(no subject)

Interesting thing about my Speech team experiences; people who perform really well but choose really craptastic pieces to perform, or at least in my eyes, though my friend says I'm too judgemental. (That's not true at all; I've judged him wrong.) For instance, the person who's placed fifth or sixth in the Prose category at the last two tournaments has a really pulpy, kind of overly dramatic piece, but he performs it so well that you don't really notice that the words are kind of stupid when they were all strung together. That's the mark of a good interper, in my eyes.

When the person's piece is by Dan Brown it's a perfect example. Poor as the man's writing is, performed right it could be mildly exciting to listen to. This particular cutting was from Angels and Demons, the extended monologue at the end by Camerlengo Ventresca (the stock evil-villain character a la Dr. No or Snidely Whiplash that appears in all of Dan Brown's novels) about the evils of science and technology and blah de blah de blah. The portion she read from ended with something like "What kind of God gives his people this kind of power without the basic moral framework of how to use it?" which in my mind begged the greater question: what kind of God makes me listen to extended sessions of Dan Brown's prose?