451 Pages Too Long...
Why Publishers Like Unnecessarily Elongated Titles and How to Tell Them The Book Isn't Worth The Paper It's Written On...
What’s all the fuss about HYPE
Some titles are about as long, and often more entertaining, unputdownable than the actual book they are trying to get you to waste $14.99 hard-earned- plus Packing on.
The glossy, embossed gold letter cover. Often the best part of modern, pale imitations of Great literary Expectations. “Never judge a book by its’ cover”… But sometimes it is the only way. Now that Woke ideology, the token “Trans Asian”, “Black Victim”, “Lesbian-high-achiever” character is shoe-horned into a flimsy plot. Then poorly directed. You write them in, just so some pink-haired Columbia Commissioning Editor will pick you off The Slush Pile. Rejections slips make excellent book marks, BTW.
Just as for most lousy films these days. The booming trailers are too often the only “Super-Gripping” five minutes of the three-hour crummy “Epic”. “The Blockbuster Coming Soon” to a cinema near you. Unfortunately. Too many Productions, Novels, Scripts that critics and air-head, on-line “Influencers” have been paid, bribed, slept-with and/or otherwise persuaded to hype. Enjoy the Hype? “Award Winner Film of The Year”. Slap on the Gold laurels. It was just 182 minutes too long. And at some screenings I’ve attended, thinking silently, “Life’s too short for this”…
But alas, not short enough. “Performance Poetry” and “Community Murals” are the worse-than-death water-board torture of the Arts. And what the hell is “Lived Experience” anyway?.. Now “Ideas”. Talent- remember that? Possibility. Imagination don’t count. Not unless their from a “Black, Lesbian-Empowerment POV”. Don’t Shoot the Messenger, unfortunately. But in Woke La-La Land and “Hooray, Hooray for Pedowood”, Californication, The Message is now the Messenger.
MONOCULTURE
The real problem for Art is worse. For creativity, and society, much worse. Many productions- films, “installations”, exhibitions, books promoting the same, you discover aren’t worth the taxpayer subsidy or “VC” Venture cap funding. Or all the swank tofu luncheons to get here. Do some social archaeology. Dig a little in Alumni Books, and you find how many crap productions are by the same “Yale friend” of some Luvvie TV Executive’s brother. Or some such creative nepotism.
The Nobies, those without the right Left of Liberal politics, and or iPhone address book, however innovative, or strong their ideas, don’t even get past the tofu starter. So you end up with a Woke monoculture from elections to casting by an elite from an elite. A self-selecting, dangerous, monoculture.
The way of the world, I’m sure. As with Trump, the Luvvies waste thousands of media hours bemoaning Trump, Trumpism, Trumpencomics. But never stop to ask the real Question- Why Trump? Why out of a population pool of some 323 millions did the American Dream end up with the nightmare choice of two muppet-puppets. He is he symptom, the talisman of a decadent and crumbling American Empire. The least worst option is not Democracy.
Back to the so-called Arts. Art and Life and Politics have always shared fates. As architecture and opera is a barometer, or rather mileometer to the end of Civilisations. Not sure what the brutalist, Modernist, dehumanised car parks and galleries and housing estates- they all look oddly alike- foretell the West. But one suspects there won’t be Critics and academics around to catalogue its’ demise.
No one literate for sure to read or write the West’s obituary or Op Ed. If only it would Decline and Fall, into the book of the movie, as good as the Planet of the Apes. Just a rusty Statue of Liberty poking awkwardly out of the sand on some beach. And played by an actor as supreme as Charleston Heston. If only.
Either way, more and more is being made by fewer and fewer, who don’t have the “right” Lefty-Liberal connections. An ever-decreasing circle, a clique within a clique. It doesn’t matter much if it’s a “Straight”, Left or Right, male or feminist clique- a clique is bad news for society. It strangles and bonsai-es ideas before they even get onto the storey-board or First Draft. Or in journalism which, as we know, is the first draft of History.
The samey genetically Liberal, artistic gene pool needs a stir. If only for the sake of human Creativity and exploration. And The Pool drying up- of ideas. As the sign in the tenement window used to read: “No Dogs. No Irish. No Blacks”. In that order. So now it’s, “No Men. White Men. White Male, Straight, Over 40, Conservative men, need not apply”…
Am I bovvered? Whatever. Of course I am.
Statistics are telling a different story to the accepted Woke narrative. And it’s more interesting- and scary- than the film of the book…
Publishing commissioning editors for instance. 90% of whom, in many of the big houses and advertising agencies and Arts Councils- are women. Women from a certain sort of suburb realtors call “Well-heeled”. With certain sorts of parents- think “Surgeon MD father”, and “Sophomore Home Coming Queen for a mother”. You get the generalisation. See The Plot and The End coming a mile off. Some cliches it turns out, are more accurate than some er… cliches.
