Book covers

An artist friend, whose opinions I listen to, wrote about the new book, "the cover font doesn't work." My immediate reaction was, Good! Say what?

We need context here. First, what's a book cover for? To give the title and author ... and to sell copies, especially this. To sell copies in a book display in a store, or (later in publishing history) to sell copies on display on a website, which requires a smaller image and different visual strategy. A book cover is supposed to sell copies.

Unless your primary goal is not to sell copies. For some time now, I have been writing for my archive, not for an audience, not to sell copies. My audience is a grad student 15 years after I'm dead who is browsing shelves in Special Collections at the Univ of Oregon, looking for a PhD thesis topic, an ignored writer with a body of work to write about. If this sounds weird, it happens -- and it has happened, in close proximity, to me twice over my career. Unexpected and strange "discovery" in dark, dusty, unlikely places, i.e. libraries.

I learned long ago that I don't write pop lit. I don't even read pop lit. I can't even read it when I try -- I tried several times to read The DaVinci Code when it was so popular and all three or four times ended up throwing the book across the room after 20 pages, screaming about cultural illiteracy. If that makes me a snob and an elitist, fine, I embrace the titles. Long live elitists and snobs! But this is not my point. My point is that I'm a realist and when I write (inside-out) what matters to me, it won't matter to most (a huge majority) others. That's fine! That's fine as long as I can find the small audience that is there for me. Eventually. In other words, I'm not writing for myself alone, I'm not hiding my work in a closet. I am a public writer. But I've never fooled myself into thinking that I'd become a popular writer. I did want to become a respected writer and still do -- and in small circles I am. But mostly I'm just another invisible, marginal writer.

All of which leads to this: my book cover was not designed to sell copies. Here's what I demanded from the book cover. First, the image. It took me some time to realize that an early painting by my wife was perfect. Next, the text on the cover. And the font. These are decisions. I wanted, most of all, a cover that did not look cool, or arty, or overly harmonious. I wanted a disjointed, almost shocking cover, without going overboard. A theme of the book is "the language has the syphilis." What font makes the language look like it's diseased? I thought this: a tattoo on the arm of a prisoner in a death camp. A stamp on a hunk of meat in a slaughter house. Incongruous language. I thought, something has to look amiss, an artist's perfect cover won't do this, something has to be a little off. So we fooled around and found something we liked and used it.

I like the cover. Others have said they like the cover. If the font doesn't work, that probably says we did what we set out to do.

Now a bigger picture. What does it mean to say a font doesn't work? Or any aspect of any art object doesn't work? Not much, alas. I take this question seriously. My minor at UCLA was Philosophy and my concentration was Aesthetics. My bibles in this regard are Morris Weitz's "Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism," which points out that over the centuries Hamlet criticism has covered the entire "it's brilliant" to "it sucks" spectrum of opinion; and Morse Peckham's "Man's Rage for Chaos", which argues that art is what we look at with a disposition for looking at art. These books share a view that art is culturally defined, not intrinsically defined. (I read both these books in grad school and precious little on the subject since, so I'm likely hopelessly out of date).

There's a brilliant book, The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, that looks into the CIA's involvement in establishing Abstract Art at its birth after WWII. We were in a cultural contest with the Soviet Union and needed "an art form" that was American and yet not controversial to politicians -- abstract art was perfect because nobody knew what it was, it didn't represent anything you could argue about ha ha, and so the CIA funded the prestigious journal and art critic that first praised Pollock and others, as America tried to show the world we weren't uncultured slobs like Europeans thought, we could compete in Art with the Soviet Union. This is a documented, true story by the way! Some critics say the influence of the CIA in establishing abstract art has been exaggerated but there's no doubt it was there. There is a great film to be made about all this. I'm too old to write it.

The point is, since art is culturally defined, politics can and has played a role in determining what is good or bad, what we like or dislike.

Tell me the language doesn't have syphilis!