Robert, Andreas and déjà vu

 

On my way back from Canada, flying far above the endless acres of wilderness, something drew me to the film Train Dreams on the in-flight entertainment. A good choice, I think. It reminded me of the life my grandparents must have had when they emigrated to Canada in the 1930s and built up what my cousin referred to as a homestead.

But it also, strangely, reminded me somehow of home in Germany and how that all came about. Meeting my husband in an Austrian mountain hut. Gradually, it dawned on me. Train Dreams is the American cousin of A Whole Life (Ein ganzes Leben) by Robert Seethaler. 

Both are the story of one simple man’s life, with identical plot points (orphan beginnings, dangerous outdoor work, brief happiness with wife and child until disaster strikes, coming to terms - or not - with old age and the world’s progress). The overall themes of the beauty and dignity of solitude, the interaction of man and landscape are common to both. The time and feel of the settings are similar, even though the actual places are far apart.

Although Seethaler’s work came first for me (the book was published in 2015, the film followed in 2023) Denis Johnson’s novella first appeared in 2002 and was republished in a different form in 2011. So if anyone can be accused of copy-catting, it’s Seethaler and not Johnson. 

But I’m prepared to give Seethaler the benefit of the doubt. We got this frequently when I worked at the ad agency. Similar ideas would pop up all the time. Call it spirit of the age or maybe synchronicity - coincidences that seem menaingful but with no apparent causal connection. 

Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest are all the same story. And, in the same way that 19th century readers had an appetite for extra-marital affairs and their consequences, perhaps 21st century readers and viewers need stories about the simple life, about our place in nature and the satisfaction of solitude. 

To me, it’s less copy-catting and more about tuning in to our collective humanity and what’s missing from our lives.

Proof of the pudding?

 

On the right side of my blog, you’ll see a couple of badges. Not unusual, as there are badges and certificates on everything these days - so many, that I expect people don’t notice them any more. 

If you press on the first of my badges, the “Contributing Thought Leader for BlogNotions” one, you’ll soon discover it’s a dead link that goes precisely nowhere. I’ve left it there as a bit of a joke. I was an official “Thought Leader” once, which I find quite preposterous. It’s kept on in the same vein as I might keep my battered British Airways gold member luggage tag on a tatty rucksack.

The second one is a bit more serious - and genuine. No “thought-leader-washing” going on here. It’s my Society of Authors members’ badge. 

And the Society of Authors have recently introduced a new scheme - and a logo/badge - to give authors support in the rising tide of AI slop.

The “Human Authored” scheme was launched in the UK this week, following the example of the US Authors Guild. Authors can register their works, and use the logo on the book itself or in publicity material. The aim is to promote all those human-author qualities - empathy, imagination, craft, care, experience and so on, giving potential readers a quality reassurance that they’re not buying AI slop.

The authors may have used AI tools to assist with writing - from spellchecks to researching and brainstorming - but not to write the book via prompts.

I’ve signed up for it, although I feel a little sad that it’s come to this. 

And, I’m not 100% convinced by the name “Human Authored”. An author is an originator and “to author” is to originate a book, poem, play, whatever it is. Can non-humans “author”? As opposed to write, or generate?

Do we need an accreditation for our humanity? Surely, to mix metaphors in an unauthorly manner, the proof of the pudding is in the reading?

How long before we hear the slightly grotesque term “human-washing”?

Play up! play up! and play the game!

 

Although no-one much reads my blog apart from a few bots, I’m eternally grateful to my younger self (OK, middle-aged, let’s face facts) for starting it up. I’ve just finished reading C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score - review further down - and can see that I’ve been Ranting about Ratings since December 2013. 

Measurement has been a frequent theme in this blog since then - here and here for example. 

And so, to The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Here’s what I thought:

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I first came across C. Thi Nguyen’s work a couple of years back when I read his paper on “Value Capture”. This was about the tendency in today’s world to obsess about rankings and ratings, about performance and optimisation, better and best in all areas of life. This resonated with me - the idea and danger of metrics (“indicators” from an external source) becoming goals becoming personal internal values to live by.

