She's not a girl who misses much

"In June of this year patient experienced an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out. A thorough medical evaluation elicited no positive findings..." 

[...] 

The patient to whom the report refers is me. The tests mentioned [...] were administered privately [...] in the summer of 1968, shortly after I suffered the "attack of vertigo and nausea" mentioned in the first sentence and shortly before I was named a Los Angeles Times "Woman of the Year." By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.

— from The White Album, by Joan Didion.

Mushroom and Child, by Seana Gavin.

I had my own not inappropriate response to various personal events at the close of 2015. We all have our seasons. But on a societal level, surely 2020 is the year when no event can surprise us, to which no response is unexpected or inappropriate.

My houseplant sprouts more beautiful mushrooms. I wonder if there's a way to preserve them before they shrivel back into the soil. And what of the spores?

I learn: Als ich wieder zu mir komme, bin ich in einem großen Raum. I wonder if I will wake up from this.

Last night I dreamt I was in a big room, and while I was working, a man was taking impressions, like mini casts or moulds, of small parts of my back, smaller than the palm of my hand, such that most impressions were near blank, with only a barely discernible curve. 

I am watching I Love Dick, based on Chris Kraus's novel, which I am considering rereading because I feel I have yet to glean all I can from it. I want to make art of sex and desire, in the things I write and sculpt and maybe in the way I live too. 

Didion writes of the illusion that "all human endeavor tends mystically west." I think about looking for god and whether the search has any value when I know I will find nothing, I will be confronted with more nothingness, the nothingness is endless. I know the destination, but I know this journey too, I've taken it before. I think of Don Draper while I hum the Beatles and think about the taglines I need to explore for a project at work this week.

There are lights on the exterior walkway in front of my west-facing apartment. As I draw the curtains one night, I feel sorry for my tomato plant there, it must not be able to sleep. The plant is five feet tall now and has fruited several dozen green globes. It must be so tired.

A factory to manufacture sorrow

You may well doubt words themselves, but there is often no mistaking the tone of voice in which they are uttered.

I had occasion recently to read Alberto Moravia's The Woman of Rome, in Rome. This was a marvelous reading experience, for several reasons, and I am definitely motivated to read more Moravia on its basis, quite apart from the enticement of the several of his novels issued by NYRB Classics.

I anticipate a surge in this novel's popularity due to its being featured in a near-final episode of Mad Men. That was certainly a factor in my choice to read it at this time. It is currently hard to come by in print, but it's readily available electronically. I hope for an NYRB edition, but at 336 pages, it's a little longer than their average publication.

The Woman of Rome shows up poolside in 1970; one fully expects Don Draper to make a play for its reader. So I was a little surprised to discover that the novel dates back to 1949, appearing in English the same year (if my copyright page is to be trusted, but the date of Italian publication varies around the web — either 1947 or 1949). The story centers around a prostitute, so it's easy to interpret the bathing beauty as a simple symbol of Don's temptation.

But really, The Woman of Rome is about Don Draper. Don is Adriana, both of them saddled with expectations, both realists in their way even if they are mostly deluded. They are fully in themselves but not of themselves.

I can remember that when I found myself in the street, among the crowds, on a fine and cloudy day of that mild winter, I felt with better certainty that my life, like a river that has been artificially turned from its course for a brief period, had begun once more to flow in its usual direction, without change or novelty, after an interruption caused by my hopes and the preparations for my marriage. Perhaps this sensation was due in part to the fact that in my bewilderment I was looking around me with a gaze shorn of its original bright hopefulness. The crowd, the shops, the streets, appeared to me, for the first time in many months, in a pitilessly objective light, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither interesting nor dull, but just as they were — as they must appear to a drunkard when his state of intoxication is past. But more probably it derived from my realization that the normal things of life were not, as I had supposed, my plans for happiness, but the exact opposite — I mean, all those things that are inimical to planning and programs are casual, faulty, and unforeseen agents of disillusionment and sorrow. If this were true, as I thought it must be, I had undoubtedly begun that morning to live again, after a state of intoxication lasting several months.

Adriana is desperately trying to rise above her circumstances, to break out of a cycle but condemned to it.

I climbed the steps, pushed aside the heavy covering over the door, and entered, putting a handkerchief on my head. While I dipped my fingers in the holy water stoup, I was struck by a scene carved around the edge of the stoup — it showed a naked woman, her hair streaming in the wind, her arms raised as she fled, pursued by a foul dragon, with a parrots' beak, that was standing upright on its hind legs like a man. I seemed to recognize myself in that woman and thought how I, too, was fleeing just such a dragon, that the course of my flight was circular, like hers, but that as I ran around in circles, I sometimes found I was not fleeing but was following a desire and gaily pursuing the ugly beast.

