The Mystery of Murakami

[ed. Something I've wondered about, too. Having read half a dozen Murakami books over the years including what are widely considered to be his masterpieces: 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, the plotting is always familiar, the sentences are indeed sometimes awful, and the story-line inevitably peters out somewhere deep in the woods. But somehow they still remain strangely entertaining.]

Seasoned fans of Haruki Murakami, having patiently waited three years since the gamma-ray blast of 1Q84, will have a few pressing questions about the master’s newest book, even though they may be able to anticipate the answers: Is the novel’s hero an adrift, feckless man in his mid-30s? (Yep.) Does he have a shrewd girl Friday who doubles as his romantic interest? (Of course; conveniently, she is a travel agent, adept at booking sudden international trips.) Does the story begin with the inexplicable disappearance of a person close to the narrator? (Not one person—four, and they vanish simultaneously.) Is there a metaphysical journey to an alternate plane of reality? (Sort of: the alternate reality is Finland.) Are there gratuitous references to Western novels, films, and popular culture? (Let’s see, Barry Manilow, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Pet Shop Boys, Aldous Huxley, Elvis Presley … affirmative.) Which eastern-European composer provides the soundtrack, and will enjoy skyrocketing CD sales in the months ahead—Bartók, Prokofiev, Smetana? (Liszt.) Are there ominous omens, signifying nothing; dreams that resist interpretation; cryptic mysteries that will never be resolved? (Check, check, and check.) Will this be the novel that finally delivers Murakami the Nobel Prize? (Doubtful, though Ladbrokes currently considers him the odds-on favorite, at 6 to 1.)

Murakami, who learned to speak English by reading American crime novels, begins with an opening paragraph that would make David Goodis proud. Tsukuru Tazaki, recently turned 20, is planning his suicide: “From July of his sophomore year in college until the following January, all Tsukuru Tazaki could think about was dying.” But where Goodis would write something like “All right, he told himself firmly, let’s do it and get it over with,” Murakami is balletic, evoking metaphysical realms and a fine sense of the grotesque. “Crossing that threshold between life and death,” he writes, “would have been easier than swallowing down a slick, raw egg.” It is one of the key aspects of his style, this seamless transition from noirish dread to mystical rumination; the most perfect Murakami title, which really could have been used for any of the 13 novels he has written since 1979, remains Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. In Murakamiland, death means merely traveling across a “threshold” between reality and some other world. It is not necessarily the end. In fact, as we soon learn, Tsukuru’s obsession with death is only the beginning. (...)

And page after page, we are confronted with the riddle that is Murakami's prose. No great writer writes as many bad sentences as Murakami does. His crimes include awkward construction ("Just as he appreciated Sara’s appearance, he also enjoyed the way she dressed”); cliché addiction (from a single, paragraph-long character description: “He really hustled on the field … He wasn’t good at buckling down … He always looked people straight in the eye, spoke in a clear, strong voice, and had an amazing appetite … He was a good listener and a born leader”); and lazy repetition (“Sara gazed at his face for some time before speaking,” followed shortly by “Sara gazed at Tsukuru for a time before she spoke”). The dialogue is often robotic, if charmingly so. (...)

How is the author of these lines capable of an atrocity like “Her smile had ratcheted up a notch”? The most charitable explanation is that in Murakami’s fiction, his ugly sentences, though often distracting, serve a strategic purpose. Like the hokey vernacular and use of brand names in Stephen King’s fiction, Murakami’s impoverished language situates us in a realm of utter banality, a simplified black-and-white world in which everything is as it appears. When, inevitably, we pass through a wormhole into an uncanny dimension of fantasy and chaos, the contrast is unnerving.

by Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Richie Pope

[ed. Got my motorcycle license yesterday. Yay! Unbeknownst to me, someone took a picture after my last riding test. Too bad about that instructor...]
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Sonam Yeshi, Fish Dreams
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Honda’s Global Strategy? Go Local.

