The old addage goes: "You cannot tell a book by its cover." It sounds cute and does about as much good or harm as a Disney movie full of morals, which is to say none. No I do not have anything against "Happy Feet". It was darling, but I know it will not lead to a generation who connect their behaviors with the well being of the world, or to more recycling, or anything less direct than donations made to penguin refuges or that ilk. I hope I am wrong, and I do believe that watching "Dumbo" (my mother still hates it/loves it as it gave her free time, but only at the expense of listening to the same 6 songs over and over) 3 times daily for about 7 years taught me slowly and without my noticing to never apologize for my many flaws. As a fine author I am reading right now, Naseem Nicholas Taleb, he of "Black Swan", and "Fooled by Randomness" (the better book, and the one with a more likeable audio book narrator) fame says, (approximately, I don't have it front of me to check wording) "I have never felt the need to apologize for my character flaws, as they are simply part of the makeup of my soul and personality, anymore than I feel the need to put on a wig before I go out my front door, or wear lifts in my shoes." I heartily conquer. If you find the sum of my merits less than that of my demerits, stop talking to me. If I am a bad employee, fire me, don't lecture me. A bad boyfriend? Dump me. Only stop with the nagging and the air of a persecuted martyr who must bear me. I am not the wart on the back of your tricep. But, the trail has wound away from our addage.
Why can't we tell a book from its cover? I can tell from the cover of a Stephen King book that I will not like it. They have a distinct look, one that says, little thought went into this, and its just like all the others, here is a cheap font on a slant to give you cheap thrills. Don't worry, indifferent style means you will know before you a turn a page to hold your breath for the fright on the next. We will give you all the proper cues. There are no surprises here. And looking at the cover of say, Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", I know that I am looking at an established, self-satisfied, maybe even snobbish work, whose editor and publisher believe only a few people will like. The book is being marketed to those who already know they want it. There is nothing, usually, to the cover, but the name of author, name of book, and sometimes, the editor, or the translator. This is not a book seeking impulse buyers. For they will bring it back, thumping the heavy tome down with the irascible or untiring impotence of a Faulkner hero how bad the book was. (His heroes are often impotent; not sexually, but with impotent rage, impotent will, etcetera. This is one of the things I always notice in Faulkner as a man with a nutrition degree; and I wonder if in post-Civil War southern areas where people had been so long without good, or much, food, if the men suffered from a general impotence. A lack of red meat and iron would be, certainly, suspected contributors to impotence. So I wonder every time I see the word, if it is meant in a sexual way, on some level. That this impotence was all throughout the land. Inability to bump and grind and to even begin fixing what was burned or overgrown or ruined, to even want to bring it all back. Come, you knew I liked Faulkner with all my parantheses. The other thing to note in Faulkner is what is missing: mosquitos. They are rarely mentioned at all, though there would have been a lot more of them. An interesting study would try to determine what amount of insects were needed to make people crazy. I expect it maximum irritation would occur in the middle somewhere, when one is not swarmed and they are not infrequent at buzzing by the ear either. Or perhaps they were so obvious a blight that he left them out of fiction, which is, still for all it tries to be, still for many, an escape, from reality or tedium. Or he did not feel the need to put those mosquitoes there, anymore than we need to be told the sun rises in the morning. We know it.) To say a thing is bad when one what means is, I do not like this thing, is another of the many traits of modern life I despise. The fault for everything now lies with the creator. If you watch a TV you do not enjoy, you write a letter, or send off an angry text more likely, to let everyone know how wronged you were. Why did you not just stop watching? That would send the message louder. You only give out free publicity when you complain about a place. Publicity is like a tomato seed. The tomato, chomped up, does not care where the seeds lie, or how they travel (in a beast's belly, through its stool, falling out of its whiskers; only that it does travel.) It is a personal insult if you do not like this blog. As if I knew you when writing it. Once a young lady I was getting to know accused me of writing a poem to make her feel stupid, because she could not understand it, which made her feel stupid (and was accusing poetry in general of seeking to obscure and make people feel stupid. It was all rather, well, stupid.. I said something along the lines of perhaps it was her stupidity that made her feel stupid. We did not get to know each other any better, for some reason. As if she had existed when I wrote the thing. Or I had.
