this) and was going to type some observations tonight, but I won’t.
I’ll be out of town until the middle of next week, at which point the blogging will continue. I will likely have finished reading the book by then.
One quick note, before I fall asleep at my keyboard. I forgot to add one complaint to last night’s post. One of the most reproachable aspects of Bennett’s site is the picture she chooses to begin the page. According to the Library of Congress entry for the book, Foster was born in 1950. This is consistent with the “portrait of the author” on the book’s dustjacket. Let me describe Bennett’s picture, if you haven’t clicked over there already. The picture is of a man in (I would say) his mid thirties. The picture is in profile, subject’s right side to the camera, clad in blue jeans, sweater, waterproof lined jacket, and cap. He is sitting on a tombstone, in a graveyard, in the snow, holding a human skull in his right hand so that it appears to be gazing at his head. His head is turned the camera, bearing a solemn expression.
OK, even if you haven’t looked at the picture yet, you get the reference, I’m sure. It’s Hamlet, of course (Act V, scene i, actually, but I had to look that part up.) It’s not a particularly sophisticated reference, to be sure, but certainly it is reasonable to indulge a Shakespeare professor a bit of silly humor. Perhaps he photocopied the picture onto the front sheets of students’ midterm exam booklets to help release examination anxieties (in the same way that we were given The Far Side on Chemistry exams and Dilbert on math exams in college.) In fact, it is likely that the setting was not Foster’s idea in the first place, as the photo is attributed to a magazine shoot. But given the tone of animosity in Bennett’s writing, I can’t help but think this was intended merely to look morbid and threatening, as another ill-reasoned jab at Foster. The photo had to be at least ten years old at the time of the murder. There are certainly more recent photos available, especially given the recent publication of Foster’s book. She certainly knows of the book, as she updated the page in November 2000 to add comments on it. Yet she chooses a fifteen year old picture of him holding a skull.
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