This book gave me heavy boots

In Foer’s exploration of 9/11, young Oskar Schell seeks some closure on his father’s death by going on a quest throughout New York City to trace a person named Black who may have some knowledge of his father. In the meantime, different narratives trace the complicated relationship between Oskar’s grandparents. His grandfather, Thomas, does not speak, communicating solely through writing and his grandmother feigns poor eyesight to try to elicit communication and attention from him. He leaves her when she reveals that she is pregnant because he does not love her enough, but he returns when he realizes he has had no sort of life without her anyway. Oskar desperately seeks connection with his dead father while neglecting the living mother he has behind.

The entire book is really a story of people communicating at cross-purposes or not communicating at all. They don’t tell each other the words they need to hear (I love you, I need you, I understand your pain, I’m scared, I can’t do this, I need help) and in the process systematically lose their ability to communicate. Take grandfather Thomas. His inability to say what he needs to say, to explore his own grief over losing Anna, ends up shutting down his entire capacity to communicate verbally.

Written communication runs as a theme throughout the book (understandable for a novel), and while it has elements of an epistolary novel, it retains far too much of Oskar’s narrative to be purely epistolary—though that would have been a logical direction for Foer to take, given his intense focus on documentation-as-substitute-for-direct-interaction in the story. Thomas writes thousands of letters to the son he never meets and writes page after page in his daybooks to communicate with people. Oskar keeps a collection of “Stuff That Happened To Me”—documents and images that define his self-conception (and that fill the book itself). He writes letters to strangers that he admires constantly, in a relentless search for approval and connection. In the end, his grandmother can’t say the things she wants to say to his face—she writes him a letter. Oskar only has the key that he finds in his father’s things, the impetus for his quest, because a man cannot open a letter from his dead father in time. Oskar is haunted by the things his father didn’t say in his final phone messages. He is incapacitated when the phone rings and loses the opportunity to speak to him a final time and hear what he really needs to hear—that his father loves him, something that it seems no one in this book (except Oskar’s mother) can say in a timely fashion.

The lesson learned is both bittersweet and clear: seize the opportunity to SAY what you need to say—make your needs clear, don’t be afraid to ask for help and above all, tell the important people in your life exactly what they mean to you every chance you get because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

The Veblen breaks down some very complex concepts that form the root of our capitalist society in a deft and thorough manner. By beginning to identify the root of class consciousness, class formation and cultural concepts of inherent value judgments accorded to labor, Veblen causes us to question our assumptions and values related to employment and economic structure. Every time Veblen articulates a point, I just felt like leaping in the air and saying “Of course!”, which isn’t something I’ve really felt (to the same extent) with other theorists we’ve studied. While the others have all presented views that are legitimate, well-researched and understandable, this one really resonated as truly accurate.

Where to begin? The fundamental separation of women’s work and men’s work and how that helps push us towards distinctions in class and employment? The absolutely delicious correlative drawn tracing the role of exploit in men’s work through the taking of trophies through the evolution of consumerism? The most academic dissection of the concept (and futility of) of keeping up with the Joneses ? WHY we have to keep up with the Joneses in the first place? The implications of manners and the deeper understanding of good breeding? Deconstructing the differences between practical labor and status-based vicarious leisure? The status-based perceptions of drunkenness (though doubtless a shift in perception of that in modern times would be expected.) It’s really awesome, isn’t it?

This is what presents the problem. I really enjoyed the entire reading and so am finding it really difficult to pick any single passage to focus on, but I’m going to try to apply some of Veblen’s more individually minded observations to a general societal problem.

The self-evident comparisons between Veblen’s cautionary observations and America’s modern credit crisis are overwhelming and not particularly interesting to comment on, except that we clearly haven’t learned anything in a century (a common theme of its own in this class). However, a few points that he makes point to a general societal problem that is only growing more pervasive. So I give you several quotations in a row and address them all together…
“Very much of squalor and discomfort will be endured before the last trinket or last pretence of pecuniary decency is put away. There is no class and no country that has yielded so abjectly before the pressure of physical want as to deny themselves all gratification of this higher or spiritual need.”

“The means of communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging his reputability than the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under their direct observation.”

“It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life, and it may in this way become as indispensible as any other item of the consumer’s habitual expenditure.”

