In-Jokes

by Kieran Healy on March 14, 2008

Matt Yglesias’s book Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats is nearing publication, providing further evidence that very long subtitles beginning with “How …” or “Why …”, and which explain the main thesis of the book, are now completely entrenched in the U.S. publishing industry. It’s the 21st century equivalent of the 19th century “Being a …” subtitle.

Anyway, the blurbs are up and the best one is from Ezra Klein, who wins the inaugural CT American Blurbonomics: How to Praise your Friends while Surreptitiously Taking the Piss out of your Enemies award. Klein says Heads in the Sand is “A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.”

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Sunday Bookchat « The Opinion Mill
03.16.08 at 3:35 am
Notes from the Far East
03.23.08 at 11:52 am

{ 29 comments }

1

Delicious Pundit 03.14.08 at 2:50 am

very long subtitles beginning with “How …” or “Why …”, and which explain the main thesis of the book, are now completely entrenched in the U.S. publishing industry.

You have to admit it is efficient. Maybe you have time to peruse book jackets, Mr. Leisureingham, but I’m far too busy.

A subgenre of this is the “changed the world” subtitle, like “Phlogiston: How A Substance Which Doesn’t Even Exist Revolutionized Science And Changed The World.”

2

Kieran Healy 03.14.08 at 2:56 am

Oh yeah, I forgot about the “changed the world” thing.

3

Righteous Bubba 03.14.08 at 2:59 am

Mr. Leisureingham

I will steal that.

4

Aaron Swartz 03.14.08 at 3:43 am

For others who have successfully forgotten this sad piece of history, the joke is explained here.

5

Vance Maverick 03.14.08 at 4:36 am

This is the third post I’ve seen tonight devoted to praising Ezra’s joke. I think my RSS feed needs to start getting out more.

6

Bruce Baugh 03.14.08 at 6:58 am

Ha! if I believed in purgatory, I’d believe Ezra won his soul a long time out of it with that.

7

freshlysqueezedcynic 03.14.08 at 9:33 am

I think we should resurrect the “Being A” subtitle. It had class.

8

ajay 03.14.08 at 10:23 am

7: no, no. Resurrect the extremely long title, eg “On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”.
On this model, MY’s book would have the infinitely superior title “An Examination of the Failings and Malfeasances of the Republican Party in the Field of Foreign Policy in General and the Middle-East in Particular, to which is adjoined a Criticism of the Inabilities of the Democratic Party in the same Arena” and would be referred to as “Yglesias’ Examination“.

Possibly relevant erudite pun: “arena” means “sand” in Latin.

9

abb1 03.14.08 at 10:36 am

Republicans Who Screw Up Foreign Policy and The Democrats Who Love Them.

10

Katherine 03.14.08 at 11:32 am

By the way, the link to Ezra Klein goes to the old blog rather than the new one at Prospect.org.

11

novakant 03.14.08 at 12:48 pm

I only hope some poor soul at Wiley was tasked exclusively with weeding out all the spelling and syntax errors.

12

Picador 03.14.08 at 2:00 pm

The movie version, when it is released, will no doubt be titled “Hiding Liberty” or “Asking Yglesias” or “Deriding Jonah”. We have standard cultural forms for titles, not just of pop-academic books, but also feature films.

13

The Modesto Kid 03.14.08 at 2:19 pm

Novakant: but if the book is published free of spelling and grammar errors, that will cast rather a lot of doubt on its authorship.

14

Ken C. 03.14.08 at 3:07 pm

The movie version, when it is released, will no doubt be titled “Hiding Liberty” or “Asking Yglesias” or “Deriding Jonah”.

These titles are double the length they should be. Maybe even “Screwups” would be too long.

15

Sebastian Holsclaw 03.14.08 at 3:39 pm

“Resurrect the extremely long title, eg “On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”.”

Oh, the ‘or’ titles are something we should bring back! I especially value ‘or’ titles that seem to contradict themselves: “Pitch Perfect Politics, or how Hillary Clinton planned her run for president”.

16

David Y. 03.14.08 at 3:47 pm

We should add “the secret history….” to the list of bad subtitles. Because each book you read like that is the FIRST book ever to be written about the subject “in such detail and care”.

I personally make it a point to resist buying and reading any book with “how” or “why” in the subtitle. If the author can’t come up with something better, I doubt it’s going to be a good book. Even if the publisher forces them to put it in,that tends to say that the book can’t speak for itself. I do wonder if publishers force these subtitles on authors so that in bookstores, conservatives can quickly decide which books they might like to read and liberals can find theirs. Heaven help us if we opened up a book we didn’t agree with and stopped having our books preach to the choir.

