No. 27 by The Baffler

No. 27

CH RIS FE RR ANTE LLO

C on t e n t s : The Baffler, no. 27 The High Hat

To the Ninety-Nines

Splurge and Purge

John Summers

Christina Moon

Keeping Up with the Babadooks

Science of Clothes

Consolidated Deviance Inc.

Bubble Butts

Elizabeth Bruenig Thomas Carlyle

From the archive Jessica Loudis

Venus in Furs

The Revolution Will Probably Wear Mom Jeans

Dickheads

Idle Threads

Three Strikes!

Eugenia Williamson

The paradox of the necktie resolved David Gr aeber The sartorial unconscious Ann Friedman Thoughts after reading Three Guineas Lucy Ellmann

Kiss the Boot

VCs Take the Media Jacob Silver man

The Taming of Tech Criticism

102

People Who Influence Influential People Are the Most Influential People

114

All Hail the Grumbler!

120

Evgeny Morozov

George Scialabba

Abiding Karl Kraus Russell Jacoby

Models

Satirized for Your Consumption

144

Toxically Pure

158

Transcendental Rites

173

The Monk Retires

184

Ben Schwartz

Joe Bageant drops out John Lingan

Edward Mendelson, with John Summers

Letting go of Philip Roth J. C. Hallman

4 1 The Baffler [no.27]

Venus in Furs

Bad Science

Mind Your Own Business Barbar a Ehrenreich

Dollar Debauch Purple Reign

The unmaking of a Yahoo Chris Lehmann

Runway City

Buffalo Exchange

Retrofitting a Rust Belt capital Catherine Tumber

PhotoGr aphic

Harlem Women

Carl Van Vechten

Ancestors

Man Is Not a Rock

Joseph Brodsky, with Elizabeth Markstein

Stories

Gustus Dei

Monica Byr ne

How Much Women Know

Ludmilla Petrushevsk aya

Poems

70 76

128

179 196 60 191

Re-Make/Re-Model

How Long Now Since the Mailmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gone Missing?

Why would the Minoans

Peter Gizzi

Danielle Blau

Caroline Knox

I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron

113

Berryman Anecdote

157

Haut Monde

172

Xu Lizhi

William Corbett Manohar Shetty

Exhibitions

A: Br ad Holland 3 B: Lucia Fainzilber 19 C: A manda Konishi 29 D: Lou Beach 101 E: Michael Duffy 190 F: Hans Eijkelboom 208

Bafflomathy 204 The

Baffler [no.27] ! 5

Venus in Furs

The Revolution Will Probably Wear Mom Jeans 3 Eugenia Williamson America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

—Warren G. Harding, “A Return to Normalcy,” May 14, 1920

ot long ago, a curious fashion trend swept through New York City’s hipster preserves, from Bushwick to the Lower East Side. Once, well-heeled twentysomethings had roamed these streets in plaid button-downs and floral playsuits. Now, the reign of the aspiring lumberjacks and their mawkish mates was coming to an end. Windbreakers, baseball caps, and polar fleece appeared among the flannel. Cargo shorts and khakis were verboten no longer. Denim went from dark-rinse to light. Sandals were worn, and sometimes with socks. It was a blast of carefully modulated blandness—one that delighted some fashion types, appalled others, and ignited the critical passions of lifestyle journalists everywhere. They called it Normcore. Across our Fashion Nation, style sections turned out lengthy pieces exploring this exotic lurch into the quotidian, and trend watchers plumbed every possible meaning in the cool kids’ new fondness for dressing like middle-aged suburbanites. Were hipsters sacrificing their coolness in a brave act of self-renunciation? Was this an object lesson in the futility of ritually chasing down, and then repudiating, the coolness of the passing moment? Or were middle-aged dorks themselves mysteriously cool all of a sudden? Was Normcore just an elaborate prank designed to prove that style writers can 22 1 The Baffler [no.27]