This book expands this line of thought - and a very good one it is, too. There is so much evidence today of people losing sight of what really matters and spending energy instead on chasing easily-measured vampiric metrics. The book is full of insight - on the distinction between goal and purpose, the psychology of games in the broadest sense, the idea of outsourcing values to an istitutional metric. And the distinction between what’s easy to measure and what really matters. 

In describing metrics, Nguyen introduces “The Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy: Rules, Scale, Parts and Control.” In work situations, we’re constantly under pressure from these four to be transparent, to be clear, to KISS. But are transparency and clarity always a good thing? Nguyen shows how transparency can undermine expertise when experts feel demand to explain and justify themselves to non-experts. We cannot understand everything, so sometimes we need to put trust in the specialists. 

“Sometimes vague language is better because it expresses the truth that things are unclear or unsettled.” 

However, although there’s so much good stuff in this book, the author is an unapologetic games enthusiast. His boisterous ebullience starts charmingly enough with anecdotes about fly-fishing, yo-yos, rock-climbing and all manner of “weird sh*t” in the way of board and online games. But after a while this started to grate and even alienate me. Everything is “glorious” or “delicious."

I have never played D&D. At university there was a group who were into that but I wanted nothing to do with it - I was too busy living my life. I do have games I enjoy, and hobbies and pastimes that I’m quite wrapped in. But I know that others aren’t fascinated by my trumpet-playing or writing children’s adventures. I’ve never understood the “thrill" of watching others playing video games, or got into esports - and I loathe being bullied by family and friends into playing games that I really don’t fancy. 

Overall, there are some brilliant ideas here, but the book is repetitive and needs editing. I found it too black and white regarding the grey, life-sucking institutionalised metrics vs. the delightful, playful, individual world of games.

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I gave the book 4 stars on amazon and 3 on GoodReads (just to be perverse). As I said back then, in 2013, in remarkably few words:

I have written reviews on amazon for years, for books mostly, and I still feel uneasy about giving out stars. Quite frankly, I'd much rather just write a review of the book. But the trend is going such that the stars and ratings and averages are becoming far more important than what people actually think or feel.

It's the same in marketing. There is a growing tendency for KPIs to become goals or objectives in themselves. It becomes more important to achieve a certain score on some numerical indicator than to work out what we want to do with our brand. 

Potemkin Perfection

 

I don’t often read recently-published novels. Probably due to my weird penchant for living in the past, and I often think the old stuff is going to be more enduring. But now and then I have a go at something new, and, in the case of Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, I was pleasantly surprised.

Here’s what I made of this tale of two digital nomads set in the first two decades of the 21st century:

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This is a brilliantly observed novel, describing in detail the life on- and offline of a young couple, from the early 2000s to 2019. I say “the life” in singular, as Anna and Tom, digital creatives, are written mainly as one entity. The pair are originally from Italy, but find their way to buzzy Berlin at the time of the digital boom and the rise of social media.

Reading the first few pages, you wonder if you’ve stumbled into a talking IKEA catalogue or similar. The style is unemotional, descriptive, rather flat. This is curious initially, but soon mesmerising as you drift into a curated, algorithmically determined world where the public persona rules supreme and reality is “stuffed away into huge, clear storage boxes.”

Of the couple, the author writes: “Anna and Tom had grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating”. Their Instagram world of curated ephemera includes vintage clothes, cupcakes, crystalline coastlines, airy apartments, flowers and book covers. And “they would find themselves utterly mesmerised by the apartment, kale salad or kitten of someone living two blocks or two continents away. They would get worked up about silly fights between strangers.”

Offline, Anna and Tom live in a similar bubble, together with kindred ex-pat creatives. They frequent trendy clubs, Instagrammable restaurants and edgy art exhibitions. This bubble is like a 21st century global digital version of a Potemkin village - curiously flat and lacking in substance.

Gradually, the pair recognise a lack of purpose or fulfillment and attempt to rectify this via volunteer work in a refugee camp. But their digital creative skills cannot be usefully deployed here.