Adriana works as a nude model when she falls in love with Gino. They are engaged to be married but it turns out that Gino is a good-for-nothing liar and a cheat, so that's the end of that. Adriana is very realistic about her assets and her prospects. Before you know it she's a prostitute; she likes the money, and her mother likes the money too, although they never really speak of it.

I was not at all ashamed; I only felt an occasional sense of servitude and betrayal of my own nature.

Adriana's relationship with her mother is central to this novel, and that complex relationship appears to have been Moravia's starting point. Mother is always there, complaining about eyestrain and a shortage of sewing work, she's always there in the background, in the next room, or waiting for Adriana to return home, or trying to keep out of the way. Adriana's character is formed by this and the expectations set on her. (Note, the Wikipedia entry on this novel gets a key point wrong: Adriana's mother is not herself a prostitute, although she certainly encourages Adriana to cash in on her looks.)

I had always loved the Madonna because she carried a baby in her arms and because her baby, who became a man, was killed; and she who bore him and loved him as any mother loves her son and suffered so when she saw him hanging on the cross. I often thought to myself that the Madonna, who had so many sorrows, was the only one who could understand my own sorrows, was the only one who could understand my own sorrows, and as a child I used to pray to her alone, as the only one who could understand me. Besides, I liked the Madonna because she was so different from Mother, so serene and tranquil, richly clothed, with her eyes that looked on me so lovingly; it was as if she were my real mother instead of the mother who spent her time scolding me and was always worn out and badly dressed.

Then there's the police chief who offers to keep her. Adriana doesn't like him much, but she comes to rely on him for advice and favours. Meanwhile she falls in love with a politically active student. She's still working and encounters some unsavoury characters. There is theft and murder, thuggishness and underground pamphleteering. All the characters and storylines are threaded together quite nicely.

If it's not clear, I loved this book. Adriana is a wonderfully drawn, complex character. According to the promo copy:

One of the very few novels of the twentieth century which can be ranked with the work of Dostoevsky, The Woman of Rome also tells the stories of the tortured university student Giacomo, a failed revolutionary who refuses to admit his love for Adriana; of the sinister figure of Astarita, the Secret Police officer obsessed with Adriana; and of the coarse and brutal criminal Sonzogno, who treats Adriana as his private property. Within this story of passion and betrayal, Moravia calmly strips away the pride and arrogance hiding the corrupt heart of Italian Fascism.

The story is not, to me, obviously political. I needed to be reminded about Italian Fascism. The novel reads very smoothly and could easily be set anytime over the last century. Reading the story in Rome leant it an extra golden hue, and brought to life the streets, the bars, the shops. Ultimately I found it to be a very introspective novel, about what we demand of life and how unfairly it can treat us.

My room, which was always full of cigarette smoke, seemed to me like a factory working day and night to manufacture sorrow, without a moment's break; and the very air I breathed had by now become a thick gelatinous mass of sad, obsessive thoughts.

The Paris Review
Alberto Moravia, The Art of Fiction No. 6
On the writing process:

I had intended it to run to no more than three or four typescript pages, treating the relations between a woman and her daughter. But I simply went on writing. [...] It was a case, simply, of my thinking initially that I had a short story and finding four months later that it was a novel instead.

On the psychology of his characters:

For the psychology of my characters, and for every other aspect of my work, I draw solely upon my experience; but understand, never in a documentary, a textbook, sense. No, I met a Roman woman called Adriana. Ten years afterward I wrote the novel for which she provided the first impulse. She has probably never read the book. I only saw her that once; I imagined everything, I invented everything.

On writing novels, generally:

I do not foresee a time when I shall feel that I have nothing to say.

Disillusionment

Mad Men has returned, and it got literary again.

While only one novel was clearly in view, and shown to be actively read — The 42nd Parallel, by John Dos Passos — there's another literary reference straining through Peggy Lee's rendition of "Is That All There Is?" which opens and closes last night's episode. The song's lyrics were inspired by Thomas Mann's short story "Disillusionment."

I zealously fed my magnificent expectations of life with the matter of a thousand books and the works of all the poets. Ah, how I have learned to hate them, those poets who chalked up their large words on all the walls of life — because they had no power to write them on the sky with pencils dipped in Vesuvius! I came to think of every large word as a lie or a mockery.

Ecstatic poets have said that speech is poor: "Ah, how poor are words," so they sing. But no, sir. Speech, it seems to me, is rich, is extravagantly rich compared with the poverty and limitations of life. Pain has its limits: physical pain in unconsciousness and mental in torpor; it is not different with joy. Our human need for communication has found itself a way to create sounds which lie beyond these limits.

