Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  According to the tired married people with kids, there is no contest. They are the royalty of the tired kingdom. They are smug with exhaustion. I belong to the tired-single-people-who-work-at-home group, and in the tired race I don’t have a prayer. I have more than enough friends in the married-with-kids group, and I’ve gone many rounds of tiredness discussions. Generally, I try to head them off at the pass with a gentle “You must be so exhausted,” hoping the acknowledgment will suffice. Unfortunately, this only sends them into their litany. When I talk to a member of this group, I try not to let it slip out that I may be a tiny bit tired, too. Sometimes it does slip out, and it can nip a tiredness conversation in the bud.

  Conversations with my neighbor usually begin with a few basic pleasantries. He says, “Hi.” I reply, “Hi, how are you?” He answers, “Exhausted.” And we are off and running. I chime in, “I’m tired, too.” We proceed to try and outdo each other. My neighbor beats me every time, because he is a single busy tired person who works somewhat outside the home. Sure I’m tired, but I’m not particularly busy. By his estimation, he averages three or four hours of sleep a night. He also naps at random, which is the true mark of a tired person who works at home (or somewhat at home). Whether naps count as sleep is unclear. (The tired married people with kids do not nap, or, if they do, they don’t come clean.)

  My neighbor and I are very specific in our chronicling of tiredness. We include time of actual tuck-in and amount of actual shut-eye, number of times awakened (including cause and effect), amount of human interaction in the day (a major factor in tiredness calculation), number of trips out of the house, and number of naps. Our conversation usually sends my neighbor back to bed.

  By now it might be time to mention my brother, the jazz musician. He is bone tired. This is because he is a member of yet another group, the international-jet-set tired people. My brother is always on the road playing gigs—from Istanbul to Helsinki to Houston Street. When he is on tour in Italy, for example, not only must he deal with the adulation of fans but he must consume sumptuous free meals and stay in Tuscan castles. And he must always hang after a gig. “Hang” is jazz lingo for drinking all night with fans, who are often female. You can imagine the tiredness this can lead to.

  Just last year, my big-wheel writer friend joined the ranks of the international-jet-set tired group. Now she, too, is always flying off to exotic locales—in her case, to work on a movie she has written. She, too, is forced to consume sumptuous free meals and stay in Tuscan castles. And, as if that weren’t tiring enough, she is also searching for a mate. Finding a mate requires an inordinate amount of human interaction, naturally leading to you know what. Every day, on the phone, my friend rattles off her packed schedule, including both lunch and dinner dates, with an occasional party thrown in. My schedule is not packed, and the conversation is rather one-sided. Yet after I hang up I am overcome with exhaustion. In fact, I don’t think I want to talk to any more members of the international-jet-set tired group. In fact, I might not want to talk to any members of any tired group. Instead, I will silently examine my own life, which will inevitably land me in the position I am most accustomed to: prone.

  1995

  JOHN UPDIKE

  PARANOID PACKAGING

  MAYBE the madness began with strapping tape. Its invention seemed to excite people, so that packages arrived more and more impenetrably wrapped, in layer upon layer of the tough, string-reinforced stuff. Where tearing fingers used to do the job, an X-Acto knife and a surgical precision had to be mustered. Domestic injuries mounted, but the tape kept coming, along with flesh-colored plastic tape that wouldn’t tear—just stretched, like tortured flesh—no matter how hard you pulled.

  Then one day, in the long twilight of the Reagan presidency, the cereal and sugar boxes that had always said “Press Here” ceased to yield, when pressed, the little pouring holes we remembered from childhood. Rather, our thumbnails broke, and turned purple overnight. Padded book envelopes, which used to open with an easy tug on the stapled turned-over flap, were now taped over the staples. The taping was tenacious, multilayered. Postal regulations, some said: too many clerks were calling in sick after cutaneous contact with half-bent staple ends. Sometime under Bush, with everybody distracted by televised bulletins from the Gulf War, the self-sealing book envelope was promulgated. Now there was no hope of a tidy opening and a thrifty reuse; nothing less than a hatchet or a machete would free the contents, in a cloud of fast-spreading gray fluff.

