A PERSONAL JOURNAL, KEPT LARGELY TO RECORD REFERENCES TO WRITINGS, MUSIC, POLITICS, ECONOMICS, WORLD HAPPENINGS, PLAYS, FILMS, PAINTINGS, OBJECTS, BUILDINGS, SPORTING EVENTS, FOODS, WINES, PLACES AND/OR PEOPLE.
Pope Francis shakes hands with an inmate as he meets with prisoners at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in Philadelphia on Sept. 27. (Jonathan Ernst/RNS via Reuters)
PHILADELPHIA (RNS) — It was a meeting of preachers and prisoners, of tattoos and crosses, of caregivers and criminals.
Pope Francis visited with 95 inmates at Curran-Cromhold Correctional Facility here, bringing with him a message of redemption, hope and encouragement.
“I am here as a pastor, but above all as a brother, to share your situation and to make it my own,” he said, peering over his glasses at the men and women — all inmates — seated before him.
“I have come so that we can pray together and offer our God everything that causes us pain, but also everything that gives us hope, so that we can receive from him the power of the resurrection.”
Inmate David Hernandez, 39, of North Philadelphia prays during the Pope Francis visit at the Curran-Fromhold Correction Facility in Philadelphia on Sept. 27. (Pool photo by David Maialetti/RNS via Reuters)
During much of the speech, the pope sat in a wooden chair made by him for some of the inmates in the prison workshop. He stood before it as he spoke as well, as though he wanted to get even closer to the men and women in prison-issue blue clothes. Bishops and archbishops, clad in black with red trim, sat to the pope’s right, sometimes looking at him, sometimes watching the faces of the prisoners.
The pope’s message was built around the New Testament story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper. In Christian practice, washing the feet of another is an act of humility and compassion.
He told them it is not possible to walk the roads of life without getting one’s feet dirty.
Pope Francis embraces an inmate as he meets with prisoners at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in Philadelphia. (Jonathan Ernst/RNS via Reuters)
“All of us have something we need to be cleansed of, or purified from,” he told them. Then going off-script — as he did with great effect at Independence Hall and at the Festivals of Families, he added, “I am first among them.”
The prisoners seemed visibly moved. Some bowed their heads, one or two had eyes that welled.
Before stepping down to shake the hands of many, one by one, he gave them a last message of hope:
They can be saved from “the lie that says no one can change.”
Forget The Book, Have You Read This Irresistible Story On Blurbs?
COLIN DWYER
Annette Elizabeth Allen/NPR
Whatever the old adage might warn, there isa bit of merit to judging a book by its cover — if only in one respect. Consider the blurb, one of the most pervasive, longest-running — and, at times, controversial — tools in the publishing industry.
For such a curious word, the term "blurb" has amassed a number of meanings in the decades since it worked its way into our vocabulary, but lately it has referred to just one thing: a bylined endorsement from a fellow writer — or celebrity — that sings the praises of a book's author right on the cover of their book.
They're claims couched in quote marks, homes for words you might never hear otherwise — like compelling, or luminous, or unputdownable. Heck, at least three books have reportedly inspired celebrated memoirist Frank McCourt to say "you'll claw yourself with pleasure."
Nearly as long as they've been around, they've been treated by a vocal few with suspicion, occasionally even outright snark and scorn. Author Jennifer Weiner, for instance, sees some value in them, but suggests they've been getting over the top; scholar Camille Paglia, not one to mince words, called them "absolutely appalling" in a 1991 speech.
And if no less a luminary than George Orwell — way back in 1936 — credited thedecline of the novel (even then!) with "the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers," one question naturally arises: Why are blurbs still around — and still, at least among publishers, so popular?
As it turns out, the answer is a bit complicated, long-lived and even a little bit (dare I say it) compelling.
Judging A Book, On Its Cover
The life of a blurb excerpted from a critic — a book review, say, from NPR — is a fairly simple one. A recognized critical institution writes a positive review; that review comes to the attention of a book's publisher, who then puts a positive quote somewhere on the book.
But well before the book's been seen by critics, well before it hits store shelves, its manuscript is passed around for praise from a writer's peers.