Is the fault mine? Is it down my spine alone that certain words can run so as to awaken in me intuitions of sensations which do not exist?

You can read it in its entirety, or listen to it here.

It's not hard to imagine that the story was written with Don Draper in mind. Ennui in extremis.

Subject to the profoundest doubt

Written in 1963, The Group, by Mary McCarthy, follows the intertwined lives of a set of Vassar graduates, class of '33.

I only became aware of this book because in season 3 of Mad Men, Betty slips into the bath with it. Generally regarded as an early feminist novel, The Group this year celebrated the 50th anniversary of its publication, though it is set several decades earlier still.

The book could equally be regarded as a set of intertwined short stories. Each chapter focuses on one member of the group, and we hear about the rest of the group from that perspective. The chapters could for the most part stand on their own, but they are more powerful within the context of the group.

Kay:

She had been amazingly altered, they felt, by a course in Animal Behaviour she taken with old Miss Washburn who had left her brain in her will to Science) during their junior year. This and her work with Hallie Flanagan in Dramatic Production had changed her from a shy, pretty, somewhat heavy Western girl with black lustrous curly hair and a wild-rose complexion, active in hockey, in the choir, given to large tight brassieres and copious menstruations, into a thin, hard-driving, authoritative young woman, dressed in dungarees, sweat shirt, and sneakers, with smears of paint in her unwashed hair, tobacco stains on her fingers, talking airily of "Hallie" and "Lester," Hallie's assistant, of flats and stippling, of oestrum and nymphomania, calling her friends by their last names loudly — "Eastlake," "Renfrew," "MacAusland" — counseling premarital experiment and the scientific choice of a mate. Love, she said, was an illusion.

Helena:

Her mother's habit of stressing and underlining her words had undergone an odd mutation in being transmitted to Helena. Where Mrs. Davison stresses and emphasized, Helena inserted her words carefully between inverted commas, so that clauses, phrases, and even proper names, inflected, by her light voice, had the sound of being ironical quotations. While everything Mrs. Davison said seemed to carry with it a guarantee of authority, everything Helena said seems subject to the profoundest doubt.

Norine is an outsider, not a member of the group, but after graduation she is a neighbour of Kay's and her life also becomes caught up in the group's fate:

"All I knew that night was that I believed I something and couldn't express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it — in other men's words."

And:

Watching her, Helena granted Norine a certain animal vitality, and "earthiness" that was underscored, as if deliberately, by the dirt and squalor of the apartment. Bedding with her, Helena imagined, must be like rolling in a rich moldy compost of autumn leaves, crackling on the surface, like her voice, and underneath warm and sultry from the chemical process of decay.

Chapter two covers Dottie's deflowering, and even while I was thinking, "Dottie, don't do it," and "The dialogue is ridiculous," and "Girls in 1933, huh", and "You're overthinking it," there was some laughing too, it also managed to make me blush. I may not have read 50 Shades, but I'm no prude, and this event was unabashedly, genuinely, beautifully female.

Is this book still relevant today? I want to say yes, but if I'm to be honest with you, I'll have to stammer that, well, it's not irrelevant, anyway. Certainly it was noteworthy on its release in 1963, but women have changed. Society and social expectations have not changed as much as they ought, and I fear today's women may neither recognize nor heed the warnings — about love, marriage, motherhood, parenting, career, gender equality, life — carried in The Group's gentle observations of what becomes of college girls.

See also:
Vassar, Unzipped!, by Laura Jacobs, Vanity Fair, July 2013.
The Mary McCarthy Case, by Norman Mailer, The New York Review of Books, October 1963.

More literary Mad Men

Another season of Mad Men has come and gone, and I thought it time to update the list of books (and poems, and other reading material) sighted or discussed in seasons 5 and 6.

(The list of books that had screen time in seasons 1 thru 4 is here.)

• Trumbo, Dalton: Johnny Got His Gun (S05E01)
• Leary, Timothy: The Psychedelic Experience (S05E06)
• Malamud, Bernard: The Fixer (S05E07)
• Plath, Sylvia: Lady Lazarus (S05E08)
• Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49 (S05E08)
• Shelley, Percy Byshe: Ozymandias (S05E09)
• Alexander, Lloyd: The Black Cauldron (S05E09)
• Francis, Dick: Odds Against (S05E09)
• Brown, Margaret Wise: Goodnight Moon (S05E11)
• Dante: The Inferno (S06E01)
• McMurtry, Larry: The Last Picture Show (S06E07)
• Levin, Ira: Rosemary's Baby (S06E08)
• Massie, Robert K.: Nicholas and Alexandra (S06E11)
• Mad Magazine: Sept 1968, no. 121 (S06E11)

A shoutout also to Hitler — "That's what they said about Mein Kampf, kid's got talent." (S05E03)

Ralph Waldo Emerson belongs on the list, but not a specific title, just the general idea of him (S06E07).

