Response to Steven's "My Grandfather's World Was Round"

As Steven acknowledged in his blog post, they are certain brands of punctuation utilized in “My Grandfather’s World Was Round” that were initially off-putting. Without any previous knowledge of his writing style, I was unaware that his dialogue was written without quotes. Again, he defends his style in a subsequent post: “I don’t use quotation marks to signify dialogue, because I think they look weird and break up the flow of a sentence’s aesthetics, so I use a capital letter instead to signify the start of dialogue. I also don’t separate it out from the structure of the paragraph.” I appreciate his attempts at literary experimentation, but I assume the average reader would fail to recognize his efforts as purely academic, efforts made for the purpose of “a sentence’s aesthetics.”

Steven’s subject was intriguing, however. Combining his relationship with his grandfather (or lack thereof) with his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s, the eras he lived through, the type of man he strived to be – self-made and self-sufficient – made his story particularly interesting. Ultimately, the piece focused on an entire generation of like-minded individuals: “The general consensus is that men like him advanced this country while they were young and hinder it now that they are old…” According to Steven, their net worth was zero; they merely existed. Consequently, what hope do the rest of us have? Do we just simply exist? Should we “do something better” with our time?