When financial journalist Jeffrey Rothfeder set out to understand why globalization has failed, he got pulled into the story of Honda, a company that has thrived as a multinational. In more than 60 years in business, Honda has never lost money. Its profit margins are the highest in the industry and its factories among the most productive. Rothfeder talked with The Washington Post about “Driving Honda,” in which he explores the enduring culture established by company founder Soichiro Honda, a perfectionist who embraced mistakes as a way to learn and improve. He also goes inside Honda’s plant in Lincoln, Ala., a model of flexible manufacturing. The following was edited for length and clarity.

How did this book come about?

I didn’t think I’d be writing about Honda or even a specific company. What interested me more was the issue of why globalization is failing, because for two decades now it’s been the guiding principle that runs U.S. economic policy — that there is going to be free trade and we’ll lose the borders and there’s no difference between General Electric here and General Electric in China. And essentially globalization was going to lift all boats economically.

But it isn’t working out the way people had hoped. Most multinational companies do not make money in their globalized operations. Classically, General Electric will say that they make more than 50 percent of their revenue outside the U.S., but they are losing money in many parts of the world.

So I was wondering, what would it take to make a successful multinational? I was also interested in the auto industry because it is such a global industry.

Why Honda?

Because it is one of the few multinational companies that has succeeded at globalization. Their profit margins are high in the auto industry. Almost everywhere they go — over 5 percent profit margins. In most markets, they consistently are in the top 10 of specific models that sell. They’ve never lost money. They’ve been profitable every year. And they’ve been around since 1949, 1950. And it’s a company that really does see the world as its market and thinks very hard about what it takes to be successful at that.

Everything it does — from corporate culture to its operational principles to the way it globalizes — was different from any other company I’ve ever looked at.

by Kelly Johnson, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Blake J. Discher, AP

Reading Upward

“Frankly, I don’t mind what they’re reading, Twilight, Harry Potter, whatever. So long as they are reading something there’s at least a chance that one day they’ll move on to something better.”

How many times have we heard this opinion expressed? On this occasion the speaker was a literary critic on Canadian radio with whom I was discussing my recent blog post “Reading: The Struggle.” Needless to say the sentiment comes along with the regret that people are reading less and less these days and the notion of a hierarchy of writing with the likes of Joyce and Nabokov at the top and Fifty Shades of Grey at the bottom. Between the two it is assumed that there is a kind of neo-Platonic stairway, such that from the bottom one can pass by stages to the top, a sort of optimistic inversion of the lament that soft porn will lead you to hard and anyone smoking marijuana is irredeemably destined to descend through coke and crack to heroin. The user, that is, is always drawn to a more intense form of the same species of experience.

Of course, while the fear that one will descend from soft to hard drugs tends to be treated as a near certainty, the hope that one might ascend from Hermione Granger to Clarissa Dalloway is usually expressed as a tentative wish. Nevertheless, it serves to justify the intellectual’s saying, “Frankly, I don’t mind what they’re reading, etc.” (as if this were some kind of concession), and underwrites our cautious optimism when we see an adolescent son or daughter immersed in George R.R. Martin. It’s not Dostoevsky, but one day it might be, and in any event it’s better than a computer game or TV since these are not part of the reading stairway.

Is any of this borne out by reality? Do people really pass from Fifty Shades of Grey to Alice Munro? (Through how many intermediate steps? Never to return?) And if it is not true why does a certain kind of intellectual continue to express them? To what end?

In 1948 W.H. Auden published an essay, “The Guilty Vicarage,” on what he calls his “addiction” to detective novels. The point he makes is that these schematic narratives serve the escapist needs of readers who share his particular psychological make-up. These people will not, as a rule, Auden claims, with some elaborate argument, be the same readers as readers of light romances or thrillers, or fantasy fiction. Each genre has its pull on different types of minds. In any event, if he, Auden, is to get any serious work done, he has to make sure that there are no detective novels around, since if there are he can’t resist opening them, and if he opens them he won’t close them till he’s reached the end. Or rather, no new detective novels; for Auden notes this difference between the stuff of his addiction and literature: that the detective novel is no sooner read than forgotten and never invites a second reading, as literature often does.

