The Weekly Screed (#757)

The blurb culture
by David Benjamin

“Question: Does it turn out that social media is better at breaking things than at making things?”
                 —    Thomas L. Friedman

PARIS — How would Einstein “tweet” the Theory of Relativity. I thought about this after reading Dennis Overbye’s lyrical New York Times story about physicists working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), who succeeded in recording a gravitational wave generated by the collision of two black holes unimaginably deep in outer space.

As Overbye noted, this galactic crash generated energy that “as visible light… would be equivalent to the brightness of a billion trillion suns.

“And yet it moved the LIGO mirrors only four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton.”

There’s no way — in 140 characters, or in 140,000 — to express the complexity and the sheer wonder of this breakthrough, and the Theory it proved. Yet nowadays, the structure of communication, among humans, whose brains contain roughly 170 billion cells, has been reduced to a paltry, abortive, mock-haiku format known as the “tweet,” but traditionally known as a “blurb.”

Most disturbing in this pop truncation of human speech, besides an inability to appreciate Albert Einstein or listen to Keith Olbermann, is the rise of a presidential front-runner who speaks almost entirely in an unbroken and un-interruptible string of plosive, provocative, preposterous blurbs.

Donald Trump, Twitter addict, is “viral” in almost every sense of the word. His verbal arsenal consists exclusively of simple, grandiose hip-shots readily accessible to the dimmest intellect. They burst into the vast echo chamber of cyberspace before any coherent thinker can examine their veracity. Trump is a human blurb mint in an era when the blurb is the inflated currency of public discourse.

Of course, I object. But I was an enemy of the blurb before Trump had a Twitter account. And the blurb was my enemy, too — except perhaps in the form of a poem by Ogden Nash: Reflections on Ice-Breaking: Candy/ Is Dandy/ But liquor/ is quicker. (65 characters)

I remember when a fellow struggling novelist, Maureen Holtz, wrote to me that — taking the advice of a writing expert — she had fashioned a crackerjack blurb for her first novel. Since I’ve never actually taken professional instruction on writing — I’m more of an idiot savant — I was surprised by Maureen’s explanation that you can’t hope to sell a book to a publisher without a kickass blurb.

Since I’d already sold two blurb-free books to publishers, I was dubious. But Maureen’s warning was inescapable. If publishers come to believe that a book of 70,000 to 200,000 words, or more, can be reduced to a cluster of 140 characters or fewer, then the author of complex, lavishly composed and — worst of all — ironic prose, who has no inclination or aptitude for the violent condensation that constitutes a blurb, well then, said author is pretty much SOL.

So much for Moby Dick, Middlemarch, Huck Finn, Harry Potter, Catch-22, Dr. Suess. And — uh oh — Ulysses? Fuggedaboudit!

Since Maureen, I’ve taken up blurbing, and gotten fairly good at it. In my newspaper days, I was, after all, a fairly deft headline-poet. But, time after time, I’ve found that my blurbs, while clever, glib and tolerably terse, tend to leave out the telling detail. They fail to elicit the theme that weaves through 300 pages of bloodstained writing and beats at the heart of the story. They cheat my characters. And if they engage a certain audience, they exclude a world of readers whose sensibilities are other-directed.

You can’t do a book in a blurb because a blurb, by its nature, is not quite true. Even worse, a blurb, bereft of connotation, reservations or gradations of meaning, with no nuance or subtlety, can antagonize the very audience it means to attract.

For my latest novel, a “football romance” called A Sunday Kind of Love, I’ve written a half-dozen blurbs, and I’ve come to dislike all of them. I cooked up a new one, just for this essay. In 132 characters, it reads: “What does a woman do when she’s in love with a man who is crazy about football and madly in love with a Sunday-afternoon hero? Punt?”

Cute, clipped, cunning? Yes. And crappy. This blurb turns off men because my protagonist is obviously a “woman.” It loses women readers because it’s “about football.” But it isn’t. Although it is. Goddammit, it’s complicated.

Blurbs are just as bad for politics, which is more complicated than you might think. A recent op-ed by Thomas L. Friedman is actually the thing that really got me thinking about the blurb crisis.

Friedman interviewed an Egyptian who helped trigger — through the strategic use of video and short, punchy messages on social media — the Arab Spring upheavals all over the Middle East. This guy got millions of people stirred up. And they stayed stirred up. But, meanwhile, the enemies of the uprising also got agitated — and organized. And then they crushed the rebels, who didn’t get organized because they were too busy sniping at one another online with blurbs, tweets, flames and 140-chararacter assassinations.

Friedman’s Egyptian troublemaker, Wael Ghonim, said that after a brief period of euphoric solidarity, “My online world became a battleground filled with trolls, lies, hate speech.”

Ghonim explained, “[I]t became really hard to change our opinions. Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in 140 characters about complex world affairs. And once we do that, it lives forever on the Internet.”

So, I get it. It’s hardly the end of the world if I can’t sell a novel in twelve dozen trenchant blips. But, putting the larger issue in Trumpian vernacular, I ask: “Can a nation survive after choosing a president who edits American democracy to 140 characters — including the empty spaces between words?” (138)