Meaningless Book Jacket Praise

this sentence certainly has a *meaning*, it's just a bit overwritten, is all

1: drum of loss = cf any military burial
2: poignant = ear of the beholder/pathetic fallacy
3: beneath the surface = mixed metaphor? (it's obvious what it means but it's best avoided)
4: presenting us with a gift = since the gift is an emotion, this is no stretch at all: um it's what music does all the time (cf 2)
5: baffling and tender gift of acceptance = may seem superficially paradoxical, buit not really if you actually think about it, loss seems to be the opposite of a gift, but acceptance is actually a good thing to reach, so it is a gift, "tender" is ear of the beholder again, and baffling? well "baffling" = "may seem superficially paradoxical"

i think "offputting book jacket praise" is a better description

Fair enough.

Some of it is at least meaningless in the sense that when you mix metaphors too much they become meaningless because the writer no longer appears to be thinking about the literal origin of the metaphor (i.e., when a drum of loss that beats beneath the surface presents a gift of acceptance).

Drum vs. heart, is the issue.

we shd post more of these though!! name and shame!!

I have a 1978 printing of the Bantam paperback 1975 edition of Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, my favourite novel. The back cover reads:

"The sun has grown deadly...
The world has gone mad, society has perished, savagery rules over all. All that was known is over, all that was familiar is strange and terrible. Today and yesterday collide with tomorrow. In these dying days of Earth, a young drifter enters the city... DHALGREN"

A few minor points:
1. The sun has not grown deadly. It's the same.
2. The world has not gone mad - there is nothing to suggest it has changed at all.
3. Society hasn't perished - except to a degree in the city, subject of an ecological disaster, blanketed in fog, 90% deserted.
4. Savagery doesn't rule over all. There is a street gang, but they don't rule anything.
5. "All that was known is over, all that was familiar is strange and terrible." It's hard to find any content to argue with here specifically, but it isn't true anyway.
6. "Today and yesterday collide with tomorrow." What the fuck is this supposed to mean?
7. There isn't the slightest hint that the Earth is dying.
8. Hurrah, fact! Indeed, a young drifter does enter the city.
9. But the suggestion that Dhalgren is his name is without any support in the text.

The inside front cover is much better:
In the crippled city
where time has lost its meaning
and violence is swift and sudden
a nameless young man with no memory appears...
He shares his great strength
in a loving trinity with a young boy
and a haunted, beautiful woman
in that time before the end of time...

Better on facts and lacking gibberish and errors. It is a very hard book to sell in a brief description - a guy wanders into a mostly emptied city, hangs around for a while, fucks, fights, talks, writes and stuff, then leaves. Nearly 900 pages. Modernist experimental, not really SF as it is labelled.

Today and yesterday always collide with tomorrow!! Well today does anyway. And yesterday collides with today. So there must be some kind of shunt effect.

Martin, I was counting back, and I've owned five copies of Dhalgren over the years. I'd still like to get the Vintage Books edition.

I've just owned the one - I've read it seven times, I believe. I've not read any other book more than three times (I'm less keen on rereading than Sinkah is).

I should get around to rereading it. I'd assume "yesterday and today collide into tomorrow" somehow refers to the wacky time antics, but who knows?

This one has always irked me.

From the back of Donald Barthelme's "40 Stories":

"The prose of Donald Barthelme is a classy rag and bone shop of sophisticated prose ... a national resource of renewal, a kind of Save the Whale of language up on the beach of mindless overuse and cliches."

1) "The prose ... of sophisticated prose" The proofreading of this sentence is a national treasure of bad proofreading.

2) Admittedly, I'm not sure what a "rag and bone shop" is, but it sure doesn't sound classy. Even if it is, the words are clunky.

3) It doesn't make sense to use "Save the Whale" as a noun -- he could be compared to a whale or a campaign to save whales, but not a "Save the Whale".

4) On that note, it makes just as little sense to imagine a "Save the Whale" on a beach.

5) If the whale is beached, it's doomed. Not a good metaphor for someone who is supposedly revitalizing the language.

6) As hard as it is to describe what Barthelme does, I think the writer could come up with something more interesting to say than to point out that Barthelme avoids cliches and mindless overuse. Any good writer does that.

more!

The back of Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers has the most misleading text.

"Chuck and Jerry, two fun-loving students at an American College, discover a faster-than-light space drive and smuggle it into the football team's plane(1). They, together with the lovely Sally Goodfellow, crusty Pop(2) and lovable old John view with horror a practical joke gone awry (3) as the plane screams off to Titan, a frozen moon of Saturn.

But that's only the beginning. When lovable old John's true and awful identity becomes known(4), a wild battle across and through centuries (5) ensues, catapulting friends and deadly foes into the midst of a yarn spun from the grandest tradition of the classic 'space opera'"

1 - They don't smuggle it onto the team plane, they have free access to it and just borrow it.

2 - There is no character in the book called Pop.

3 - There isn't a pratical joke, they have to do it to save their lives.

4 - John's identity as a communist spy is the catalyst even that sends them to Titan, not his true identity is discovered on Titan.

5 - I have no idea what centuries they are talking about. The whole adventure takes about a week.