I base my dislike after having read many of these books in my free time at college, and though they tended to be about Iraq or 9-11, I found most of them to tend to be polemics, sometimes thoroughly researched but often enough not. They tend to be written by journalists who although well informed in their fields, are rarely a source of unique insight or true expertise. My little theory, I think, draws some legitimacy from the fact that two of the best books in recent years by journalists were “Assassins Gate” and “Fiasco.” Neither had a “how or “why” subtitle.
The one counterexample of a good book with a crappy subtitle is “Ghost Wars – The secret history of…” by Steve Coll. I think journalists in particular need to use these subtitles because often they are communicating their own reporting knowledge combined with summaries from academic experts and think tank “experts”. In the end, I think its better to read the history that is directly written by historians: Taylor Branch for Civil Rights or David Kennedy for 20th Century American history generally, or Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize”. I tend to enjoy those well-written history books (Though the prize isn’t that well written, just a good book…) much better than any journalistic pseudo history, which “Heads in the Sand” sounds like (even if I will agree with it). Did Matt Yglesias do any original research? Did he interview administration players never before heard from? Doubtful. He’s probably putting his astute blog commentary into book form. Whatever. I get real annoyed when people read a few books, usually the definitive ones in the area, and then feel they have expertise. I’ve read many of those same books. I’m not an expert, and I don’t play one in the blogosphere. Unless you’ve actually sat down and gone through THOUSANDS of primary documents and interviews and the vast secondary literature on a subject, you’re not an expert. I’m looking at you Jonah Golberg, and your doughy pantload of a book.

17

RICKM 03.14.08 at 4:50 pm

Sebastian

As long as its not a ripoff of the Dr. Strangelove subtitle. I read an article by Jim Cramer that used that cliche, and from then on I became convinced only morons use it.

18

Ken Houghton 03.14.08 at 6:20 pm

(blogwhore moment) Well, that puts me in my place.

Serious comment: Do you really think that’s a positive blurb? “A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care” translates in the browsing reader’s mind as “G-d that was long and boring, even if you care about such things.”

19

tom s. 03.14.08 at 6:38 pm

“How…” subtitles are so last year. Surely everyone who’s anyone is all “And So Can You” now.

20

The Modesto Kid 03.14.08 at 6:55 pm

Oh, the ‘or’ titles are something we should bring back

But isn’t the part of the title following “or”, effectively a subtitle?

21

Cryptic Ned 03.14.08 at 8:02 pm

Has “Nonsensical Phrase Drawn From Primary Source: Random Word, Random Word, and the Actual Topic of this Book” finally gone out of fashion?

22

Sebastian 03.14.08 at 8:25 pm

“But isn’t the part of the title following “or”, effectively a subtitle?”

Effectively, yes. But it sounds like you couldn’t make up your mind which always inspires confidence in the work product.

23

smaug 03.14.08 at 10:13 pm

Has “Nonsensical Phrase Drawn From Primary Source: Random Word, Random Word, and the Actual Topic of this Book” finally gone out of fashion?

I just poohed my shorts laughing at that one. I think every humanities/anthropology first book is titled this way.

24

Wax Banks 03.15.08 at 5:22 am

I can’t be the only one who finds Klein’s blurb juvenile, can I? I know book-jacket blurbs aren’t exactly the salon culture of our time, and I know grownups make stupid jokes when blurbing their roommates’ books too, but surely we can do better than Family Guy as a model for ‘intellectual’ allusion. Ha ha it’s only a blog joke and like twenty people will get it (and won’t they feel involved) and yes no one expects greatness from these guys, but the mutual-masturbatory style of the Klein/Yglesias blog circle is exceeded in tackiness only by the taunting-schoolboy childishness that passes between partisan camps.

25

Henry (not the famous one) 03.15.08 at 12:59 pm

Whether you like Billy Collins or not, it’s hard to disagree with the thesis of “Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles.”

26

Michael Bérubé 03.16.08 at 3:14 pm

I can’t be the only one who finds Klein’s blurb juvenile, can I?

Ehhh . . . could be, Doc!

27

biff3000 03.16.08 at 4:25 pm

#11: “Yglesias’ editor” belongs on one of those worst jobs lists, right up there(!) with “Britney’s gynecologist”.

28

HP 03.16.08 at 11:21 pm

Well, this is embarrassing. I’ve just sent the final proofs of Cryptohistoriography: How Secret Histories Changed the World off to the printer.

That wasn’t even my first choice for a title. I wonder if it’s not too late to change it back to The Basques of Eden: Language, Culture, and the Invention of History.

29

richard 03.17.08 at 5:17 pm

“Nonsensical Phrase Drawn From Primary Source: Random Word, Random Word, and the Actual Topic of this Book”

Genius. I blame the journals for this, though, which encourage a standard “memorable hook: a collection of searchable keywords” structure. When you’ve written half a dozen of those and come to publish your book project, you’re expected to punch it up a bit, and there’s your result.

When I come to write my own books I plan to use HOWTO structures, like: “HOW TO build a world-girdling empire with nothing but slaves and slave-like labor relations” or “implanting and nurturing false consciousness in colonial workers: a beginner’s guide.”

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