I realize this is lazy criticism, since I won’t be posting evidence (perhaps upon request), but I was a bit miffed by the number of grammatical errors in Rob Jovanovic’s Big Star bio, which I finished recently. Perhaps they wouldn’t have bothered me so much if the rough draft status didn’t extend beyond mere grammatical faux pas.
For the record, I enjoyed Rob’s book on Pavement (Perfect Sound Forever) a lot—at least I don’t remember feeling like the language was less than readable, so I was disappointed that for much of the first hundred pages or so covering the band members’ pre-Big Star days, Rob’s text proved somewhat laborious, the writing a bit amateurish. Things improved by the time talk turned to recording sessions and melodrama going on behind the scenes, but not dramatically.
And although much of it is dutifully researched and was obviously quite the undertaking (the interviews alone), I still felt cheated by the high school term paper treatment, let alone the grammatical errors appearing in a published work—forget that an editor missed those things, what about Rob, who boasts of over a decade of research in the post-script. Didn’t he re-read his own type?