The implications are clear enough. Auden denies any continuity between literary novels and genre novels, or indeed between the different genres. One does not pass from lower to higher. On the contrary one might perfectly well fall from the higher to the lower, or simply read both, as many people eat both good food and junk food, the only problem being that the latter can be addictive; by constantly repeating the same gratifying formula (the litmus test of genre fiction) it stimulates and satisfies a craving for endless sameness, to the point that the reader can well end up spending all the time he has available for reading with exactly the same fare. (My one powerful experience of this was a spell reading Simenon’s Maigret novels; after five or six it gets harder and harder to distinguish one from another, and yet one goes on.)

Auden, it should be noted, does not propose to stop reading detective novels—he continues to enjoy them—and expresses no regret that people read detective novels rather than, say, Faulkner or Charlotte Brontë, nor any wish that they use detective novels as a stepping stone to “higher things.” He simply notes that he has to struggle to control his addiction, presumably because he doesn’t want to remain trapped in a repetitive pattern of experience that allows no growth and takes him nowhere. His essay, in fact, reads like the reasoning of someone determined to explain to himself why he must not waste too much time with detective novels, and at the same time to forgive himself for the time he does spend with them. If anything, genre fiction prevents engagement with literary fiction, rather than vice versa, partly because of the time it occupies, but more subtly because while the latter is of its nature exploratory and potentially unsettling the former encourages the reader to stay in a comfort zone.

by Tim Parks, NYR |  Read more:

Image: Arnold Eagle: Boys Climbing the Fire Escape of a Deserted Building, 1935

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Beautiful Girl

When I was fifteen, I cut off the last joint of my left ring finger during a woodshop class. I was laughing at a joke while cutting a board on a table saw. The bite of the blade sent a great shock through me, and I didn’t dare look down, but the bleached faces of the other boys told me just how bad it was.

They didn’t reassemble bodies in those days. Later, I heard that one of the guys in the class had picked up the joint, complete with dirty fingernail, and scared some girls with it. No surprise, no hard feelings; it was the kind of thing I would’ve done, and not only because I was a jackass. The girls around me were coming into glorious bloom, and my way of pretending not to be in awe of them was to act as if we were still kids—to tease and provoke them.

I’d never had a girlfriend, not really. In sixth grade, in Seattle, my friend Terry and I used to meet his cousin Patty and another girl at the Admiral Theatre on Saturday nights. Patty and I sat in the back and made out for two hours without exchanging a word, while Terry did the same with Patty’s friend. After the movie, Terry and I left by the side exit so his aunt wouldn’t see him when she picked the girls up. Never a dance, never a soda with two straws.

That winter, I moved to a village in the Cascades. The elementary school had four rooms, where four teachers taught the eight grades. Of the ten kids in my class, nine were boys. Nevy drove us crazy, favoring this one, then that one. I had her attention for a while when I was new, and never again. Anyway, she was into horses, not boys.

The high school was in Concrete, thirty-two miles downriver. When we finally got there, we found girls, all right, but the pretty ones in our class got picked off by juniors and seniors, and the older ones wouldn’t look at us.

That was the situation as I woke one afternoon with two-thirds of a finger and a bandage as big as a boxing glove to find a beautiful girl smiling down at me from the foot of my bed. By then, I’d been in the Mount Vernon Hospital for almost a week, because my stump had got infected and there was a danger of gangrene. I was floating on a morphine cloud and could only stare. “Hi,” she said. “See, Daddy—just like Dr. Kildare!”

“That’s my girl, Joelle,” the man in the next bed said. There were five others on the ward, all men. Joelle sat on my bed and offered me a candy bar. She said that I looked exactly like Dr. Kildare. I didn’t speak, just listened to her husky voice. She had dark-red hair held back from her high brow by pink barrettes. Her skin was pale, pearly, with a few freckles across her cheeks. Her eyes were green, her lips red with lipstick. The other men watched us with amusement. They must have seen that I was in love.

by Tobias Wolff, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Christian Gralingen

Humans Need Not Apply

Surveillance as a Business Model

[ed. Read of the day. How surveillance became the default condition and principal business model in the Internet's evolution. See also: The Internet's Original Sin.]

I've come to believe that a lot of what's wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work.

I don't know if they did this in Germany, but in our elementary schools in America, if we did something particularly heinous, they had a special way of threatening you. They would say: "This is going on your permanent record".

