The Cult of Genius and the "Worker Who Reads"

In spite of his great importance for modern literature Bertolt Brecht is little mentioned in the English-speaking world, while from what mention he does get it is as a highly experimental playwright, rather than as a poet who produced many a verse of more conventional character.

One of Brecht's more famous poems is "Questions From a Worker Who Reads." The poem's worker, becoming acquainted with the events of history--the feats of arms, the feats of construction--finds himself wondering at who actually accomplished those feats. As he remarks early on all this is attributed to "kings," but it is not clear how they did it. "Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?" he asks. Reading of the conquests of Alexander and Caesar and even Frederick the Second, he wonders if they were alone when he made them--for certainly the books give the impression, speaking of no others. "Who cooked the feast for the victors?" he asks. "Who paid the bill?"

The worker finds no answers in the conventional, "Great Man"-minded history he has before him--and many would consider it an impertinence that he expect any, for only the Great Man was worth writing about. But alas, there is the matter of who hauled up "the lumps of rock." The trick for many is to trivialize that aspect of the matter, and the people who perform that task, as they enlarge the contribution of the "Great Men."

This is where the usage of the concept of "genius" of which we hear so much comes in, because it permits that to happen--permits, above all, individuals to be credited with the work of collectivities, even collectivities over eons, because it claims nothing short of transcendence of the merely human via reference to some mystical quality that endows the rare possessor with powers of the mind or personality as outlandish as the physical powers of the greatest superheroes.

However, to the best of my knowledge Brecht never wrote the poem where the worker was given that answer--and what the worker thought about it.

Why Are Pop Stars as Big as Ever When Other Celebrities Aren't?

Over the years I have written about the decline of celebrity, and seen this as partly a matter of broad social and technological developments (like the fragmentation of pop culture), but also developments relevant to particular kinds of celebrity (like the way that franchises and hyper-edited special effects-packed spectacle have overshadowed actors and thus stars in the biggest movies around, or sports have become less central to the entertainment-media world with all that means for how big a sports star can get).

However, music would seem an exception--this an area where the biggest Names are as big as they ever were, maybe bigger. (Pre-Taylor Swift, how many recording artists were honored by TIME as "Person of the Year?")

If one sees such a phenomenon as telling us something about the state of the culture in which we live it seems reasonable to give a moment's thought to explaining it.

One attempt by the BBC's Steve McIntosh to explain the matter (actually as attentive to the decline of the film star as the prominence of the pop star) stresses, on the positive side, the sense of closeness of people to pop stars in a way not the case with actors. He makes much of the personal connection people feel with a singer listening to their song, and especially the presentation of many of today's top pop stars as singer-songwriters, the source of their own lyrics which therefore mean that much more.

This can seem plausible--but also questionable. Pop stars and their performances are as manufactured a product as anything else, down to the voices we hear in the recordings as processed as any image to come out of Industrial Light & Magic, and their lyrics that we are only told they wrote, while these, are just part of productions that, whether the matter is a concert, music video, or even just the sound we hear through our earbuds, the musical equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster for the vast deployment of money, personnel, technology in the making of that sound to create an effect, and out of the effect a professionally marketed image. Live concerts, even concerts seen by way of concert films like The Eras Tour, add a crowd aspect that, I think, complicates any sense of intimacy between listener and singer. And as for the content itself . . . to the extent that fans feel emotional intimacy with the performer, it is more than ever a matter of intimacy with a raging narcissist.

Of course, that in itself does not mean that this sense of intimacy, of connection, is not there--just that this sense involves a good deal more illusion, delusion and frank deception than many realize, as fans give a pass to some very unattractive traits in their idols. (Narcissism is no way to make friends and influence people, but those of hierarchy-respecting conventional mind accept, defend, even celebrate, narcissism in a "star.")

It seems to me that other things are going on as well--like the combination of that intimacy with remoteness. As McIntosh points out, actors spend a lot of time promoting the movies they star in (so much so that many in the press looking for cheap non-structural explanations of Hollywood's lousy box office year in 2023 blamed the actor's strike's disruption of their promotional efforts) but the biggest names in popular music maintain a greater distance from the public, to the point of almost totally keeping clear of the press. McIntosh treats this as a reflection of their stature, but one can at least see this as contributing to their stature--for a star is supposed to exist in the heavens, and not on earth. (One can also see the touring so essential to a recording artist's career as a promotional tour, but a subtler one than doing interview after interview more in keeping with that remoteness and its fascination.)

All that said, it also seems worth thinking about the fact that the biggest names, like Taylor Swift, have been around for quite some time now--Swift having had her first big hit way back in 2006, in a different media universe, before the smart phone, before streaming became what it is, before a good deal else made for the fragmented media universe in which we now live. Beyoncé, the only figure who I think can be compared with Swift, made her name even earlier. It does not seem implausible to think that those who arrived on the scene later than they will never get to make so big a splash--that what we are looking at is "peak pop star," and that perhaps not too many years from now we will be looking back and thinking that, just as today we remember Michael Jordan and think no sports star since has loomed quite so large culturally since his day, no one ever got to be as Swift was in her extraordinary heyday.

Will Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Lose Money?

The film's production budget has been reported as $168 million. I do not know whether this is supposed to be net or gross--whether it includes or excludes subsidy defraying the studio's actual expenditure. However, not unreasonably assuming that this is what the studio spent, going by the old formula it suggests a final outlay of at least twice that to be made up before the film breaks even, or some $340 million. The movie likely needs to make at least 55 percent of that theatrically, which comes to $190 million in theatrical revenues, which would require a global gross of some $380 million.