"When we start thinking about a publicity plan, you talk about what's going to be important. And so one of the first things to come up is: 'Are we gonna go after blurbs?' " says Kimberly Burns, a co-founder of Broadside, a literary publicity firm.
She says the process begins usually around the time that a galley — a bound manuscript of a book, prior to copy editing — is ready to send out. And it begins with a conversation between the author and her editor, an attempt to cobble together a list of prospects to whom they'd send galleys.
Before Laila Lalami began seeking endorsements for her latest novel, The Moor's Account, she says she met with her editor over lunch to divvy up their lists. "There were a couple of authors he was friends with, so he made the requests himself," she writes in an email, "and others I was closer to, so I wrote those emails directly."
As a writer requesting blurbs, Lalami says the idea is to find "an endorsement from someone who is a good fit for the subject matter, has a very strong reputation, and rarely blurbs can have a significant effect on tastemakers."
But, when you're on the other side of the requests — as the author writing the endorsement — the process varies more from person to person. Some writers report receiving up to five unsolicited galleys in the mail a day, a deluge that's prompted plenty to swear off blurbing altogether.
It also prompts a question: How do all the other blurbers do it?
"I can figure things out pretty quickly," says Gary Shteyngart, a novelist and memoirist who has polished the practice into an art form. He's given so many blurbs (more than 150 by his counting) that there's even a Tumblrdevoted to some of his more notable snippets.
"I'll look at a first sentence [of a galley], I'll look at the cover and it just comes to me," he says. "Reading randomly from a book is also very helpful. Sometimes I try to read further — but you know, how far can you get? Does anyone even read these books anymore?"
That said, he doesn't hold back.
"I've compared people to Shakespeare, Tolstoy or whatever," he says. "I'll do anything."
Still, he — and Lalami — remain ambivalent about just how effective these are in getting a book noticed by readers, especially since there are so many blurbs now in circulation.
"I think the blurbs that people write for me are pretty heartfelt, and I appreciate them," he says. "But ultimately what effect they have — I don't know. If we could all enter a memorandum of not blurbing anyone else, I think it would be easier for us."
Selling The Song Of Myself
Whatever the future may hold for this arms race of blurbs, its roots stretch much further into the past than Lalami and Shteyngart, further than Orwell or even the guy who came up with the word "blurb" in the first place — humorist Gelett Burgess, whose 1907 book Are You a Bromide? featured a woman he called Miss Belinda Blurb, extolling the book's manifold virtues from its cover.
Burgess may have invented the word (and defined it as "a flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial" — or, "a sound like a publisher"). But the practice it describes had been alive and well for at least a half-century before Burgess got to it.
In fact, many trace its conception to one of the titans of American letters: Walt Whitman — making use of a letter of his own, sent to him from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
On reading the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which had been sent to Emerson unsolicited, Emerson had mailed Whitman back a glowing note. At that time, Emerson was already a nationally esteemed intellectual, while Whitman was a relative unknown outside his native Brooklyn. The note began as a private word of encouragement, but it wasn't private for long: The New York Tribune published it in full with Whitman's consent just months later.
And the next year, in 1856, one line of that letter found its way to an even more prominent location. Printed in gold-leaf lettering on the spine of the book's second edition, sharing space only with the title and Whitman's name, were Emerson's words:
"I greet you at the beginning of a great career."
"I have not seen any blurb before that. I know scholars have looked, and I don't think anybody has been able to locate one," says David Haven Blake, a professor and author of Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity. "I suspect in one sense that is the first blurb — though Whitman wouldn't have described it in such a way."
Whitman, it seems, was very adept at self-promotion — "a one-man publicity shop forLeaves of Grass," Blake calls him.
Jerome Loving, who wrote Walt Whitman: Song of Himself,adds: "It's not surprising that the poet who began his first great poem with the words 'I celebrate myself' would be one of the originators of the book blurb."
A shot of the 1856 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, with Emerson's blurb on the spine.
