July 15th, 2011 / 3:13 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
Please, please, no more promo emails for your client’s new book where the first line is a question meant to sum up the central conflict. I seriously just got this one: “Dear Blake, What happens when a serial killing cab driver and a suicidal socialite collide?” Bro…
I agree. Every book sounds awful when reduced this way.
Wouldn’t what happen depend on how fast they were going when they collided? I assume they must have been going relatively slow or else they would have both been killed and then the book would have been very short. (Maybe that would be for the best.)
it would be interesting if they were both suicidal and serial killers, lots to work out there
The President of the United States… is a duck??
What happens when a would-be writer and the salons of Faubourg St Germain collide?
What happens when a young office-worker and a bizarre legal system collide?
What happens when the product of an early experiment in operant conditioning and the London Blitz collide?
If we observe their speeds we would lose their positioning though! Then we lose the book!
what do you get when you cross a penis with a potato?
– a dictator
Seriously. This is so so key. Stop asking me questions. Just tell me about the book. Somewhere along the way, publicists decided they needed this interrogative hook to get an audience for their book. It is annoying and never works.
What do you get when you cross a homosexual with a gentile?
A goy
What happens when a person has a degree in liberal arts and is lucky enough to have caught on with a book publisher who provides a paycheck for working with books that helps pay a portion of the loans and one day has to write PR copy for a book he/she doesn’t think much of anyway and the his/her boss mangles it in final edits before it goes out to a blogger?
Just be nice and hit delete.
I want a book with a pistol built in that says, “Read me or I’ll bust a cap yo.” And then I will read it. I will not even care what it’s about. I will just think, Shit, this book is going to shoot me if I don’t comply.
i delete all mail i get from publicists, don’t worry
that book is a gun being held by a criminal who wants to kill you and sometimes the criminal kills you anyway even if you read the book because the book isn’t really a book it’s just a gun.
Yeah, but what happens when a gun-book and someone who refuses to kowtow to inanimate objects, no matter how dangerous, collide?
Oh shit. I think we’d have a serial killing, cab driving book on our hands. That is one killer read!
“Dear Blake, why not check out my client’s new book, yo?”
Based on that question, I’d read a couple or few pages of that book in consideration of finishing the thing.
How do people resist blurbs??
It doesn’t seem so bad. The only parts that I don’t like are the “Dear Blake” and the word “collide”. They should say “Dear Mr. Butler” and use the word “meat”.
ok you go against everything. got it
see
that right there is a blurb that would get me to read a few pages
I have this theory that deadgod is actually that computer they got to play jeopardy
“How do people resist blurbs?”
They remind themselves that Amy Hempel and Gary Shteyngart wrote glowing blurbs for James Franco’s book.
You know those guitars that are like, double guitars?
I’m saying that recognizing one bogus blurb, each bogus blurb, every bogus blurb, and all bogus blurbs doesn’t ‘disenchant’ me (anyway) from the next cunning attractor. –because I want the next book I read to be one of the most important to me, you know? It’s an example of even a self-consciously fallible intellect betrayed, as it were, by the passions it’s rooted in and which simultaneously are rooted in it–‘the triumph of hope over experience’. As I suggest, a few pages in – off the store/library shelf – , and I’ve tested the blah-blah to my satisfaction (to a limited extent). But I do know that I’m easy to trick into opening the book, which is what the cover letters spoken of in the snippet are trying to do, right?
I don’t have a Trey theory
Geeze….are we now hyper-analyzing blurbs, deadgod? I was merely looking for an excuse to take a potshot at James Franco.
I can’t think of a more uninteresting topic than book publicity.
I took your obvious wisecrack as an excuse to be more clear about being a sucker for blurbs, which kind of ‘advertising’ occasioned the snippet that occasioned “our” mildly “analytical” discussion.
Sure you can.
You might be the first “sucker for blurbs” I’ve met. Too many blurbs (not all, but too many) read like cover letter templates that teachers use to write letters of rec for their students.
And, actually, my wisecrack is somewhat of an indictment on blurbing. Have you read Franco’s book?
I did. I figured I should if I was going to be a Franco hater. Well, let me tell you and anyone else who will listen: t is truly, truly awful. Words cannot describe this book’s awfulness and inhumanity; it’s a blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic book and I find it disheartening that two esteemed writers would stamp their names to it.
You might be the first “sucker for blurbs” I’ve met. Too many blurbs (not all, but too many) read like cover letter templates that teachers use to write letters of rec for their students.
And, actually, my wisecrack is somewhat of an indictment on blurbing. Have you read Franco’s book?
I did. I figured I should if I was going to be a Franco hater. Well, let me tell you and anyone else who will listen: t is truly, truly awful. Words cannot describe this book’s awfulness and inhumanity; it’s a blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic book and I find it disheartening that two esteemed writers would stamp their names to it.
Okay, full disclosure: I gave up after the gratuitous, purposeless, gang rape scene where a bunch of white, rich dudes enacted their Asian fetish on the victim (there was no irony, no social commentary, no playing with style/genre or subverting aesthetic–just straight-up hamfisted, undergraduate gore).
It’s disgraceful that Amy Hempel and Gary S. endorsed this racist, misogynistic garbage in their “blurbs.”
Oh yeah, and Ben Marcus too. Way to be a hypocrite, Ben–take on Franzen, and then turnaround and endorse this filth.
hmmm