It was pretty scary. I had never seen a permanent record, but I knew exactly what it must look like. It was bright red, thick, tied with twine. Full of official stamps.

The permanent record would follow you through life, and whenever you changed schools, or looked for a job or moved to a new house, people would see the shameful things you had done in fifth grade.

How wonderful it felt when I first realized the permanent record didn't exist. They were bluffing! Nothing I did was going to matter! We were free!

And then when I grew up, I helped build it for real.

Anyone who works with computers learns to fear their capacity to forget. Like so many things with computers, memory is strictly binary. There is either perfect recall or total oblivion, with nothing in between. It doesn't matter how important or trivial the information is. The computer can forget anything in an instant. If it remembers, it remembers for keeps.

This doesn't map well onto human experience of memory, which is fuzzy. We don't remember anything with perfect fidelity, but we're also not at risk of waking up having forgotten our own name. Memories tend to fade with time, and we remember only the more salient events.

Every programmer has firsthand experience of accidentally deleting something important. Our folklore as programmers is filled with stories of lost data, failed backups, inadvertently clobbering some vital piece of information, undoing months of work with a single keystroke. We learn to be afraid.

And because we live in a time when storage grows ever cheaper, we learn to save everything, log everything, and keep it forever. You never know what will come in useful. Deleting is dangerous. There are no horror stories—yet—about keeping too much data for too long.

Unfortunately, we've let this detail of how computers work percolate up into the design of our online communities. It's as if we forced people to use only integers because computers have difficulty representing real numbers.

Our lives have become split between two worlds with two very different norms around memory.

The offline world works like it always has. I saw many of you talking yesterday between sessions; I bet none of you has a verbatim transcript of those conversations. If you do, then I bet the people you were talking to would find that extremely creepy.

I saw people taking pictures, but there's a nice set of gestures and conventions in place for that. You lift your camera or phone when you want to record, and people around you can see that. All in all, it works pretty smoothly.

The online world is very different. Online, everything is recorded by default, and you may not know where or by whom. If you've ever wondered why Facebook is such a joyless place, even though we've theoretically surrounded ourselves with friends and loved ones, it's because of this need to constantly be wearing our public face. Facebook is about as much fun as a zoning board hearing.

It's interesting to watch what happens when these two worlds collide. Somehow it's always Google that does it.

One reason there's a backlash against Google glasses is that they try to bring the online rules into the offline world. Suddenly, anything can be recorded, and there's the expectation (if the product succeeds) that everything will be recorded. The product is called 'glass' instead of 'glasses' because Google imagines a world where every flat surface behaves by the online rules. [The day after this talk, it was revealed Google is seeking patents on showing ads on your thermostat, refrigerator, etc.]

Well, people hate the online rules!

Google's answer is, wake up, grandpa, this is the new normal. But all they're doing is trying to port a bug in the Internet over to the real world, and calling it progress.

You can dress up a bug and call it a feature. You can also put dog crap in the freezer and call it ice cream. But people can taste the difference.

by Maciej Cegłowski, Lecture: Beyond Tellerrand Web Conference, Germany, May 2014 | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Danny Santos II, Shooting Strangers

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Here is How to Be Sorry

"Here Is How to Be Sorry" - an erasure poem from page 175 of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

“Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.’ Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.” — David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Erasure poetry is at once a metaphor for death and a mechanism for dealing with it. We are all eventually erased, whether at the hands of time, illness or accident — opportunities for addition and revision over. What we leave in our stead, however, is never a complete absence. To cope with the loss, friends, family and colleagues each weave new stories from memories and mementos – stories that say not who we were, but who we were to them, stories that hold in spite of the gaps.

via: Jenni B. Baker

Our Microbiome May Be Looking Out for Itself

Your body is home to about 100 trillion bacteria and other microbes, collectively known as your microbiome. Naturalists first became aware of our invisible lodgers in the 1600s, but it wasn’t until the past few years that we’ve become really familiar with them.

This recent research has given the microbiome a cuddly kind of fame. We’ve come to appreciate how beneficial our microbes are — breaking down our food, fighting off infections and nurturing our immune system. It’s a lovely, invisible garden we should be tending for our own well-being.