be fooled into believing almost anything is trendy? By March 2014, Vogue had declared Normcore totally over, but even that lofty fiat couldn’t put a stop to it. Gap adopted the slogan “dress normal” for its fall ad campaign, and the donnish Oxford English Dictionary nominated “normcore” for 2014’s word of the year. A full twelve months after Vogue tried to extinguish it, Normcore continues to convulse opinion, a half-life long enough (in fashion-time, anyway) to place it among the decade’s most enduring trends. More than that, elaborate prank or no, Normcore is a remarkably efficient summary of hipster posturing at its most baroque. Never has a trend so perfectly crystallized the endless, empty layers of fashion-based rebellion. And never has a trend shown itself to be so openly contemptuous of the working class. Like many a fad before it, Normcore thrives on appropriation. But where privileged hipsters once looked to underground subcultures—bikers, punks, Teddy Boys—as they pursued their downwardly mobile personal liberation, they now latch onto the faceless working majority: the Walmart shoppers, the suburban moms and dads. Even if it began as something of a self-referential fashion joke, the media’s infatuation

H O L L I E C H A S TA I N

with all things Normcore says a lot. Not least, it highlights our abiding social need for a sanitized counterculture, for a youthful rebellion that can be readily dismissed, for the comfort of neoliberal melancholy, for what Warren G. Harding—the unheralded John the Baptist of the Normcore Gospel—famously called “a return to normalcy.”

The Revolt of the Mass Indie Überelite The adventure began in 2013, and picked up steam early last year with Fiona Duncan’s “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion,” a blowout

exploration of the anti-individualist Normcore creed for New York magazine. Duncan remembered feeling the first tremors of the revolution: Sometime last summer I realized that, from behind, I could no longer tell if my fellow Soho pedestrians were art kids or middle-aged, middle-American tourists. Clad in stonewash jeans, fleece, and comfortable sneakers, both types looked like they might’ve just stepped off an R-train after shopping in Times Square. When I texted my friend Brad (an artist whose summer uniform consisted of Adidas barefoot trainers, mesh The

Baffler [no.27] ! 23

Venus in Furs

Dickheads The paradox of the necktie resolved 3 David Gr aeber

Some people (me, for instance) put a great

deal of energy into organizing their lives so that they’ll never have to wear a tie. I’ve often wondered why this should be. Why should ties have such symbolic power? It’s not as if other parts of a formal suit—white shirts, tailored slacks, vests, or blazers—inspire the same sort of indignation. Somehow, it feels as if tying the necktie around your neck marks a final act of closure. It’s the act that transforms all those items into a suit, with all the suit implies, whether it’s the power of the boardroom or the ceremonial formalities of weddings and funerals—that whole world of official business over which men in suits invariably preside. No doubt, part of the objection to the tie is to the pure arbitrariness of the thing. A tie serves no function. It doesn’t hold your trousers up or keep you warm. But at the same time, it’s uncomfortable, so much so that putting it on does somehow feel like a gesture of submission, a reluctant pledge of allegiance to everything the suit is supposed to represent. Still, if you think more about it, there’s something peculiar going on here—a kind of paradox. Yes, a tie embodies the message of the suit, but in many ways it’s the very opposite. After all, the rest of the suit is almost entirely bereft of decorative elements. Suits tend to be dark, sober, boring. Ties are supposed to be the exception. The tie is the one place where you’re allowed to add a little color, to express yourself a little. Why, then, should the one thing that’s least like the rest of the suit somehow feel like it embodies the message of the whole?

30 1 The Baffler [no.27]

MARK DANCE Y

Ready, Aim, Attire! Formal male clothing wasn’t always boring. In Elizabethan times, for instance, men—particularly rich and powerful ones—were just as inclined as women to deck themselves out in flashy jewelry and bright decorative col-

Couldn’t we say that a tie is really a symbolic displacement of the penis, only an intellectualized penis, dangling not from one’s crotch but from one’s head?

9 ors, and even (as in the court of Louis XIV) to wear wigs, powder, and rouge. All this changed in the eighteenth century, a period some historians of dress have referred to as the age of the “Great Masculine Renunciation.” Suddenly, male clothing was expected to be less ornamental, more generally businesslike than women’s. Eventually, something very much like the modern business suit began to emerge: uniform, dark in color (the more serious the context, the darker it should be) with little or no patterning—its very dullness embodying seriousness of purpose. The modern business suit appeared around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and it embodied the spirit of the emerging bourgeoisie. Such men scoffed at aristocratic fops as parasites. They saw themselves instead as men of action, defined by their ability to direct and transform the world. They were producers; aristocrats were mere consumers. And in this new bourgeois order, consumption was to be the domain of women, who continued to wear powder, lipstick, necklaces, and earrings (though usually not quite so extravagantly), even as their husbands gave them up. This transformation explains a number of curious usages surviving in our own formal clothing: notably, the way a blazer can still be referred to as “sports jacket,” even though you wouldn’t want to run a race in one. In fact, the business suit derives not from aristocratic formal wear, but from hunting clothes—this is why fox-hunters, for instance, still wear something very much like one. Both uniforms are a kind of active wear, adopted by a class of peo-