#MeToo. @WhiteMaleStraightPissedIgnored
The Luvvies, like the execrable Weinstein was, are The Gatekeepers (Good Title). To creativity. The Arts. Who gets, and more revealingly who doesn’t get, the “Advances”. Thankfully, and usually not, Mr. Weinstein’s kind. So screenplays that should never have been “Saved As” anything. Damien Hirst “Retrospectives” that weren’t worth the looking first time around. “Installations” and Cy Twombly, novels and plays about plays. All are written, produced, watched and paid for because you are a token. A Token Whatever “Under-represented”, “Minority” they define. Just fill in the blanks.
And too many are now the disproportionately, over-underrepresented. Given the full Monty Broadway red-carpet treatment. Not because anything you create is actually creative. Or even much good. But who lets Political Correctness get in the way of a good story. Not once the marketing department label the dust-jacket with an adhesive, peel-off “Bestseller”. “Booker Prize Winner” so often translates as “I’m showing off. Virtually Signalling on the train home”. See how open-mined and trendily “au courant” I am. How I can Anti-ageist. Anti-Fascist. Anti-Anti, I can be. Competitive Wokeness is a scream. Worthy of Munch.
“Writers” that shouldn’t be let lose “writing” a shopping list. By backers who couldn't run a bath. At least not one as good as the one Michelle Pfeifer took in What Lies Beneath. And to name drop in true luvvie fashion, got to tell her so. Like dodgy over-priced, over-hyped wines, many films and books become “Classics”, given enough time, and enough rich American fools, willing to buy, untasted, at an auction.
The Best Thing since- the last Best Thing.
All will be forgotten, if not forgiven, artistically. Those with too much money, and too little taste, are like thirteen year olds with a licence who gets a Porsche 626 and wonder why it crashes all by itself. Those who shouldn’t get to decide what is “made” or not made. They are the excited teenagers. The same who reach for the Glock 9MM in the glove compartment.
Have you seen the new Cy Twombly art show, they shriek? OMG!
No, I reply, I hadn’t even seen the old Twombly. Paraphrasing conductor Sir Thomas Beecham on modernist composer Stockhausen- but I believe I may have “trodden in some”.
Can you recall a single line, a print, from The Greatest, not so living, artist? No. Me neither. Just a four-old’s inane scribbles in brown crayon. Hype, writ large. Inanity magnified on 20ft canvas. And the price tag magnified by a few million.
It’s “Conceptual” my host implores. Cajoles. Persuades. Then dismisses me- not the work of Art.
And no, I don’t want to “understand” it. Or Educate myself. My late sometime mentor Brain Sewell, and later still Art Critic of the London Evening Standard, forewarned me of the bitchiness and prejudice of those who claim to anything but, bitchy and prejudiced.
It’s not that I’m “against” Modernism I told him- “I just don’t like any of it”.
Twombly. The dafter the name, preferably with an ethnic tang, the more The In- Crowd take it- and themselves- seriously. Lap it up, the marketing cream from the marketing trough. What passes for “Contemporary Art”, and music, is trapped in its’ perpetual 20th century bubble. The Emperor’s new clothes syndrome- from Architecture to indeed Politics I venture. It’s all just not as good as the brochure says it is. Cy is stark naked. Philippe Starke naked. And it’s not even a pretty sight.
“The only good thing about a tortuous, lingering death is that it’s a Once in a Lifetime experience. A bit like a “Cy Twombly” Private View.
Rather have ten minutes in front of one of Giotto’s more inferior sketches. Sorry Cy, “The Scribbles” are what some in uniforms used to call De-generate. No uniforms, but The Wokerati are just as dictatorial in their way. Uniformed opinions. I agree, it looks at its’ best, as the brochure tells me, in natural light. Yep. Outside the gallery in a skip heading for the New Jersey City incinerator.
And no, I don’t want to be “Challenged” by it. I just want, and want society, to forget it all, like some bad dream at the Met. A painful artistic verrucae. As some fawning critic chum said of a recently departed “Giant” of modernist opera; how they died “too young”… “At their peak”. True. But perhaps not young enough.
Reminds me of John Cleese’s story about being invited to a show on Broadway by some American friends. Got the last three tickets to a “Sensational”, “Hit Show”, the y shrieked.
“You do know it’s lousy, don’t you?”, Cleese demurred.
“Who cares”, they reply, clasping their diamond-encrusted hands together in exultation- “It’s a Hit”…
Similarly, Life’s too short to waste on another “Musical Extravaganza”. Unfortunately, not short enough.
CODY and Me Too
Still, Cody looked pleased with himself. Sat. Shuffled his elegantly worn Newport loafers. The pair he got last Summer. At that chandlery in Hyannis. The one he couldn’t understand, why I couldn’t remember.