Courtesy of the Drew University Library
The Numbers
Considering its remarkable endurance — and its pervasiveness today — one might expect the blurb to be a prime way to move copies. After all, it was pioneered by a poet with a penchant for self-promotion. Wouldn't the right blurb, placed just right on the book's dust jacket, be a recipe for great sales?
The thing is, few people seem to know for sure.
"I'd say it's nothing that we can track," says Carl Kulo, the U.S. director of research for Nielsen Bookscan.
On a monthly basis, in collaboration with publishers, Nielsen conducts a survey of some 6,000 book buyers across the country, asking about the books they bought, where they bought them, the formats they were in and how they became aware of the books. The questionnaires change just about every month, and of course the results do, too.
But Nielsen doesn't ask about how blurbs influence purchases; he says publishers haven't asked Nielsen to track that data, either.
"It doesn't exist," he says. "To be honest with you, we never thought of it."
Yet there is at least one group keeping tabs on this information.
At Codex Group, an independent audience research firm, founder and CEO Peter Hildick-Smith says he has worked with every major publisher and many major retailers to test the sales success of a book's cover before it hits store shelves. Using samples of several thousand participants each, Codex tests three or four possible variations of a book's cover — usually including one that's entirely bare of blurbs. Then, they test how participants pick.
He says he's found that two factors are key to a blurb's success.
"Do you care about who's doing the blurbing, and is it somebody who really matters to you?" says Hildick-Smith. "And is it something that's really bringing some value to your understanding of the book?"
And yet, even when the blurber is a reader's favorite author, Hildick-Smith's numbers show that such recommendations have only a modest influence on their buying habits. Asked about the book they bought last, just 2.5 percent of participants discovered it through the recommendation of their favorite author; about 1 percent of them were persuaded to buy a book because of such a recommendation.
About as many participants discovered their last book through an author recommendation as those who found it with a search engine.
So, Why Blurb?
If the sales impact of the blurb is, at best, a small part of a larger mix of a book cover's attractions — or, at worst, a negligible one — the question appears to persist. Why blurb?
Well, the short answer is: The blurb isn't exactly meant for readers — at least, not entirely. By the time a blurb gets to the reader, by the time it's resting on a book in a display, it has already done most of the work it's supposed to do.
"We now very often receive submissions from literary agents to consider a book, and the agent's letter will have endorsements already in place from authors you've heard of," says Michael Pietsch, CEO of publisher Hachette Book Group. "And that's the way the agent is getting the publishing community to read this book ahead of all the other thousands of books on submission at that time."
Pietsch entered the publishing industry in the late 1970s, by which time, he says, the process of soliciting blurbs was already well established. A longtime editor himself, Pietsch says, "The editor's job is to get people to read the book" — and that job has been getting started earlier and earlier in the process. Editors aren't just trying to get the reader to buy into their authors' work, but the staff in house at a publisher, as well.
"People's reading time is very limited," he says. "And you want them to actually have the pleasure of this book, so that they can talk about it with that full-hearted enthusiasm that you really only get when you've actually read it and loved it."
And that's quite a task, considering the number of books getting published: He says that 300,000 books were released last year alone by the mainstream publishing industry.
"There's just this vast blizzard of books coming out all the time," Pietsch says, "and getting any one book to stand out and catch people's attention is extraordinarily hard work."
For most of those books, the path from manuscript to store shelf can be loosely thought of as a chain. From agent, to editor, to publicists, to booksellers — the prospect of a book standing before the eyes of a potential buyer depends largely on persuading each link in that chain to give it a read.
It's a challenge that gets even more difficult with writers new to a U.S. audience; that's one reason why Laila Lalami says she tries to blurb "especially if it is a debut author, or an author in translation."
The 1925 edition of In Our Time, by Ernest Hemingway. Back when he was virtually unknown by readers, Hemingway turned to blurbs, too — getting endorsements from the likes of Sherwood Anderson and Ford Madox Ford.
Courtesy of University of South Carolina Libraries
It's no coincidence, then, that Whitman, a longtime newsman, borrowed a bit of Emerson's prestige to gain traction in the literary world; nor that even Ernest Hemingway, Pietsch points out, squeezed no less than six endorsements onto the front cover of his first commercially published book in the U.S., In Our Time. Another editor likened blurbing to scholars advising Ph.D. candidates — with established writers supporting apprentices just getting their start.