Season 6 also saw references to Edgar Allan Poe and William Wordsworth, and Don's kids watching The Prisoner (not a book, I know, but it has literary qualities and I'll take this reference as an excuse to rewatch it).

(I'd had the feeling that scenes of people reading has slowed down, but listing them out here, that appears not to be the case at all.)

One episode of season 5 featured original fiction by account exec Kenny Cosgrove (S05E05). He refers to his short story, "The Woman Who Laid an Egg and Then Gave It Away," and we're treated to an excerpt of "The Man with the Miniature Orchestra." He describes "The Punishment of X4":

"There's this bridge between these two planets and thousands of humans travel on it every day, and there's this robot who does maintenance on the bridge. One day he removes a bolt, the bridge collapses, and everyone dies."

"There's more to it than that," a nervous Cosgrove tells the hushed room. Don pushes for further details: Why does the robot destroy the bridge? "Because he's a robot," Ken answers, clearly encouraged by Don's interest. "Those people tell him what to do and he doesn't have the power to make any decisions, except he can decide whether that bolt's on or off."

What have I missed? (This more complete list includes books seen of shelves, but we all know that just because a book is sitting there doesn't mean it's been cracked.)

I have a passing acquaintance with many of Mad Men's books, but I haven't read many. I've read Plath and Shelley, and Johnny Got His Gun seriously affected me as a teenager. I don't think I'll be reading Dante's Inferno on the beach this summer, but The Crying of Lot 49 and Rosemary's Baby are more intriguing than ever. Are you still reading along with Mad Men?

Just some pennies that you pick up off the floor

Season six of Mad Men opens with Don Draper reading Dante's Inferno (tr John Ciardi), on the beach.

Midway in our life's travel, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood.

He is, of course, taking his own journey through hell.

The episode is entitled "The Doorway." Leave it to Roger, simple drunk, guru, to channel Aldous Huxley, to see things clearly:

"What are the events in life? It's like you see a door. The first time you come to it you say 'Oh, what's on the other side of the door?' Then you open a few doors, then you say 'I think I want to go over that bridge this time, I'm tired of doors.' Finally, you go through one of these things and you come out the other side and you realize that's all there are. Doors and windows and bridges and gates and they all open the same way and they all close behind you. Look, life is supposed to be a path and you go along and these things happen to you and they're supposed to change you, change your direction. But it turns out that's not true. It turns out the experiences are nothing. They're just some pennies that you pick up off the floor, stick in your pocket. You're just going in a straight line to you know where."

It brings to mind yet another journey through hell, William Blake's:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

Huxley in The Doors of Perception (which title was inspired by Blake's poem) also references "The Door in the Wall," a short story by H.G. Wells, whose protagonist reminds me of someone...

Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written visibly in his face. I have a photograph in which that look of detachment has been caught and intensified. It reminds me of what a woman once said of him — a woman who had loved him greatly. "Suddenly," she said, "the interest goes out of him. He forgets you. He doesn't care a rap for you — under his very nose..."

Yet the interest was not always out of him, and when he was holding his attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an extremely successful man. His career, indeed, is set with successes.

I rather suspect Don may meet a fate similar to Wallace's.

I am more than half convinced that he had in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something — I know not what — that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination.

Hold it tightly by its little tentacle

"I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."

"Cherish it!" cried Hilarius, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."

For a few weeks now I've been scouring local bookstores for a copy of The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon. I have some Pynchon on my shelf that I mean to get to some day, but now, now! — since that episode of Mad Men with Pete Campbell on the train reading The Crying of Lot 49 — I have to read that Pynchon first, and now.

Were it available as an ebook, I'd have downloaded it by the time that episode's final credits had finished rolling.

By an amazing coincidence, the day I've coordinated my schedule to make a lunch-hour trip to a particular bookstore on which I'm betting to have an actual physical copy is the day I receive news that Penguin has struck a deal with Pynchon, and his books are available digitally as of today.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Mad Men effect played a role in nudging both parties to reach an agreement.

See also: Why the Hell is Peter Campbell Reading The Crying of Lot 49?