How much of the way has the movie gone toward that mark?

Well, after its first four days in release the film has pulled in just $25 million domestically in its first three days, and $31 million in its first four.

The first Mad Max movie made 3.4 times its domestic opening weekend gross ($45 million) over its longer run in North America ($154 million), and 2.5 times its domestic gross globally ($380 million), or 8.5 times its opening weekend gross. Optimistically applying that formula we get a worldwide gross in the vicinity of $210 million. Even if we go by the four-day opening as a basis (which I think would be generous to a fault), we only get to $250 million. Working out to "rentals" of $125 million, and perhaps the equivalent of 80 percent of that from post-theatrical revenues on top of this, this comes to revenue of $225 million--some $115 million short of the $340 million+ the movie probably needs.

The result is that at this stage of things there would seem rather a yawning gap between what Furiosa would have to make to break even, never mind become profitable, and what it seems likely to make barring an extraordinary improvement in audience response--instead of good legs, really extraordinary ones, and a Fast-and-Furious-like balance of the international to the domestic gross over that longer run. In fact, the possibility of a $100 million+ loss suggests the movie may have as good a shot at making Deadline's list of biggest box office flops come April 2025 as anything released so far this year--though it is also the case that this year is young, and many bigger movies seem likely to have receptions no better than this before New Year's Day.

Notes on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga's Opening Weekend

As compared with last summer--and even this spring--I have been paying the box office less mind as of late. Part of this has been having less data to go on since Boxoffice Pro drew back from its publication of systematic, detailed, regularly updated forecasts, but part of it has been that in the main it is the same story over and over again--the contraction of the American box office, the sharply fallen returns on Hollywood's longtime box office strategy. And even where that story is concerned it seems that the early summer releases from which little was ever expected--The Fall Guy movie, the Planet of the Apes sequel no one ever asked for, etc.--mean little next to the bigger releases coming only relatively late in this season--with Inside Out 2 (due out only June 14!) generally considered the first.

Still, the discussion of the opening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga got my attention. In spite of the bizarre talking up of the prior Mad Max movie as if it were some kind of record-crusher it was a merely respectable performer even by pre-pandemic standards--just #21 on the list of the year's domestic and worldwide grossers according to Box Office Mojo--and frankly a weak one given the reported $150 million production budget (reflected in the movie's reportedly losing money). It was not an obviously logical business decision to continue the saga from there, let alone do that in the form of a prequel to a character who is not the actual Mad Max (the strategy not of a main line Star Wars film but a Solo) put out a decade after that marginal performance with a different lead. Even if the movie was green-lit without the benefit of knowledge of how tough the market would become that ought to have been restrained expectations for it even pre-pandemic ought to have been lower still by mid-2024.

Considering the figures one may as well start with how Mad Max: Fury Road really did. That movie opened to $45 million over three days in 2015--the equivalent of $60 million in mid-2024 terms when adjusted for inflation. In fairness the box office-watchers expected less than that, about $40-$50 million in the first three days, and just $45-$55 million over the four day Friday-to-Monday Memorial Day weekend period. Still, anyone with a sense of how box office grosses have declined in the last few years (as the frequency of moviegoing practically halved) might suspect that a mere 16 to 33 percent real drop they projected was still on the optimistic side. Consider, for example, how even before the debacle of Captain Marvel 2 the Marvel Cinematic Universe's films (from Thor 4 to Guardians of the Galaxy 3) were doing just 50-80 percent of the business of the preceding films in their series'--a proportion which works out less to $40-$50 million than $30-$50 million, even with what was then, and even now remains, a stronger brand than Mad Max is in 2024. And indeed even the $30 million was more than the film took in over its three day period, its take just $25 million--while the fourth day does not get it much past the $30 million mark (at last report, just $31 million).

The obvious conclusion is that, even if expectations are lower than they were before, they still have not fallen anywhere near enough to give the professional box office-watchers a really realistic sense of just what the market is like now. Will they learn?

I wouldn't hold my breath--the more in as so much of what passes for analysis is mere claquing.

Craig Thomas' Snow Falcon: Some Reflections

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

As I have remarked in prior posts one of the most striking aspects of Craig Thomas' Snow Falcon was the extent to which Thomas had moved beyond the Cold War propaganda-caricature of Firefox in his conception of the Soviet Union. This is not simply a matter of his giving a little more thought to his characterizations of the Soviet figures, or his depiction of the society they inhabit (such as I have already discussed in Winter Hawk, even if this book goes further that way), but the fundamentals of the thriller plot itself, which offered quite a few surprises. Consider the impression the description of the book one is likely to find on the back cover of the paperback or the relevant page on the retail site makes--references to Thomas' longtime hero Secret Service chief Kenney Aubrey, photos suggestive of Soviet military moves in the vicinity of Finland, the infiltration of British special forces soldier Alan Folley to check out what is going amid an emerging crisis threatening nothing less than global catastrophe by way of a combination of coup d'etat in Moscow, and military aggression in Scandinavia which NATO is bound to resist.

Standard stuff, even the idea of the British cooperating with not just the Americans but Soviets to save the day.

