I’m digging into Culture Crash, the killing of the creative class, by the late Scott Timberg.

One of his early points: We are often caught in the shockwave of current events, if we are so unfortunate to be caught in the wake of their aftermath. This is why I’ve made the conscious choice to remain ignorant – whenever possible – of geopolitical instabilities and media sensations; they offer me nothing of value.

Right away in his introduction, Timberg mentions the idealized “reader,” one who we will likely never meet, yet whose interests and curiosities we would hope to engage. I like to think of this concept as the “silent majority” which I have written on before.

“People around me would often tell me they were not religious, they were spiritual, but I was neither: art and literature did all that religions were supposed to, without Crusades or cults or scented candles.”

This got me thinking about the writers of the Bible, both the Testaments Old and New. They likely could’ve had no idea that one day their words, often brutally mistranslated, would be part of a Holy Bible sworn upon by both the forces of Good and Evil, and very often in vain. They may be just words, but en toto they are some of the (if not the very most) important words in human history, even if no one actually reads the vast majority of them with any intent to truly understand their context or original intent.

Timberg makes an ominous prediction that soon “the only people who will be able to work in culture will be those who don’t need to be compensated — celebrities, the very rich, and tenured academics.” I must therefore take full advantage of my current status and produce all I can in the current moment before the opportunity is lost.

I have never once begrudged a middle-class existence, if I have what I need, and here is why:

“Most literary writers, and visual artists, and architects, and journalists, and curators, and publicists, start in the middle and end up there if they can. But these tales are rarely told, and the economic roots of the many thousands of the creative class who do not appear in magazine profiles are even more obscure.

“There is, then, an invisible class of artists and artisans whose fortunes are worth taking seriously. We rarely hear about them, and we don’t have a stable context in which to consider them, because of centuries of myths and misperceptions. We need to understand the situation, and its various layers, as clearly as possible if we’re going to work to repair the current fracture.”

Two more interesting points back to back:

“When Google is used as an excuse to fire the librarian, or ‘free’ access to information causes circulation to drop and newspapers to lay off staff, the culture pays a very real price.

Will the result be a neutron bomb culture? Lots of art and information left standing, but no people making it?”

The issue is much more dynamic than this. This is a bit of an oversimplification calling out the symptoms of causes that are still mostly hidden from plain view. The issue is that the wealth that should be going to culture is being sucked up by lame duck performers who serve as puppets for the elite’s modern version of a court of jesters. However, the “neutron bomb culture” idea is a fair assessment of the end result of the current activities of our geopolitical and hyper-capitalistic nightmares.

Google does not replace the expertise or passion of a librarian in the know of the annals of curation and professionally articulated encyclopedic and didactic knowledge. A search engine is a stop gap measure, a starting point. Unless the youth and society at large come to appreciate the need for cultural groundskeepers (note that I didn’t say gatekeeper) we can’t solve the actual problem, which is the decay of the average knowledge base across the world. An AI such as the google search engine or any number of writing tools cannot grasp the moral fiber and true passion of a living breathing cultural worker. That simply cannot be replaced by any lesser substitute, including the many placebos available and mass marketed presently.

“AS CULTURAL WORKERS LOSE THEIR Jobs, where will they go? Not only is the person who works in the book/record/ video store a kind of low-paid curator, but these jobs have long served as an apprenticeship for artists, including Patti Smith, Quentin Tarantino, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, and Jonathan Lethem.”

This is an even more salient point. You need apprenticeships, but now you have to be a self-made expert or drown and go deaf in the noise.

…

In Culture Crash’s second chapter on Disappearing Clerks, Timberg has some great insight from novelist Jonathan Lethem about his time working as a bookstore clerk.

“With bookstores, you go in and you find the things you weren’t looking for. The clerk is doing that 24/7- my reading was shaped by what was left behind. And you develop a loathing for the false canon-the two books each year that everybody is supposed to read.” It also shaped the writer he would become, known for a mongrel. genre-blending style. “You can’t hang on to those sacred quarantines,” he told me, “when you see the mad diversity around you “

…

In a conversation he had with a clerk at Tower records classical annex named Eric Warwick, they discussed the “ruthlessness of mobile society” which is actually fitting because that’s what I’ve been railing against lately. Of his conversation with this man. Timberg found “what started out as an innocent question sometimes left me intellectually worn out.” I aspire to be like that clerk.