ple who wanted to define themselves through their actions. Actually, I suspect that the ultimate derivation of the business suit is from a suit of armor. The suit, after all, encases your body, covering as much of it as possible; what minimal openings to the world such clothes do afford—at your neck and sleeves—are bound tightly together by ties and cuff links. The contours of the body are thus obscured, in striking contrast with women’s formal wear, which, even in covering the body, constantly hints at revealing it, and particularly at revealing its most sexualized aspects. Skirts, even when they cover the lower half of the body completely, tend to form an open-ended cone whose apex is between the legs, and except in the most prudish times, there has been some gesture toward revealing the cleavage. It’s almost as if the staid uniformity of men’s attire is meant to efface individuality just as its design is meant to make the body itself invisible; women’s formal wear, on the other hand, makes the wearer both an individual and an object to be seen. Indeed, the conventions of higher-class fashion ensure that any woman wearing such an outfit is obliged to devote a good deal of time and energy to monitoring herself to make sure too much is not revealed and, more generally, to constantly thinking about what she looks like. And this is still true. Just recall the bifurcated fashions at the sexual battleground of your high school prom. The guys all dressed identically. They were, in effect, sporting a uniform. But if two girls wound up wearing the same dress, then oh, what a scandal. The

Baffler [no.27] ! 31

Venus in Furs

Idle Threads The sartorial unconscious 3 Ann Friedman

In The Devil Wears Prada, the 2006 rom-com

starring Meryl Streep as a cartoonish version of the notoriously icy Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Streep delivers a speech about the importance of the fashion industry. “You think this has nothing to do with you,” Streep says to her new assistant (Anne Hathaway), who wishes she were doing hard-hitting investigative work rather than fetching coffee for an arbiter of high-end taste. “You go to your closet and you select . . . I don’t know . . . that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.” And yet, Streep explains, her assistant’s sweater is this particular shade of blue because a designer featured it on the runway a few years ago, a decision that then trickled down through the fashion food chain all the way to the shopping-mall clearance racks. “It’s sort of comical,” she concludes, “how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.” You think you choose to wear things because you like them, because they’re special, or maybe because you’re special. But in fact, you’re not special, and neither are your choices. You’re just an angora-clad cog in a great capitalist wheel. The real Anna Wintour would never put it so bluntly, even behind closed doors. Hers is an industry that depends on all of us continuing to believe that our choices are special and that our senses of style are unique. At a White House event for aspiring fashion designers this year, Wintour said, “Fashion can be a 34 1 The Baffler [no.27]

BOOKS REVIEWED

Women in Clothes, by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton, Blue Rider Press, $30 Worn Stories, by Emily Spivack, Princeton Architectural Press, $24.95 Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the ’90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion, by Maureen Callahan, Simon and Schuster, $26

powerful instrument for social change. It allows us to think about who we are as individuals and as a society.” She did not say, “A handful of luxury designers and a few major clothing brands decide what you will like and, in turn, buy and wear.” Why would she? The modern fashion industry wants consumers to think that we are not consumers at all, but curators instead. If the midcentury mantra was “Dress to impress,” and the roaring-’80s catchphrase was “Dress for success,” the directive now is “Dress to express.” This approach to fashion is at the heart of Women in Clothes, a thick new book based on a survey that writers Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton circulated to more than six hundred women asking them what they wear and how they feel about it. The women offer hyperspecific thoughts about their every sartorial choice, but only a few admit that they

ELEANOR SHAKESPEARE

You’re just an angora-clad cog in a great capitalist wheel.