However, as quickly becomes clear when one actually reads the book, the role of the Soviets is not marginal this time around--extending a hand to Aubrey, Folley and company as they play the principal role in saving the day. Indeed, senior KGB operative Alexei Vorontsyev becomes very prominent this time around in the first chapters, not only as a factor in these events but as a fully realized character living within a society with a more or less normal daily life (not least, in a failing marriage that can seem an all too common story anywhere, all of which soon proves more than mere background detail). By the midpoint of the book he actually emerges as the protagonist of the story, all as that British soldier checking out Soviet activity on the Finnish border gets captured, and lost to sight. Indeed, where in a conventional, jingoistic Cold War thriller Folley would play Rambo, escaping to finish his mission, it is Vorontsyev who does so--evading pursuit, fighting off enemies (in one case singlehandedly taking out most of an army squad and hijacking their armored personnel carrier for the purposes of his getaway), and actually rescuing Folley, who is not a triumphant action hero now ready to take the lead, but a man broken by the villains' torture, who in his damaged, degraded, pitiable condition (an astonishing counterpoint to the cult that was then growing up around Folley's Special Air Service) can help only with the clues he can give regarding the man behind the plot, to whom he was presented while in captivity. Naturally it is Vorontsyev and not Folley who personally hunts down the man, confronting him face to face.

Just as we have an interesting switch pulled on us with respect to the hero, so do we have one pulled with the villains. In the West the conventional idea is that no honest, intelligent, person could possibly have ever believed in the Bolshevik Revolution, let alone still been loyal to it in 1980. Indeed, looking at the mutiny on the Soviet destroyer Storozhevoy in 1975 Western intelligence was sure that what had been happening was an attempted defection--a reading that was the inspiration for Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October (who had read Gregory Young's Naval Academy master's thesis on the event). However, as it turned out the mutiny was not against the Revolution, but an attempt to save a revolution being betrayed by the Soviet elite led by ship political officer Valery Sablin--and especially in hindsight that the possibility was so little regarded by Western analysts can seem to testify to the intensity of Anti-Communist prejudice, and how it muddled the thinking of those whose job it literally was to understand the Soviet bloc for the purposes of fighting the Cold War. Yet such an attempt to save the revolution is what we ultimately see here--the plotter that Vorontsyev ultimately hunts down an old man who remembered Lenin, and had never ceased to be devoted to it, and regarded Stalin as having betrayed it--with the policy of "socialism in one country" that has, along with the reign of police terror with which Stalinism has been identified ever since, limited, twisted and threatened to destroy what Lenin and his allies sought to achieve, leaving us with a more than usually complex sense of this figure, the history he lived through, his world.*

Just as it seems to me that Thomas was ahead of Clancy in imagining the submarine scenario of Sea Leopard, he can seem ahead of Clancy in being able to consider such a possibility as that--and in the rather full-bodied development of a fairly conventional Cold War thriller premise, made what could have been standard a surprising and more than usually nuanced, richer, work.

* Thomas does not refer to the plotter as a Trotskyite, but this was, of course, a major Trotskyite criticism, and indeed we see the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico recalled by him as part of Stalin's catalog of crimes.

Of Upton Sinclair and Booth Tarkington

Recently considering the reputation of Booth Tarkington I was struck by how close to the height of his glory he was when Upton Sinclair produced his book Mammonart--and declined to give him a single mention, even of a negative kind. Rather Sinclair had occasion to mention him in another of his nonfiction books, The Brass Check, in which Sinclair contrasted the press' treatment of his own divorce (as usual, missing no chance to scandalize him) with its far more respectful treatment of Tarkington's divorce.

The contrast put me in mind of Sinclair's discussion of "ruling-class artists," who pander to the powerful and established, flattering them and their views, and "hero artists" driven by conscience and conviction to challenge them. Sinclair did not in that earlier book necessarily have these two categories handy--and certainly did not put Tarkington in the one category and himself in the other--but the difference in treatment was telling nonetheless (Tarkington "a novelist whose work involves no peril to the profit system," as Sinclair put it, in contrast with the work of one such as himself).

Both ended up largely forgotten--but if it seems to me that Tarkington was a rather slight writer who simply became less fashionable, Sinclair was a writer critics sought to bury, especially amid the turn the country's political and cultural life took in the following decades, when conservative critics, advancing their prejudices behind pieties about the priority of form, and the inappropriateness of "message" and "politics" in art (by which they meant, of course, the message and politics of dissenters and not those of the powerful, which they did not recognize or criticize as message and politics at all). Looking back it can seem as if in the process both Tarkington's falling by the wayside (for his just not having said much, and not said it particularly memorably), and Sinclair's burial (because of what he did say, especially to the extent to which he made it memorable), validated what he had to say about the politics of criticism--the more in as the world did not change in the way he had expected it would.

A Few Thoughts on Booth Tarkington's Legacy

Thomas M. Pryor's judgment on Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons strikes me as about right--"an exceptionally well-made film, dealing with a subject scarcely worth the attention which has been lavished upon it."

That slightness of subject reflected not the film's departure from Booth Tarkington's novel, but rather its extreme faithfulness to "the spirit and text of the novel" as Robert Gottlieb observed, sufficiently slight stuff that after I read it even as I disagreed greatly with many of that list's all too conventional choices, I wondered just how it managed to make the number one hundred spot on the Modern Library's list of the 100 Best Novels produced in the English language during the 20th century. Here and there I found something of interest--in the tidbits about the early days of the auto industry, and how Aunt Fanny lost her money in what hucksterism-indulging business journalists today breathlessly call a "start-up" because she failed to grasp the difference between what works well in a workshop and what is actually a salable product. Still, such things were few within the book, and relatively minor details, and at any rate not the kind of thing that generally catches the interest of critics in our era.