As the years pass, the couple sense the pain of a generational change and leave Berlin, returning to Southern Europe. Although the ending hints at a new stability, one cannot ignore the date - 2019. My mind continued to tick over when I’d finished the book, wondering what happened to Anna & Tom (and their ilk) in the pandemic.

Insightful, thought-provoking, well-written and translated, “Perfection” evokes the spirit of the early 21st century in Europe (almost) perfectly.

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And even though I’m a little older than the protagonists, I had several ouch-been-there-done-that-moments.

Needless to say. I read Perfection on my Kindle, as is my wont these days. I still hanker after real books, to be honest, yet this was the perfect book to read on Kindle, which enhances that flat, Potemkin village feeling. 

Just as I’d finished the book, though, I saw a wonderful sight just down the road which could just be the start of the way back to real books. It’s kind of the opposite of a Potemkin village - an inside-out bookshop - Bruchköbel’s very own bricks and mortar brand.

Our relocated local bookshop, the Rathaus Buchhandlung, designed by the Artbau Gruppe. Congratulations to all concerned, and much success with the new shop. 

 

BREXILE: Lost Content

 

A spot of Brexile nostalgia - one of the first things to make a new home in Germany was The Shell Nature Book, published in 1964. Fifty years later, in 2014, I wrote about how this early example of “branded content” (yeurgh!) stirred my childhood imagination. 

My imagination (slightly addled) continues to be stirred.

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LOST CONTENT

 

The usual portal to the landscapes of childhood, those blue-remembered hills, is a photograph album. Something with tassels and stiff dark pages, perhaps. Or from a later era: once-sticky backing sheets that now release fading squares like autumn leaves.

 

But not for me. Those happy highways are captured only in slides, packed in their yellow and white boxes, dated with Dymo tape and relegated to the category of one-day-we’ll-sort-those-out.

 

No, my vehicle to the vistas of days gone by belongs to the collective, not the personal. A book, one that I’m sure many 1960s families possessed. But with the boundless and borderless imagination of a child, I made it my own. The process of growing up involves the setting of more and more boundaries. What is real. What is imagined. What is present experience. What we can see. What we can’t. As a child, these merge into one, as they did each time I opened that book. I made it an interactive medium before the notion was ever dreamed of.

 

My copy of The Shell Nature Book was published in 1964. Bought, I expect, by my parents on their return from the barren rocks of Aden. Were they driven by underlying guilt? Their two small offspring had been deprived of the British countryside for most of their lives. That we had paddled daily in a warm sea and conversed with camels did little, perhaps, to mitigate this imagined deficit.

 

The book has seen better days. Although, like a much-loved toy, I still see it as I did then. The cover picture, with its unlikely juxtapositions of butterflies and bats, birds and beetles, night and day, lies under cellophane courtesy of my mother. As a primary school teacher, she knew the secrets of protection from eager clumsy thumbs and sherbet-licked fingers. Inside, the pages are still shiny as mother-of-pearl, faintly redolent of the print room.

 

I still wonder that “branded content” – for this is the 21^st century term for such publications – can be of such high and utterly lasting quality. Shell’s reputation these days has so much of the negative baggage associated with the fossil fuel industry that the words “Shell” and “nature” sit uneasily together. But the list of contributing painters (not illustrators) reads like a Who’s Who of mid-20^th century British talent. S.R.Badmin, Edith and Rowland Hilder, John Leigh-Pemberton … In between war service – often as not for the RAF – their work was commissioned by the Ministry of Information, by London Transport, by Ladybird Books.

 

These paintings captivated me, and I would lose myself in their Arcadian landscapes. The Flowers of the Countryside section, arranged by month, features a detailed foreground by Edith Hilder against a backdrop stretching into infinity, by her husband. In June, a rustic wooden pail brims with dog roses, foxgloves and wild irises, buzzing with summer, while the background of ivy-clad ruins – and a blue-remembered hill – fades mysteriously under a high sun.