Making everything ordinary too beautiful to bear

There were phrases of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that still made Coe cry. He always thought it had to do with the circumstances of the composition itself. He imagined Beethoven deaf and soul-sick, his heart broken, scribbling furiously while Death stood in the doorway, clipping his nails. Still, Coe thought, it might have been living in the country that was making him cry. It was killing him with its silence and loneliness, making everything ordinary too beautiful to bear.

— from "The Man with the Miniature Orchestra," by Dave Algonquin.

Mad Men gets literary again

Season 5 of Mad Men is off to a fine start. Episode 1 culminates in a surprise birthday party for Don. And it's a fabulous party: drinks for everyone, boys looking at girls, marijuana on the balcony, a little yé-yé, and a heated political discussion in the kitchen that references in great detail Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo.

[I read Johnny when I was about 14 and it blew my mind. And boy, do I know it — talking about that book is a great way to kill a party. But then, at 14, I was going to a different kind of party.]

No blatant literary references in episode 2, but I couldn't help but pick up a little Lolita vibe as Lane Pryce obsessed over a photo of aptly named Dolores.

Maybe it's a sign that Simenon is too much on my mind, but it strikes that a couple characters are potentially deeply Simenonesque.

Pete Campbell, junior partner. I don't find him sympathetic, or even likeable, but mostly he's just trying to catch a break. He tries hard. In these episodes I'm noticing a look in his eyes. When he rides in to work on the train in the morning, there's a look like it might be his last ride, he's not riding home ever again. When he returns to his suburban home one evening there's a look of "how did I get here?" (I mean, "how the hell did I end up here?") and for a moment I thought he might snap his wife's neck.

Lane Pryce, finance guy. British, but also deeply sympathetic. He keeps wanting to step out of his box, but always ends up squarely in his box. Now he finds a wallet, finds a photo inside the wallet, calls about returning the wallet and talks to the girl in the photo, returns the wallet, but keeps the photo. It's so small, but it's a transgression, and it's pervy. The others may topple secretaries over their desks, but Lane's innocuous actions are more loaded. My money's on Lane absconding with the company funds. For a girl.

Now, all the characters cross lines, social and ethical. So why do I point to these two as typical Simenon antiheroes? For most of the characters, their morals fall whichever way the 60s are blowing. They fill an immediate need, resolve an immediate problem; they scratch an itch. They're not, on the whole, acting out of any deep-seated unhappiness; they're just reacting. But these two! It's like they're prodding some existential bruise.

Is Simenon colouring the way I look at the world? Am I reading too much into Pete and Lane? Are they any different from the rest of the Mad Men? What do you think makes them tick?

See my list of books referred to in Mad Men's first 4 seasons.

Advertising

I don't understand advertising. I don't understand how it works. How is it that it still works when I know what it's trying to do? The most astute ad men while they can appreciate an ad's workings will still be seduced by a turn of phrase, an image, or the idea behind them.

But when I don't see what it's trying to do, it appears to be pointless — and what's the point of pointless advertising? Some ads, no matter how hard I look, have neither cool nor clear branding going for them. I know that I'm cynical by nature, and I tend to question my surroundings, but I couldn't possibly be immune to advertising, could I? Is anybody immune to advertising?

The advertising agency Leo Burnett earlier this year released a book about its HumanKind philosophy. Humankind, by Tom Bernardin and Mark Tutssel, Leo Burnett Worldwide. It should be of some interest to advertising professionals. As a coffeetable book it's sure to interest many casual browsers. It is gorgeous. But I'm not sure who would read it cover to cover (although, I did).

(Note: I'm not actually completely stupid about advertising. I did work at an agency for a couple of years (in the capacity of "quality assurance specialist"), and some aspects of my current job also have a marketing angle. Also, I once dated someone who is now an advertising mogul. But I won't pretend that I know a whole lot about the business either.)

Humankind starts off reading like a manifesto.

HumanKind breaks the routine into which the advertising industry fell during the let-the-good-times-roll years of the late-20th and early-21st century global economic boom (and to which many people in the industry still adhere). People then had money to burn — or they could easily borrow the money to burn. Merchandise and services were flying off shelves. We were generating a need for products whose only purpose was to placate clients and shareholders' desire for more, more, more. Creativity rooted in genuine human need was devalued. In its place "positioning" began to masquerade as creativity.

Because of all of this, many of us who market brands — and if you're reading this book, that may mean you — got lazy and began to forget that it's people who make the difference. We found ways to communicate based on our needs and ambitions. People? Who are they?

Empty at its core, faithless to human needs, and untrue to the world in which we live, this sort of creativity sputtered and finally lost its power.

The Internet had a lot to do with this, of course. People today are savvier yet more cynical — savvier because information is literally at our fingertips, more cynical because information is literally at our fingertips.