Ultimately my guess was that it seemed to the list-makers that Tarkington rated a mention more on the basis of his extremely high standing for some decades earlier in the century than his actual literary accomplishment by any relevant measure, and that this most famous of his books benefited from association with Welles' film.* But that, too, seems to me worthy of some remark--a reminder of how writers have so often gone from the heights not just of bestsellerdom but critical adulation to near-oblivion within a short span of time, with Tarkington's slightness very much relevant to this. That slightness, in combination with his conservatism, helped make him safe, appealing, popular with the critical community, and the public at large--a Saturday Evening Post regular. But it meant that he offered little that would endure as tastes changed, as indeed they did--a bit of patrician snobbery and nostalgia as he looked back to his privileged youth, an aesthetic distaste for automobiles and suchlike, an assurance to the people that a Sinclair Lewis satirized as Babbitts that they were just fine, but no more than that, as he produced works that were genteel, sprightly, straightforward, provincial, in a period in which, in line with the ascendant Modernism and postmodernism, critics were looking for brutal, dark, oblique, difficult; for obscurantist pseudo-profundity, and cosmopolitan urbanity; to the point of worshipping reactionary edgelords like Nabokov and Burgess (both far ahead of Tarkington on that Modern Library list; Nabokov can actually be found in the #4 spot!).

The result was that in contrast with the way critics strove to bury a Sinclair Lewis they simply forgot about Tarkington, the more in as the critical sensibility of the twentieth century changed so much from what it had been in his time.

The result is also that where those who in spite of those critical efforts to bury Lewis, discover Sinclair Lewis often find him worth their time, far fewer of those who happen upon Tarkington's books seem to find him so.

* Interestingly both Gottlieb and Thomas Mallon in their twenty-first century glances at back at Tarkington cite Alice Adams as a much more impressive novel than Magnificent Ambersons--which even got made as a movie twice, with the second adaptation a George Stevens-helmed, Katharine Hepburn-starring production nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress. But the film, like the novel, would seem obscure today.

Upton Sinclair's Ruling-Class Artists and Hero Artists

In Mammonart Upton Sinclair acknowledges the hard fact that for the artist "the path to honor and success in the arts has been through the service and glorification of the ruling classes." They desire that their persons and deeds should be flattered, their prejudices and lifeways affirmed, their sense of self-importance and their fantasies indulged--and "their subjects and slaves" taught "to stand in awe of them." Those who did so most satisfactorily could be very well-rewarded indeed, not only in life, but in death, and for the ages, it no accident that a Homer, a Shakespeare, a Racine--ruling-class artists all in Sinclair's view--were acclaimed the greatest of their era and nation, and continue to enjoy that status today.

I suppose this is in part because of the conservatism of literary critics, who tend to act as the priests of literature, uncritically accepting the judgments of the past to such a degree that they can at times seem to not even bother to have real opinions of their own, though they also would not seem to find acceptance of those judgments handed down to them a stretch given that the tastes of the comfortable have not changed so very much over the millennia--the upper-class Briton of Victorian times still able to thrill to Homer as the poet's own listeners once had. (Thus did ancient Greek robber-barons have poems composed "to glorify the ancestors of powerful chieftains and fighting men, and inculcate the spirit of obedience and martial pride in the new generations," and a William Gladstone still be moved.)

Equally those who walked a different path suffered for it--often in death as in life--with Sinclair making a pointed contrast between the treatment of a Shakespeare and a Shelley, a Racine and a Molière.

In handling the conceptions of the "ruling-class artist" and "hero artist" Sinclair displays some nuance--reflecting the reality that over a long career many a writer has been a mix of the two, and that many who began as one thing ended up another, with it all too sadly predictable that the more common pattern has been for a hero artist, or someone who might at least have become one, to become a ruling-class artist (as he recounts cases from Wordsworth to Wagner).

Still, if it is those who pandered to the powerful who have commanded respectability thousands of years after their passing, it has also been the case that those who look at them with their own eyes and make their own judgments are often less admiring than they are told they should be. In the aristocratic heroes giving in to "unbridled desires" of the epics and tragedies they are told they ought to speak of only in superlative terms they may, as Sinclair did again and again, see nothing but "spoiled children, flattered by servants and fawned upon by slaves," who were ultimately raised to be "psychopaths," and the art that portrayed them not at all "sublime" but rather "a bore." Those hero artists the powerful treated with such disdain, however, often manage to speak to us across time, space and culture in a way that surprises us.

Of course, it has been a long time since many read Sinclair--and few of those have been in positions of any influence. And so the canons of a century ago endure as the canons of today, as those of us required to read for school, or still read at all of our own volition, read the stories of psychopaths, and very likely find them a bore, but to retain the good opinion of others claim to have found them sublime.

Reading Ray Kurzweil for a Quarter of a Century: Some Thoughts

I first took an interest in Raymond Kurzweil's writing about the Singularity back when he first published The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999). All that sort of thing was a lot more novel then, and I was really intrigued by it--the more in as Kurzweil, unlike so many futurologists, presented long lists of specific forecasts precisely dated for 2009, 2019 and after.

Those forecasts for dates that were not too far away in particular had me thinking "Let's see what happens with all this," and so as I took in news about technological developments kept an eye open for signs that the advances he described--in the neural net-based pattern recognition that seemed most central to the progress in artificial intelligence, the mass-production and mass-scale usage of carbon nanotubes that would power Moore's Law into a post-Silicon age, the construction of nano-scale machinery, etc.--were actually happening.