 

S.R.Badmin’s painting of Trees and Shrubs for May beckoned me in, from the balcony, overhung with Horse Chestnut candles, down, down, under caterpillar-green beech leaves and wild cherry blossom, to the lake, where a boat waits ready to row to the island. John Leigh-Pemberton’s Life on the Downs scared me a little with its soft eeriness – sinister fairies had surely not long departed the ring of mushrooms nestling under that foreboding, rainbow-streaked sky.

Many of these paintings merged into real places plucked from my 1960s Home Counties world. The Hilders’ May with its backdrop of oast houses and rolling hills mirrored the view from my paternal grandparents’ Kent garden. Badmin’s July, all clipped hedges and lawns, seemed to echo with the clipped accents of the Air Force Staff College. And the Rowland Hilder and Maurice Wilson sun- to moonlight scene with young badgers frisking oblivious to the stateliness of the white mansion in the background was surely a corner of Windsor Great Park.

 

Amid these scenes of moor and meadow, cornfields and copses, like the evil godmother at the christening, lurked a stranger section to the book. Entitled Fossils, Insects and Reptiles, the paintings are by Tristram Hillier, who I have since learned was a British Surrealist, influenced by de Chirico and Max Ernst as well as Paul Nash, with whom he worked. And here they were, the bits that didn’t fit in the golden land of the other paintings. Creepy-crawlies, lower forms of life. Parts discarded by death. Or that not yet alive. Shells. Moths. Birds’ eggs. Skulls.

 

Hillier’s painting entitled Fossils epitomises this curious world that skulks below the surface of the sunlit British countryside. A quartet of books sits on a desk, two of these perched on a Pandora-esque box. Proper learned books, with stiff spines, muted cloth covers and old gold lettering: Elements of Geology, Vol II. And growing out of the volumes, like petrified fungi, are the fossils. Corals the shade of ancient teeth, a sea-urchin resembling a decaying bun – and the “ites”, iron-grey relics from way beyond the Iron Age. Belemnites, Pyrites, Ammonites.

 

One ammonite sits at the centre of the display, a perfect specimen, although all ammonites are perfect in their neatness, coiling for eternity to the centre. They are described in terms of extinct weights and measures – “vary from penny size to giants two feet across.” 

 

Before leaving this page, the eye is drawn to the left of the desk. A used match lies there, carelessly placed but carefully painted. Did Hillier light a pipe – perhaps the one that appears in his otherworldly study of moths three pages later – before he embarked on his work? Was this a hint towards the carboniferous era? Or simply a surreal gesture?

 

In these days of Google Earth, we can travel to any landscape on the globe in a matter of seconds. We never have to visit the same scene twice. Yet I still have a yearning for these scenes of my childhood, for they have not been fossilised. Viewing them today, memories and experience combine with my immediate perception, to create something of wonder anew.      

I’m the bad guy

 

Last week, I was in a local school, doing an author visit. Over the years, I’ve developed this into a kind of show. You don’t want listen to me droning on, I say to the class, and instead recruit a few volunteers to act out scenes from the book. There are props - a ruby-encrusted cane, a “bomb” in a biscuit tin - and a few costume bits and pieces such as tiger ears. And, of course, the villain get-up of eye-patch and stick-on moustache. 

I get the feeling I have more volunteers for the mad dictator and his bodyguard, and the evil drummed-out-of-the-RAF ex-officer Featherstonehaugh than for the young heroes of the story. And maybe it’s no wonder, as - hand-on-heart - I have a lot more fun writing the bad guys. I’m sure that’s true for a lot of writers - just look at James Bond to Batman to Harry Potter.

This article for Contagious, by Tom Beckman of Weber Shandwick, references another article from Wired. Both note the trend to villainy in popular culture - very clear in the world of films (Wicked, Joker: Folie a Deux, Deadpool and Wolverine ...) and showing up on the fashion catwalk too. The author then moves to music and I’m afraid my attention started to wander at the mention of Charli XCX and “brat style.” I began to wonder whether Tom had been given some kind of trend-cliche bingo card at that point. Still, there does seem to be something in the air as far as being on the wrong side of the tracks goes ...

Brands are also having a go at showing their bad side. It must be a relief after all that po-faced, goodie-goodie stuff to do something like Nike did for the Paris Olympics - no it’s NOT about “taking part”!!!