  All this time, childproof pill bottles had been imperceptibly toughening and complicating, to the point where only children had the patience and eyesight to open them. Though the two arrows were lined up under a magnifying glass and superhuman manual force was exerted, the top declined to pop off. Similarly, the screw-tops on the can of creosote and the bottle of Liquid-Plumr refused to slip into the grooves that in theory would lift them up—up and free. Instead, they rotated aimlessly no matter how much simultaneously downward and sideways, or semicircular, pressure was applied. Occasionally, an isolated householder did enjoy a moment of success with these recalcitrant containers; manufacturers, swiftly striking back, printed the instructions in even smaller type or, less readably yet, in raised plastic letters. The corporations, it seemed, did not want their products released into use—any upsurge in demand might interfere with their lucrative downsizing programs.

  The little bags of peanuts with which the downsizing airlines had replaced in-flight meals became, as the Clinton administration warily settled into the seats of power, impossible to open. The minuscule notch lettered “Tear Here” was a ruse; in truth, the plastic-backed tinfoil, or tinfoil-backed plastic, had been reinforced in that very place. Mounting frustration, intensified by the normal claustrophobia, cramping, and fright of air travel, produced dozens of cases of apoplexy and literally thousands of convulsively spilled peanuts. Even the little transparent sacs of plastic cutlery for airplane meals (when these were actually served) proved seamlessly resistant, and yielded up their treasure only when pierced from within by a painstakingly manipulated fork.

  Such consumer-resistant packaging devices were all as bows and arrows before the invention of gunpowder, however, once the maker of Vanish, a brand of mysterious crystals alleged to be able to clean toilet bowls, came up with a red child-resistant cap, shaped like a barred “O,” a three-dimensional “,” whose accompanying arc-shaped directions read, “To open: Squeeze center while pulling up.” Well, good luck, Mr. and Mrs. America: squeeze until your face turns red, white, and blue. No amount of aerobic finger exercise will ever pack in the squeeze power needed to release those crystals into that murky toilet bowl.

  Either as a nation we have grown feeble or the policy of containment, once preached as the only safe tactic for dealing with the Communist menace, has now refocused upon the output of capitalism, in all its sparkling, poisonous, hazardous variety. They—the corporate powers that control our lives—have apparently decided, in regard to one product after another, to make it, advertise it, ship it, but not let us into it. Be it aspirin, creosote, salted peanuts, or Vanish, it is too wonderful for us—too potent, too fine. We rub the lamp, but no genie is released. We live surrounded by magic caskets that keep their tangy goodness sealed forever in.

  1996

  DAVID BROOKS

  CONSCIENTIOUS CONSUMPTION

  YOU’RE a highly cultured person who has never cared all that much about money, but suddenly, thanks to the information-age economy, you find yourself making more dough than you ever expected. The problem is: How to spend all that income without looking like one of the vulgar yuppies you despise? Fortunately, a Code of Financial Correctness is emerging. It’s a set of rules to guide your consumption patterns, to help you spend money in ways that are spiritually and culturally uplifting. If you follow these precepts, you’ll be able to dispose of up to four or five million dollars annually in a manner that shows how little you care about material things.

  Rule No. 1: Only vulgarian
s spend a lot of money on luxuries; restrict your lavish spending to necessities. When it comes to members of the cultivated class, the richer they get the more they emulate the Shakers. It’s crass to spend sixty thousand dollars on a Porsche, but it’s a sign of elevated consciousness to spend sixty-five thousand dollars on a boxy and practical Range Rover. It’s decadent to spend ten thousand dollars on an outdoor Jacuzzi, but if you’re not spending twenty-five thousand dollars turning a spare bedroom into a new master bath, with a freestanding copper tub in the middle of the floor and an oversized slate shower stall, it’s a sign that you probably haven’t learned to appreciate the simple rhythms of life.

  An important corollary to Rule No. 1 is that you can never spend too much money on a room or a piece of equipment that in an earlier age would have been used primarily by the servants. It’s vulgar to spend fifteen thousand dollars on a sound system and a wide-screen TV, but it’s virtuous to spend fifty thousand dollars on a utilitarian room, like the kitchen. Only a bounder would buy a Louis Vuitton briefcase, but the owner of a German-made Miele White Pearl vacuum cleaner, which retails for $749, clearly has his priorities straight.