A few years on, I saw no evidence of anything remotely like the pace of progress he predicted. The Segway scooter, instead, was as good as that seemed to get. Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (2005), which seemed to me to elaborate his earlier theorizing rather than really break new ground, let alone demonstrate dramatic progress since the time of his last book, did not convince me otherwise. Nor did anything else I saw in the years that followed, including the smart phones that, for all their wonders, refined well-established technologies rather than representing the breakthroughs he talked about. And indeed, when 2009 rolled around, ten years after the appearance of Spiritual Machines, I published a systematic evaluation of his technological forecasts for that year in which I concluded that he had consistently been far off the mark in those areas where it counted most.

Indeed, watching so long and seeing so little I was getting fairly skeptical of promises for radical developments just around the corner. In fact I paid a lot less attention to technological forecasting afterward--in part because the writing about it I saw gave me less reason to do so, the writers seemingly saying the same things over and over again rather than presenting any new ideas, or new arguments for them, let alone present evidence for momentous things happening.

Of course, around the mid-2010s there was a new wave of techno-hype, the more in as progress in neural nets and machine learning was gaining steam, all as we were told a great wave of automation was very likely to soon sweep through the economy--with the supposedly imminent automation of our vehicles merely the beginning. At its height I suggested, optimistically, that perhaps we were running a decade or so behind Kurzweil's forecasts.

Alas, the it was just another bubble of techno-hype that went bust with almost nothing to show for it before the end of the decade, as the pandemic reminded us all how un-automated our economy really was, and seemed likely to remain for a good long while to come, while we ran a lot more than a decade behind Kurzweil's forecasts--our 2019 less advanced than his 2009, giving us additional grounds to doubt that it was worth comparing our trajectory with his timelines at all.

Of course, I knew that techno-hype is a cyclical thing and would resurge again, but it happened sooner than I would have guessed, while frankly being prompted by rather less than I thought it would take to accomplish that--Open AI and its chatbots. That excitement remains very much with us, fed by further advances in chatbots, and promised wonders such as what we have seen of Sora, while the price of the NVIDIA corporation's stock soared past the $1,000 mark because of its standing as a maker of AI chips, all as Wall Street generally seems to be behaving not as if the Singularity is near, but as if the Singularity is here (with the apocalyptic panic coming from some quarters only the other side of the expectation that momentous things were happening). The result is an especially opportune climate for Kurzweil's long-promised and repeatedly delayed follow-up to The Singularity is Near--The Singularity is Nearer--to appear before the world. As yet only the earliest reviews have appeared, as those of us who did not get early copies must wait another month before having the chance to check out Kurzweil's book for ourselves.

Will Kurzweil persuade those of us who grew skeptical of him over this uninspiring past quarter of a century to pay attention to his predictions again?

I suppose we will find that out soon enough.

Segway Scooter Memories: Recalling the Innovation That Didn't Change the World

Those old enough to remember the '90s are likely to recall it as a time of tech boom that the most bullish thought would be effectively permanent (Dow Jones 36,000! Dow Jones 40,000! Dow Jones 100,000!)--but that the boom proved bubble just after the turn of the century. What they are less likely to recall is that after the famed dot-com crash much of the business community and "intelligentsia" went on, on some level, thinking, or at least hoping, the crash was just a minor correction and that the boom would get going again in short order (as seen when the business press went nuts over a spasm of growth in late 2003).

If what the investors and those presuming to advise them had on their minds was asset values and profits, there was also where those values and profits would come from--technological progress, which we were led to expect would explode in these years.

It was in this atmosphere that Dean Kamen's development of some new innovation that would "change the world" became a "hot story"--and I remember how in late 2001 we were told what it actually was.

I was underwhelmed by what we actually saw, a funny-looking scooter. So were most others, I think. And if some have not wholly let go the idea (back in 2018 CNN published a piece telling us that while it hasn't done so it yet might), it seems that most of us have forgotten the episode, or at least brushed it off as being of no importance.

However, to me the Segway scooter acquired an increasing symbolic significance over the years--of the gap between the reality of and the hype about the pace and force of technological innovation in our time. Even after we had reconciled ourselves to the remoteness of the "flying car" future, the Kurzweils of the media-business world breathlessly talked up the imminence of a grand new "molecular" age of intelligent machines, of atom-by-atom construction, of revolutionary new materials promising solutions and wonders far, far more radical. Instead the Segway was what we got then--and looking back from 2024 it still seems to me that that it remains as good a symbol as any for the reality of twenty-first century INNOVATION!

Are We More Annoyed by Celebrities Than We Used to Be?

My answer to this post's titular question is an emphatic "Yes," and I think there are three very good reasons for it.

1. The Worsening of Overexposure.
A celebrity's publicity machine getting so aggressive that rather than interesting us it irritates us is not a new thing. But it is probably worse in an age of truly continuous subjection to media that devise like the smart phone have helped usher in--the more in as that publicity is amplified by the disease of the Internet that is clickbait. Amplified, too, by the way that celebrities personally contribute to this with their use of social media, making their idiocies tiresomely public as they take to heart the adage "Better to be thought a fool and remain silent than open one's mouth and remove all doubt" and do the extreme opposite, and alienate at least part of the public in the process again and again.