9 are influenced by trends or marketing. They are much more likely to lay the blame on their own bodies. “A woman is never thin enough,” writes Vedrana Rudan. “I have a double chin, I shove my tits into minimizers that minimize nothing, I get into Levi’s designed to flatten the tummy and lift the ass, but my ass and

stomach are immune to the intention of the jeans. I am a cow!” The survey responses are shot through with the hollow promises of the fashion industry—that with the right combination of trousers and shirts and dresses and skirts, cut in the right way and worn just so, women can The

Baffler [no.27] ! 35

Venus in Furs

Three Strikes!1 Thoughts after reading Three Guineas 3 Lucy Ellmann I made nice.2 It didn’t work. Women are still 1 In baseball, three strikes and you’re out. Out on your ass. The expression therefore has some bearing on the trajectory of this article, my pitch being that men are swinging wild. The original idea for the piece came from reading Virginia Woolf’s 1938 essay Three Guineas, to which I was alerted by the novelist Peter Burnett. But I couldn’t refer to three letters as Woolf does, since nobody writes letters anymore; and I chose strikes to replace her guinea idea, since nobody knows what a guinea is anymore either. (Nobody knows what a strike is anymore, come to think of it. That’s why we need one.) Woolf is being ironic about guineas anyway. With wit and eccentricity, her essay considers various good causes to which three guineas could usefully be put: the prevention of war, rebuilding a women’s college in Cambridge, and finding employment for women in the professions. In the end she offers each cause a guinea, this being all an “educated man’s daughter” could afford: Woolf’s three guineas thus become, in their paltriness, an emblem of women’s second-class status (making the diminished status of women the real subject of Woolf’s essay). It may be hard now to imagine being patronizing toward Virginia Woolf (aren’t we all supposed to be afraid of her?), but she was well aware of what the “intelligentsia” and “ignorantsia,” as she calls them, put most women through. In her essay, she concludes that women are “outsiders”—but in a good way. So are the many footnotes in her essay. Footnotes are always outsiders within a text, and therefore make obliging underdogs in an essay on female subordination. The footnotes here are the women of this essay, and they’re taking over. 2 As George Bernard Shaw said on his second arrival in America, “I told you what to do and you haven’t done it.” In 2013 I put my solution to male violence toward women in the most palatable form I could think up, a rom-com novel called Mimi, about a rich guy in New York who sees the light and becomes a champion of women. Mimi’s solution to the downward spiral of patriarchal insanity and its cata-

42 1 The Baffler [no.27]

strophic effect not only on women, men, and children but also on the arts, culture, and the environment is: hand over the money. Transfer all wealth into female control. Not half of it, not 52 percent—ALL THE MONEY. Given the mean little way that late capitalism works, a steady and wholehearted redistribution of wealth seems the simplest method of ensuring that women get treated with more respect, and get raped and murdered less (a fad that clearly owes much to women’s low social status). Until we can return to a matriarchal form of socialism, or “commonism” (as the Scottish novelist and political activist John Aberdein would say), in which money has no place, we must put women in possession of real, unquestionable wealth. This pro-female asset-rearrangement, which I’ve dubbed the Odalisque Revolution, constitutes a peaceful revolutionary act, and can be achieved on an individual basis, in private, by any right-thinking man who’s tired of hearing about women being deprived, denied, despised, derided, deluded, ignored, cheated, exploited, manipulated, mocked, blamed, scolded, threatened, raped, killed, overworked, and ordered about. (Incidentally, women are automatic members of the Odalisque Revolution.) It’s not just about guineas, though. The ultimate aim of the Odalisque Revolution is the start of a new matriarchal era in human civilization. It seems to me a safe, sensible, efficient, and really rather innocuous solution to the problem of male mayhem, war, and the destruction of the environment. And yet hardly any men to my knowledge have followed my very clear instructions on how to relinquish the unfair advantages so many of them claim to abhor. Only one man (the intrepid English writer and critic Anthony Rudolf ) has asked to have his Odalisque Revolution Mea Culpa Declaration stamped. This detachable certificate can be found at the back of any copy of Mimi (on page xxv): all the contrite uxorious philogynist has to do is sign it and give all his money (or most of it: he can keep some petty cash, for pizza’s sake) to a woman or women of his choice. The Declaration, written in plain English, merely invites the signatory to make an admission that male

