Pink Air

Girls talk

As a rule, middle-aged men (like me) don't read fiction. If we read at all, we prefer history, science, you know, facts. After a certain point, reading about people and events that don't exist begins to feel like, not a waste of time exactly, but it's not "making progress." Deep down, maybe it's a sense of running out out of time, but I feel as though I need to understand "the way things are".

Of course, as all the scare quotes and italics reveal, "the way things are" is a sort of fiction and fiction is about the way things are, but while non-fiction addresses the question quantitatively in a this-plus-this-plus-this sort of way that feels like progress, fiction examines the way things are in a more qualitative way. Non-fiction builds. Fiction soaks. And sometimes you need to soak. Fiction refreshes the parts facts can't reach.

I've been soaking recently, but as I step back, there does seem to have been some progress made. By chance, I read two books told largely from the perspective of tween girls. Both Atonement and Never Let Me Go are novels that expand from explosions within the dense, superheated social imagination of young girls. And both reminded me of Thomas de Zengotita's description in Mediated of tween girls as "impresarios of an evolving social art":

They devote enormous energy to mastering an array of symbols and cues, an interplay of appearance, clothes, accessories, music, slang...They know everything. Every lyric, every gesture, every band, every brand name, every novel expression of approval or disdain. But they know much more than that. They are not mere scholars. They are not pedants. They are not just an audience of passive consumers...They can do it themselves. They are performers.

Of course, all three (five, including me and Dave) of these guys are middle-aged men imagining the world of tween girls, which may be why it sounds like an especially grisly version of Star Search. But it did all kick me back into the world of facts, wondering why fiction is read largely by women and whether it has something to do with whether you see the world of social imagination as fact or fiction.

The F Files

Like Charlie Brown, I've always been fascinated by failure. In general, marketing culture suffers from failurephobia. Not that we should strive for it (in which case, it wouldn't be failure I guess) but we're generally unwilling to even admit its existence, which means that we never learn how to work with it. And we do need to learn to work with it because having lots of little, coherent ideas around a brand (most of which will fail) is a better, more adaptive, more robust, more interesting way to do marketing than staking everything on a single big idea.

But that's an old story. Just by way of introduction to the Failure File, where I stash interesting observations about failure, its nature, benefits, inevitability. One of my favorite entries is this one, from Richard Feynman's 1974 commencement speech at Caltech:

Sometimes I imagine how liberating it would be to attend a Marketing Ineffectiveness Awards where prizes are given for campaigns that tell us something new and useful about what didn’t work.

people:cats::television:people

Despite their loner reputation, cats actually do like being around people. We emit a low wattage, comforting glow that they can bask in without being forced to engage. A cozy social murmur without the shock, effort, or even the possibility of actual interaction. People are warm background radiation, like fire, muzak and television.

By the way, with Halloween coming, now is a good time to re-watch Donnie Darko, peruse Richard Kelly's post-Darko CV and think about Malcolm Gladwell's distinction between early and late-blooming genius.

Party's over

Pause! Read! Consider!

Political fans

What does it mean to be a fan? The fact that the word is short for fanatic is a tip. To be a fan is to lose some degree of objectivity. Jerry Seinfeld once joked that managers and players come and go, so sport fans are really just supporting a uniform or "cheering for the laundry." Reading the commentary on the US presidential campaign, you certainly feel a lot of hot air being blown around by fans of both teams. (Full disclosure: (And isn't it interesting how quickly "Full disclosure" has become an iro comic meme?) 1. I am a registered Democrat and 2. In searching for the Seinfeld quote, I found that I'm not the first person to connect it with the current election. End of disclosure. Back to concealment.)

I've always been comfortable describing myself as a liberal, even though I'm not entirely sure what that means. It feels more like a fuzzy personality description than a political philosophy to me. The correlation between personality and politics is a contentious area. Just saying that there is a correlation draws the criticism that you're trying to "explain away" political beliefs as irrational. But there is a lot of valid, very interesting research in the area, some of which is reported in my friend Sam Gosling's book, Snoop, which you should all buy right now and I'll talk more about later.

On the much less rigorous side, I've been keeping a list for a few years now of gut-level beliefs that I hold (or more accurately, that hold me) that I associate with liberalism and that contrast with stated beliefs held by people I know who describe themselves as conservative. (The fact that I want to insert hundreds of caveats here may be a liberal characteristic, but I'm going to skip it, assuming that you know what they are, would make up better ones than I would or are willing to simply imagine a cloud of reservations swarming before your eyes making the following list hazy, flexible and plausibly deniable.)