Lately I’ve been getting a little irritated at Facebook boastings about all the great and lofty things that people are accomplishing in these COVID days. The ten best lists that highlight a person’s erudition or sophistication, for one thing. So announcing that I have been using this time of self isolation to finally tackle the greatest novel in English risks sounding like a boast. If so, I humbly apologize.
About six years ago, I posted a piece called Westie Wonk on my website – about how in adopting Betsy from the Pound, I had accidentally joined a club. A club in which I can be approached by a total stranger and asked, “Is that a Westie? I’ve got a Westie too! Aren’t they great?”
“In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture; the word ‘elitist’ could be spat out with the same confident contempt as ‘coward’ at a court martial. It seemed as if prejudice could not be banished without driving some other topic, once freely discussed, or even admired, into a shameful exile…
I didn’t mean to become one. My preferred dog breed is “mutt”. But there she was, at the Pound. Skinny, scared. A breeding bitch. Finally spayed at age seven after being surrendered by an owner who “didn’t like her”…
I suppose what made Mad Men work was that it brought 21st Century eyes to the sixties. And many details are so dead on. The smoking, the drinking—now in season 6 the ridiculous whorish makeup and stiff hair and crotch-skimming miniskirts. The women look insane. Mutant. Impossibly girlish. The womanly styles of the earlier years were so much more attractive, I think.
As the show went on, it lapsed into the usual preoccupation with people’s sex lives, with racial, cultural, social changes pushed to the fringes of the narrative, but the first few episodes of Mad Men delighted me – the sight of kids rolling around untethered in the back seat of a station wagon.
It would be redundant, excessively obvious, to say “the ruins of” wouldn’t it? My guide, Stefano, probably a closet fascist, said “Madame would you mind if I show you the red light district?”
Could I have said no? I suppose I could have but I did not. I was still glowing from his earlier compliment: “Madame, you are very smart. You ask very good questions.”
I wanted to see the documentary Google and the World Brain because the title and synopsis addressed a fear of mine – that Google is conniving to empty out libraries and archives, digitize everything, make us all forget how to do research, how to dig, how to find stuff out the way we used to – and once we are entirely powerless and in their thrall, to start CHARGING us for the information we seek.