But in the journal Bioessays, a team of scientists has raised a creepier possibility. Perhaps our menagerie of germs is also influencing our behavior in order to advance its own evolutionary success — giving us cravings for certain foods, for example.

Maybe the microbiome is our puppet master.

“One of the ways we started thinking about this was in a crime-novel perspective,” said Carlo C. Maley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-author of the new paper. “What are the means, motives and opportunity for the microbes to manipulate us? They have all three.”

The idea that a simple organism could control a complex animal may sound like science fiction. In fact, there are many well-documented examples of parasites controlling their hosts.

Some species of fungi, for example, infiltrate the brains of ants and coax them to climb plants and clamp onto the underside of leaves. The fungi then sprout out of the ants and send spores showering onto uninfected ants below.

How parasites control their hosts remains mysterious. But it looks as if they release molecules that directly or indirectly can influence their brains.

Our microbiome has the biochemical potential to do the same thing. In our guts, bacteria make some of the same chemicals that our neurons use to communicate with one another, such as dopamine and serotonin. And the microbes can deliver these neurological molecules to the dense web of nerve endings that line the gastrointestinal tract.

by Carl Zimmer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Cashing in on Congestion

[ed. Reminds me of the Mafia controlling garbage collection contracts and protecting its turf. See also: Fight Brews on Changes that Affect Derivatives.]

By 10 a.m. the heat was closing in on the North Shore of Long Island. But 300 miles down the seaboard, at an obscure investment company near Washington, the forecast pointed to something else: profit.

As the temperatures climbed toward the 90s here and air-conditioners turned on, the electric grid struggled to meet the demand. By midafternoon, the wholesale price of electricity had jumped nearly 550 percent.

What no one here knew that day, May 30, 2013, was that the investment company, DC Energy, was reaping rewards from the swelter. Within 48 hours the firm, based in Vienna, Va., had made more than $1.5 million by cashing in on so-called congestion contracts, complex financial instruments that gain value when the grid becomes overburdened, according to an analysis of trading data by The New York Times.

Those profits are a small fraction of the fortune that traders at DC Energy and elsewhere have pocketed because of maneuvers involving the nation’s congested grid. Over the last decade, DC Energy has made about $180 million in New York State alone, The Times found.

Across the nation, investment funds and major banks are wagering billions on similar trades using computer algorithms and teams of Ph.D.s, as they chase profits in an arcane arena that rarely attracts attention.

Congestion occurs when demand for electricity outstrips the immediate supply, sending prices higher as the grid strains to deliver power from distant and often more expensive locations to meet the demand. To help power companies and others offset the higher costs, regional grid operators, which manage the nation’s transmission lines and wholesale power markets, auction off congestion contracts, derivatives linked to thousands of locations on the grid. When electricity prices spike, contract holders collect the difference in prices between points from the grid operators. If the congestion moves in the opposite direction, holders pay the operators.

The contracts were intended to protect the electricity producers, utilities and industries that need to buy power. The thinking was that the contracts would help them hedge against sharp price swings caused by competition as well as the weather, plant failures or equipment problems. Those lower costs could reduce consumers’ bills.

But Wall Street banks and other investors have stepped in, siphoning off much of the money. In New York, DC Energy accounted for more than a quarter of the total $639 million in profits in the congestion markets between 2003 and 2013, The Times found. Some of DC Energy’s biggest paydays involved Port Jefferson, a village 60 miles east of Manhattan. Because of the geography of the grid, moving power from one point to another means demand often briefly outstrips supply here. (...)

DC Energy — and its profits — are an unexpected result of the deregulation of the nation’s electric grid. The idea behind deregulation was to eliminate old monopolies and create robust, competitive markets that would encourage investment and ultimately lower costs for consumers. But in most places, electricity bills have been rising, not falling. While fuel prices, taxes and fees have added directly to the costs, Wall Street-style traders have contributed in subtle ways by turning new markets, like the trading of congestion contracts, to their advantage, The Times analysis found.

by Julie Creswell and Robert Gebeloff, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kathy Kmonicek

Gary Clark Jr.

[ed. Channeling Hendrix. Thanks, Deb.]

