Book cover marketing FAIL?

To bail out of a fight really quickly, I’ve not read Foucault’s Pendulum or indeed any Thomas Pynchon. I read very few novels these days, so something has to really grab me to get one of the limited spots.

@Quatrefoil: There’s a lovely commentary on last week’s Germaine Greer Tour of Australia over at Lavarti Prodeo, entitled On Rage: Raging against Germaine:

I was interested to see Gary Sauer-Thompson observe that most of the reaction (and there’s been tons of it) to her writing and various speeches and appearances in the press has completely avoided the issues she actually raises, and concentrated on interweaving loud denunciations of her — and claims that she’s irrelevant — with already well established “media narratives”. If she’s in fact got nothing of relevance to say, as one of our commenters observed, you have to wonder why all the energy expended.

Well, the answer to the commenter’s question is easy: In the increasingly-busy lives of producers and editors, Germaine Greer’s semi-regular visits, where she parachutes into Australia and says something that will almost inevitably sound controversial, it’s an easy way to fill your program or publication. Too easy, in fact. I think I’d brand it “lazy”.

(Yes, when I worked for ABC Radio I, too, relied on the “author tour” to fill airtime.)

The implication of that answer is that if you want an issue to be taken seriously, then Germaine Greer should not be your spokesperson. Any discussion will always descend into a battle about GG’s relevance, and the original point will be lost. Still, GG will have gotten her airtime, her reputation as an enfente terrible (or mad old cow) will be reinforced, and her book will sell.

Similarly, Melbourne University Press presumably knows that the gift-set market is another niche to exploit, and the aim is to provide names that the buyer recognises, not the eventual reader. Putting GG in there means that at least one of the authors will have been seen the Daily Telegraph — perhaps quoted well out of context, but that doesn’t matter.

The Lavartus Prodeo piece makes another interesting point:

I think the post is unfortunately all too typical of one of the weird confusions that swirl around Greer’s thought and indeed have a much broader contemporary purchase — that to explain something is to justify it. Greer appears to be setting out to explain Indigenous male rage. From what I’ve seen of her interviews over the last few days, she is insistent that this is not a justification. But apparently people either can’t understand that distinction, or believe that any reference to the origins of phenomena in Indigenous Australia in dispossession and colonisation signals justification. It does not.

@Giania: The “back story” of The Name of the Rose is, perhaps, Umberto Eco’s entire brain, filled as it is with obscure observations about the cross-linkages of signs and symbols throughout history. That’s his gig. I much prefer his witty and far more accessible essays and newspaper columns.

I do think The Name of the Rose will reward the persistent. But in the competition for my attention, in 2008 it would fail.