I Don't Give a RIFF about L.O.V.E

I really don’t know what to say about Laura Kipnix, “Against Love,” I can’t quite say that I love it or hate it. I just remember while reading through the first third of the paper and getting stop due to her diction—numerous times when I had to pull a dictionary out—but she managed to lure me back in with her example of a “couple language.” As she guides me through her paper I did notice her usage of white spacing to section her writing. Other strategies that we have learned over the time of the course are hyphens, parentheses, quotes, and possibly italic words were scattered beautifully. She noted her passion for painting and she reflected to her writing as, “dabbing [paint] at it, endless revising,” and as a painter myself, I used this analogy to visual her writing process with my drawings and paints.

One thing that I have to note about her writing was her use of analogies that highly appealed to me because her language and sentences can be dense at times. And this was a way to short down her thinking process for me to catch up from her examples. I enjoyed her example of love in the context of linguistic (it is great when authors reference subject matter you are studying) and how love is a language couples must decode for better communication. My BIGGEST kudo goes to her playful language when she conveys the term, “opening up,” with the reference of the Trojan War in relation to intimacy—I found that to be so witty and clever!

There were areas where she stated a contraction to her comment, backed up her claim in a humorous, yet sarcastically. She said, “You can’t leave the bathroom door open—it’s offensive. You can’t leave the bathroom closed—your partner needs to get in,” which again, I found it to be playful and witty! I admired her usage of repetition of the word “can’t” as a pattern in decoding love. Needless to say, her switch to second-person perspective is like an extra element a painter paints in to give another layer of dimension to pull in the viewer—and yes, she executed it well.

However, I started losing her again on the last paper last paragraph with long sentences that are loaded with questions (or I was too stupid to understand…). But I do think that love is the “vital plasma and everything else just tap water,” and based on these extreme, yet to the point phrases that made Against Love so entertaining to read.