2. The Fragmentation of Popular Culture.
It has become a truism that less than ever before do we all seem to be watching the same movies and television shows, listening to the same music, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The result is that, especially to the extent that celebrity is associated with the entertainment world, we are probably more likely to be personally attentive to a smaller portion of the range of figures working in it, with the result that when we are hit by a piece of celebrity news we are more likely to say "Who is that?" And even after we learn who that is, not care--but still find ourselves constantly hearing about them so that we ask "Why am I hearing about this person I don't care about all the time?"--which is undeniably irritating.

3. Culture War.
As if points 1 and 2 were not bad enough the world of entertainment, like everything else in American life at least, has been swallowed up by the culture wars. Along with it, so has celebrity culture, with stances, identifications, associations playing their part in it--meaning that just about everyone can offend somebody just by existing, and often what we are hearing about is much more than their existing, as the "journalists" of the entertainment press, analyzing the implications of every word and gesture, every trivial detail of dress, demeanor and everything else make of everything a statement, and every statement a battle. Whatever side of that battle we are on we are likely to find ourselves constantly annoyed, even if that side is no side at all, especially insofar as they detest the very existence of the culture war, because everyone else seems obsessed with it, and rubbing it in their faces all the time.

What Does it Really Mean When They Say That the Global Box Office Rose 31 Percent in 2023?

Discussing the post-pandemic box office as a whole I have focused on the U.S. box office, because of the abundance of detailed time series relevant to it, and my long familiarity with them, as well as the abundance of conveniently available analysis to its interpretation.

That does not exist for the global box office, a larger, more complex, less well-covered topic.

The result was that the Deadline report that the global box office saw a 31 percent jump in 2023 over 2022 got my attention. Was it possible that the U.S. was an anomaly, that there was a stronger recovery abroad?

Alas, on close inspection the biggest chunk of that surge is the recovery of the Chinese box office from its extremely depressed state in 2022--this 83 percent surge in that one market accounting for a rough third of the global increase. Cut China out of the picture and you get only a 20 percent rise in the rest of the world. That still sounds pretty impressive--except that this was exactly what we had in the U.S.--the jump from a bit under $7.4 billion collected in 2022 to $8.9 billion collected in 2023--that meager margin of improvement relative to the post-pandemic pattern--itself a gain of 20 percent (indeed, 21 percent), before the inflation that was not even counted here.

The result is that the report seems to me another case of a headline that sounds a lot better than the reality, and only confirms the impression that the box office, and with it the prospects of the studios and their movies, have stabilized at a significantly below pre-pandemic level (while in combination with what Hollywood's movies actually made in that country, China's outsized part in the "recovery" is a reminder of how little business Hollywood can expect in that market). Of course, that same scarcity of data about the global box office implies that more caution is warranted in any judgments about that, though I do not think that this year is likely to change the assessment.

* The box office tended toward $14 billion in 2023 dollars over 2015-2019.

Book Review: Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation, by Upton Sinclair

In the second chapter of his book Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation (1925) Upton Sinclair explains his purpose in writing the book as "to investigate the whole process of art creation, and to place the art function in relation to the sanity, health and progress of mankind." Of course, this raises the question of just what Sinclair actually means by art. His answer is that it is "a representation of life, modified by the personality of the artist, for the purpose of modifying other personalities, inciting them to changes of feeling, belief and action." Art is thus by definition "inevitably and inescapably propaganda"--"sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately" Propaganda.

However, if all art is propaganda it is also the case that not all propaganda is equal from the standpoint of artistic significance, Sinclair taking the view that "great," "real and enduring works of art" offer "propaganda of vitality and importance" according to "the practical experience of mankind," conveyed to the audience "with technical competence in terms of the art selected," with this combination of "propaganda of vitality and importance" with such competence to be expected only when "the artist in the labor of his spirit and . . . stern discipline of hard thinking, find[s] a real path of progress for the race."

From this one may conclude that art can never be about just the perfection of form, purely "escapist" or unconcerned with morality or politics; while Sinclair adds that far from being for only the few "great art has always been popular art," and that far from slavish devotion to tradition and the classics as models "vital artists make their own technique," with "present-day technique . . . far and away superior to the technique of any period."

Yet it is also the case that artists must live, and in line with the realities of the class societies of history this has generally meant the accommodation of the artists and their art to the requirements and desires of the rich and powerful--to those who have "owned" the artists as they have owned everything else--with service to these what enables an artist to do well in life (rather than do good), with the most "successful" becoming the coddled pets of wealthy and powerful patrons, and often enjoy critical respectability after their time. In contrast with those "ruling-class artists" the "hero" artists, the "martyr" artists, who did good rather than well--not least in "tak[ing] up the cause of the dispossessed and disinherited" rather than flattering their so-called betters--struggled and were even persecuted in life and often marginalized after their time, with all this reflected in the prevailing standards and canons (a triumph of Mammon over all other moral forces, hence his coinage of "Mammonart" here). Indeed, Sinclair makes it clear that he sees "six great lies prevailing in the art world" against which his positions run up, namely the lies of "art for art's sake" (the argument for art as an exercise in form only), "art snobbery" (the elitist art-is-for-the-few viewpoint), "art tradition" (advocacy of slavish classicism), "art dilettantism" (the view of art as pure diversion), the "art pervert" (the denial that art has anything to do with morality) and "vested interest" (the claim that art "excludes propaganda and has nothing to do with freedom and justice"). Challenging all of them in principle and in practice, here Sinclair endeavors "to set up new canons in the arts, overturning many of the standards now accepted," while in the process rescuing real "treasures" from "the scrap-heap" to which Establishment critics have consigned them, and transferring those false treasures now being exalted "to the history shelves of the world's library" where they belong.