People have gone from passive to empowered, from one-size-fits-all to wanting and expecting everything to be custom-made, from inferred knowledge to direct knowledge.

We are no longer "consumers" first, but humans first.

[...]

We can no longer build brands, we can only move people. We can no longer position brands, we can only create content that encourages authentic conversations between people and brands based on a brand's human purpose. We can no longer rely on ads that speak to people, we must provide people with opportunities to act. As marketers, we can no longer claim that it is up to us to be the motor that drives brands, we can only empower people and let them take the steering wheel themselves.

But the book soon dwindles into a portfolio of case studies. Ultimately, I'm not sure that it's more than a lush piece of marketing collateral for the agency itself. Still, it has inspired me to react.

Leo Burnett's biggest success, without a doubt, at least in terms of embodying the HumanKind philosophy, is Earth Hour. This now annual global event is, at its core, a marketing campaign. It raises awareness regarding a specific issue. It doesn't matter that we don't know that World Wildlife Fund is behind it. In this case, marketing isn't about sales.

As I already mentioned, this book is gorgeous: photo spreads, bold font, pages of colour. There are slogans spattered throughout, often big white text on pink or orange or green. Things like, "value of the brand to society = value of society to the brand." "Ad agencies don't create iconic brands, people do." That all (good) advertising is an invitation to people to act.

On sober afterthought, I'm no longer reacting viscerally — when first I closed this book, my gut was screaming that advertising is stupid (is it because I so badly don't want to be played?). How can anyone make money with this, how can they spend so much money to create this, who does advertising work on?

But, on sober afterthought, I'm finding much to admire in HumanKind; for example, the Museu Efémoro, where a rum distillery sponsored the cataloguing of street art in Lisbon.

An interesting supplement to this book, both as reinforcement and occasional counterpoint, is a documentary I recently watched, Art & Copy (which can be viewed in its entirety online), in which the importance of connecting with your audience is stressed above selling a product per se.

The modern advertising agency, according to the film, stemmed from a fundamental shift in thinking about advertising — from words, often illustrated as an afterthought, to art, in which design was integral to the message being conveyed. Hence the Creative Director was born.

Mostly though, this film features people who just love doing advertising, because it can be clever and cool, and when they're lucky, they make a lot of money by helping someone make a lot money. But I'm not convinced a lot of people understand how it works.

Don Draper cut through all the bullshit when he said, "I don't sell advertising, I sell products." Has the essence of advertising really changed all that much from the world as portrayed in Mad Men?

Yeah, advertising can be cool. Humankind almost makes me believe that it can even mean something.

Literary Mad Men

It's taken a while, but finally I've watched all Mad Men episodes to date. From the start of the series, it's been impossible not to notice what these wonderfully culturally literate (it is advertising, after all) characters were reading.

I've tried to keep a list of those books that were directly discussed or in the hands of readers. In chronological occurrence of their mention:

• Lawrence, DH: Lady Chatterley's Lover (S01e03)
• Jaffe, Rona: The Best of Everything (S01e06)
• Uris, Leon: Exodus (S01e06)
• Rand, Ayn: Atlas Shrugged (S01e08, but with several mentions)
• O'Hara, Frank: Meditations in an Emergency (S02e01)
• Fitzgerald, F Scott: Babylon Revisited and Other Stories (S02e04)
• Forester, CS: Horatio Hornblower (S02e08)
• Porter, Katherine Anne: Ship of Fools (S02e09)
• Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury (S02e11)
• Gibbon, Edward: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (S03e03)
• Ogilvy, David: Confessions of an Advertising Man (S03e06)
• Twain, Mark: Tom Sawyer (S03e06)
• Hilton, Conrad: Be My Guest, Autobiography of Conrad Hilton (S03e07)
• McCarthy, Mary: The Group (S03e10)
• Benedict, Ruth: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (S04e05)
• Keene, Carolyn: The Clue of the Black Keys (S04e09)
• Berne, Eric: Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships (S04e10)
• Le Carré, John: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (S04e13)

Of course, there have been countless literary allusions throughout the series. TS Eliot's The Hollow Men was recited. A reference to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Sloan Wilson) is as much a cultural touchstone as it has to do with any novel. Moby Dick. I can't help but think of The Bell Jar when you mention the summer the Rosenbergs were executed, but very likely that's the sort of reference that wasn't necessarily intended.

I've read only a few of those listed, some of them many years ago, but on watching some episodes, I have been inspired to directly seek out some titles, particularly since they are not merely props but have direct bearing on the plot or characters at issue. I know I'm not the only one to be reading up. Frank O'Hara's rediscovery has been widely noted.

