Month: March 2009

a jauntiness about her movements

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

p. 55:

I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes – there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.

A great way to enjoy this sentence is to think of all the worse ways to describe just such a woman.  It wouldn’t be enough to just say that she has natural athletic grace.  It would be pale cliché to call her a swan, a ballerina, a long tall drink of water.  It’s not just that she’s sporty, that she grew up with money, that her cool physicality glows through an evening dress.

She moves “as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.” The magic of this phrase is that it also captures the observer’s social standing, as a man who regards the patrician pastime of golf as a subject of aspiration if not envy.  He knows that the only girls who grow up on golf courses are those who have their cares in the world filtered through a fine inheritance.

best and brightest = delusional and egotistical

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When are people going to realize that the phrase “best and brightest” is only used without irony by those whose egos blind their senses?

David Halberstam used The Best and the Brightest the right way when he wrote about the supposed brain trust in the Kennedy administration that led us into the Vietnam War.  The title has roots going back almost 250 years, when a pseudonymous protestor applied the caustic label to the fools in his government’s ministry.

And yet the phrase remains an irresistible cliche to people who embody the opposite of the literal words.  The CEO of AIG misuses the phrase when he says Treasury must allow over $100 million in bonuses to be paid for the firm’s performance last year.  That’s right, bonuses for year 2008, when they made the decisions that led to a financial disaster that has cost $173 billion dollars of taxpayer money so far.  In explaining this bizarre disconnect between actual performance and justifiable compensation, this delusional buffoon says, “We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.”

Wall Street workers must be especially immune to irony these days.  Judith Warner says it’s a relatively modern malady to call finance workers the best and brightest, though she seems unaware of the irony deficit involved in the labeling.  On the other hand, commentators from all around the political spectrum seem appropriately aware of the mistrust we should have of any collection of pointy-headed resume polishers.

Are Wall Streeters the most delusional about their own talent and worth?  Well, they at least share the top of the list.  A peripatetic career through law, finance and technology has exposed me to enough people, professions and archetypes to form this thoroughly unresearched hierarchy of vocational delusion and egomania:

Seriously delusional: high finance versions of bankers, investors, lawyers, and consultants. This only applies to those who deal in hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars daily.  Something about dealing with massive amounts of money causes these people to equate their self-worth with the heady figures involved.  Two factors encourage the greatest separation from reality: (1) the abstraction of money from actual value-creating activity makes it easy to misplace the truth, and (2) the impact of punishing hours of soulless work requires delusions of grandeur to justify the sacrifice.

Mildly delusional: doctors, engineers, and fiction writers. An odd grouping at first glance turns out to have important shared traits.  All are involved in the creation and expansion of life, doctors in the most literal sense and writers in an equally important artistic sense, with engineers somewhere in between.  High intelligence and passion is required for success, and at the most successful extremes, significant fortunes can be made.  So it is not uncommon in these vocations to believe that only the best and brightest could thrive in their fields.

Surprisingly humble: venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Because the most successful in these fields can become as rich as any in high finance, you might be surprised to find humility in their ranks.  However, although these two classes are often at odds (where one needs money and the other supplies it), they share a deep knowledge that success often arises from repeated failure and fortuitous circumstance.  These people know that the best and the brightest lose repeatedly to the persistent and the lucky.

Pathetically self-loathing: journalists and comedians. The best in these fields are every bit as bright as in any other vocation.  But the necessity of constantly examining the foibles of humanity leads to a misanthropic cynicism, which extends broadly to all throughout their view while saving the greatest contempt for the familiarity in the mirror.

These are obviously broad generalizations subject to many exceptions in every direction.  There’s no financier higher than Warren Buffett, who is famously humble; on the other hand, entrepreneur Larry Ellison is a reputed egomaniac.  And there are people in every category who hold dear to the belief that they exemplify “the best and the brightest” – and to these I say:  You’re right!

urban distaste for the concrete

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p. 54:

‘Anyhow he gives large parties,’ said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete.

Among the class distinctions that haunt Fitzgerald, and therefore this novel, is the divide between the straightforward mien of the Midwest and the slick sophistication of the Eastern cities.  Saying exactly what you mean is looked down upon by the city elite, precisely because it is a sign of naivete.  They’d like to think that those with fast minds and agile imaginations prefer to deal in subtleties, inferences and innuendo.  By their logic, only a simpleton prefers the simple truth.

But beneath the distaste for truth is the fear that an honest opinion is unpopular, or that plain words would reveal their own ignorance.  For they were all newcomers to the city once, and they escaped the mark of the rube by hiding in obfuscations, hedging their way through false sophistication.  Urbanity is just a mask to hide your true face.

A rarity here, possibly unintentional, is the wordplay in “an urban distaste for the concrete.” Cities are made from concrete, couldn’t be built without it – just as society couldn’t survive without the hard facts, however unfashionable they may be.

All that said, the generalization that Jordan proceeds into is a classic:  ‘And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.’

losers, killers, drugs, cars

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What does it mean to say that TV lost to computers, as Paul Graham suggests?  Graham tries to explain why the Internet “won” in the battle of media convergence, but he begs the question of whether media “convergence” was a valid proposition in the first place, or what it was even supposed to mean.

Take a close look at any claim that one kind of media “lost to” or “killed” another.  Were they ever really in competition?  Sure, every kind of experience is a competitor for our limited time, but I’d call this “attention competition” rather than “replacement competition.”