As relating to judging people shallowly, well our book by its cover wisdom does not do there either. It would only do to say, never judge a book that is self-published by its cover, and that would be false too. For a self-published book's cover could reveal to us such things as the author's vision, intent, artistic and aesthetic skill, ambition, and the size of the book tells us something to. And in people, who are self-published books, well I agree that the size of one's nose is not relevant to the person (except perhaps it was in forming them, as society and school fellows treat a big-nosed child differently than a small nosed one, so that even when the effect seems absent, its absence is an effect), and am not promoting shallowness. I am the only shallow man in the world though, you may not have known. I once said with incredulity that I had a coworker who was stalking a 300 pound woman, and everyone gave me a look as if to say, what an awful man I was. Though no 300 pound women were sitting on the laps of the man, and these young women were not sitting in the laps of slobs. I was offended by their being offended. I am actually not so very shallow. But what I do mean, is it is quite easy to take the cut of a person almost instantly. Not handsome or plain or ugly, but what kind of person they are. There are the always obvious non-verbal cues. Body language, posture, stride length, velocity of walk. This tells us if the person is in a hurry, moves with purpose, has confidence. Though it is lost on most people. Now that is something to muse upon: we can forget instincts, which by definition is what we did not know we knew. And so we can be, though educated, less perceptive and often clueless. So much of communication I find vapid for this very reason. When a person asks me, "how was work?" (The most asked question there is and one I always respond to with a sort of sneer- why not just ask, how is your painful stubbed toe?), I cannot answer. I am simply too aghast that they would ask. How could they need to. For one, they work, and two, it should have been evident already in the 1/3 of a second since we saw one another to you. "How are you doing?" Fits in the same boat. I play the Sherlock Holmes game, describing a person in detail from across a room based on first impressions and what you can see. And everyone I spend a little time with starts showing off spy skills to me. Trying to sneak up on me, commenting on the color of some bozo's tie and then flinging their eyebrows up to tip me off that I should be impressed. Learning to read body language that any dimwitted little baby chimp hardly old enough to blink could get instantly. This is after that stage when people argue with me, accuse me of making things up, of audacity and delusions of grandeur (which I have no doubt, which I need certainly, but not in this).
Besides this poorly developed sort of cue though, there is the advertising. The outright, intentional, and directed campaigning. Could we live any other way. That is the result of ads now, not so much to make us buy, but to make us do it. Twitter and Facebook are the obvious epidemic results of being unable to turn away from the assault of sales pitches. Now we simply are commercials, reduced to slogans, reducable to such, our own cliff's notes of cliff's notes. I offer you the following situation: You are at a party and two twins are standing nearby. One twin is very tan, has blonde highlights, is wearing track shorts, tennis shoes, and a tee shirt that reads "Horizontal Moonlit Marathon Champion" with a copy of Sports Illustrated tucked into armpit. The other is wearing spectacles, dress clothes, fine patent leather shoes, has impeccably brushed hair, and a volume of Hafiz in hand.
Do you position yourself between these twins and make eye contact with both until it is established which, if either, you have something in common with to talk on? Or do you gravitate towards one or the other automatically? Or find both appalling? Do the covers tell you nothing?
A modern American has so many choices in presentation that there is nothing not revealed by the cover. Tee shirt, or dress shirt? Skirt or slacks. Tall boots or hiking boots. Big earrings or no earrings. Tattoo or no. Tramp stamp on a female, barbed wire bicep for a man, or a german line of Goerthe across the ribs? What kind of phone? Hair dye, style. Piercings? It is all advertising. Meant to attract or deter, to identify and signal. It is like a peacock spreading feathers. It is the cover, but it certainly tells you all you need to know, if you pay attention. To go up to someone with a pink mohawk and ask them if they like Beethoven would be to invite their appropriate snarl back at you, as if you were quite dense: Whotheeven? Though I doubt they would be so clever. And getting a little shallower, can we not infer from body type much of a person? I know some big-boned people, and I prefer my women Boticcelean, but flab says something. Something like, look at me, I don't care. Or, look at me, I sure am not up for a hike tomorrow at sunrise. How about sleeping all day and then watching painfully predictable movies all night with soda? I do not consider myself a body, yet I cannot shake the pride in being well formed. Beauty was once linked to fitness, to health. A well-built man offered health and vigor and protection. An endowed woman would survive a bout with consumption. The appeal of the anorexic is a further proof of our disconnection, our disinheritence to use a phrasing I liked in Czeslaw Milosz the other morning, with what would be a natural environment. But it is too late. This is all obvious and rambling. The point is made. If I say little structural, it is because before you can ask me how I am, or what is new, I have already transferred the information to you and learned your answer. And so I grumble nothing and do not ask in return. It goes deeper with practice, how much of the book you can guess. And so I do not start most books. My teachers all told me not to judge without reading at least 3 chapters when I quit on books quickly. I had made my decision before the second page, often at the cover, despite their warning. And I find when I do force myself to start the story, I am usually not wrong. But so often one is forced to start the story and then abort it. One is pressed and pressed into it, with the mind made up already. And maybe I don't need to read every Stephen King book, for that is the thing about a Stephen King book, while one is perhaps worth the trouble, any given one, the thing is none of them sits there sighing about how its just another Stephen King book. No each thinks of itself an individual who must be read in full and commented upon in a book club. That's part of mediocrity, is not knowing it is mediocre. But I meet people and try to politely decline to show curiosity or interest in them, and this subtlety on my part is taken for a sort of malfunction, or disability, which they in turn, must politely help me around. So as if guiding me across the street, a male for instance, the other day, kept coming and coming. It turned into a real sparring match. He introduced himself, I said okay and limply took his hand. So he prompted me, "and your name?..." As if trying to delicately skirt my faux pas. Oh no sir, it was intentional. And after a few minutes of this, one has to be rude and slam the book closed.
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