Similarly, according to NPR, "Interest in Rand and her philosophy is on the upswing. Since the 2008 presidential election, according to Brook, the novel Atlas Shrugged has sold more than 1 million copies, far more than in any similar period in the book's 54-year history." While this is linked to the rising popularity of the Tea Party, no doubt sales for this particular novel were boosted by its exposure on Mad Men.

But I think my favourite book sighting, late in season 4, is the Nancy Drew mystery in Sally Draper's hands. We've seen the books in the house she grew up in; it should come as no surprise that Sally too should find escape in a good book. Reminds me a little of my own young self, visiting my dad's office and being told to sit quietly — I'd read. Though I can't recall it specifically, I'm sure I read The Clue of the Black Keys — I read them all. I'll be sure to dig this one out of the box in my mom's basement as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Have you been reading along with the Mad Men?

Sandwich guy

Every day (well, most days), sometime between 11:45 and about 12:30 (although on at least two occasions as late as 1:20), there's a guy in a ski jacket and tuque who walks briskly down the main aisle (on which I'm situated) between the desks at my office, with a big blue cooler slung across his back. He calls out, "Sandwiches," brusquely; sometimes as he's approaching, but sometimes you just hear the echo of it — you look up and realize he's already turned the corner.

It took me a couple of weeks to figure it out: the man actually sells sandwiches. And a little while longer before I actually witnessed a transaction.

What era are we in? I see them sell sandwiches from the cart on Mad Men, but I never thought I'd see anything like it in my working career.

After monitoring his comings and goings for a few weeks, I finally asked some coworkers about him. They rewarded me with a spreadsheet recording the times of his appearance over the space of a few months, about a year ago. It seems my predecessor gave him the moniker I was already using in my head, and my time-tracking observations were confirmed.

Sandwich Guy does indeed sells sandwiches; and they're pretty good, they say.

He's associated with Les Sandwichs Volants, but nobody knows definitively his relationship with that organization, or how he comes to traverse our office space on a quasi-regular basis.

There's on ongoing debate as to whether his service commands tipping, and it seems my predecessor believed firmly that it did not — which, it's alleged, may have a little something to do with his unreliability. Past a certain hour, you just can't be sure that he'll have anything left to satisfy your particular lunchtime needs, or that he'll show up at all. (Although, it's hard to know if they ever really attended to Sandwich Guy's behaviour before my predecessor drew attention to it.)

Today, was my first first-hand experience with Sandwich Guy. I tagged behind a few coworkers who were hoping to head him off before he sold out of goods at the other end of the office. Alas, no carrot cake for the translator, but the vegetarian was in luck, and so was I.

Only two meat sandwiches left. I considered roast lamb, but opted otherwise.

Rôti de porc tranché, mayonnaise, piments marinés, sauce piquants, tomates, concombres, laitue. On a foot of baguette. Delicious. For $5.50.

And he called me mademoiselle.

I'm sorry I waited till winter is almost over. I could grow to really like Sandwich Guy.

The catastrophe of my personality

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

— from "Mayakovsky," by Frank O'Hara, in Meditations in an Emergency.

I first heard this bit of poetry quite recently, and it's probably the first I'd ever heard of Frank O'Hara, and I'm sure it's true for many people, when Don Draper recited it at the close of an episode of Mad Men.

It's not the first time Mad Men has inspired my literary pickings, and I'm sure it won't be the last, but something about this recitation made me gasp, and cry a little, and want to know everything about Frank O'Hara and the bar he sat in while writing it.

I think this stanza did all it could do for me, and then some — one beautiful television minute, lingering and working through my bloodstream. Weeks since I first saw it, I think about it every day.

But I ordered this collection for my sister straightaway (happy birthday Ivonna!), because, well, I don't know why. There is no emergency, no urgent need for meditation, not beyond the daily emergency of life. Not for her, I don't think, and not for me. It may be the coldest day of the year, that's all, and we should meditate some.

I think about becoming myself again.

Two social documents

I recently read The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath (originally published under a pseudonym), and I have to admit, I'm a bit mystified why so many people (well, mostly anonymous-to-me online readers, grown women who read it when they were moody teenagers) think of this book so fondly.

I didn't know anything about The Bell Jar, except that it was the only novel Plath wrote. (The Biblioracle suggested it to me months ago, and I thought, huh, there's a gap in my literary education.) Talk of it never seemed to address the novel itself, but rather was steeped in the "romantic" circumstances of Plath's life and suicide.

It's often described as chronicling Esther Greenwood's descent into depression, which I think is a bit false; there is no descent into madness — the depression is always there. It's not a gradual progression, nor does it appear to be due to a particular trigger. Esther's just wired that way. And in that way, I think it's a pretty accurate portrayal of what I understand clinical depression to be. Also, the account of the experience of undergoing electroshock treatment is fascinating.