K AT H E R I N E S T R E E T E R

property and power are ill-gotten gains, the products of men’s misguided five-thousand-year-long terrorist campaign aimed at the usurpation and colonization of women. To give him his due, my copanelist, Alan Bissett, at a so-called debate on so-called feminism at the so-called Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2013, publicly pressed upon me £10. It was a start, though far from the full relinquishing of funds I have in mind. In return, I sent him, too, a stamped copy of the Mea Culpa Declaration. But from other men—apart from my husband, Todd McEwen, who has already given me all he has—there have been very few signs of acquiescence to my demands. No one has even asked me to defend my position. Men have relied on their stock tactic in response to female insurrection: they have tried to starve the idea of oxygen by not responding to it at all (aside from a

long, ill-considered review by Christopher Buckley in the New York Times that, among its other failures of understanding, wrongly accused my heroine Mimi of being a nymphomaniac—get with it, mister, female sexuality is legit). A few female reviewers have surfaced too, voicing doubts about my pro-female cash-redistribution plan. Now, wait a minute! You’re telling me you object to acquiring all the available wealth in the world, and with it the opportunity to subvert the murderous course men have taken? You’re using the examples of Margaret Thatcher and Elizabeth I and Medea and Pandora and Lady Macbeth to justify never giving women an even break? All because a few female creeps rose to high office within patriarchy, and because male writers came up with some violent female characters? You really believe women would The

Baffler [no.27] ! 43

Ba d Sci e n c e

Mind Your Own Business 3 Barbar a Ehrenreich

t about the beginning of this decade, massmarket mindfulness rolled out of the Bay Area like a brand new app. Very much like an app, in fact, or a whole swarm of apps. Previous selfimprovement trends had been transmitted via books, inspirational speakers, and CDs; now, mindfulness could be carried around on a smartphone. There are hundreds of them, these mindfulness apps, bearing names like Smiling Mind and Buddhify. A typical example features timed stretches of meditation, as brief as one minute, accompanied by soothing voices, soporific music, and images of forests and waterfalls. This is Buddhism sliced up and commodified, and, in case the connection to the tech industry is unclear, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist blurbed a seminal mindfulness manual by calling it “the instruction manual that should come with our iPhones and BlackBerries.” It’s enough to make you think that the actual Buddha devoted all his time under the Bodhi Tree to product testing. In the mindfulness lexicon, the word “enlightenment” doesn’t have a place. In California, at least, mindfulness and other conveniently accessible derivatives of Buddhism flourished well before BlackBerries. I first heard the word in 1998 from a wealthy landlady in Berkeley, advising me to be “mindful” of the suffocating Martha Stewart-ish decor of the apartment I was renting from her, which of course I was doing everything possible to un-see. A possible connection between her “mindfulness” and Buddhism emerged only when I had to turn to a tenants’ rights group to collect my security deposit. She countered with a letter accusing people like me—leftists, I suppose, or rent70 1 The Baffler [no.27]

ers—of oppressing Tibetans and disrespecting the Dalai Lama. During the same stint in the Bay Area, I learned that rich locals liked to unwind at Buddhist monasteries in the hills, where, for a few thousand dollars, they could spend a weekend doing manual labor for the monks. Buddhism, or some adaptation thereof, was becoming a class signifier, among a subset of Caucasians anyway, and nowhere was it more ostentatious than in Silicon Valley, where star player Steve Jobs had been a Buddhist or perhaps a Hindu—he seems not to have made much of a distinction—even before it was fashionable for CEOs to claim a spiritual life. Mindfulness guru and promoter Soren Gordhamer noticed in 2013 that tech leaders from Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other major tech companies seemed to be “tapped into an inner dimension that guides their work.” He called it “wisdom” and named his annual conferences Wisdom 2.0—helpful shorthand, as it happens, for describing the inner smugness of the Bay Area elite.

oday, mindfulness has far outgrown Silicon Valley and its signature industry, becoming another numbingly ubiquitous feature of the verbal landscape, as “positive thinking” once was. While an earlier, more arduous, version of Buddhism attracted few celebrities other than Richard Gere, mindfulness boasts a host of prominent practitioners—Arianna Huffington, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anderson Cooper among them. “Mindful leadership” debuted at Davos in 2013 to an overflow crowd, and Wisdom 2.0 conferences have taken place in New York and Dublin as well as San Francisco, with attendees fanning out to become missionaries

LISA HANE Y

This is Buddhism sliced up and commodified.