And at least in this instance, Jake Cumsky-Whitlock says, the blurb works. As the head book buyer at Kramerbooks, he decides what stocks the shelves at the Washington, D.C., bookstore, and he says that blurbs serve to position an unfamiliar name by familiar beacons.
"It's less for what the blurb says than who's doing the saying," Cumsky-Whitlock says. "If I haven't heard of the author writing the book, but it comes with the imprimatur of a reputable writer or someone I respect, that will make a big difference."
Ultimately, that kind of reaction is enough — for the writers doing and receiving the blurbing, for the editors and the publishers.
"My job is to help out a little bit," Gary Shteyngart says. "If a crazy person sees my name on the back of a book and says, 'I'm gonna pay $25 for this,' then I've done it — I've done a great service to my community.
David Hume: Is there any new philosophical thinking in his later work?
In the years immediately following Hume’s death in 1776 his near-contemporaries were in no doubt about the surest foundation of his claim to lasting reputation. Thomas Ritchie, writing in 1807, could see no merit in Hume’s contributions as either a metaphysician, or a moralist, or as a writer on economics and politics. For Ritchie, it had been only when Hume turned aside from these speculations and applied himself to the history of his country that he had achieved anything durable. In the pages of the History of England, Ritchie announced, there was to be found “a source of useful information to the statesman, a noble monument of its author’s talents, and an invaluable bequest to his country”.
The disregard for Hume’s philosophical writings expressed by Ritchie strengthened during the first half of the 19th century. In that Kantian climate Hume could be presented only as a thinker who had, with a kind of gifted wrong-headedness, explored the dead-end of scepticism with unprecedented thoroughness. Hume had been a mesmerising magician who with virtuoso flourishes had demonstrated the melancholy truth that, pursued in this way, there was after all no rabbit in the philosophical hat. Sir William Hamilton dramatised Hume’s career as a moment of disciplinary dilemma, when philosophers were forced to choose between “either . . . surrendering philosophy as null, or of ascending to higher principles, in order to re-establish it against the sceptical reduction”. Hume’s contribution had been the vital but ancillary one of supplying the crucial first impetus to Kant.
The Victorians, however, were no more enthusiastic about Hume’s historical works than about his philosophy. Even when the volumes of the History of England had first been published some had noticed that they were, in the polite euphemism, “lightly researched”. It was clear that Hume had worked solely from printed sources, and that he possessed neither the technical skills, nor in all probability the appetite, to forage in archives to any good effect. His was a history written in a library, and it was bound to suffer once the Germanic revolution in historiography had been assimilated by English writers. John Stuart Mill dismissed the History of England as “really a romance [which] bears nearly the same degree of resemblance to any thing which really happened, as Old Mortality or Ivanhoe”. Francis Jeffrey, writing in the Edinburgh Review, pronounced the devastating verdict (he was of course fond of pronouncing devastating verdicts) that Hume’s “credit among historians, for correctness of assertion, will soon be nearly as low as it has long been with theologians for orthodoxy of belief”.
It was only towards the end of the 19th century that the tide began to turn, and then only in a limited way. In respect of Hume’s philosophy, eventual disenchantment with Kant was a necessary preliminary to a partial restoration of Hume’s fortunes. The publication of Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century in 1876 initiated a tentative reassessment of Hume’s philosophy, in that the questions Hume had pondered were rescued from the condition of being simply misconceived. On the contrary: these had been and were still the stubborn, fundamental philosophical questions. Stephen did not find Hume’s answers satisfactory, but the questions had at least been the right ones:
Hume began as a philosopher . . . but in the Treatise reasoned himself into a position which made philosophy look as though it had destroyed itself under the pressure of systematic sceptical argumentation. Therefore, he turned from philosophy to subjects which could be treated purely empirically, such as politics, political economy, and history, but in each case the work that he produced was evidence that . . . his power as a destroyer was much greater than his abilities as a creator. . . . Hume’s scepticism left him trying to make ropes of sand in his writings on these topics.
