Meaningless Book Jacket Praise

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.