9 for the new mind-set. This yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s event in San Francisco advertises not only familiar faces from Google and Facebook, but also speeches by corporate representatives of Starbucks and Eileen Fisher. Aetna, a Fortune 100 health insurance company, offers its 34,000 employees a twelve-week meditation class, and its CEO dreams of expanding the program to include all its customers, who will presumably be

made healthier by clearing their minds. Even General Mills, which dates back to the nineteenth century, has added meditation rooms to its buildings, finding that a seven-week course produces striking results. According to the Financial Times, 83 percent of participants said they were â&#x20AC;&#x153;taking time each day to optimize my personal The

Baffler [no.27] ! 71

The Dol lar Deb auch

Purple Reign The unmaking of a Yahoo 3 Chris Lehmann

When the great granddaddy of opinion

journals, The New Republic, abruptly vanished in a sad, squalid burst of pixel dust and management theory last winter, establishment journalists rent their garments and gnashed their teeth in horror. “The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow,” a group of former writers and editors associated with the magazine pronounced in a public statement. The New Republic, they said, formerly “a kind of public trust,” had now suffered “its destruction in all but name.” In-house disputes over how the august policy organ should adapt to the digital age had claimed the jobs of editor Franklin Foer and literary editor Leon Wieseltier. A mass walkout ensued, with more than thirty writers, editors, and contributing editors forsaking the shop even before Foer’s designated successor, onetime Gawker editor Gabriel Snyder, could fire up his company email account. Chris Hughes, the thirty-one-year-old former Facebook mogul who acquired The New Republic in 2012 amid a round of adulatory press reports hailing the marriage of Silicon Valley largesse and Beltway savvy, now stood contemplating his handiwork in an all but vacant New Republic office, not long after he’d presided over the magazine’s onehundred-year gala. Happy Anniversary. The extraordinary—and largely portentous—burst of commentary that followed suggested something more was at stake than the bust-up of a magazine long past its prime. A month earlier, similar convulsions had upended the management team at another journalistic concern, one whose digital 76 1 The Baffler [no.27]

identity had been settled from the first: First Look Media, the pet project of eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. There, Rolling Stone muckraker Matt Taibbi and John Cook—another former Gawker editor—had bailed out of their plum positions editing Racket and The Intercept, two much-ballyhooed First Look startups with a roster of top-drawer writing and editing talent. (Racket, indeed, was permanently mothballed after Taibbi fled.) For a few months there at the end of 2014, it was as if the crown princes of digital innovation had become Midases in reverse, repelling experienced journalists in droves, even in the face of one of the most depressed markets for journalism work in modern history. Those thousand think pieces bloomed, all seeking to shed new light on the strange mores of tech-industry moguldom, and on how the inventors of the future had failed to match up to the tough-minded folkways of magazine-style journalism and the notoriously capital-and-labor-intensive work of reporting and analyzing the news. To me, though, the overlapping sagas of First Look and The New Republic were less a dramatic climax of the zeitgeist than a slowmotion train wreck that had already ejected me through the windows and into the woods. Even as the press notices greeting these enterprises had first unspooled, I couldn’t help but hear the low moan of a gathering nemesis in the distance. Or—to switch up my entertainment metaphors—I felt increasingly like a seasoned horror movie fan, espying all the telltale signs of a disaster waiting to happen: the callow corporate rhetoric of disruptive

MICHAEL DUFF Y

genius, the witless embrace of a nonsensical array of platforms and formats in a sequence seemingly adapted from a Mad Libs game book, the airy dismissal of content-production as though it were simply a species of hireling grunt work. All this had come rushing back because once upon a time, I had lived through it too, in my late, unlamented career as an online

news executive in that labyrinth of highoctane managerial passive-aggression known as Yahoo News.

Into the Purple Valley Yahoo News, it so happens, occupied center stage in the New Republic fiasco. In October 2014, a month before the whole operation went to hell, Hughes brought on Guy Vidra, The

Baffler [no.27] ! 77

K iss t h e B o o t

VCs Take the Media 3 Jacob Silverman

Alex Blumberg wanted to start a business.

