book ads

a day lived a day learnt. well, here's one people not living in france, or those living there without televisons, advertising books on tv is illegal. how very logical. print advertising for print material, audio-visual advertising for audio-visual production. it's simply a clear division of artistic labour!

comparing situations, in australia books have been advertised on tv for years. however, lately i have noticed a suspicious rise in the quality of these ads. it used to be that typically an ad would consist of a shot of the cover and a voice-over heaping praise on the latest book by wilbur smith, with perhaps, if we were lucky enough, some miniscule extract from the book itself read by a rather smary sounding man. but lately these ads have gone big budget, and consist of an entirely audio-visual creation of the book's diegetic world. these ads have become trailers for the book. but unlike the film trailers, there is no real extract in these apart from a voiceover which sounds rather like the blurb on we might expect to find on the book's cover.

but clearly advertising on tv is too expense an exercise for the latest robbe-grillet to get a guernsey. (tho' perhaps not with his erotic tales, a very popular genre. in a qbe bookshop [a cheap chainstore bookseller] the other day i saw that they had a vampire section. a whole shelf devoted to this wonderful genre!). which is a shame, since this exposure could possible result in a larger public for this most notoriously difficult of writers. or advertising for poets even. i am surely somewhat niave when it comes to the impact of ads, but i tend to believe, and this is at least the case with a lot of music, that constant exposure to it results in a cracking effect, whereby the listener is slowly brought over to the once thought darkside. a piece of mind space is occupying with the naiscent possibility of going down the shop to buy the latest manning. tho' of course actually parting with the cash is something altogether different.

thanks julia!

in talks with universities australia, julia gillard has confirmed that the research quality framework (rqf) will be relegated to the dustbin of government policy. and there's a glimmer of hope in those doubters' eyes that things would actually change under a rudd governement.

which is great for me, because i was dreading answering the wonderful question: 'so, given the imminent introduction of the rqf, what's your five year research plan?' where should i publish? is it worth publishing in a student journal? what do i mean by 'big impact publications'? well i mean that a fucking tornado literally flies through one's bowels when one reads my article! it's a rush!