So what do we do with all of these together? Well, the mass psychosis of modern over-consumption and debt can be found here. First, people will buy long after it ceases to be prudent or advisable, because the act of gratifying one’s wants is far more pleasurable than the process of responsible self-denial, particularly in a world that makes want gratification so easy!
What makes them want so many things? Part of it is the relentless inundation of marketing, but the other part of it is the constant exposure to other people’s gains. A century ago, who did we have to compare ourselves with? Family, neighbors, and public figures. Now, it’s everyone on the internet, so really, it’s everyone. For a culture already overly comfortable with relentless consumption comparison, potentially comparing yourself to everyone on the Internet is staggering and is exercising transformative impact over definitions of ‘good breeding’ and the display of goods.

In terms of breeding, there has been a bit of a reactionary revolt against standards we had held before. Language has deteriorated thanks to “lol-speak” and texting grammar. A basic decorum and reservation of manner has been replaced by relentless over-sharing and a celebration of gauche crudity (hello reality television) because people want to identify more with the people on their televisions, so instead of aspiring to greater successes, they drag their celebrities down to their level.
However, despite bringing the aspirational figures down to a more manageable level, society still covets and produces and consumes at an ever-increasing pace. Technology has reduced product cycles and attitudes towards innovative products have shifted from ‘evaluate carefully and then plan a purchase’ to ‘buy the latest, greatest amazing thing because it will TOTALLY CHANGE YOUR LIFE’.

Easy access to credit has made that possible in a way Veblen could have never anticipated. No longer do you even have to struggle to maintain an aura of conspicuous consumption, banks will enable you to have whatever you want, whenever you want, so long as you pay for it for the rest of your life. People value goods less because they have to work less (on the front end) to receive them. Society as a whole does not fundamentally appreciate that at some point, things bought on credit must be paid for. As a result of this, while people continue to spend and spend to match up to their ‘peers’ and maintain their sense of self-worth, they are in fact destroying their own capacity for financial self-determination and potential for ascending the class ladder by indebting themselves beyond repair. If it weren’t so sad, it would be almost funny.

V for Very Obvious Emotional Manipulation

Barthes was, for me, a bit of hit and miss. While I did not respond to ‘The Face of Garbo’ with the same enthusiasm as some of my colleagues, I found two essays to be very resonant: ‘The World of Wrestling’ and ‘The Blue Blood Cruise’. It seemed that the world of French wrestling is very similar to modern American professional wrestling—pageantry and artificial drama over any semblance of pugilistic skill—and I do confess being one of the people who disdains wrestling as a sport and assumes that most of the people who are enthusiasts are idiots who don’t realize it’s staged. I hang my head in shame at the Barthes. Whether all spectators are cognizant of the moral drama being played out in front of them is still something I question, but realizing that wrestling has more in common with a morality play than a sporting event completely changes the nature of the beast and I begin to see its purpose in modern society. Really, the summary of the idea can be found on page 18: “In both [wrestling and theatre], what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art.” So what does this mean? By viewing a wrestling match, we as audience engage with the wrestlers, asking them to project their internal struggles for us to witness, for they are also our internal struggles, and in enacting them before us, purge us through acts of catharsis. Do we yearn for a world where good and evil are so clearly defined as to be determined by the color of someone’s cape? Definitely. Do we truly feel that there is some sort of justice in the world when watching it be pantomimed in the ring? Possibly. Are we so purged of emotion by the end of the match and full of the false sense of righteousness that comes with watching justice be meted out that we accept the true injustices of the world because our complacency has been purchased through spectacle? Sadly so. “What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.” Life is so much simpler under these circumstances!

Amy and I went to see ‘V for Vendetta’ in theaters. I thought it was pretty awesome and under the auspices of the Bush administration, it felt very relevant and satisfying. I felt righteous, happy and emotionally… voided afterwards. I asked her what she thought of it and she was troubled. She said that the catharsis engendered in the audience watching it is extremely detrimental for the development and mobilization of legitimate social change and people would walk out of that theater feeling that their righteousness and sympathetic emotion from watching the film was somehow equivalent to actually taking action. As usual, she was right and reading this essay on ‘The World of Wrestling’ called that particular exchange to mind in a way I never would have expected.