And why not? Villains have more fun, as the school visit demonstrated. If your brand isn’t in some deadly serious, responsible category, maybe it’s more entertaining and memorable to try for world domination with a bit of tongue-in-cheek that holier-than-thou saving the planet.

And talking of that, here’s Javier Bardem (somehow inspired by Iggy Pop?) for Uber Eats. Is your brand good at being bad?

 

BILLY and the circular book club

 

Pre-owned is growing like nobody’s business. Second-hand clothing, for example, was worth $141 bn in 2021 and will likely reach $230 bn this year, with an estimate of hitting $350 bn by 2028. 

IKEA, whose 20th century war-cry in the UK was “Chuck out your Chintz” is now a paragon of sustainable thinking and doing - and strives to be a circular company by 2030. Joining the IKEA Buy-Back Service is a peer-to-peer marketplace, IKEA Preowned. It’s starting off in Madrid, but aims to roll out globally in the next few months. This is a good example of how AI is helping make good ideas a reality. 

And what better way to celebrate your new-old BILLY bookcase than to fill it with a few new-old books? But don’t sleepwalk your automatic pilot to Amazon. There’s a new way now which benefits both indie bookshops and authors. It’s called Bookloop and it has been set up by Bookshop.org partnering with the Society of Authors and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. This means that a % of royalties will go to authors - something that Amazon wouldn’t dream of doing.

All aboard the literary carousel and off we go!

I wonder if you’ll find this one there?

Seek - and WHAT will you find?

 

Something has flickered at the edge of my attention for the last few weeks when I’ve been on Amazon. Up to today, my brain had noted “oh, there’s what looks like an AI summary of reviews” and I hadn’t bothered to read further.

But today I had a look. The feature is headed “customers say” and is “AI-generated from the text of customer reviews.” I started with a music stand I’d bought a couple of years back for £14.99. Here’s what the AI rehashed from thousands of reviews:

Customers say

Customers appreciate the value, ease of folding, and ease of assembly of the product. They mention it works well, is easy to put up, and adjust for all heights. Customers also like its lightweight design. However, some customers have mixed opinions on its sturdiness.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

My pernickety side would probably take issue with some of this, but it’s useful enough for a relatively low-price, functional purchase.

But how would the AI fare with something more literary? Amazon did start out in books after all, whatever their plans for world domination.

I took a book I read last year which, to fit the topic, features a robot as the main protagonist: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro:

Customers say

Customers find the prose wonderful, flawless, and incredibly readable. They also find the story interesting and engaging. Opinions are mixed on the character development, with some finding them well-drawn and unforgettable, while others say they're thin and not satisfactorily described. Reviews are mixed also on the boring plot. Occupants have mixed feelings about the emotional content, with those who find it sad and heartbreaking, while those who say it's unconvincing.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews 

Who are those “occupants”? Something to do with inter-planetary craft? This bland and badly-composed summary would hardly help me in deciding this was a book I’d love - or hate.

For contrast, my review of the novel is here. I even get an IKEA reference in!

Now, I know Amazon will be working to iron out bugs, and I may well eat my words when I look back in a couple of years to re-read this. But, to me, it’s yet more evidence of the tendency to lump ratings and reviews together, to go for the lowest common denominator, to smoothify and blandify everything, to dock the long tail and snip off all that’s individual, quirky, odd-but-fascinating, the bits that don’t fit ...

And this is what’s happening in the area of Search. I listened in to a Gartner seminar yesterday on the Future of Search. After some initial and well-publicised hiccoughs, Google now provide AI overviews, (along with a resource carousel of links) to typical search queries. The feature is available in the US and some other markets. The example shown by Gartner was a simple “electric vs gas dryer”:

   

Helpful enough, I guess - and Gartner gave plenty of marketing tips to make sure your brand ends up in the overview or the carousel. 

The functional advantages of electric and gas dryers are one thing, though. Whether to read Klara and the Sun or Brave New World next is quite another - as is any question or decision that involves human intellect, taste, culture, emotion, past experience, hopes, dreams and anything else full of nuance and impossible to measure. 

