Original Bobos

 Douglas Holt's 2004 book on cultural branding—discussed last time—devotes some passages of cultural analysis to David Brooks's famous theory of the "Bobos," or "bourgeois bohemians," which he propounded in his 2000 work of cultural criticism, Bobos in Paradise. Brooks's fundamental thesis, as recapped in Holt and a plenitude of other books and articles, is that the professional elite of the 1990s was distinguished from their predecessors by their appropriation of the iconography of bohemia. Torn between a conventional striving for upper-middle-class success and a fear of selling out, they clung to countercultural paraphernalia as a way to set themselves apart from the supposedly unimaginative, culturally reactionary, and philistine bourgeois classes of prior generations. 

I, in turn, don't think that Brooks was wrong. I just think that the phenomenon he identified was not new to the 1990s. Rather, it relates to a fundamental dilemma at the heart of all countercultural projects that has marked every version of bohemia from the days of Murger on. For evidence, I point to Wyndham Lewis's 1918 novel Tarr (which I read this weekend in its 1928 revised and expanded edition favored by its author and the editors of the Oxford World Classics). Lewis, we discover from the OUP's front matter, in fact originally intended to call his book "The Bourgeois-Bohemians." And most of the novel's satire is directed against precisely this milieu, which Lewis identified with the middle-class poseurs who circulated on the Rive Gauche in the early twentieth century.

Errata and Marginalia 022: Holt

Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston, Harvard Business School Press: 2004). 

Every advertising pundit I've read, from Bob Garfield to Rosser Reeves, has united in condemning the sort of "creative" advertisement that could pass muster as a student film project for an MFA thesis, but utterly fails to tell the viewer anything about the actual product it is selling. Now, I read Douglas Holt's 2004 book on "cultural branding," and he tells me with equal confidence that the "artistic" advertisement is the only thing that has ever saved a company's branding. 

No doubt the truth lies between these two extremes. It is in the interests of business writers trying to supplement their income with consulting gigs, after all, to polarize the issues. They say that everyone else who's writing on the subject is doing it exactly wrong, and that their approach is the only correct way to do it. Still, even if we find more value in the old principles of the "unique selling proposition" and "positioning," etc., than Holt is willing to concede, it is refreshing nonetheless to hear his alternative perspective. It is about time that someone spoke up for the much-maligned advertising creative—the liberal arts major who really just wants to tell a story, and is forced to do so through the medium of copy in order to put food on the table. 

Capitalism

There are moments that really make you realize what everyone is complaining about, when it comes to capitalism. Take what happened on the stock market yesterday. Admittedly, the big picture of the plunge in stock values that occurred had to do with ongoing concerns over the Fed's plan for rate hikes. But the precipitating cause appears to have been much more specific. 

As the Wall Street Journal summarizes, Home Depot issued a "disappointing" forecast for the coming year. What was the main concern? The retail giant said that it expected less in overall profit. Why? Were sales and earnings way down? Nope. It's just because it planned to devote an extra $1 billion to raising the wages of its hourly employees. 

This instantly sent the stock price into a tailspin, and ultimately dragged down the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average, and thence the stock market as a whole. 

"Desolation"

 In the Coleridge and Wordsworth section of his lectures on The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, T.S. Eliot introduces his discussion of the former poet's critical writings by portraying the state of Coleridge's mind at the time he composed the Biographia Literaria. Eliot seeks to present a contrast between the youthful rebelliousness of Wordsworth at the time he made his most lasting critical statement—in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads—and the somber mood of late-career desolation with which Coleridge composed his own most famous prose work. At the time he wrote the Biographia, Eliot reminds us, Coleridge "was already a ruined man."

The source of Coleridge's condition at the time, Eliot explains, was a fear that the flash of inspiration he had once experienced would never come again. This may surprise us. We tend, when thinking of the great poets and artists of history, after all, to imagine that their masterworks must have given them lifelong satisfaction—and sufficed them for lifelong occupation. They must have recognized their own most immortal works for the eruptions of genius they were, we think, and been able to spend all of their time in composing similar works or merely basking in the glory of their achievement. What we forget is that in this, as in all domains of achievement, no matter the merits of a single work we may have done, there is still, once it is accomplished, all the rest of life that needs somehow to be filled up.

"Magic and Dread"

 The last few weeks in the news cycle have been slow on the conventional sort of political news; yet despite this—or perhaps because of it—they have been bloated with a sense of supernatural alarm. There was the ecological catastrophe in Ohio stemming from a train derailment, for example, around which various conspiracy theories immediately began to swarm. Of course, there seems to be no substance to any of these claims (when is there ever?), but when I looked at the photos of the disaster, I can see why it would inspire the apocalyptic imagination. There is indeed something appalling and Biblical in the sight of the enormous pillar of black smoke arising from the burn. 

The picture calls to mind a scene from Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise, in which the protagonist and his family are forced to flee their small college town for a government evacuation center, due to the presence of a "black, billowing cloud" caused by some mysterious toxic event. The cloud towers over them—it is so massive it appears to be generating its own internal weather. It is one of the more memorable images from DeLillo's justly-beloved novel, and—of all the book's passages—is perhaps the one that best distills the novel's mood of vague uneasiness and paranoia. 

"Lack of labour"

 Once again it's "good news is bad news" week on Wall Street. First, there was the news at the top of the week that consumer prices fell slightly less than expected last month, due to continued strong demand and a great job market. Then, there was the announcement that retail sales were way up last month, as Americans continue to be gainfully employed, jobless rates are at historic lows, and people feel the confidence in their financial wellbeing to spend, which in turn is the main driver of growth in the U.S. economy. (Oh no! Not a strong economy and labor market!) Finally, there was similar data at the end of the week about producer prices failing to fall at rates economists were expecting. 

With each burst of good news about the rosy state of the American worker, the gloomy headlines followed: "Stocks waver on news of strong labor market"; "Stocks tumble on news of strong retail sales in the first month of 2023"; "investors anxious..." etc. 

"Whelps and Dams"

The ghastly earthquake in Turkey and Syria is reminding the world of the plight of—among many others—the millions of displaced people still living in both countries who had fled Syria's civil war. Amidst the overwhelming catastrophe, some U.S. senators have even spared a thought for the tens of thousands of displaced civilians in the region who are still held in locked detention camps, despite never being charged with or convicted of a crime. These are the families of suspected ISIS fighters (and other civilians with the misfortune of being found in former ISIS territory) who are still being confined at the al-Hol camp in Northwest Syria. 

In truth, the al-Hol facility is far from the earthquake's epicenter and most of its devastation. News reports say they have not yet heard of any damage to these facilities in particular. Nonetheless, the renewed threat to the safety and survival of Syrian refugees in general prompted a bipartisan group of senators to re-introduce legislation seeking—rightly—to protect an even more stigmatized subset of the displaced civilian population: those at al-Hol. The senators are calling for the creation of a special office charged with coordinating the repatriation of the individuals confined in this camp, instituting formal prosecutions where those are actually justified by the evidence, and eventually closing the camps.  

Cold Calls Revisited

 Well, it happened. It comes for us all eventually. You can't say I wasn't warned. Today it came for me. The bad cold call. 

Of course, everyone listening to me strain and fumble for a response knows it could just as well have happened to them. Every one is sitting there thinking: "there but for the grace of God..." 

But that is much less consoling in practice than one might have hoped. The very fact that people can see themselves in one's place gives one a taint of misfortune. One has the sense (almost certainly a projection) that people are averting their eyes when one passes. Don't bring that bad luck over here! Or perhaps they are simply filled with the discomfort of pity and don't know what to say. 

"An Arles for My Hiring"

 The hosts of the podcast Rational Security were debating in this last episode, among their chosen topics for the week, the question of just how scared we should be of the new (but already old-seeming) AI chatbot, ChatGPT. Some were of the opinion that it would unleash turmoil throughout the world of professional writing. One of the co-hosts cited a recent article in the Atlantic which argued that the future of writing would never be the same. Even among professionals, this article's take went, it would soon become standard to create first drafts of an article using an AI. The human writer's role would therefore be confined more to editing and refining than to generating the base text. 

Quinta Jurecic spoke for us all, however, when she expressed skepticism. In a voice that I hope will not seem naively John Henry– or Ned Ludd–esque ten to twenty years from now, she declared that she can't see ChatGPT replacing human content creators anytime soon. She pointed out that, even if she wanted to write her articles using the machine, she "couldn't even see how that would work." 

Papa's Projections

 In a post back in 2018, I remarked on a passage from Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa which finds Papa whining to Mama about how Gertrude Stein never appreciated him enough. Hemingway's then-wife, who is cast in the memoir in the role of simpering condoler and remover of every thorn lodged in Papa lion's paw, replies: "She's just jealous and malicious. You never should have helped her. Some people never forgive that." The irony, I observed, is that Papa is actually the one who repaid Stein with ingratitude for her assistance in his career. 

It appears on further reading that not only was I correct, I had if anything underestimated the full extent of Hemingway's pattern of ingratitude. He was, upon closer inspection, a serial backstabber, an incorrigibly Oedipal slayer of benefactors. Sherwood Anderson, who gave him his start? Hemingway wrote a whole book mocking him. But it didn't stop there. There was also Ford Madox Ford, whom Hemingway skewered in prose, despite the latter publishing his works and facilitating his career. 

Sweet Milk

 The sheltered groves of academe are exerting the same baneful influence on my character as they did the last few times I was enclosed in university walls. Part of the problem is that, when one is a student in an institution of higher learning, the only people around one who appear to have jobs, and who therefore must serve as emblems of successful adulthood, are professors. And talking to these professors in turn rapidly convinces one—because they are a profession, and like all professions have developed among themselves a set of self-flattering myths—that there is nothing else desirable in life that one could ever be. (This process, in turn, takes place—I find—regardless of whatever other, non-professorial "profession" the academic program in question claims to be preparing one for.)

The central professorial myth, and the one that proves most useful to them in exercising their spiritual terrorism to keep students on the straight path (something like the myth of hell in the Christian tradition), is that, if one ever sets foot outside of academia, one will kiss goodbye to all intellectual life. There is no intellectual life outside a university, the professors believe. And talking to them, one almost begins to believe it oneself. Even if one has in fact already had a job outside of academia in which one did intellectual work; even if by the end of one's previous job, before returning to the sheltered groves, one's daily tasks had largely been refined down to writing only about things one found interesting—even then the professors manage to convince. 

Perfection

 We are well into the second semester of law school, and I felt today the first jab of real regret. It's not that today was a particularly bad day. It was just a rather deadening one. And all at once a sadness came over me that I had managed to keep at bay and shunt off to the margins of my consciousness until now. Suddenly, I missed my house. I missed New England. I missed my family. I missed my job. I couldn't remember any longer why it had seemed necessary to tear everything apart, pick up, and relocate halfway across the country to start a new life. 

After all, wasn't my previous life perfect? Didn't I have a job doing meaningful work that—if not absolutely ideal in every regard—at least I could trust wasn't doing active harm in the world? (The same, I need hardly point out, cannot be said of much of what yawns before one on the other side of law school graduation.) Didn't I have a nice place to live? Wasn't I close to my family? Wasn't I, in short, as settled as one could hope to be in one's early thirties? 

Ostriches

 A friend of mine in the ministry gave a sermon the other day for which he felt particularly keyed up. "How did it go?" I asked. He replied that the feedback he received had been uniformly positive, but somehow distinctly unsatisfying. 

People had lined up afterwards and told him how much they appreciated the service. Then they would add: "I especially liked the part where you said..." and whatever came next would be completely off. Sometimes, it was the opposite of what he had intended to say. Other times it was simply irrelevant. 

I tried to reassure him that this experience was a near-universal in the ministry. Everyone who's preached has had the same thing happen to them. The dream of course is to convey one's deepest feelings to another—to vibrate in synchrony with them on precisely the same emotional wavelength. (To "touch without touching," as William Gass's preacher protagonist puts it in Omensetter's Luck). But this rarely happens. So often the result is instead a complete miscommunication. 

Little Hells

Certain memories have the power to arrest me in my tracks and leave me suddenly stricken. I will be going about my day when some stray occurrence in the surroundings or odd thought in my brain reminds me of, say, the time—a few weeks into attempting to learn Spanish—I introduced myself to a perfect stranger with a phrase I thought meant something like "pleased to meet you," but which turned out to mean something much closer to "I love you." There are others I don't even want to talk about that occurred while trying to learn Spanish (if a person is socially maladroit enough in their primary language, just imagine the opportunities for gaffes in a tongue they barely know!). These are the reminders that stop me cold. Oh God, get out, you obtrusive, horrible memories!

"Be a Damn Fool"

 A friend of mine works as a freelance instructor in the gig economy of online teaching, and one of his more memorable assignments took him to an address in the suburbs. His curiosity was piqued when he arrived at the address to find a monumental front gate. This led, upon opening, to a winding drive, then to an enormous fountain set before a palatial mansion. The wonders of this Xanadu did not cease from there. Inside were a full-time staff. There was a private helipad on the roof. And so on. 

The family within appeared, in short, to be living a life of unfathomable luxury. My friend and I of course were desperate to learn their story, so we pieced together as much as we could through research online. It turned out the father had owned a successful business in California that he had just sold for a small fortune. Some portion of it—we did not know how much—had obviously gone directly into the down payment on this castle.