Blurbs
Nick Tosches is a man after my own heart. After providing a quick history of the word “blurb,” he lays out his delicious principle on the matter of blurbing:
I myself haven’t been so giving or so kind when it comes to blurbs. I’ve often given blurbs to friends, and occasionally to strangers who’ve struck me as good souls. As a matter of policy, however, I’ve never actually read the books that I’ve blurbed. For one thing, I’m such a slow reader that if I were to read a book before I blurbed it, the book would already be published and remaindered before I came up with a blurb. But, more to the point, I’m just not interested in these fucking books, no matter how sincerely I might wish their authors well.
I happened to be in my office, procrastinating. Turning away from the pile of papers awaiting my attention, I began to read an old issue of Bookforum on my desk. A review essay by the very wonderful Geoff Dyer. Here’s what Dyer says in the course of the review:
… Martin Amis observes that writers’ lives are all anxiety and ambition. This is not strictly true. There is also–as Writers on Writers makes plain–drinking. Only minor textual alterations would have been required if the publishers had decided to call the book Drinkers on Drinkers. Some of our century’s biggest swillers–Berryman, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, Kerouac–are featured at the height of their drinking powers. Compared with such lager-than-life figures, one views others in the book–Nabokov, say, or T.S. Eliot–with sadness at their unrealized potential: They could have been serious drinkers if their writing hadn’t got in the way.
I immediately went to the Bookforum website to renew my subscription and that is how I found the piece by Tosches that I have quoted from above. And also this interview with Vikram Seth. Listed among the contents of one of the recent issues, but not available online, was a review by Mukul Kesavan of Salman Rushdie’s last novel. Arre bhai Mukul, review dekhne ko milega kyaa?