I’m all for AI providing information that could be helpful when choosing what to buy.  I look forward to Google (and others) rolling out this kind of overview as an option. But, in the race to be first, I hope they don’t cut down the inspire and discover side of search in favour of definitive answers. 

Cory Doctorow’s vision of the AI Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, and the metaphor of feeding cows a slurry made from the diseased brains of other cows is grim, but not entirely implausible. 

Opening up to possibility

 

This 10,000 word essay may be the best thing I’ve read this year related to my work. Here’s my review:

I can thoroughly recommend this essay on the nature of the two brain hemispheres - what they do and what they’re like. Why we need both and why as a society we’re becoming left-dominated, with less appreciation of tone, irony, metaphor and humour.

Forget the simplistic, convenient explanation that “the left brain is rational and the right brain is emotional” - this isn’t the point. In McGilchrist’s own words, “one way of looking at the difference would be to say that while the left hemisphere’s raison d’etre is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere’s is to open them up into possibility.”

Wise, erudite and indispensible.

Next step - investigate the website . I see that the excellent Orlando Wood is featured. 

Paradessence

 

I’ve got a list of books that isn’t so much To Be Read as At-Some-Point-In-My-Life-This-Looked-Terribly-Interesting-And-I’ll-Make-A-Note-Of-It-And-Read-It-One-Day. Many of these never get read and drift to the oblivion of the depths of the list. The Savage Girl by Alex Shakar is one that I rescued just before it floated off into obscurity. I’d noted it about ten years ago, when the book was already ten years old.

Here’s the review I published. I wasn’t too savage, but it wasn’t an easy book to read:

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The Savage Girl

 

Without giving away too much, the subject of cryogenics features in “The Savage Girl”, and I felt rather as if I’d defrosted something frozen in time, or opened a time capsule as I read this novel. It was written at the turn of the 21st century, certainly pre-social media and Web 2.0 which makes it oddly quaint in places. 

 

The novel is a satire on marketing, trend-forecasting and the consumer society. Not the sort of book I normally read for leisure, but I’ve worked in advertising and marketing more years than I care to mention, so thought I’d give it a go.

 

I found the novel quite difficult to get into. Because of its age, a lot of what may have seemed futuristic at the time of writing seems a bit - so what, or what the? - today. One character sits looking at an array of giant computer screens, pulling out patterns. Well, today we have ChatGPT and tomorrow who knows? The characters are by-and-large grotesques - not human enough for you to care about any of them, yet not outrageous enough to be amusing. Sometimes, it all seemed a bit pretentious and just too clever for its own good.

 

Having said that, there were some excellent ideas along the way. The story forsees lots of stuff going on today - the metaverse and virtualism, shifting truths and echo chamber bubbles. I did cringe at some of the passages evoking those ghastly bullsh*tty brainstormings and insight sessions that I’ve participated in. And the concept of “Paradessence” - paradoxical essence or “two opposing desires that a product satisfies simultaneously” (such as stimulation and relaxation) - is spot on. “The job of a marketer is to cultivate this schismatic core, this broken soul, at the center of every product.”

 

The question of whether we are heading for the “Light Age” - the optimistic view - or the “Lite Age” was also interesting once I finally got the distinction.

 

All-in-all, thought-provoking in places, but wish I’d read this novel when it (and I) were 20 years younger.  

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There’s a long lecture by one of the obnoxious characters in the book, which examines Ernest Dichter’s The Strategy of Desire, Soviet propaganda and American marketing, and the development of irony and “now” - post-irony. All interesting ideas, which are commented on in this review and interview with the author. 

The “Paradessence” idea is one I’ve banged on about frequently in this blog - and I liked the examples in the book:

Coffee - stimulation and relaxation

Air travel - sanistised adventure, exoticism and familiarity

Ice cream - eroticism and innocence

And while one character refers to this as “a schismatic core/broken soul”, his less cynical colleague expresses it as the “magic” - the sneakers that enable you not just to grip the earth and stay grounded, but to soar into the air and your dreams, too.

