Faint praise and damnations

If I recall correctly the later editions of W.W. Bartley’s biography of Wittgenstein (which was controversial for claiming that Wittgenstein used to pick up men in the park, among other things, with very limited evidence, so far as I understand) had blurbs like “A horrible piece of slander that is better ignored” (some famous Wittgenstein scholar). Unfortunately I can’t find a copy of the back cover of any edition, and not even a front cover of a later one, on the web. I thought it was a pretty good marketing idea, though. Who doesn’t want to read horrible slander, after all?

Not on topic, but I once gambled and asked a teacher I disliked for a recommendation. I had done fairly well in his class, but not especially well. His recommendation was approximately “In 1979-80 Mr. Emerson was a member of a very fine class I taught”. I suspect that I had failed to conceal my dislike adequately.

As was my wont.

An oldie but a goldie

“Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterrley’s Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.”
– Ed Zern

Alasdair Gray wrote his own blurb for 1982, Janine which I thought got it mostly right:

This already dated novel is set inside the head of an ageing, divorced, alcoholic, insomniac supervisor of security installations who is tippling in the bedroom of a small Scottish hotel. Though full of depressing memories and propaganda for the Conservative Party it is mainly a sadomasochistic fetishistic fantasy. Even the arrival of God in the later chapters fails to elevate the tone. Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author’s first books, Lanark and Unlikely Stories, Mostly, is to be found here in concentrated form.

The Wasp Factory was much, much better than the war in Iraq.

Oh, bloody HTML. I knew that was going to happen, the preview box isn’t working for me and I’m too stupid to get it right without it. The book is:

The Darwin Wars: How Stupid Genes Became Selfish Gods

The link above works.

“Yes, there is one scene in [the Wasp Factory] that stayed with me for days and made me wish I could clean out the inside of my brain with bleach.”

s/”for days”/”for blimming *ever*”. At least, I’m fairly sure it’s the same scene (metal skull-cap, right?)

witch @10,

Brown’s book is not notably superficial, and it’s not merely about Gould v. Dawkins — IIRC it goes to much greater length, for example, on Midgely v. Dawkins — and its framing conceit is poor old George Price being driven mad by the implications of his famous equation. It might be fair to say that the book is a survey of how evolutionary theory has affected thought about what we humans are, and why; especially, but not only, when the people doing the thinking are scientists.

Midgely herself gave the book a much nicer blurb, BTW, even though the book had pointed out that, in her attack on The Selfish Gene, she had “got the biology as wrong as one could possibly get it”, or words to that effect.

All that said, Dennett’s blurb is splendid. I imagine Brown is particularly proud of it.

The other apocryphal one is “this book fills a much-needed gap”…

I remember once listening to a bunch of professional authors tossing out ideas for ambiguous cover blurbs. It might have been Ursula Le Guin who suggested, “I cannot recommend this book too highly.”

Cheerful thought for the day: the scene in The Wasp Factory alluded to above is the only one in the book that actually [*] happened.

Which, given some of the things that happen in that book, is a cheerful thought.

* In that something very like it was recounted to Iain and me by a nurse. She could have made it up, but I doubt it.

Ken, couldn’t you have waited until _after_ lunch to mention that?

21: which is an excellent reason for, “Carry On” films and white stockings notwithstanding, not socialising with nurses. They come out with this kind of stuff without warning. (Especially casualty nurses.)

Feith’s is a serious work

The fullest and most thoughtful statement of the Pentagon thinking

God, yet another right wingnut writing a very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care . . .

It wasn’t just hostile reviews just inside the front cover of The Wasp Factory, I think. I remember it having alternating incredibly hostile and complementary reviews, with the conceit presumably being not only that you had to read something which some people thought was quite so reprehensible, but that you had to read something which people disagreed about quite so much. You might almost think that it was designed to provoke that kind of reaction…

Oh, thanks, Ken. Just what I needed to consider.

Someone correct me, but didn’t Will Self once receive just about the best review I’ve ever seen: “This is a horrible, loathsome, revolting book that I could not wait to reach the end, and I have the terrible sinking feeling that I shall soon pick it up and read it again”?

Am I mistaken or was that Irish Times review penned by John Banville?

From a blurb on the dust jacket of a perfectly adequate, if workman-like monograph in my field:

“There are keen insights in almost every chapter, and the research is excellent.”

I feel like the usual phrase is “almost every page” and what’s more, the reviewer is pointing out that whole chapters of this book are without a single keen insight. Ouch.

Cold Mountain, not Old Mountain.

I used to pick up women in the park. Does that make me a straight Wittgenstein? Everyone knows that Ludwig was gay. So what if he picked up men in a park? I read that biography and it was excellent.

I never could keep Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks straight. Now I get it: They are the same person.

My question is: Is he the son or grandson of Rosie M. Banks, the celebrated female novelist?

“I have been stunned and baffled by Roger Lewis’s vast biography of the stunningly baffling Anthony Burgess.” –Jan Morris, author of The Meaning
of Nowhere

@35 Target Rich Environment is way too obvious. I always thought a good one would be Regrettable Necessity

If Feith is the “stupidest” according to Gen Franks, what exactly is Franks then? Franks didn’t have the balls to stand up and say without a well planned ofccupation phase, we shouldn’t even have an invasion phase.