You get the idea about Cody. You’ve all met, or know, or are betrothed to a Cody. There’s always time to get away, even if the food on Titanic looks very nice.
Finished? I asked without having to ask, by raising my eyebrows.
Finished, he replied, also without speaking, just the eyebrows.
When finally he spoke it was a number.
“451”.
Pages, I knew. Proudly. As if authorial longevity, “sustaining” the narrative was all. Like his sex life with Maud, I speculated silently? Until I remembered they had just divorced. Or rather had divorced a decade ago, and had now only just “separated”: mortgage endowment, college fees for Abigail, and who got Mother’s Revolutionary high-backed chair- and the dog-baskets. Not even the dogs.
“Let no man, or lawyer, put asunder Thy Beatles on vinyl Limited Edition”…
I “Facilitated”, he thanked me for nothing. As I didn’t realise I had. No time to tell Cody it was a ghastly word. He was always moving, moving. Even in Vietnam. In between. In between lives, I often thought and think now, shuffling those deckies under the table. Still, apparently sitting between two sofas saying nothing, without a single facial expression for two hours, passed for bo-toxed “Mediation”.
There are limits to friendship when it teeters drunken into insanity. With a long drop below. But that was what Cody had been contemplating at the time. So if he believed that I believed I had saved him, that was good enough, for both of us. I could say something “oh so witty” here about getting older- you either become like a vintage, caramelly Bordeaux- from the East bank of course- or vinegar at the back of the larder you should have binned long ago. The choice is your- ex-wife’s
“Pleased?”, I ventured. Referring to both book and his new found singledom.
“Very”.
Quickly he added a footnote, in Garamond 9pt. “Did I enjoy the draft?”, he sent by courier. Email had been “unsafe”, his East Side publisher had advised, no doubt inflating both their inflated, flatulent egos. He promised to get me a lunch invite next time I was “in town”. Maybe a “gig”- “Reviewing”- or some such… Promises.
“Certainly”, I lied. Lied to my best friend. Best man. Carefully avoiding more than one word answers, I learnt in the Army, was invariably safer than elaboration with a verb or noun to camouflage the original lie.
He shuffled his scuffed yachties again. Fidgety, I knew as all writers are immediately after birth. Just as we get munchies for Oreos when “composing”. Cody prefers that to mere Writing.
“I’m glad”. Cody smiled cryptically, as if a character in one of his own books. The Shifty one, you know, in Chapter 2, whom you can’t remember his name by Chapter 10. 451 pages later and not worth the thumb turning.
“Had to be careful”, Cody began. “What he said”. Was told he needed more Black characters. More lesbian. More Trans. For the “Woke” audience.
But I thought you were writing a book. Fiction.
No, no. Seemingly I didn’t understand, Now.
Now, “Fiction” was so much harder than Non. than Reference. “A Life of Aaron Burr” had been “mooted”. By Monica-with-the-nice eyes. His agent. Except he couldn’t say “things” like that about her any more. The “nice rack”, when her blouse button popped that time, that was, The Old Him. He was Reformed.
And he needed the next advance check. He nodded, choir boy caught with something he shouldn’t have in his cassock, looking down at the loafers. The deck shoes, now minus the 16ft Sea Dreamer sailboat, sea-sick Maud would get to enjoy not sailing in.
“Fiction” meant you couldn’t just make “stuff” up. That was Autobiography. Coffee-table books on “Climate Change in Canada” you never quite got round to reading.
Long pregnant, italicised pause. Period. No, I lie, a Semi-colon.
“Was it too long?”, enquired a sheepish Cody.
“About 451 Pages. Give or take”- I didn’t answer.
I wonder if we would still be buddy-bud, best friends if I had? I pride myself if nothing else, on straight-talking, Philadelphian reliability. Yet here I was, lying through Cody’s capped dental work- again.
I am a schmuck. Worse, because I try not to be. Too hard. Sometimes I think Cody guesses, but perversely, being deceived by the “only one he can trust”, is somehow the lessor of two evils. Even if I suspect, “the only one in this state in New England”.
Yes. A gold-toothed, diamond-studded schmuck. Sometimes I think everyone on campus knows. Even Monica-with the eyes, in NY, whom I’ve met twice and never spoken to. Everyone in the the Northern Hemisphere at least. All except me.
And all within five minutes of my best, perhaps only real friend in College, if not The Whole Wide World, sitting down and nursing his ego and a luke soya coffee. Yep Soya, another of his “All New Me” innovations.
Honesty. It’s an experiment few of us, let a lone little ’ol me can afford. Not with my bank balance, and a weekend sail boating with Maud to avoid. Wonder if Monica gets sea-sick too? Or as only Cody would add, “Or her girlfriend”.
From James Chanel “Letters to England, USA” 2024
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