I wonder how much money has been made over the years from touting the paradox-resolution brand essence idea around, dressed up with a clever-clogs name and a fancy model?  

News of the World

Back in the last decade, it was social media - Facebook, Mumsnet, various writing forums - that were my trap for getting tangled up in when I should have been doing something better. These days, I’m more likely to end up scrolling through endless articles and related comments on regular news sites.

It’s easier to justify because:

1. I’m paying a subscription

2. It’s a good thing to be informed about what’s going on in the world, surely?

Yet these news sites often leave me with that nasty bingey mental junk food feeling that I used to get from Facebook:

    - that wasn’t paricularly nutritious or satisfying

    - and I couldn’t stop: the “enough is enough” button was having a day off

I’ve been reading How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds, from The School of Life, which analyses this phenomenon and offers a few curative suggestions. 

The click-baity title I could have done without - another example of the mismatch I wrote about here. That aside, the book shows how the modern media preys on the less desirable aspects of human nature - passivity, celebrity, nastiness and distraction, which encompasses all sorts of stuff like helplessness, outrage, mawkishness, schadenfreude and sanctimoniousness.

It’s a relief to know that my own reaction to the modern media diet is not unusual.

On to the suggested cures. There are 9 of these, of which two particularly appealed to me:

Become an aristocrat (of the spirit)

This is inspired in part by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly who declared that “the most beautiful destiny: to have genius and be obscure.”

The book says of Aristocrats of the Spirit: they are set apart not by haughty contempt but by a melancholic certainty that the disputes of the populace will be chaotic, brutal, partisan, deeply illogical and unfair because this is the normal, unfortunate lot of the human animal.

And that obscurity leads to the idea:

Never Be Famous

I’ll admit it: 10 years ago I loved the idea of collecting clicks and likes, for blog posts to go viral, for my books to be picked up by a top publisher and top director and all the rest. But the idea of that now is quite hideous. I like retreating back into obscurity, which is my “safe place”.

In a world without fame, certain books, sofas, cheeses or lamps will still be better than others, certain ideas will still be more valuable, certain people will still have hearts that are kinder and more sensitive, but none of these would have to be identified by the destructive and manic spotlight of the media.

Having said that, of course, this is one area (or many) where brands are not like people.

Good Pop Bad Pop Good Book

 

I’m back in the UK, in the old house, busying myself with sifting through junk. Well, not really junk, rather my past, which makes the task simultaneously more fascinating and more tricky.

I’m being accompanied by Jarvis Cocker. Not musically, but in a literary sense. I’m part way through Good Pop Bad Pop which is described as “An Inventory”. Another way that Jarvis puts it is “self excavation” - a sort of archeology of the self via artefacts rediscovered in the loft.

In Chapter 9 of the book, those rediscovered artefacts are FMCG brands, starting with a sliver of soap, worn down to the “distinctive brand asset” and not much more:

Jarvis kept this soapy remnant because the Imperial Leather design changed. Other examples he cites are Marmite, which used to have a metal lid and Rose’s Lime Juice, which had a glass bottle with tiny limes in relief. All of these packs and designs were tied up with memories.

And while I’m not a famous musician, so my Castrol and Rover tins will never end up in an art gallery or hard-backed book, I’ve got a few branded memories of my own.

Most people of my age are nostalgic for the crinkly orange cellophane of the old Lucozade bottle. And what about the Strepsils tin? The empty tin was repurposed by resourceful children for all sorts of things - I kept dried shredded sunflower leaves in one - maybe it’s best not to ask.

Jarvis Cocker’s analysis of why he would have kept a useless scrap of soap is about the aspect of his personality that resists change. He concludes (in one of my favourite passages of the book so far):

I am “over” my problem with change. I embrace change. (Maybe “embrace” is too strong a word: more like “I awkwardly shake hands with change.”) I can move on.

I’ll awkwardly shake hands to that. 

