storytelling

Robyn emails in response to my post about reviews with a link to waxy.org's approach to amazon reviews:

Here's a fun game... First, look up the most popular and critically-acclaimed books, movies, and music on Amazon. Click on "Customer Reviews," and sort them by "Lowest Rating First." Hilarity ensues! It's the Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game!

Waxy provides examples of one star reviews of books, movies, and music he loves, and they really are funny. Then his readers get in the game and post their examples of funny one-star reviews. Walt provides this one star review of the DVD release of Lawrence of Arabia:

I bought this DVD as a way to show off my new DVD player to my family. I had seen the movie several times in the theater, and knew its bright colors would be beautiful on my TV screen.
To my horror, I saw that Columbia had seen fit to alter a masterpiece. Yes, the film came complete with those horrific black bars at the top and bottom of my screen, which obscured about half of the picture. I've seen those bars on the "artsy" videos on TV, and I sometimes enjoy them. But this is a classic work of art! You don't try to make it "hip" and "relevant" with modern touches. It would be like adding a moustache to the Mona Lisa.
Until Columbia drops the act and releases "Lawrence of Arabia" without those bars, letting us see all of the picture, stay away.

Waxy also provides a link to Justine Larbalestier's weblog entry on how to turn bad Amazon reviews into an entertaining afternoon's reading, but before you go off reading that, here's the one star review of Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant (one of my very favorite novels) that made me snort and then, yes, laugh.

I wanted to like this novel, but I just couldn't. Like all of Patchett's other works, this one is boring and hard to read. After I bought the book and read it, I felt like I had been tricked by an evil magician. I felt like an unwilling participant at a magic show--the lady who gets sawed in half. The plot is jerky and lackluster; it's predictable and rather dull. The characters are slippery and distant. There is no energy, no rabbit out of the hat. It's a one woman show where the magic is missing. It deserves a zero but the marks don't go quite that low.

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Just about six weeks or so before a new book comes out, I start thinking about reviews. Because they are coming. They are coming from places like Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and Booklist. My publisher and editor will read them. They will be sent to me. They will end up on Amazon, bad or good, scrupulously fair or dripping with venom, as the first thing a potential buyer reads.

The reviews can be limp with distaste or bristling with sarcasm or even positive -- but one thing is pretty constant: I almost always have the really strong sense that the reviewer didn't really read the book beyond a casual skimming. Here's the thing: reviews -- even mean spirited ones, even nasty ones -- would be easier to take if the process were less opaque. The big places who exist primarily to produce reviews (Kirkus, for example) do so anonymously. The books are farmed out like so many little lambs, and the reviewers are paid far less than the cost of a rib roast for a review. They are often frustrated writers and students of writing.

Being reviewed by PW is a little bit like being sewn (blindfolded) into a sack with a very unstable bipolar person who may, or may not be, on meds, but who certainly has a weapon.

I know this sounds like the mewling of a disgruntled mother after her baby has failed to win the beauty contest. After all, I didn't have to write the book, and I didn't have to go find an agent or let her sell it or take the money. Reviews are part of the process and the price.

So it's time to gird my loins. That phrase always strikes me as particularly funny -- as a kid it gave me a mental image of a sirloin wrapped in bacon (there's a theme here, I notice, blood and meat and cutting) -- so to cheer myself up I went over to the OED. This is part of the entry under loins:

2. Chiefly Biblical and poet. This part of the body, regarded    a. as the part of the body that should be covered by clothing and about which the clothes are bound; so, to gird (up) the loins (lit. and fig.), to prepare for strenuous exertion.

    1526 TINDALE Matt. iii. 4 This Jhon had his garment off camels heer and a gerdell off a skynne aboute his loynes. 1535 COVERDALE Prov. xxxi. 17 She gyrdeth hir loynes with strength. 1605 SHAKES. Lear II. iii. 10 My face Ile grime with filth, Blanket my loines. 1667 MILTON P.L. IX. 1096 Some Tree whose broad smooth Leaves together sowd, And girded on our loyns, may cover round Those middle parts. 1742 COLLINS Ode Poet. Charac. 21 To gird their blest prophetick loins. 1753 SMART Hilliad I. 27 Her loins with patch-work cincture were begirt. 1833 L. RITCHIE Wand. by Loire 17 It was necessary, therefore, to gird up our loins and walk. 1855 BROWNING Statue & Bust, The unlit lamp and the ungirt loin. 1877 BRYANT Odyss. v. 280 And round about her loins Wound a fair golden girdle. 1880 MRS. E. LYNN LINTON Rebel of Fam. II. v, He was standing like the impersonation of masculine punctuality with loins girded.

How about that patch-work cincture? And I particularly like the Browning quote: the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin. Because when somebody at Publishers Weekly decides to teach an uppity author a lesson, you need some time in a dark room to recover, and tend to the wounds.

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