I hope your migraine goes away!  The aura went away at least, right?  I hope so.  I hate those.  Feel better!

And now, some food, and a bed.

1. The reference to Martin “The Queen of Summertime” Prince was sublime.

2. The smooth functioning of our household relies on the presence of uninterrupted access to Maxalt.  I am happy to be educated in the possibility of one of those magic packets going out of date, though sad that this important information came at your expense.

Or the hand gesture.  The hand gesture is key.

Anyhow, thanks for not busting me on my missing word in the previous comment—“if you’ll forgive the bluntness,” of course.

Good luck with the writing!

I’ve tried to do basically what you’ve suggested above.  I’ve been writing something like a new prospectus or a possible rough draft of an intro, and I mention this guy’s work briefly only to point out how deficient it is.

So sorry to pester you when you’re suffering, but your comment helped a lot.

- - -

* - Thanks to Wikipedia.

Seriously—what you want to convey here is a Martin Prince-esque “I’m aware of his work.”* You’ve seen it, you understand it, you’ll acknowledge that it pre-exists your own text, but there are so many holes in the argument as made there that we might as well just acknowledge it and move on.

That’s my take, at least.  But yours—I mean, your friend’s—is a field far more hidebound, if you’ll the bluntness, than is my own, and one that demands far more of a bowing to the elders.  But it sounds like this book wasn’t actually written by one of the elders that you—he, sorry—have to bow to, so I’d say footnote it to acknowledge the similarities and point out the inadequacy of the earlier text, and move on.

—

*Please tell me you get this reference.  I’ll be forced to comment again if you don’t.  And while my head hurts much less than it did earlier today, staring at the laptop screen is not really where I want to be right now.  In fact, anywhere my eyes are open is not where I want to be.

Let’s say this unnamed friend of mine has been working on a dissertation on a rather well-known 17th-C poet, and this friend recently happened upon a recent but seldom-cited book which contains a chapter on this very 17th-C poet.  The book isn’t very good, but the problem is that the argument of the said chapter is virtually identical to the argument that this friend of mine has been making in his dissertation.  So my friend finds himself in a dilemma, but I’m–err, he’s–at a loss even to evaluate how bad of a dilemma it is.  On the one hand, the argument in that existing chapter only runs for about sixteen pages and is bad enough that the actual readings of the rather long poem in question are completely different from my friend’s.  On the other hand, the last thing my friend wants to do is sound like he’s piggybacking his project on some relatively unaccomplished writer’s book.

Any thoughts?