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| RTomens, 2023 |
Fresh off the typewriter - literally minutes ago! The text is from What Remains of Words, the booklet, which in turn was made from around 60,000 words I started collating over ten years ago with a view to shaping all the sampled text into something like a 'novel', but only something like one just as William Burroughs cut-up 'novels' were something like novels. A few people even own a copy of WRW, the lucky few!
Flicking through The Look of the Book the other day I came across the part about blurb and learnt that Walt Whitman is regarded as the first to use it in 1857, although he cheated by having an excerpt from a letter to him by Ralph Waldo Emerson printed on the spine - cheeky sod! Great marketing, though.
I confess to being swayed by blurb - isn't everyone? I'm so gullible that if a book doesn't have any I wonder what's wrong with it - stupid, eh? But it's so persuasive to be told by Simon Heffer that Jonathan Meades is: 'The most significant cultural critic writing in English today...', (although I didn't need persuading to buy the collection, Pedro and Ricky Come Again) or that Jonathan Raban's Soft City is, according to Jan Morris in The Spectator, 'A tour de force'. By the way, it's coincidental that both authors are called Jonathan...I don't see any significance in it...they're just the first two with blurb that came to hand.
The funniest blurb is that which contains just one word, such as 'Brilliant' or 'Thrilling' because we all know that's cheating and either could be extracted from a review which says 'This book has a brilliant premise but fails to deliver' or 'The action scene are thrilling but the story is weak' - huh!
I browse the back of lots of books since I work in a bookshop and the £2 sales table is filled with novels described in glowing terms via blurb but they're just not my kind of books, usually. It's easy to find ecstatic blurb for blockbusting, best-selling crime novels. They don't convince me because my mind's already made up.
There's some blurb on the back of my vispo collection, You Would Say That. I didn't pay the authors, honest. I think the editor must have paid them - ha-ha!
It's very satisfying to discover that somebody apart from my sister, who certainly doesn't know what the hell Vispo is but remains thrilled that I have a book published, agrees to offer praise. It lends an air of...um...authority (?)...no...professionalism (?)...no...something to the work, to my work. Ultimately I hope it helps shift a few copies. Being relatively 'unknown', I need all the help I can get so a word or two from 'known' writers helps. Well, at least one of them is well-known in Vispo circles. Vispo circles, by the way, are incredibly small...almost dots, really, on the art map. No matter, it's one of the things I love doing!
TTFN
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