The veteran radio producer had established himself with such prestige radio programs as This American Life and Planet Money. But in 2014 he decided he was ready to strike out on his own—to build a podcasting network featuring several narrative journalism projects in the TAL style. He began by starting a podcast about starting his podcasting business. He called it StartUp. “Meta, I know,” he says in the first episode. It’s certainly that, but it’s also a clever proof of concept, illuminating the anythingbut-intuitive connection between startup economics and real-world business planning. Whereas most startups fuss obsessively over unreleased beta versions of a new platform or iPhone app, or reconfigure sheaves of worked-over PowerPoint stacks, Blumberg had something to show people. But there was a hitch. Unlike a conventional documentary or reality show, StartUp wasn’t a retrospective chronicle—though it wasn’t quite a real-time narrative either. Blumberg was still building the company and talking to investors when the show aired its first episode on August 29, 2014. More installments followed, one every two weeks. The result was that anyone Blumberg talked to while creating his startup—his wife, potential investors, business partners and their spouses, would-be advertisers—knew they were becoming characters in a piece of narrative journalism. They were facing all the struggles that typically beset a startup project—from disputes over equity to philosophical arguments over how to describe the company’s mission—with the added complication of playing for the audio recorder the role of themselves. The effect was less 92 1 The Baffler [no.27]

meta than slightly vertiginous: Where does the media object end and Blumberg’s startup begin? Was this a daring new brand of documentary journalism or a venture-capital road show? Was Blumberg turning the spotlight on himself to chronicle his efforts or to promote them? The answer in all these cases, as one might guess, is both. But more important, StartUp serves as a strange but useful case study in deconstructing startup culture, where the future is anything a rich person promises it to be and a company’s value is a matter of shared hallucination. Given its public-radio pedigree, StartUp is what you might expect: confessional, insistently self-effacing, and chatty. Blumberg is smart, good-humored, and wears his feelings on his sleeve. He gets choked up, for instance, when he asks a new friend to become his business partner. The podcast milks awkward moments for dramatic effect, and there are more than a few. Blumberg has some excruciating verbal stumbles when first pitching his business to a prominent venture capitalist, and again when his soon-to-be business partner asks for 47 percent equity—a great deal more than the 10 percent stake Blumberg had in mind. In episode 4, he rises at 5:30 a.m., his voice hushed so that he won’t disturb his sleeping family, and spends several minutes solemnly reminiscing about The Giving Tree— Shel Silverstein’s famed children’s fable about unrewarded generosity—which had made him cry the previous day. Before sending out a term sheet to potential investors, Blumberg has to decide how much his company is worth. The number his team comes up with is $10 million—an essentially arbitrary figure, as he’s quick to admit.

S P E N C E R WA LT S

“The valuation, like everything in this startup world, is a story you’re telling,” Blumberg says. It’s a promise of future growth. The value isn’t, in any familiar sense, real. But all this is typical for a startup, especially in the midst of the present tech bubble. Even some of Blumberg’s investors admit that his valuation is

bubble-inflated, but that doesn’t seem to matter. For one thing, many people in Silicon Valley weren’t around when the last bubble burst. They haven’t been chastened by experience; meanwhile, there’s so much easy money sloshing through the system that it’s entirely plausible for a fortune to be coaxed out of it with The