Stephen and other late-Victorian writers such as James McCosh and Hume’s editors T. H. Green and T. H. Grose tended to script Hume’s career as a drama of two acts. In the first, Hume had written the Treatise of Human Nature and had thereby discovered the dismaying truth that progress in philosophy was not to be had. In Act Two, he had turned aside from philosophy, had dabbled in essays and history-writing, had pursued a public career, and amassed considerable wealth and public fame. As Grose sourly remarked, “Few men of letters have been at heart so vain and greedy of fame as was Hume.”
One might have expected that the preferences and aversions of Bloomsbury would have overturned this narrative. In a way, they did. In Portraits in Miniature Lytton Strachey admired what his Victorian predecessors had disparaged: “Had Hume died at the age of twenty-six” — the age at which he had completed the two volumes of the Treatise — “his real work in the world would have been done, and his fame irrevocably established.” For Strachey the Treatise was the “masterpiece” which contained all that was most important in Hume’s thought. The rest of his life had been nothing more than filling in time. It is clear, however, that in reversing the Victorian evaluation of Hume which he had inherited, Strachey had done nothing to reshape the underlying narrative of Hume’s career. This was still a drama of two acts, and the interval still arrived disconcertingly early.
Although later 20th-century study of Hume’s philosophy continued further down this path of rehabilitation, the notion that the Treatise contained all Hume’s really hard and original thinking, and that he spent the rest of his life re-packaging and re-formulating the insights that had broken upon him in his mid-twenties would prove very durable.
James A. Harris admires the Treatise, and his account of its arguments and its relation to the British philosophical conversation of the late 1730s is fine and probing. But his intellectual biography is committed to destroying and clearing away for ever this “two-stage” model of Hume’s career, with its attendant thesis that the Treatise contains the whole of Hume’s subsequent thought in concentrated form and that the later decades of thinking and writing amounted to nothing more than a process of dilution:
Once he had given up on the Treatise, Hume never once presented himself as a systematic thinker, as someone who conceived of his writings in terms of foundation and superstructure, or of core and periphery, or of trunk and branches. The abandonment of the project of the Treatise would appear, on the contrary, to have been the giving up of the whole idea of a philosophical system, in favour of several distinct and different kinds of philosophical project.
Here Harris is wise enough to follow Hume’s own lead. “My Own Life”, that wry and posthumous autobiographical narrative, establishes the broad sequence of Hume’s literary career, and establishes that the key turning point was the rejection of the mode, if not the insights, of the Treatise, and all that that rejection implied.
In the place of the reductive Victorian two-stage model of Hume’s career, Harris proposes a different understanding of what Hume was about, based on a more historically-informed idea of what it was to practise philosophy, on a more nuanced conception of scepticism, particularly as it could be understood in the 18th century, and above all positioned in relation to a subtle understanding of what it could have meant in the 18th century to commit yourself to a career as a man of letters. Commenting on Hume’s wish to revive the calm discursiveness of antiquity, when “Atticus and Cassius the Epicureans, Cicero the Academic, and Brutus the Stoic, could, all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were insensible to all those distinctions, except so far as they furnished matter to discourse and conversation”, Harris remarks:
Hume wrote these words, perhaps, more in hope than in expectation. He was reminded often how hard even the men of letters among his contemporaries found it to lay aside personal animosities and rivalries. He was told that he was both a Whig and a Tory when he took himself to be neither. He was told that he was an atheist when he believed he had revealed nothing at all in his writings about his personal religious views. He was told he was licentious and a subverter of morality when what he thought he had done was merely to show how morality might better be understood. Sometimes Hume found these things amusing, sometimes he found them deeply offensive. They showed him that the philosophical conversation which he desired to join could not be presumed to be already going on, waiting for him to take his place in it. His task as a man of letters was to be part of the effort to bring that conversation, the conversation that we call the Enlightenment, into existence.
