Not to mention the endless bird refs in chapter 4. Partly funny, partly useful, pretty distracting. His pun-heavy tone is definitley worth mentioning, but nothing I want to rail against--I get worried that, when I criticize or otherwise scoff at an author's "impenetrable" writing style, it's actually displaced frustration from not understanding the material (of course, sometimes the writing style really is horrid, complicated for the sake of being complicated, etc.). Aspects of chapter 4 aside, I appreciated a lot of his little jokes and refs though (like, his choice of musical theatre and Proust examples).

"who turns, in turn, a solitary, miserly, misanthropic man, a bachelor properly linked with those I've described as sinthomosexuals, away from his backward turn of mind and the sterility of his (be)hindsight..." (53).
-aha

The page 14 pun I was ok with letting go. The birds section I thought got way out of hand. I was wondering- trying to do what you reccomended, oh brother, and acknowledge that maybe I just don't get it- if it's some kind of super-intellectual joke/allusion. Foucault and D&G could get kind of playful as well, and I wonder if in the actual French they wouldn't be even more so; I kind of remember reading something to this effect in the D&G intro but didn't remember the English being that full of puns. Irreverancy seems to be a totally sanctioned element in postmodern theory writing.

"the pleasure Scrooge takes, what turns him on, comes in part from refusing to use his nuts to drop acorns from the family tree." (44)