I might choose to watch basketball rather than baseball in the limited time I watch sports, but basketball didn’t kill baseball:  although basketball had a later start and has grown more in recent decades, both sports businesses are larger than they have ever been before.  Things that compete for my attention do not kill each other, they just give me more choices.

In contrast, I use a safety razor to shave my face.  A safety razor is better than its predecessor, the straight razor, in every way – shaving is faster, cleaner, closer, easier, safer – except possibly price, which I am happy to pay for those benefits.  I am not the only person to make this choice, by and large the entire shaving market has.  Although some people stick to the straight razor for reasons of fashion, self-esteem, or violent secondary uses, the straight razor has been replaced by the safety razor to such a large extent that you can say the latter killed the former.  Losers and killers in the market can only exist among things that accomplish the same function.

A lot of media is entertainment, and “entertainment” is not a function, it’s a category.  Historically, there has been a huge amount of attention competition within the entertainment category, but much of this competition has only given us more choices in an expanding market for leisure.  Novels did not replace plays, radio did not replace books, movies did not replace radio, TV did not replace movies.  Most if not all of those businesses are larger in absolute terms than they’ve ever been, even though many are smaller in audience share.

On the other hand, vinyl albums nearly got replaced by 8-tracks and then cassette tapes, then all of these lost to CDs, and now CDs are losing to music downloads and streaming on computing devices.  All of those formats simply fulfill the function of delivering music, so here you really can say that a new format killed an old format, and various businesses were winners and losers along the way.

If you’re thinking that it’s not so simple, you’re right.  Let’s go back and examine the entertainment category again.  TV may not have completely replaced radio, but a certain kind of radio show no longer exists in any noticeable volume:  the radio drama, of the type that the Shadow knows.  Were these replaced by TV shows?  Probably.  And for that matter, books and their predecessor scrolls and tablets did replace cave drawings.  So how can you really tell when you have competitors for attention within a category, rather than replacement competitors in a race to be the best format for the same function?

I think one key is to ask whether the format gives rise to a distinct art form.  I don’t mean to make lofty judgments about art, but more mundane observations about senses and brain responses.  (I could say “neurosensory experience” rather than “art,” but that would be replacing pretension with didacticism.)  The novel engages the brain in conveying a narrative in a way that the brain is not engaged in hearing or watching essentially the same story.  Plays have a sensory experience in a way that is not captured in TV or movies.  But radio dramas never really attempted to deliver any experience that wasn’t the same experience done better by a TV drama, so when people began enjoying TV shows, that did kill radio shows.  There is arguably no distinct form of art tied to radio – music obviously can be delivered well in many formats – so it’s likely that radio will actually be killed by superior forms of distribution for audio content.

So does TV have a distinct art form?  Well, over the last few decades we have seen the rise of ever longer dramas that tell a story with character depth that have been quite distinct to TV (especially as opposed to movies or plays).  From Hill Street Blues to The Sopranos, viewers became accustomed to following character development and story lines over years rather than one-hour episodes.  This “long form passive story viewing” is distinct to TV – and even though you can watch these same TV shows on your computer, that doesn’t mean that the Internet ”’killed”’ TV.  It matters whether we are talking about the art form of TV, or the delivery vehicle of TV.

See, this my objection to Graham’s argument.  He says that “Facebook killed TV,” meaning that the social applications made possible by the interactivity of the Internet led to the downfall of TV.  But this mixes and matches the format and the substance; it is an inapt attempt to make a larger artistic and social commentary.  Social applications are an attention competitor for the long form passive story viewing that is on TV today, but neither will kill the other.  To say that TV loses to the computer is only saying that the screen in your house on which you watch TV shows will also be the screen that you use for Facebook – it’s a somewhat interesting comment, but not more interesting than cassettes beating 8-tracks.

My view here is complex and probably not stated very well, so I’ve come up with a simple question to ask when considering the losers and killers that others see:  Are we talking about drugs or cars?

Popular recreational drugs have distinct effects on the brain, and all are competitors for the attention of recreational drug users.  Some people prefer particular drugs, but in the overall drug market, meth doesn’t kill heroin doesn’t kill cocaine doesn’t kill weed – all of these have their audiences because each elicits a distinct effect on the brain.  (For some reason, only heroin seems to be a popular point of comparison for technology in general, Internet addiction, or porn on the Net.  I think comparisons should be more exact:  TV is heroin, social networking is coke, Internet porn is meth, and so on . . . but I don’t really have the time or social position to research this properly.)

Before safety razors and CDs, cars are the prototypical replacement choice – the advent of cars killed the horse-and-buggy, literally a superior delivery vehicle.  If it’s not this kind of outright replacement, then there shouldn’t be talk of losers and killers.

just a man

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p. 53:

He’s just a man named Gatsby.

Jordan tells this untruth when Nick, fresh off the surprise of an unexpected introduction, demands to know who this mysterious host is.  Is Jordan lying?  She’s known Gatsby long enough and well enough that she knows “just a man” is an inadequate description.  Likely she doesn’t have anything to add to the fevered speculation that winds through his nightly bacchanalia, and she’d rather Nick want to talk about something else.

More about Gatsby’s extraordinary smile carries over to this page:  “It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”  I’m telling you, that’s not a natural smile, that smile has to be practiced with a focus on effect rather than on feeling.

This page has almost that all Fitzgerald ever gives us in terms of a physical description of Gatsby, “an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty.”  We don’t really know how tall he is, what color his eyes are, the shape of his nose or lips.  It’s an intentional cypher on which you can write your own imaginings.  And yet, the impression of Gatsby is enduring because of the description of his effect on those around him.