From: jwkenne@attglobal.net
On 2015-04-26 22:41:10 +0000, William Vetter said:
> J.Pascal brought next idea :
>> On Sunday, April 26, 2015 at 1:48:15 AM UTC-6, William Vetter wrote:
>>> J.Pascal used his keyboard to write :
>>>> On Saturday, April 25, 2015 at 9:02:02 PM UTC-6, William Vetter wrote:
>>>>> After serious thinking Bill Swears wrote :
>>>>>> On 4/22/2015 8:53 PM, Kay Shapero wrote:
>>>>>>> In article , wswears@gci.net says...
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 4/14/2015 11:28 PM, Kay Shapero wrote:
>>>>>>>>> In article , mdhangton@gmail.com says...
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> What's the worst you can come up with?
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> "Book".. though come to think of it there's one of those out there,
>>>>>>>>> though the title isn't in English, and it seems to be quite popular.
:)
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Putnam's Puerile Petunias Proliferated Pointlessly.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Hmm... maybe The Dullest Story Ever Told?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> Putnam being the PhD who realized that the zombie plague was
inescapable, and
>>>>>
>>>>> Why does character need a doctorate to know to run from zombies?
>>>>>
>>>>>> organized a small group of contagion free and hardy survivors to move
>>>>>> into orbit. After many years of strife to get the orbital arcology in
>>>>>> working order, and the sociology of the disparate population
>>>>>> functioning peacefully, he finally had time to look down, and realized
>>>>>> that his home was inhabited by zombies, who puttered by habit through
>>>>>> something like normal domesticity, completely ignoring the Petunias
>>>>>> blooming in riot, having outgrown the beds his wife had planted those
>>>>>> years before. Quite poignant, in a zombie laden, heavy handed way.
>>>>>>
>>>>> I'm not quite sure how you mean this synopsis to be taken.
>>>>>
>>>>> Let me ask another question. Consider the title
>>>>>
>>>>> _Hip-Hop Bitches of Gor_
>>>>>
>>>>> This suggests the body of the manuscript will be puerile shit. (I made
>>>>> it up.) Is it a bad title?
>>>>>
>>>>> Here is another one:
>>>>>
>>>>> _A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, by Frederick Douglas_
>>>>>
>>>>> This book is one of the few autobiographies worth reading, but is it a
>>>>> crappy title?
>>>>
>>>> If either title accurately describe the book, they're good titles.
>>>>
>>>> If the Hip Hop Gor thing has nothing to do with Gor or Hip Hop, maybe
>>>> it's about a knitting club in Kansas... then it's a bad title.
>>>>
>>> I'm presuming you know what John Norman's Gor series was. Let us say
>>> both titles are for books about slavery.
>>
>> I'm failing to see your point in any way whatsoever.
>>
> My point was that I thought you were of a generation who might not
> recognize what Gor was. See below.
>
>> "About slavery" describes almost nothing. You could take a 50 Shades
>> and biography of Margaret Thatcher and say they were both "about being
>> a woman."
>>
>> A title is a good title if it helps to sell the book to people who want
>> to buy the book.
>>
>> So... bad title. "Firefly". Freaking HORRIBLE title. I and who knows how
>
> I agree. "Serenity," the movie, wasn't much better.
>
>> many thousands of other people who were the exact audience for that
>> show never bothered to watch it because what the heck is "Firefly?"
>> Give me that
>
> It was given a bad time slot.
>
>> title and "by the creator of Buffy" and it has not been "sold to the
>> people who want to buy it." Now, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is an
>> awesome title of amazing brilliance. It describes the movie in four
>> words. Only one less word than, "Ditzy valley girl fights vampires."
>> Going back to your "book about slavery" thing, "Buffy the Vampire
>> Slayer" and "Dracula" are both "about Vampires" but the fact they are
>> doesn't make them interchangeable.
>>
> John Norman was a fellow who wrote a long series of books during the
> 60's and 70's similar in setting to Conan's Hyboria (the name of the
> fictional world was Gor) that was more or less soft-core male dominance
> pornography in which all women were slaves, without enough explicit sex
> to prevent them from being sold as paperbacks in chain bookstores.
> They all had titles in the form _Something Something of Gor_ and a
> muscular fellow dressed in a loincloth on the cover, with perhaps a
> scantily-clad woman cowering at this feet. Or so I was told by the few
> people who would admit to ever reading any of them (although they sold
> well enough). I never witnessed it personally, but I was led to
> believe that the lines at his autograph tables showed that many of
> Norman's fans were young women, for some reason.
Just to qualify it a bit, the first volume was pretty good
Burroughs/Howard pastiche, and the third had really well-drawn aliens,
while the sadism/slaverey part was minimal in both. And he could write,
in his way. (He was actually an academic, slumming.)
> _A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, by Frederick Douglas_
> was something else, and it related only a part of his life as a boy
> slave during which he learned to read, and not his adult life in which
> he became a famous Abolitionist. The pivotal line in the novel, which
> he overheard his master telling the wife, was "Teach a nigger to read,
> and you'll ruin the best nigger in the World." At that moment, Douglas
> was launched on a quest to ruin himself. _That_ was what it was about.
> If the title were linked to that line, it would have been a beautiful
> title to me, but it would have been unacceptable in 1850. My opinion,
> though, in retrospect is that this is a great work with a crappy title.
--
John W Kennedy
"Though a Rothschild you may be
In your own capacity,
As a Company you've come to utter sorrow--
But the Liquidators say,
'Never mind--you needn't pay,'
So you start another company to-morrow!"
-- Sir William S. Gilbert. "Utopia Limited"
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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