UNFORTUNATE WORLD OF DUST JACKET COPY

Yesterday I encountered what I feel must be the worst dust jacket text since people first found dust on their books so repellent. I was scanning the stacks and I found a George Eliot novel I had never heard of called The Impressions of Theophrastus Such. The inner flap copy begins seductively enough with "So you thought had read all of George Eliot?" I am under no such illusions, but the rhetorical come-on kind of pulled me in. Unfortunately, it degenerated into this:

As Nancy Henry points out in her comprehensive introduction, this book goes beyond even Daniel Deronda in positing the role of collective memory for the future of national cultures and the power of literary texts in creating and preserving both. It is a complex and deeply intelligent synthesis of Eliot's previous great works as well as an interesting departure from them. It signals the culmination of her development as a writer of organic form and the beginning of what could be termed an early modernist experimentation through fragmentation of form.

Urghh. Argh. Perhaps Impressions is a wonderful book. Maybe it cracks open the universe like an egg and shows to us its slimy yellow secrets. But after that kind of academized bumpf I don't want the secret slime anymore. I'm picturing George Eliot's agent pitching the book to a publisher: "I'm serious, Bobby, this book fuckin' posits. Man, I thought that George had stopped at 19th century organic form, but whoah - fragmen-fucking-TATION, Bobby! George has got that modernist mojo going on!" Therefore I give the dust jacket copy of Pickering & Chattos 1994 reprint from holographic MS of George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such my lowest possible rating of 5 Adornos. To wit:

Oh my God! What are those little heads? What's the situation? Is it copacetic, or are we witnessing disaster? What have I done?

WHAT PALINODE HAS DONE

I'm introducing a measure of coherency to classify my inchoate opinions with as little intellectual expenditure as possible: a ratings system.

I have decided to rate things (dust jacket copy, books, movies, individual pieces of trash like a stick I saw in a field the other day) on a scale of one to five Adornos, with one Adorno being the best and five being the mark of shame. Hold your mouse pointer over each image to reveal my system of grading.

WHO'S THE LITTLE MAN THEN?

The little man is T.W. Adorno, 20th century German philosopher, cultural critic and all around stick-up-the-butt fellow who came to America early in the Nazi era and spent the rest of his life criticizing American culture, even after he returned to Germany. Lotte Lenya described him as "a paleface, flaming asshole," and that seems to sum his personality up pretty well. He was also given to pronoucements that seemed impossible to fulfill, the best known probably being "no poetry after Auschwitz" and "nothing is exempt from the responsibility of thought". He recognized the immense difficulty of living up to the obligations of such statements, but that was perhaps part of his point. Nonetheless, Adorno was a complicated and original thinker whose suspicion of totalizing systems of thought led him to promulgate a philosophy that resisted the lure of the totalizing and the totalitarian.

He had a particularly tortured relationship with movies. He reckoned that mass culture was simply an instrument of opression, a means of distracting people from their own enslavement. There is, of course, a huge discussion here, but what fascinated me about Adorno's scornful attitude to cinema is that he seemed to watch movies fairly regularly, and counted amongst his friends members of the German expatriate film community in Hollywood. Of movies he said "every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse". And when I read that all my resistance to Adorno melted away, and I saw him across the span of some sixty years, sitting in the fifth row of a screening of Arabs with Dirty Fezzes followed by Some Like It Hot, a grimace of horror stretched across his face, unable to look away.

parode - exode