Talkin’ ‘bout my generativity

 

Towards the end of the last millennium, at a time when today’s mighty oaks were saplings and I was navigating the first stage of adulthood amid a neon excess of cocktails and heartache, I read The Man who planted trees by Jean Giono. This short story - may the correct term is parable - had been originally published in 1954 and enjoyed a renaissance in the 1980s. The tale starts in 1913, when the young narrator meets a 55-year-old shepherd, Elzéard Bouffier, who has taken it on himself to plant acorns in the Provence countryside over the last three years. 

Even if you haven’t read it, you can probably see where the story is going, and it does, most charmingly, accompanied by beautiful woodcuts. Two World Wars cannot destroy the consequence of one man’s simple act, regenerating a whole community and landscape.

Elzéard Bouffier and his story is the perfect example of generativity, a concept I’ve touched on here and here. Generativity - a concern for establishing and guiding the next generation - is the main focus of the 7th Stage of Life in the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development. Interestingly, Erikson extended his stages from the Shakespearean “7 Ages of Man” in that he envisaged eight in total. Maybe this has something to do with increasing life expectancy - more of that later.

The 7th Stage of Life, or second stage of adulthood, typically occurs at what we’d call middle age - 40-64 approximately. Interestingly, once Erikson passed this age (he lived to 91) he reviewed his theory and admitted that generativity continues to play a major role beyond retirement age, too. Even more interestingly, his wife and collaborator Joan later added a 9th Stage of Life to the theory. She was 93 at the time.

Generativity, in its human/social meaning, has a lot of nuances as an idea. There’s a strong sense of altruism, but the “self” is not absent from the concept. It encompasses an inner desire for immortality in the form of leaving something of value as a legacy, making one’s life count for something. And there’s a strong component of responsibility to others, both now and in the future.

The language of generativity has been much used in sustainability communications. “For future generations” has become a cliche, usually accompanied by stock photos of carefree cute children running through sun-kissed meadows or fields of wheat. But maybe there’s an opportunity for companies and brands to use the generativity of their (ageing) co-workers to positive effect beyond tired sustainability tropes. 

The idea of “purpose” has been criticised due to its association with short-term activism and “cause of the moment”. It should be less about “high(er) and mighty” and more about the long-term. Passing on values, skills and knowledge. Mentoring within the company. Keeping the culture alive. Creating something new taking into account both what the brand and company does well and new human needs arising from our changing world.

The opposite pole to generativity is stagnation - and that’s not healthy for brands or people. 

Slave to the algorithm

 

I was a latecomer to Wordle, and snuck in just before the puzzle was taken on by The New York Times. It has kept me amused for a couple of weeks, even if I’ve been kicking myself for breaking my winning streak due to US English spelling (not-twigging-of) a little while ago.

Yesterday, though, I was completely bemused. I put in a five letter word, nothing obscure, and was told that this word was not on Wordle’s list. 

The word in question: “slave.” I genuinely wondered if this was a hiccough in the software, so tried on another device. Same result. Intrigued, I searched for an explanation and found news articles to the effect that there are various words that the new owners of Wordle don’t allow - the word for a female dog, for example, or “words associated with racism” such as “slave”. 

There were, no doubt, words for the idea of “slave” long before the English language evolved. When I think of the word, yes, the Atlantic slave trade comes to mind, but I also have associations with earlier history, Roman times, and the present day - I’ve often been asked to sign documents assuring potential project partners that my little one-woman show does not involve slavery in any part of the value chain.

Then there are the more abstract uses of the word - as in that glorious 1980s anthem by Grace Jones. Metaphorical uses, figures of speech, analogies, word-plays. It’s a word with many uses, meanings, nuanaces, contexts.

I’m a writer, and I’ve commented before about the homogenisation of language, as well as the cultural poverty (am I allowed to say poverty?) society is walking into with predictive text and suggested words and phrases. It’s bad enough when suggestions come as to which words you might like to use, but when words themselves disappear from lists and dictionaries? I know language changes all the time, but I am not talking about weird obscure historical words that have had no application for the last five hundred years here.

It’s just a game. OK, it is. But if it’s a game where I have to question every five-letter word and wonder whether it could offend someone, effectively censoring my own vocabularly, then I think I’d rather go back to the Internot and find my ancient Scrabble board game where I can use whatever words I see fit.