Highlights and Interstices

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children, vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts. But the best is often when nothing is happening. The way a mother picks up the child almost without noticing and carries her across Waller Street while talking with the other woman. What if she could keep all of that? Our lives happen between the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

by Jack Gilbert, Art Beat |  Read more:

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Criss Canning, Square-Fruited Mallee Gum
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No, No, Nine-Ettes

The ’90s: The Last Great Decade?,” asks the title of the National Geographic Channel’s three-part documentary special, premiering this month, the noisy capper to a 90s nostalgia craze that really got raring last year online, along the cable grid, and in the dense foliage of the fashion pages.Grunge; Friends; Seinfeld; Felicity; Dawson’s Creek; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; The X-Files; My So-Called Life; Beverly Hills, 90210; Clueless; Thelma & Louise; The Matrix; Saved by the Bell; Boy Meets World; Beavis and Butt-Head; Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation; Biggie Smalls; Tupac Shakur; the hoop-net arabesques of Michael Jordan—what a hit parade. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a 90s kids’ favorite, are set for a movie reboot, the songs of Alanis Morissette stream from the car speakers of the sporty convertible Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon share in the upcoming The Trip to Italy, and Coogi knitwear has made a comeback. As someone whose decade loyalty is to the 70s, I don’t begrudge others their 90s glow-on. It’s only fair that Generation Xers—the Nine-ettes—enjoy their turn in the hot-tub time machine now that they’re old enough to appreciate what a disappointment life can be after the louche splendors of the old dorm. But nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, to borrow the wistful title of Simone Signoret’s memoirs.

Mostly a white people’s pastime, nostalgia used to be a pining for an idealized yesteryear, for a prelapsarian world tinted in sepia. “Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable,” the social critic Christopher Lasch wrote in The True and Only Heaven. Ah, no longer. Since the publication of Lasch’s book, in 1991, the Internet and cable TV have colonized the hive mind and set up carnival pavilions. Now every delight is obtainable and on display at an arcade that never closes. Friends, Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The X-Files still cycle in syndication; Felicity and My So-Called Life are on Hulu; making a Holy Ghost appearance as a hologram at the Coachella music festival, Tupac and his thug-life gaze have cast the posthumous spell of Malcolm X posters (he is even the subject of a new Broadway musical, Holler if Ya Hear Me); and the grunge look is a perennial, re-applied with a grease gun. This anxious, ravenous speedup of nostalgia—getting wistful over goodies that never went away—is more than a reflection of the overall acceleration of digital culture, a pathetic sign of our determination to dote on every last shiny souvenir of our prolonged adolescence, and an indictment of our gutless refusal to face the rotten future like Stoic philosophers. It’s also a recognition that September 11, 2001, and the Iraq war cast a pall over everything that has come after. The millennium has been a major letdown. Yet let’s not con ourselves. It’s not as if the 90s were some belle époque, either, a last fling before the anvil fell.

Unscrewing this time capsule is opening a can of worms. The 90s were the decade when the last tatters of privacy were torn aside, a national forest of woodies seemed to sprout overnight thanks to the rollout of a little blue pill called Viagra, reality TV unthroned soap opera as the medium’s queen of discord, and political theater lit up like a porno set. The snapshot of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart’s lap that torpedoed the married senator’s 1988 presidential hopes looked like Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello having a cuddle compared with the sex scandals the 90s were about to run through the grind-house projector. From the pubic hair on the Coke can and the invocation of “Long Dong” Silver in Anita Hill’s testimony at the Senate confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas to the semen stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress and the pursed-lipped prurience of independent counsel Ken Starr’s Starr Report (which historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the most salacious public document in the history of the republic”), the down-and-dirty details were a godsend to late-night comedians and a new breed of leering pundit quite different from the august eggheads of capital sonority, for whom David Broder of The Washington Post was dean. The tone of political discourse and public debate took a distinct dip. The Washington establishment and its tail-wagging courtiers fell into a circular frenzy somewhere between a witch hunt and a panty raid. Unless you were a Clinton-hater and/or a conspiracy hound convinced that Hillary had Vince Foster snuffed out, it wasn’t much fun then and it looks even worse now.

