Brutal Barbs

     It’s always interesting reading those few grumpy one-star Net comments on products and services, and those emotional discussions on every news issue or announcement, which often degenerate into the crudest kinds of name calling and vicious put-downs.

     We’ve always had put-downs, of course, but in those much-lauded good old days they were more civilized, more intelligent and clever.  Classier.

     A few examples:

     From Beethoven after listening to a rival improvising on the piano for a half hour: “Will it be long before you begin?”

     Theodore Roosevelt about President McKinley after he refused to declare war on Spain:  “No more backbone than a chocolate eclair.”

     Abraham Lincoln on the ideas of his political opponent Stephen Douglas:  “As thin as the soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death.”

     H.G. Wells on a literary work by Henry James:  “A magnificent but painful hippopotamus.”

     Winston Churchill on Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after he supposedly convinced Hitler to leave England alone in exchange for Britain’s noninterference:  “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”

     Winston again on Clement Atlee:  “A modest man, who has much to be modest about.”

     Prince on a rival’s new album:  “Michael Jackson’s album was called ‘Bad’ because there wasn’t enough room on the jacket for Pathetic.”

     But my favorite is one from radio and TV host Arthur Smith to a rude heckler.  I think it can be applied equally well to most of those mean-spirited losers out there who cruise the Net giving one-star reviews to everything they come across:  “Sorry, I can’t hear what you’re saying.  I’m wearing a moron filter.”

Phil

Downside Up

     All my life, I’ve thought of northward on a map as ‘Up,’ southward as ‘Down,’ and eastward or westward as ‘Over.’  Living in New England, we would drive ‘up’ to Canada for a summer vacation or ‘down’ to Florida for a mid-winter warmup, or ‘over’ to New York State to visit my uncle and his family.  I would look ‘down’ at my feet to see if my sneakers were tied or ‘up’ into the night sky to marvel at the familiar constellation Orion.  Everybody else I knew seemed to observe the same orientations.

     Then a few years ago I went way ‘down’ to Chile in the Southern Hemisphere to view the night sky from a barren mountaintop high in the Atacama Desert, where it has not rained in decades and the atmosphere is not only free of moisture but also free of both air and light pollution.  Severe clear.

     The night sky was spellbinding in its majesty.  Impossible to adequately describe.  Venus was casting my shadow onto the ground, I could see the Andromeda galaxy with my naked eyes, and the legendary Pleiades, those ancient beautiful seven sisters, were dazzling and nested in a bed of diamond-like lesser stars I’d never even known were there.

     But the constellation Orion was upside-down.  A few other constellations that I’d been able to see from the Northern Hemisphere and that I could still see from the Southern Hemisphere were also upside-down.  What?  I had to make a sketch on a pocket pad to figure out why.  For the first time I realized there really is no ‘up’ or ‘down’ or ‘over.’  Those are all merely arbitrary concepts.  Weightless astronauts learn this lesson quickly on arrival at the International Space Station.  At any distance from our home planet, there is no longer any ‘up’ or ‘down.’  Even on the surface of our planet, if I look ‘down’ at my sneakers and then wait twelve hours, or half an earth revolution, I’m actually positioned on my head from where I was twelve hours earlier, looking ‘up’ at my sneakers.

     It was a disconcerting lesson in orientational prejudice.  The good people in Chile have every right to say they’ll go ‘up’ to Antarctica for penguin-watching or ‘down’ to Maine for photographing moose if they wish, and I have no right to fault them for it.

Phil

Crimes against graphics

     Authors often invest nearly superhuman effort—thousands of laborious hours over many months or even years—in creating fine books worthy of publication and significant readership.

     But in all too many cases those efforts are sadly thwarted by hasty, half-hearted, or just plain incompetent graphic cover artists, who in most cases I suspect have not even read the first paragraphs of the books they’re tasked to work on for a mere few hours.

     There are many ways a fine book can be cloaked in graphics rags that are sure to relegate it to obscurity.  I’ve served as an awards judge for two excellent writers’ organizations and have studied book covers in stores for years, and I think I’ve seen them all.  Dark red lettering on a black background is a frequent way to render cover copy unreadable.  A background photo that was never interesting to begin with and has no relevance to the subject matter or setting of the book is another unsubtle way to turn off readers as they scan the shelves; a novel set in the dead-flat country of eastern NC featured a dull cover shot of mountains, for one bad example.

      Whimsical graphic experiments that look like something created during a workshop/vaping session at a convention of abstractionists can also doom books quickly; a recent cover had the one-word title broken up into syllables and scattered, so it required some study to figure out, and the author’s name, in dark gray over slightly darker gray, was utterly lost at any distance over two feet away.  Selecting tiny font sizes on covers and for the inside text is a just-plain-mean way of convincing readers to shun a book.  Murky low-contrast nonsensical collages that turn to mud when reduced to the thumbnail sizes often used to advertise books in magazine ads and online is a clever way to test the vision, and the patience, of book browsers.  Why publishers allow, or even seem to embrace, such criminal graphics is a mystery.

     There are fads and trends in cover design that come and go, some good and some not so good.  There’s one current industry-wide trend I like.  Almost every hardcover dust jacket is done with an overall finish of matte varnish, which provides a good grip and a nice rich feel for the reader.  Using spot high-gloss varnish on these covers, such as for the title and author name and a selected graphic element, provides pleasing, attention-grabbing contrast. 

     And of course there are the superb covers that complement and even augment their books’ contents and make these relatively few volumes stand out amid all the intense competition in any bookstore.  Those graphics wizards are to be commended.  The covers and interior layouts are indeed works of art done by thoughtful, caring people with real talent.  The authors lucky enough to benefit are deeply grateful, I’m sure.  Invariably, such covers adorn books that the rest of us writers would do well to emulate. Just as these covers themselves ought to be studied and emulated by some of the lesser graphics practitioners out there.

Phil