After having lucidly explained the most fundamental of his intellectual premises Sinclair then proceeds upon a grand survey of art through Western history, proceeding from one figure and their works to the next down to the present time (generally devoting a chapter to each).

It is an exceedingly ambitious undertaking for a single-author work (and at that, a non-specialist who had his hands full with a staggering number of other interests and activities over the preceding decades), and it also seems only fair to point out the limits of the result. In surveying Western art, in spite of a handful of glances at the visual arts (Michelangelo, Raphael, and after that, curiously, just Whistler), and music (Beethoven, Wagner), what we get is in the main a survey of literature; with, after some coverage of the Bible and the highlights of Greek and Roman literature, Sinclair skipping over the Middle Ages entirely (no Beowulf or Norse sagas or Song of Roland or Nibelungenlied or Arthurian romances, etc., etc.) to the Renaissance, which rates mere glances before he gets on to the birth of modernity and the centuries since. Doing so he gives us mainly English and French literature with a little attention to a handful of the most prominent Germans and Russians (Goethe, Tolstoy et. al.), and only occasional glances at any other Western literature (Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Ibsen, Strindberg all we get from Southern Europe and Scandinavia), all as even in surveying the literatures on which he concentrates there are some curious omissions. (H.G. Wells appears in this book--but not as one of the writers to be discussed, just as Sinclair's host at the New Reform Club, where he pointed out one of the writers Sinclair does discuss, Henry James, as "the Great Cham.") One may add that besides the omissions Sinclair can seem very dismissive or impatient of a good deal of what he examines (in an extreme example, owning up to having given up reading Dostoyevsky's The Karamazov Brothers at the time of Father's Zosima's funeral, some two-fifths of the way into the book).

Still, imperfect as the survey is of art, or even literature, Sinclair still covers an impressive, and useful, amount of essential territory with knowledge, frankness and insight--enough to constitute a very respectable "intro to Western literature" course in itself. Indeed, I doubt that many of our tenured professors of literature these days, or even in his day, could do the job nearly as well, neither where sheer range is concerned, nor the significant task of making this long treatment of a very large and complicated subject so readable as Mammonart manages to be from beginning to end, in which his framing the text as a dialogue between a caveman and his wife ("Mr. and Mrs. Ogi") is the least of the matter, with Sinclair's not being an academic perhaps an advantage. Far from having been trained in "raking the dust-heaps of history" in the manner he so derided in his book on higher education in America, Sinclair here stands in relation to literature as a writer, reader, lover of literature for whom these works are first and foremost art to be experienced, for what they make the reader feel and think, rather than a priest calling the flock to worship or an archaeologist poring over relics in the hopes of uncovering clues to the past, bringing to bear in addition to the thoroughly worked-out intellectual position he spelled out in that early chapter genuine personal engagement.

One result of that combination of viewpoint, engagement and scope was a good deal of iconoclasm--for the most part, well-warranted iconoclasm. Admittedly I disagreed with particular appraisals of Sinclair again and again, especially as he got to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where my reading has been more extensive and frankly my opinions about the authors he discussed stronger. (I thought him overly dismissive of Coleridge, and Scott, and Dostoyevsky; thought it wrong that he saw in Balzac wallowing in the money-mad world of which he wrote rather than criticism of that world, and indeed, "relentless, ferocious assault" on it; etc.) Still, he argued well for his positions, leaving those with whom he disagrees few nits to pick and often something to think about. (Sinclair dislikes Coleridge for his obscurity and irrationality, Scott for celebrating the Middle Ages, Dostoyevsky for going over from rebellion to reaction, and one cannot deny that all those charges are true, or that the only difference between Sinclair in disliking them for that and the kinds of critics he assails here is his being more forthright about his politics, and taking a progressive rather than a conservative or reactionary view stance.) And the truth was that I found myself agreeing with Sinclair more often than not--about the cult of the Classics, about the politics of Shakespeare, about Zola, about much, much else. Indeed, treating writers such as Henry James (a hankerer after feudalism and its relics and supposed graces, for whom no people exist but those furnished with "large sums of money . . . without effort on their part" permitting them "complicated and subtle aesthetic sensibilities"), or Oscar Wilde (whose "smart" dialogue is produced with the simple-minded formula of proclaiming the opposite of "any statement involving the simple common sense of mankind" to produce overrated epigrams), or Joseph Conrad (a "cruel-souled" "Zealot of Pessimism" in the "Agnostic Sunday School" of whose books "Agnosticism upon closer study turns out to be Capitalism," and for whom "the capitalist ownership and control of marine transportation" is "God," and accordingly ever given to directing "jeering scorn," "venom" and satire at the "altruistic impulse"), Sinclair was again and again a breath of fresh air, saying what seems to me all too obvious and obviously in need of saying, but all too rarely, actually, said. (Especially about Conrad, given how "liberal" English teachers so unthinkingly serve up to their students the insanity into which Kurtz descends in Heart of Darkness as the indisputable, sole, truth about human nature.)