This is the NYT review of a book written by Amy Fisher:

Amy Fisher’s taste in music is as lamentable as her taste in men. You might think that a book that begins “The Eagles are my favorite group of all time” can only go uphill, but just a few sentences later we are told “Joey himself wore no underwear.” Joey, of course, is Joseph Buttafuoco, aka Joey Coco-Pops, who Miss Fisher says became her lover almost a year before she shot his wife, Mary Jo, in 1992. In “Amy Fisher: My Story,” written with Sheila Weller, the author of “Marrying the Hangman: A True Story of Privilege, Marriage and Murder,” we are also told that Joey French-braided Amy’s hair, taught her how to do the lambada – the forbidden dance – and sucked her toes. Mr. Buttafuoco, now under indictment for statutory rape, will most likely deny that any braiding, lambadaing or toe-sucking took place. Miss Fisher claims to possess a photographic memory (well, maybe) and to have visited every motel on Long Island (no argument there). The reader may sometimes wonder if it is really Amy Fisher doing the talking – “I am a grim, chastened person” – but a more recognizable voice inevitably asserts itself: “Those pea-brains who arrested me weren’t on my side one bit.” According to one of those “pea-brains,” whom Ms. Weller interviewed, Miss Fisher asked the police during her confession if they would have to tell her parents that she had shot Mrs. Buttafuoco. To quote Joey Coco-Pops: “You’re a trip, babe.”

Musician magazine used to run a page of very short, usually cutting reviews. My all-time favorite was a review of The Best of Kansas. In its entirety: “Why did I expect both sides of this record to be blank?”

I’ve never read The Wasp Factory, but have read Use of Weapons and know exactly what elf meant about looking at chairs in a different way. Incidentally, just started the new Culture novel Matter today. So far, so good

Dang, a nest of intellectuals. Where am I?

Haven’t read _The Wasp Factory_ but I’ve read a number of Banks’s other books, and he’s as brilliant as the above commenters say. Definitely should not be included in any paragraph that references Feith or the rest of the right-wing nutjob squad.

The blurb on the back of Banksy’s Wall and Piece is:

“There’s no way you’re going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover.”
— Metropolitan Police spokesman”

bad jim cites “2) I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review before me. Soon it will be behind me.”

This was the response by the composer Max Reger to Rudolf Louis’ review of his sinfonietta. It sounds even better in the original German:

“Ich sitze in dem kleinsten Zimmer in meinem Hause. Ich habe Ihre Kritik vor mir. Im nachsten Augenblick wird sie hinter mir sein.”

#38 reminds me of the famous (and almost certainly spurious) Chinese rejection letter. To my horror, a full minute of Googling turns up only allusion that assume you already know the full text. Anyway, the general point is that your paper is so marvellous that publishing it would set a standard that no future contribution could ever meet.

I wasn’t really creeped out by “the scene” in The Wasp Factory, because it was obviously fictitious: Maggots don’t consume live flesh, and have been used, even in modern times, to clean wounds of the dead tissue that could cause infection.

(Side note: There are some parasitic maggots that do consume live flesh, but not in temperate climates, which is where the book takes place.)

Y’all are a bunch of pansies! :-P

#64 I’m not so sure. As far as I can tell, the provenance “ancient Chinese saying invented by Ernest Bramah” is fast become as general and spurious as “ancient Chinese saying”.

See, for example May you live in interesting times

Ahem. “Ellmann”; “is”. Where’s the copy editor in this joint?

From the Irish Times again, Brian Dillon reviewing the reviewer (specifically a collection of reviews by Dale Peck, who famously called somone or other the worst writer of their generation):

“And then there is the matter of his own style: a medium in which “transition” is a verb, and banal metaphors so belaboured that by the time he announces (of an obscurely significant hole in the ground) “I want to embrace that image, but also let it go”, this reader could only sigh: yes Dale, please, give it up… And if that sounds “snarky”, consider this: “genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby”. That was Walter Benjamin, a critic who deserves better than to be seen in the same sentence. As Dale Peck.”

jamesp @ 70: What’s wrong with Christiansen’s book on the Northern Crusades? I thought it was rather good, actually, as is his The Norsemen in the Viking Age.

Ken macleod, whether you are right or wrong about that maggoty scene happening, I can assure you that I read a few years ago in the Sydney Morning Herald about someone who had been a victim of exactly the underlying causal events in The Wasp Factory. (Obviously to say what those underlying events were would be to spoil the whole novel for other commenters, so I shan’t). When I read the account I assumed Iain Banks had read something similar somewhere.

a collection of reviews by Dale Peck, who famously called somone or other the worst writer of their generation

Rick Moody. Who, to be fair, may indeed be the worst writer of his generation. Peck’s review (of The Black Veil) was outdone by James Wolcott, however:

To conduct his investigation, Moody will walk in Handkerchief Moody’s footsteps and cross ‘a bridge of ghosts’ into the New England of Puritan belief and Indian raids. He will quote extensively from Handkerchief’s diaries, visit graveyards, describe the rooms he lived in, put Hawthorne’s text under the microscope for dissection, and explore every crooked branch of the family tree. He will bore us, bore us, and bore us some more.

Permit a personal note. I pride myself on being a professional. I’ve reviewed epic borers by John Barth and Harold Brodkey that would have broken the spirit of Cochise. Here I nearly met my match. It took every ounce of fading willpower to get through word-choked pages in The Black Veil that seemed to stare back, defying anyone to finish them…

(Anybody still here?) Henry, after I squeezed off the line about Iain M. and Rosie M., I Googled Iain. According to Wikipedia, he originally wanted to be Iain M., but his publisher induced him to drop the initial because of the potential confusion(?) with Rosie M. Swear to God.