More from Western Lands

What an excellent book this is. Here is a passage with some good, practical advice to expand on what our esteemed ħkʰárwə was saying:

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective. If someone has reason to expect a psychic attack, an excellent move is to make oneself as visible as possible to the person or persons from whom the attack is anticipated, since conscious attacks on a target that engages one's attention are rarely effective and frequently backfire.

This strategy is especially indicated for critics. Leave your name in the phone book, attack writers on radio shows, anything to keep your image clearly in the foreground of enemy attention. Best of all, engage the writer in public refutation by outrageous misrepresentation and falsifications. For example, here is a critic on a writer who has spent six years on a book: "This slovenly potpourri, obviously thrown together in a few weeks."

A rule that is almost always valid: never refute or answer a critic, no matter how preposterous the criticism may be. Do not let the critic teach you the cloth, as they say in bullfighting circles. Never charge the cloth, even if the critic resorts to actual misquotation.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating, disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that would capture the reader's full attention.

This procedure is based on scientific evidence: Poetzel's Law states that dream imagery excludes conscious perception in favor of preconscious perceptions. And Freud's hypothesis that the neutral character of preconscious perception permits it to serve as a cover for material that would not otherwise escape the dream censor, so that unpleasant affect is attracted to preconscious perception. There is, in fact, a fifty-seven percent correlation between preconscious recall and peak unpleasantness. Charles Fischer says that dreams have a tendency to take up the unimportant details of waking life.

There are other tricks: the use of generalities like "the man in the street" and the editorial "we" to establish a rapport of disapproval with the reader and at the same time to create a mental lacuna under cover of an insubstantial and unspecified "we." And the technique of the misunderstood word: pack a review with obscure words that send the reader to the dictionary. Soon the reader will feel a vague, slightly queasy revulsion for whatever is under discussion.