by James Wolcott, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: John Ritter

Pink Collar

Modern public relations has, in its own parlance, an image problem. As an investigation copublished by the Columbia Journalism Review and ProPublica put it, the industry was literally birthed from a train wreck. In 1906, ex-reporter Ivy Lee preempted media investigations into an Atlantic City train accident by issuing a statement about the accident to reporters on behalf of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The New York Times printed verbatim what would later be regarded as the first press release. Since then, public relations (often broadly referred to as “communications”) as a practice has expanded to comprise almost sixty thousand workers, and intersects nearly every other industry. Though the addition of technologies such as social media and mass email distribution have added new layers of specialized labor to the sector, the fundamental premise of PR has remained relatively unaltered since its conception: Hired to promote products and people, publicists exist to solicit positive media coverage for their clients.

Now outnumbering journalists four to one, publicists are an omnipresent component of the machinery that powers creative industries like fashion, arts, and publishing, and increasingly also play central roles in social-justice movements. Though organizations such as Free Press and writers like Robert McChesney have led the charge in asserting that the proliferation of these spin doctors constitutes an insidious and growing threat to journalism and democracy, few have bothered to analyze the gendered split between journalists and publicists. In stark contrast to newsrooms, in which women have never exceeded 38 percent, public relations operates as a solidly pink-collar sector of the creative industries and comprises a labor force that is currently over 85 percent female.

The palpable distaste for PR practitioners that continues to swell — spearheaded by the very same members of the media with whom publicists theoretically enjoy a symbiotic relationship — requires, then, a deeper look at how gendered assumptions about work continue to shape our contemporary notions of creative labor under capitalism.

The day-to-day of PR work ranges from producing press releases to manning social media accounts to planning events, but the crux of publicity is the establishment of relationships with the press. Networking with relevant editors and journalists is an essential component of PR, and includes attending industry parties, arranging pitch meetings or getting drinks with influential members of the press, and, in the case of the bigger-budgeted, company-sponsored lunches and dinners, to woo the aforementioned influencers.

In PR, a certain overlap of professional and personal relationships is not only likely, but ideal. As former beauty PR manager Mackenzie Lewis noted in an interview on The Hairpin,

A big part of public relations is building relationships between your brand and the media. Because brands are built by humans and humans run the media, this relationship … often boils down to your run-of-the-mill work friendship. When I was in PR, I had an expense account and a quota of breakfast/lunch/dinner or drink “meetings” I had to go out on each week (seriously). We didn’t have new products launching that often, so I wasn’t always there to pitch a specific story. A lot of times I was there to get to know the editor better so that pitching her in the future would be easier for both of us: I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable calling her and I’d already know how and what she likes being pitched. But, like with other work acquaintances, if you go out for company-sponsored cocktails enough it’s easy to become fast friends. When you inevitably get to the stage where you’re sharing boyfriend drama, it’s not awkward to start a phone call with “I need a favor …”

Though this elision of work and friendship is necessary for effective PR, it also forms the basis of what people find questionable about the profession. In response to Lewis’s description, her interviewer stated, “It’s unfair to the readers not to disclose which products are great and which are there as the result of a friendship. Which is the thing that gets to me, it all seems so phony.” Phoniness is a criticism leveled again and again at PR as a practice that, after all, necessitates an expression of enthusiasm for a product because of pay rather than passion.

The notion of PR as an insidious corporate apparatus designed to pull wool over consumers’ eyes is so widespread that “flack,” once a term that merely denoted a public relations professional, has transformed into an overwhelmingly disparaging synonym for any huckster. Given that the end goal of PR is company or client gain, a healthy suspicion of publicity materials is only reasonable. But so often these misgivings manifest as indictments of the publicist and her work, rather than of the neoliberal economy that enables and necessitates this form of labor. And this is especially troubling given the disproportionate presence of women in PR. With the already high numbers of women in PR continuing to climb, Ragan Communications, a news resource for PR professionals, conducted a video interview with several senior-level publicists to discuss the source of this burgeoning “pink ghetto.” As is the case with most other forms of gendered work, assumptions about women’s “natural” traits guided the discussion.

by Jennifer Pan, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch