Herculodge

In the Age of YouTube, Celebrity Is Everything and Nothing

Able to videotape ourselves and make our own "shows" with us as the "star," we have become celebrities unto ourselves. But the contradiction is that if all of us are celebrities then none of us are. No book captures this contradiction better than Thomas De Zengotita's Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It, which I reviewed for Amazon:

In Mediated (at one time titled The Flattered Self), Zengotita shows how a media-saturated culture has created a new breed of narcissists-namely you and me. We are, Zengotita argues, so self-absorbed, so obsessed with our own flattery, so hell-bent on the creation of our own perverse sense of celebrity that we have lost the true measure of greatness. For example, he argues that we can no longer aspire to great heroism because truly heroic figures are no longer relevant in our media world. Heroism, which requires devotion, sacrifice, imagination, and mythos, has been replaced with counterfeit celebrity that makes "heroism" appealing only when it's a consumer product. Literalism, self-aggrandizement, being pandered to by an onslaught of advertisers in every media form, and the resulting delusion that we are always the center of the universe makes us into pseudo celebrities so that we have no room in our consciousness for the real heroes of the world. He makes a great case for the fact that we have become, thanks to the media, more like full-time actors than real humans. All of us, he says, have learned from television "method acting," so that a media person could stick a microphone in front of any Average Joe and that Average Joe would be able to give a polished interview. We're all competing to be the star in a world of wannabe celebrities. 

He does a good job of showing how television gives us a God's-eye view of everything so that we have a delusion of omniscience and this false power fuels our delusions of grandeur. Additionally, this God's-eye view spoils us so that we can't live in stillness and see life in the here and now but only media's cheap, hyped representations of life. 

This unhealthy quest for god-hood, he shows, has taken shape in the popularity of Reality TV shows, which feed our sense of entitlement, self-pity, and our narcissistic wish to be recognized over others. 

By showing how our inability to embrace true heroes connects to our obsession with making ourselves into pseudo heroes, Zengotita has found an original, sometimes funny, and always profound way to make us look at the way the media is shaping our psyches and our souls.

The Sad and Curious Decline of Magnus Mills' Novels

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In 1998 I read Magnus Mills' The Restraint of Beasts and was in for a delicious novel, both full of philosophical depth as it presents a fable about capitalism that is unforced and full of the uncanny, both mysterious and familiar. The novel is deceptive, light and funny, but there is a demonic talon lurking beneath. With great anticipation, then, I read his next novel All Quiet on the Orient Express. No sophomore jinx here. The second novel was as satisfying as the first. Both novels feature a lugubrious unnamed narrator, half nincompoop and half Every Man, who languishes under forces he cannot control. Both novels take place in a very tactile, muddy, gritty world. Both novels are short, which I like, no more than 60,000 words. I think both have the qualities of a masterpiece, full of hilarious characters, mysterious, and having the quality of having written themselves. I'd give both novels an "A" grade. Then Mills' third novel Three to See the King, took a metaphysical turn, withdrawing from a real, tactile world and focusing on a fairy-tale like fable. Its satirical treatment of a false Messiah figure was eerie and mysterious, which I like, but its failure to produce a gritty world like its predecessors make me esteem it less. I'd give the novel a "B+/A-". Mills' next novel The Scheme for Full Employment seemed less like a novel and more like a cartoon outline. It was all concept and contained no detailed world. Nabokov said the great novelist creates a world that the reader has never before entered. Mill's fourth novel fails miserably on this count. Then Mills' fifth novel Explorers of the New Century seemed a notch above his fourth. However, it lacked compelling characters like he had created in his first three. Thus far I await Mills' sixth novel but I am skeptical. If Mills has lost his juju, I can forgive him. His first two novels are fun-to-read masterpieces for which I salute him grandly. 

A Few Vital Novels Still Out There

MFA programs have rendered too many novels cookie-cutter types, with privileged, precocious kids flexing their muscles and trying to show how hip they are. Too many novels fall into this category. But the special kind of novel, the one that, to use Nabokov's words, sends a "tingle" up your spine, is a rare beast. Here are 5 such tasty beasts I've read in the last 7 years or so:

2007: The Little Girl and the Cigarette by Benoit Duteurtre: An office worker lets his own brilliant insights into the folly of modern civilization get the best of him as he spews a tirade against politically correct sanctimonious politicians, office hacks, and the masses who have embraced a self-serving Cult of the Child.

2004: Little Children by Tom Perrotta. This facile novel seems to vindicate all the prophecies of Nietzsche who warned of the spiritual vacuum that would afflict "The Last Man." A funny parody of privileged adults, the novel shows parents with the emotional maturity of little children languishing through their narcissism and dysfunctional marriages.

2002: The Horned Man by James Lasdun. The fastidious, repressed narrator, a professor, is overtaken by some dark Jungian Demon, his "horned man" as we witness someone having a slow, steady meltdown.

2001: The Lecturer's Tale  by James Hynes. Using gothic and satire, Hynes writes a page-turner about a lowly lecturer who gains magical, demonic powers to ascend in power at a university. Hynes uses this plot as a vehicle to skewer all the tomfoolery and imbecilities that run rampant in academia.

1998: The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills. A dry deadpan first-person narrator chronicles the conflict between bovine laborers and their diabolical bosses. The allegory begins in the very earthly world but becomes more and more surreal. There is no novel quite like it. 

Study Guide for The Little Girl and the Cigarette

The following questions highlight the major themes from the satirical masterpiece of a novel The Little Girl and the Cigarette by the French author Benoit Duteurtre.

1.    How does the author raise the conflict between common sense and the marriage of self-serving sentimentality and legalism in Chapter 1? (see also page 53 for the fetish of eloquence, elocution, and bloviating over substance) ESSAY TOPIC
2.    What do you think the author is trying to say about such organizations as the Associations for Defense of Public Health? Perhaps they micromanage our health and “morals” while losing the big picture. See 43. ESSAY TOPIC
3.    In what ways is Quam Lao Ching the consummate bureaucrat and how does his role push forward the plot and contribute to the author’s satirical theme? See Chapter 1. (no “firmness” 14, 17)
4.    In what ways does Maren Pataki embody the soggy-brained, self-promoting mediocrity? Chapter 1; 15, 19, 39, 46 (a true believer or do-gooder who hides behind movements because in truth she is a nonentity or a cipher), 52 (condescending and patronizing)
5.    What frustrations imbecilities of modern life afflict the first-person narrator in Chapter 2? 22; see also 59 and 60, “paradoxical pollution.” ESSAY TOPIC
6.    What is the source of the narrator’s contempt for children who, as a result of the Child Cult, have become thoroughly odious? 23-27; We see the cult of the child and all its discontents. See also 28-32 as children are used to promote the mayor and become an imposition at work. See 65 where it appears adults are held hostage to the needs of children who have become arrogant and emboldened by their sense of excessive privilege. ESSAY TOPIC
7.    What do the child “monitors” in Chapter 2 have in common with Maren Pataki? The marriage of surly, self-righteous certitude and bovine stupidity. A burning religious fervor in all their mediocre undertakings.
8.    What kind of life has the narrator carved out for himself on pages 33-37 and how is his life, as he values it, now threatened?
9.    Is his lifestyle selfish or reasonable? Explain.
10.    How does the legal entanglement result in good fortune for the tobacco industry? 42, 96-102; they sponsor the “moment of reflection” commercial with wild flowers before the planned execution, which, as the commercial’s dramatic narrative dictates, is cancelled because of a surprise pardon.
11.    How is “spin” the object of satire in Chapter 3?  (You might compare this theme to the film Thank You for Smoking). ESSAY TOPIC: How has spin in the media age revealed the public’s loss of contact with reality?
12.    According to the narrator in Chapter 4, how has the cult of the child debased or corrupted adulthood? 55, 58 (the narrator rebels and regresses to adolescence); See also 66 where adults are reprimanded like children. ESSAY TOPIC
13.    Do you agree with the narrator that public health authorities have become a suffocating nanny turning adults into children who must sneak a cigarette in the bathroom? 56 ESSAY TOPIC
14.    How is the cult of the child described in Chapter 4? 57, 61 we see the emasculation of adults who are forced to see salvation, purity and renewal in bratty children; on 66 we see that children have a sense of entitlement and their “rights” but lack character to the degree that they are spoiled brats; in other words, the Child Cult does not serve them well either as they exist in a sick symbiosis with the self-serving adoring adults; on page 67 we see the children have no boundaries; (check out this theme in the book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Therapy and the World Is Getting Worse) ESSAY TOPIC
15.    In the context of Nietzsche’s Last Man (consumer satiety with spiritual emptiness), how might we better understand the emergence of the Child Cult? ESSAY TOPIC
16.    How does the narrator pique the mayor’s animus against him? 60
17.    How does the narrator’s brother-in-law ruin the narrator’s “bucolic expedition”? 63, 64; perhaps the narrator is overly sensitive and defensive to rules, especially rules that remind him of the major and government authority in general. Also the brother-in-law’s wife, affecting a coughing fit in front of the guest room door, behaves in a passive-aggressive manner.
18.    How does the narrator’s life take a turn for the worse on pages 69-72? By calling the girl an “idiot” he has committed a blasphemy against the Child Cult. Serious repercussions must follow. See 77-90.
19.    How do the narrator’s hostile passions blind him to Latifa’s needs on page 72?
20.    How is the narrator a societal freak? 83; he has no children; as a result he’s put “on trail” for the way he sneaks a cigarette in the bathroom stall.
21.    What is the police officer’s attitude toward the narrator? 88
22.    What evidence is there that the little girl (and later several others) will be coached to falsely accuse the narrator? 88, 114
23.    What redemption does the condemned man enjoy that must be denied the narrator and why? 101
24.    Do you sympathize with the narrator as an innocent victim who, with his brilliant insights, finds himself surrounded by a “confederacy of dunces” who are threatened by his vision of the truth or is he a paranoid egotist who can only blame himself for his troubles? Or do you see a little of truth in both positions? Explain your answer. ESSAY TOPIC
25.    What evidence is there that the Cult of the Child is not at all for children but for self-serving adults and that, paradoxically, the Cult of the Child emerges in a world where child abuse and neglect are on the rise? Perhaps the Cult of the Child is a feeble smokescreen to assuage adult guilt for their negligence, abuse, dysfunction, and, ironically, their childishness. ESSAY TOPIC
26.    How does the narrator’s life become entwined with Maren Pataki’s, much to his detriment? 106-114 (complicit with his girlfriend Latifa, late to court, uses the language “mad spell,” takes the word of the child, wants to make a plea for indecent exposure, she’s named “Sudden Death” by other prisoners all too familiar with her incompetence, etc.)
27.    Recount the narrator’s “slippery slope” beginning with his hostility against the major and children, which is established in the novel’s very beginning and how he ends up as Lulu’s wife. 118-123
28.    The celebrity of Desire Johnson and the demonization of the narrator say what about the theme of how perceptions are often more important than reality? How is this even more true in the modern media world? See Chapter 8; 125-140. ESSAY TOPIC
29.    What does the “reality” show Martyr Idol and its terrorist principals “John Wayne’s Conscience” say about how entertainment and the culture of celebrity are drugs that pervert our senses and blind us from substance, logic, and reason? Consider the satire’s influence from American Idol. 134-140. ESSAY TOPIC
30.    What contradiction is implied in Chapter 9’s “pure air” reference? Perhaps the pollution of the mind that afflicts us in the modern world as we labor to have “pure air.”
31.    What moral equivalency fallacy do we see on page 150? Perhaps his “sin” of disdaining children, especially children in The Child Cult Age, is, erroneously, equated with being a child criminal.
32.    What is the symbolic significance of the mock trial headed by juveniles? 151-166
33.    What theater or gimmick does the desperate narrator employ in his feeble attempt to save himself? 172
34.    How does the novel dramatizes the conflict between Christian and Nietzschean morality? ESSAY TOPIC

The Either-Or Fallacy of Michiko Kakutani

Ben Yagoda, author of a book I'm currently enjoying, The Sound on the Page, a defense of writing "style," has recently written a critique of book critic Michiko Kakutani in Slate. He highlights some of her weaknesses as a critic:

"For Kakutani, there is no middle ground: a list of deficiencies, and a bit of plot summary, are all she has for us, and, lacking any other ideas or themes, she (characteristically) exaggerates the novel's faults. In her world, books tend to be masterpieces or rubbish; in the real one, they're almost always somewhere in between."

He goes on to point out that Kakutani is somewhat of a philistine when it comes to language:

"Virtually every word or phrase is a cliché, or at best shopworn and lifeless, and evidence of Kakutani's solid tin ear. (She has justly been called out for her near-obsessive use of "lugubrious" and "limn," words that probably have never been said aloud in the history of English.) That's what can happen to a writer when she merely praises and merely blames. Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do. Here, she tries to energize the prose with lapel-grabbing intensifiers like utterly and wonderfully and superfluous adjectives like savvy and embarrassing, but they just make her look like she's protesting too much."

A convincing writer, Yagoda has made me feel abased, but for the better, for having relied on Kakutani as my literary bible for the last twenty years.

Streisandism: How Very Santa Monica

In the New York Times Book Review, Walter Kirn, reviewing A.M. Homes's new novel This Book Will Save Your Life, writes:

"Homes's respect for the wisdom of the East and her disdain for the vanity of the West are both very Santa Monica, of course. Properly combined with opportunism, in fact, they form Streisandism — the alchemical religion that allows Hollywood's bipolar elite to self-loathe its way into a party mood every wartime Oscar night. For masochistic moneyed meditators, shame is bliss, embarrassment nirvana. Their biggest grins are their most conscience-stricken. That's why they hire satirists as hosts and why the guests look so refreshed after their beatings, while the satirists go home looking glum and neutered. They came to harshly tease but they appeased."