  Rule No. 2: It is perfectly acceptable to spend lots of money on anything that is “professional quality,” even if it has nothing to do with your profession. For example, although you are not likely ever to climb Mt. Everest, an expedition-weight three-layer Gore-Tex Alpenglow-reinforced Marmot Thunderlight jacket is a completely reasonable purchase. You may not be planning to convert your home into a restaurant, but a tripledoored Sub Zero refrigerator and a ten-thousand-dollar AGA cooker with a warming plate, a simmering plate, a baking oven, a roasting oven, and an infinite supply of burners is still a sensible acquisition.

  Rule No. 3: You can never have too much texture. The high-achieving but grasping consumers of the nineteen-eighties surrounded themselves with smooth surfaces—matte black furniture, polished lacquer floors, and sleek faux-marbleized walls. To demonstrate your spiritual superiority to such people, you’ll want to build an environment full of natural irregularities. Everything they made smooth you’ll want to make rough. You’ll hire squads of workmen with ball-peen hammers to pound some rustic authenticity into your broad floor planks. You’ll import craftsmen from Umbria to create the look of crumbling frescoed plaster in your foyer. You’ll want a fireplace built from craggy stones that look as if they could withstand a catapult assault. You’ll want sideboards with peeling layers of paint, rough-hewn exposed beams, lichenous stone walls, weathered tiles, nubby upholstery fabrics. Remember, if your furniture is distressed your conscience needn’t be.

  The texture principle applies to comestibles, too. Everything you drink will leave sediment in the bottom of the glass: yeasty microbrews, unfiltered fruit juices, organic coffees. Your bread will be thick and grainy, the way wholesome peasants like it, not thin and airy, as shallow suburbanites prefer. Even your condiments will be admirably coarse; you’ll know you’re refined when you start using unrefined sugar.

  Rule No. 4: You must practice one-downmanship. Cultivated people are repelled by the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. Thus, in order to raise your own status you must conspicuously reject status symbols. You will never display gilt French antiques or precious jewelry, but you will proudly dine on a two-hundred-year-old pine table that was once used for slaughtering chickens. Your closet doors will have been salvaged from an old sausage factory. Your living-room rugs will resemble the ponchos worn by Mexican paupers. The baby gates on the stairs will have been converted from nineteenth-century rabbit hutches. Eventually, every object in your house will look as if it had once been owned by someone much poorer than you.

  You will never spend large sums on things associated with the rich, like yachts, caviar, or truffles. Instead, you will buy unpretentious items associated with the proletariat—except that you’ll buy pretentious versions of these items, which actual members of the proletariat would find preposterous. For example, you’ll go shopping for a basic food like potatoes, but you won’t buy an Idaho spud. You’ll select one of those miniature potatoes of distinction that grow only in certain soils of northern France. When you need lettuce, you will choose only from among those flimsy cognoscenti lettuces that taste so bad on sandwiches. (You will buy these items in boutique grocery stores whose inventory says “A Year in Provence” even as their prices say “Ten Years Out of Medical School.”)

  Accordingly, you will pay hugely inflated prices for all sorts of things that uncultivated people buy cheap: coffee at three seventy-five a cup, water at five dollars a bottle, a bar of soap for twelve dollars. Even your plain white T-shirt will run fifty dollars or more. The average person might be satisfied with a twenty-dollar shovel from Sears, but the sophisticated person will appreciate the heft and grip of the fifty-nine-dollar English-made Bull Dog brand garden spade that can be found at Smith & Hawken. When buying your necessities, you have to prove that you are serious enough to appreciate the best.

  Rule No. 5: If you want to practice conscientious consumption, you’ll want to be able to discourse knowledgeably about everything you buy. You’ll favor catalogues that provide some helpful background reading on each item. You’ll want your coffee shop and your bookstore to have maxims from Emerson and Arendt on the walls, because there is nothing more demeaning than shopping in a store that offers no teleological context for your purchases. You’ll only patronize a butcher who hosts poetry readings. Remember, you are not merely a pawn in a mass consumer society; you are the curator of your purchases. You are able to elevate consumption above the material plane. You are able to turn your acquisitions into a set of morally informed signifiers that will win the approbation of your peers. You are able to create a life style that compensates for the fact that you abandoned your early interest in poetry and grew up to be a corporate lawyer. You care enough to spend the very most.