At the same time he made good on his promise to try and rescue many a treasure from the scrap-heap--like the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier, whom Sinclair hails the "[Robert] Burns of New England," while in putting in a word for not-quite-ignored figures like a Shelley or Keats reminding us that in his day they were given less than their due (and perhaps still are). At the same time those writers we may be surprised to see included in spite of their mention serving no such purposes, as with political dramas-without-politics author Humphry Ward, or adventure story writer Richard Harding Davis, still help Sinclair explain what he is trying to say about the history of literature, down to his own time.

In the process Sinclair not only tells us something about these authors and works, and by way of them illustrates and supports his arguments from early in the book--and very powerfully--but usefully develops many of those ideas he expressed initially, as with his thoughts about the "ruling-class artists" and "hero artists" (persuasively exemplified by the contrast between French playwrights Racine and Moliere), and the contrast between the art of ruling elites, and the art of oppressed and rising classes, not least the way in which the art of the former stresses form, the latter content. Particularly rare, and affecting, in the case of a Whittier or a Burns or a Keats he reminds us of the struggles endured and the scorn faced by those poets who emerge from the people than the salons, and wrote of and for those from whence they came (struggles and scorn that, he does not forget, mean that many a would-be poet, one who might well have been great, dies, not only without recognition, but without ever having had a proper chance to compose a line, "some mute, inglorious Milton" resting in an unmarked grave).

Alas, few have since had the benefit of the insights Sinclair offers in this book about authors and literature and art more broadly--far fewer than Sinclair hoped at the time. Writing Mammonart he still thought that the bad old world he was struggling against was but "an evil dream of but a few more years," and its standards with it. However, here we are a century later, with the predictable result that the six lies he called out remain very much with us. Indeed, they are the standards by which Sinclair's own works have been judged; been weighed, measured and found wanting; as one sees looking at Anthony Arthur's obituary for Sinclair in that newspaper that (as he relates in another work, The Brass Check) treated him so abominably in life. Deriding his works for being "admitted propaganda," for his "interest in persuasion and politics"--for his having "sold his birthright for a pot of message"--it makes clear just how little Sinclair's case that all art is by definition propaganda altered the prevailing standards. The result is that where Sinclair endeavored to rescue literary treasures from the scrap-heap, his own novels have been tossed into the same scrap-heap ("no longer read" Arthur flatly said), with the same going for everything else he had to offer, Mammonart most certainly included--as the shelves of the library of which Sinclair spoke have only become more crammed with false treasures.

Literature, culture and social thought today are all the poorer for it.

Do the Consensus Historians Still Matter?

When I first started reading, for example, Richard Hofstadter (if memory serves the first of his books I picked up was Anti-Intellectualism in American Life) I had either never heard or failed to recognize any significance in the term "consensus historians." The awareness I was to develop of that bigger context came much later, consolidated as I found myself approaching the matter of "centrist" ideology in a serious way.

Naturally reading up on all that I became aware of how the consensus historians belong to another generation, since superseded by other views--with some of those historians, in fact, contributing to that process themselves with displays of renewed attention to what their visions of consensus missed. (Thus did consensus historian Hofstadter produce the volume American Violence; A Documentary History, a reminder of just how conflict-ridden the history of a country whose history was supposedly defined by "consensus" actually was.)

Still, there is no question of those historians of mid-century having left their mark on American intellectual life, and much more besides. This is, in part, because of the ways in which they helped shape that centrist outlook that I think few understand much in any conscious way, but which is so much a part of American political culture--determining thelimits of the "legitimate" ideological spectrum and with it what people are allowed to talk about or even expect, the conduct of mainstream politicians, the operation of the media, the "political language" we use, etc..

However, it may also be because academic historiography since that time, shaped by the continued tendency to specialization, the influence of postmodernism, and the widening gap between the scholarly and the popular in a culture which is on the whole fragmenting while becoming less and less literate, has simply not had the same potential for broad vision, or broad influence. Indeed, considering the situation I find myself recalling their fellow centrist theoretician, the sociologist Daniel Bell, in The End of Ideology, in which, in a deeply lachrymose passage, he remarks the inferiority of the more prominent public intellectuals of his time in comparison with those of the prior generation (a Veblen, a Beard, a Dewey)--and think that today there are grounds for saying the same of the last generation or two as against those we had at mid-century.

Of Climate "Skepticism"

In the arguments over climate change it has been common for the press to refer to those rejecting the longstanding and overwhelming scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is a reality as "climate skeptics."

The term "climate skeptic" implies people who are honestly and seriously considering the evidence for climate change and rejecting it. Some of those rejecting the consensus may fit this description--but hardly all.

The person who rejects the science without really having done the homework--whose answer may simply be "What the hell do scientists know?"--would seem more remote from the characterization. Of course, one may generously allow that perhaps they are skeptical of science broadly. However, after dismissing climate science, we may see them point to a study that correlated low IQ scores with poverty as evidence that economic and social outcomes are a matter of personal failings and not societal failings and confidently underline their position by adding "It's science!" with Ron Burgundy-like assurance.

Rather than any real skepticism there was just denial--and to call it "skepticism" with all the brain-work the term implies dignifies it excessively. But that is what the mainstream media does, and can be expected to do, given that its business imperatives and professional culture, its ideological inclinations, and much, much else, bias it toward extreme deference toward those interests and groups which champion climate denial, and their representatives. The readiness to "both sides" the issue when on so many other points they acknowledge only one side is one way in which this has been the case. The use, down to the present moment (just do a keyword check of recent news stories and you will see this for yourself), of the term "climate skepticism" when they should be saying (as only occasionally they say) "climate denial" is another.