The first portion of the book tells of Esther's adventures in New York City. They're kind of crazy, not in a psychologically abnormal way, but in a wild-life-of-college-girls-let-loose-in-the-big-city way, and this is fairly comic and entertaining. The tone is quite similar to that in a couple other books I've read lately: Elaine Dundy's Dud Avocado and Rona Jaffe's Best of Everything (more on this in a bit).

And then Esther starts trying to kill herself. This is where the novel stops working for me, because I just can't connect with this character. I take this as a fairly sure sign that I don't have clinical depression, but it also makes me question how good is this novel as a novel. Forget its worth as a sociohistorical document, insight into Plath's biography, the breaking of taboos regarding mental illness, for there's no doubt the novel has great value in this regard. It just leaves me cold. And a good novel makes me feel for who peoples them, whether or not I have anything in common with them. With Esther I feel a kind of blankness (and maybe this is the point? that this depression, the suicidal ideation, is really unknowable unless you're in it?).

I'm now also seriously worried about all the young women who relate to this book. Really?

For all this, The Bell Jar is a quick (less than 200 pages) and relatively entertaining read, not depressing at all. Esther's voice is light and chatty; it's not the "poetry" I was expecting, but there are some wonderful, sometimes startling, descriptions:

That was another thing — the rest of us had starched cotton summer nighties and quilted housecoats, or maybe terry-towel robes that doubled as beachcoats, but Doreen wore these full-length nylon and lace jobs you could half see through, and dressing-gowns the colour of sin, that stuck to her by some kind of electricity. She had an interesting, slightly sweaty smell that reminded me of those scallopy leaves of sweet fern you break off and crush between your fingers for the musk of them.

There's a throwaway line in the opening pages: "last week I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with." Later, when Esther's steeped in her illness, I questioned whether I'd read that line at all, or if I'd understood it correctly, and I wonder now how much it contributes to the attitude I'd formed toward the rest of the book, that Esther will survive this, everything's going to be all right.

But as far as depicting the recklessness of the young American woman of the 1950s, The Dud Avocado (though set a few years later) conveys something more meaningful to me, with more comedy and tragedy, and in a much stronger, fresher, more distinctive voice.

The Best of Everything, by Rona Jaffe, is another fascinating sociohistorical document, much more accessible, and in my opinion, an all-round better novel.

I've only recently started watching Mad Men, and at the beginning of episode 6 (Babylon) of season 1, Don Draper is in bed with this novel as Betty is chattering about the movie adaptation and whether Joan Crawford's looks are holding up. The beauty of the ereader is such that minutes after the episode finished, I myself was reading The Best of Everything in bed. (I'd be reading Leon Uris's Exodus now too if it were available as an ebook.)

No doubt Don was reading it to complement the advice of the review in the New York Post: "Any employer reading these pages will make a mental note to check up on what the girls in his office do after lunch, and with whom."

It follows the lives of a handful of women, most of whom work in a publishing office, and offers a glimpse into the workings thereof. While it might be said to focus on their romantic adventures, it's a lot more complicated than that. Office politics, gender politics, career ambition, the pressure to marry. These women have a lot to deal with, and Jaffe dispenses a fair measure of philosophical wisdom in her commentary:

Change in a person's character structure is slow and almost imperceptible, and although many people look back and say, This was the day that changed my life, they are never wholly right. The day you choose one college instead of another, or decide not to go to college at all, the day you take one job instead of another because you cannot wait, the day you meet someone you later love — all are days that lead to change, but none of them are decisive because the choice itself is the unconscious product of days that have gone before. So when April Morrison, looking back, said, "The day of the Fabian office party in 1952 was the day that changed my life," she was wrong. The day she cut her hair because she wanted to look like Caroline Bender, the day she saw her first movie and dreamed of New York — all were days that changed her life, and if it had not been for all of them she would never have become involved with Dexter Key.

(And a tragedy that turned out to be!)

Anyway, The Best of Everything is a novel that had me up late at night and snatching coffeebreaks at work just to see what happens next. It even made me cry. It had seemed to me that the only way to close off the story would be either in utter devastation or else with an unrealistically fairy-tale finish, but Jaffe surprises in offering up a perfect ending. It's completely hopeful that a balance can be struck between career and family, and that a woman's independence, whether sexual or financial, can be asserted. Sadly, I think this novel is still very relevant today.

If you're one of the many who love The Bell Jar, I'd love to hear why! Then go read The Best of Everything.