  1998

  LOUIS MENAND

  THE END MATTER

  IT is 2:30 A.M. of a Monday, spring semester, 1983. Things are looking extremely good. Forty-eight hours of high-intensity stack work and some inspired typing have produced the thirty-page final paper for Modern European History (Mr. Blague, MW 9–10) that you were supposed to be working on all semester but that an unfortunate dispute involving a car, which, as you have repeatedly pointed out, really wasn’t in such good shape when you borrowed it, has prevented you from giving the time and attention you sincerely intended. Now, as you contemplate the pile of neatly typed 20-lb. Eaton noncorrasable bond on your desk, you are satisfied that you have turned out, in two days, the intellectual and moral equivalent of three months’ steady application, a paper that Professor Blague will recognize as the work of a powerful and unexpectedly mature historical mind. Only the notes and the bibliography remain. You have scored an emergency supply of No-Doz, the collegian’s friend. Your Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter, the high-school graduation gift of proud grandparents and a machine expressly designed to meet the exigencies of the all-nighter, shows every sign of being equal to its historic task. Two-thirty is by no means an unreasonable hour of the night. You anticipate a decent five or six hours of sleep before class time. And you are, of course, so wrong. You are not nearing the finish line at all. There is a signpost up ahead: you are about to enter The End Matter.

  Annotation may seem a mindless and mechanical task. In fact, it calls both for superb fine-motor skills and for adherence to the most exiguous formal demands. Throw in sleep deprivation and a mild case of caffeine jitters, and the combination is guaranteed to produce flawed page after flawed page. In the world of End Matter, there is no such thing as a flyspeck. Every error is an error of substance, a betrayal of ignorance and inexperience, the academic equivalent of the double dribble. That the decorums of citation are the arbitrary residue of ancient pedantries whose raisons d’être are long past reconstructing does not reduce the penalties for nonconformity. You are on pp. 3 of your endnotes before you remember that ibid is supposed to end with a peri
od, since it is an abbreviation for ibidem (“in the same place”). What genius decided that it was worth saving a character by this practice no longer matters. What matters is that it is now three-thirty in the morning and you have to retype three pages of notes. Or perhaps it suddenly strikes you, with the force of panic, that maybe, as a foreign term, ibid. should be underlined. You quickly discover that, by continually hand-adjusting the typewriter’s platen (the “roller,” in layman’s language), in order to superscript your endnote numbers, you have thrown the alignment out of whack, and when you roll the page back up to underline the ibid.s you type the line right through the word. You have to pull the paper out and start over.

  You also need to remember that, even in the United States, the city in which Harvard University Press is situated is cited as Cambridge, Mass., while the city where Cambridge University Press is found is simply Cambridge. (Not that the British care; they happen to be complete slobs about citation.) And which is it: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, the Belknap Press, or Harvard University Press? What is the Belknap Press, exactly? The whole subfield of publishers’ names is a thornbush of institutional idiosyncrasy. There is no such thing as the University of Mississippi Press. It is the University Press of Mississippi (just as Indiana University must never be called the University of Indiana, even though that, in fact, is what it is). Once, there was Charles Scribner’s Sons; now it is Scribner. Make sure you have the right one. Knopf is both cooler and more kosher than Alfred A. Knopf, but W. W. Norton is a publishing house and Norton is a character in The Honeymooners. The student who types Macmillan & Co., Inc., instead of Macmillan & Co. is inviting a big red circle from the Blague marking pen, even though Macmillan & Co., Inc., is what it says on the title page. Little, Brown insists on its baffling comma (what’s wrong with Little and Brown?); the comma-free Harcourt Brace Jovanovich is not a law firm but possibly hopes to be mistaken for one. Then there is the special hell of reprints—the Penguins and Plumes and Harper-Torchbooks, the Bantams, the Dovers, and the Signets. It seems undignified to cite the publisher of a book that cost $2.95 and was originally printed somewhere else. And if the pagination is different is it a new ed., or still a repr.? Is an “expanded edition” a rev. ed. or a 2nd ed.? You suspect that there are rules covering these things, but it is now 4 A.M. and you have no idea how to find out.