Baffler [no.27] ! 93

Mo d e l s

The Monk Retires Letting go of Philip Roth 3 J. C. Hallman

T he phenomenon of Philip Roth’s “retire-

ment”—and that seems to be what it is now, a phenomenon—is not about a writer’s vanity, an ego grown so massive it’s like a publicity black hole sucking up limelight that might have shined warmly on other equally deserving authors. Nor is it about an inability to shut up, even though Roth admitted that his decision to quit writing, announced abruptly in 2012, had triggered in him an impulse to “chatter.” (Almost everyone has taken this quotation out of context, and I have too, which means that “chatter” may be on its way to becoming one of those offhand remarks that gets used to make a famous person appear to mean the opposite of what he probably did mean.) No, Roth’s announcement that he would leave the literary stage, followed by his conspicuous failure to do so in favor of a series of curtain calls, is about us—Roth’s audience, a community of readers. We’re the ones endlessly fascinated by Roth’s penchant to pontificate about himself in public, from an interview with the BBC aired last spring (titled “Philip Roth Unleashed”) to a promised appearance on The Colbert Report (reportedly scheduled for last summer, but apparently scrapped). Through it all, Roth continues to insist that he’s retreating into full Garbo mode. “You can write it down,” he told a reporter last May after a star turn at the 92nd Street Y. “This was absolutely the last public appearance I will make on any public stage, anywhere”—this just a week before collecting an award from the Yaddo writer’s retreat and two weeks before accepting an honorary doctorate at the conservative Jewish Theological Seminary. 184 1 The Baffler [no. 27]

Roth’s Where’s Waldo? approach to forsaking the public stage shouldn’t trigger another wearisome debate over how trustworthy the utterances of fiction writers need to be (short answer: not at all). Instead, it should give us a moment’s pause to ask just who Roth thinks he’s talking to—a question that, not incidentally, continues to sit, unanswered and arguably unanswerable, at the heart of all literary enterprise. Just as the moment of reading, the event of literature, is as much a function of a reader’s excited mind as it is the end product of a writer’s work, so too does the phenomenon of Philip Roth’s “retirement” say as much or more about what readers expect from their relationships with writers as it says about Roth, and his gnomic, ever-shifting sense of his own literary posterity. When it comes to the question of what writers are, exactly, in relation to readers, there is a remarkably broad range of thought. On the academic side of book culture, you have the whole death-of-the-author spiel, which would have us believe that writers are completely irrelevant to the literary experience, apart from having served as the corporeal conduit between ether and text. In contrast, on the business side, there’s an entire industry dedicated to manufacturing author personas: a marketing complex based entirely on the notion that readers use books as a means to become intimate with writers who either have, or have been outfitted with, compelling backstories. These extremes have something to do, I think, with Roth’s assertion—made in the same interview in which he initially offered his momentous announcement—that

PHILIP BURKE

The

Baffler [no. 27] ! 185

Ancestors

Man Is Not a Rock 3 Joseph Brodsky, with Elizabeth Markstein

This conversation between Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and

Austrian writer Elizabeth Markstein happened in Vienna during the summer of 1972, and it’s believed (by us, anyway) to be his first recorded interview after being expelled from the Soviet Union for no good reason. Privately held until Markstein’s death in Vienna on October 15, 2013, the recording, along with a transcript, was published two weeks later by the magazine Colta, one of the few independent outlets in Russia today. The interview appears, abridged, in English translation for the first time here.* The conversation begins with Brodsky reading five poems, including “The Candlemas,” or “Nunc Dimittis,” dated February 16, 1972. The poem alights on the meeting of Simeon and Jesus at the Temple and is dedicated to Anna Akhmatova. Brodsky’s final stanzas seem to foreshadow his own torch-carrying exile (in translation here by George L. Kline): He went forth to die. It was not the loud din of streets that he faced when he flung the door wide, but rather the deaf-and-dumb fields of death’s kingdom.

He strode through a space that was no longer solid.

The rustle of time ebbed away in his ears. And Simeon’s soul held the form of the child— its feathery crown now enveloped in glory—

aloft, like a torch, pressing back the black shadows,

to light up the path that leads into death’s realm, where never before until this present hour had any man managed to lighten his pathway.

The old man’s torch glowed and the pathway grew wider.

Elizabeth Markstein: Are there trends, schools, in contemporary poetry? * W hy the interview was not published (in any language) during the lifetimes of the two participants we don’t know. Brodsky’s literary executor, Ann Kjellberg, informs us that “he speaks critically of several writers and friends whom he held in high regard during the decades following; perhaps this was a constraint, and he did not in the end elect to make those views—necessarily of the moment—public.” Thanks to Ann Kjellberg for her kind permission to publish this interview, by the way.

196 1 The Baffler [no.27]

JOSEPH CIARDIELLO

The

Baffler [no.27] 197

DO NAT E

F LY N S T I T U T E

( P LE A S E )

THE BAFFLER FOUNDATION 9 Charitable as a Church! 9 thebaff ler.com/donate

Albrecht D端rer, Adam and Eve, 1504.

t heba f f ler.com