Word: blurbs
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Ironically, Hollywood may be mincing a dead horse. As a journalistic form, the movie review has descended to the level of the pressagent's blurb-a blurb commonly reprinted by newspapers too idle or strapped to staff a reviewer. A few perceptive, readable critics are still at critical work. But many papers leave the job to worn-out deskmen, middle-aged ladies (the New York Daily News has three) or unqualified cubs, or else, like the Des Moines Tribune, spread it through the city room, at $3 a review...
...Maturity. Though Eliot is probably the wealthiest poet alive (The Cocktail Party netted the lyrical sum of $1,000,000), he still reports for his thrice-weekly chores as a partner of the publishing house of Faber & Faber, where he is renowned as the firm's best jacket-blurb writer. There, last week, in his picture-lined office, he made a remarkable confession: "I'm just beginning to grow up, to get maturity. In the last few years. everything I'd done up to 60 or so has seemed very childish." Reminded of a youthfully immature shaft...
...heaving exterior, the interior was still more disturbing. What most visitors saw first walking through the caterpillar's insides was the figure of a gaunt man with porthole-sized gaps in his anatomy, holding a staff topped with a mostly black butterfly. This, said Dali in an explanatory blurb, "portrays human anxiety." Next on the way "toward a harmonious tranquillity" came a diaphanous female figure with a winged-egg head, who carried a staff with a crepuscular moth. The third figure was what Dali called "the true butterfly of tranquillity"-a maiden in yellow, with a head composed...
...plus earnings, Author Gunther is perennially strapped. He was forced to interrupt work on Inside Africa to pick up much-needed fees from a lecture tour. Last fall he was so short that he did something he had always staunchly refused to do: an Inside blurb for an advertiser. Hired by a pharmaceutical manufacturer, he ground out a 5,000-word piece called Inside Pfizer ("Before I visited Pfizer, I did not know the difference between an antibiotic and a housefly"). Typically, Gunther earned his fee (more than $12,500) by traveling 2,000 miles and interviewing 50 Pfizerlings...
...dream houses of a short-drive-from-the-city development known as Sunrise Hills turn out to be nothing better than air-conditioned nightmares. The point is illustrated in the lives of eight inhabitants of this magnificently planned slum-four young couples "thrown together," as the book's blurb explains, "in the devastating intimacy of a four-house courtyard...