Guided by this general strategy Harris follows the various twists and turns of Hume’s career, which he presents as possessing a real narrative, and as being in some respects improvised and not teleological. Hume, like the rest of us, responded to reversals and unexpected opportunities, and these left a trace on his career. This means that Harris has to follow Hume also in his various kinds of expertise, and one of the impressive features of this book is the author’s mastery of the different fields — philosophical, political, economic, historical, literary — in which Hume wandered. What are the particularly strong points in Harris’s biography?
In the first place, Harris is very sure-footed — and often persuasively surprising — in mapping the relationships of Hume’s arguments to his great predecessors in the post-Renaissance intellectual tradition: to thinkers such as Grotius, Locke, Hutcheson, Berkeley, and Shaftesbury. Most interesting, however, are Harris’s findings concerning Hume’s relation with the iconoclastic and controversial Bernard Mandeville, by whose provocations Hume was initially allured, but only until he found, as he thought, more powerful and subtle arguments for a less inflammatory view of human nature which allowed him to offer a measure of rejection to a man who nevertheless must be acknowledged as a powerful influence.
Harris brings Hume’s relation to ancient philosophy into a particularly sharp focus. As we have seen, Hume wanted to restore to the philosophy of his own day something of the equable temper of ancient philosophy. Of course, this wish was in part encoded disparagement of the dogmatic, intemperate spirit with which Christianity had infected the realm of thought ever since the momentous Church councils of the fourth century.
What it did not mean was that Hume wanted to reintroduce the ancient idea of philosophy as intellectual medicine. Concerning the ends of philosophy Hume was unswervingly modern. For him philosophy was a mode of investigation and a style of thought. It could never be a therapy.
Not that Hume’s world had no need of therapies. After he had abandoned the Treatise he turned his attention to the English and Scottish society in which he lived, and which he found to be riven by disputes bequeathed to it by the 17th century. Hume’s essays and his History of England were calculated as balms to be applied to these disputes, no matter how enraging or inflammatory their arguments might at first sight seem to the combatants. Harris explains Hume’s strategy in these writings with great insight, while at the same time drawing attention to the particular judgments which contradicted the idées reçues Hume considered especially mischievous.
Had English liberty been born in the profound glooms of the Hercynian forest, as Montesquieu had asserted, and as generations of Whiggish English historians before him had also proclaimed? On the contrary, “It was nonsense to say . . . that the modern English system of liberty was found in the forests of ancient Europe.” Had the Norman Conquest fastened the chains of feudal servitude upon a once proud and free people? Not a bit of it: “The conquest put people in a situation of receiving slowly from abroad the rudiments of science and cultivation, and of correcting their rough and licentious manners.”
Was medieval Catholicism a bondage of the spirit? Considered as a natural religion it had its weak points, to be sure, but there were also points to be made on the other side of the account: “tho’ the religion of that age can merit no other name than that of superstition, it served to unite together a body of men who had great sway over the people, and who kept the community from falling to pieces, from the factions and independent [sic] power of the nobles.” Were the Puritans of the 17th century nothing more than the panders of despotism, as the hotter Whigs of the later 17th century had claimed? The truth, notwithstanding the autocratic interlude of Cromwell, was slightly different once a longer perspective was taken: “The precious spark of liberty had been kindled, and was preserved, by the puritans alone; and it was to this sect, whose principles appear so frivolous and habits so ridiculous, that the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution.”
Why has this kind of study of Hume — calm, reflective, patient, informed, but far from uncommitted — been so long to seek? In part this is perhaps because Hume until very recently had not really become a subject for dispassionate study. Although the conflicts in which he was a participant have all long since been concluded for better or worse (usually for worse), nevertheless a totemic potency clung to Hume as the embodiment of the impotence of reasonableness in the face of prejudice and obscurantism. Now, when (depending on your point of view) either that battle has been won, or one despairs of its ever being won, Hume is released from the condition of being a combatant or a proxy and can be considered in a more free and more historical way.
Guided by Harris we can now see a figure more human and more engaging, whose ideas developed and flexed over time. Harris’s meticulous anatomising of this figure is a major achievement in Hume studies and in studies of the Enlightenment more generally.