Just because someone labels you with a job title like “clerk” doesn’t mean you can’t imbue that opportunity with the trappings and efforts of a role that is much harder to define with just one or two words. Clerks often morph into curators of a sort, guardians and acolytes of culture, even if their pay scale and job title remain about the same.

Here’s that passage I was recalling that I mentioned to Emily recently (thankfully, there’s this iPhone feature that lets you snapshot and copy / paste plain text!):

“‘Usually the people in college-town scenes are not formally associated with the colleges,’ said David Blake, a young scholar who has done significant work on universities and their non-academic impact. But a university shapes the culture produced nearby. It fosters institutions- record stores, art galleries, bars with bandstands, coffee shops with readings or music series, and so on- that would not exist in the same density otherwise. And a concentration of colleges does something to the local sensibility: its ethos sees culture as an exploration rather than a purely moneymaking activity, encourages journalistic criticism, and works out a crucial paradox. ‘The liberal arts idea is about being disinterested-you pursue the best thinking, the best art, whatever, without any considerations of utilitarian or careerist advantage,’ Blake noted. “But you go to college so you can get a job. So there are pressures underneath the disinterestedness. One of the things a college town scene does is focus them.’ The artists who best negotiate that contradiction–a band that sticks to its principles but also makes a living, for instance typically become heroes to the scene, becoming part of the city’s canon, its sense of it-self. Canons, of course, reinforce the culture that grows up around them.”

Another clerk I really like that Timberg profiles, Hammurabi Kabbabe:

Unlike the outgoing, almost hyper Warwick, who grew up surrounded by classical music, Kabbabe was self-contained, internal, and saw music like a secret built of “forbidden knowledge” passed from one believer to another. When customers asked him for suggestions, whether for themselves or a friend, Kabbabe would present a battery of questions, some quite personal: What do they read? Are they early risers or night owls? Where do they live? Do they have conservative or progressive tastes? What’s going on in their lives? What other music, classical or otherwise, do they like?

“I wait for something it’s almost like free-associating-until they come up with the answer themselves.” As sensitive as he is to his customers’ tastes, he also felt a “moral commitment” to contemporary music and unjustly overlooked composers from all eras.

I love his pseudo-Socratic method to get customers to discover answers for themselves. To be less market driven, too.

Another brilliant excerpt:

“Strolling, in particular, is something that these shops encourage, and when they close, they often make neighborhoods less walkable. ‘Walking, ideally, is a state of mind in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord,’ Rebecca Solnit, the great, eccentric author of place, wrote in Wanderlust: A History of Walking. ‘Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.’ Browsing through books, records, and movies resembles this motion- it’s a kind of ambling of the mind.

“Humans are now so sophisticated and technologically advanced as a species that we’ve begun to disregard actual human beings, and maybe humanistic values as well.” – Scott Timberg

…

Back to culture crash, chapter 3: Of permatemps and content serfs.

“We have trouble grasping that something that empowers the individual might also wreck the structures that have protected the individual for decades.” -Thomas Frank, ‘Bright Frenetic Mills,’ Harper’s

While this statement is ostensibly true, it ignores the fact that creating new such structures is entirely possible. Yet, this is instead used as an excuse for self-pity.

Timberg begins his promising chapter on permatemps and content serfs essentially taking the perception of the gig economy being likened to frontier pioneers. This is, actually, how many people like to talk about the wide spread of freelancing. The trouble is, it’s not good at all, which he does get into shortly.

To wit: “But for those who must actually scrape together paying work in this new “gig economy” — architects, filmmakers, writers, musicians, bookstore managers, graphic designers, and other downsized members of the creative class, folks made obsolete by the Internet and the current predatory style of corporate power – Freelance Nation is a place where they fight to keep a home, a livelihood, or medical coverage.”

And they often lose, as I did.

…

Food for thought:

“Steve Jobs and technological heroes are still worshiped, said Thompson, but it doesn’t translate to creative people who do things that are intangible or hard to understand.

“I’ve seen people walk into a museum and say, ‘I can do that,” he said. “They can’t, of course. But when their computer breaks down, they know they can’t fix it. Creativity is a form of expertise,” something that we, as a democracy, have never been entirely comfortable with.”

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From the chapter: “The End of Print,” which actually didn’t happen… like at all, at least not on demand printing. Traditional assembly line printing, yes, that’s in the past.

“What if it happened in an age dominated by images and pseudo-events, perhaps developing, as Norman Mailer once said of Los Angeles, as if it had been “built by television sets giving orders to men” Instead, the nation’s formative years came roughly halfway into the four centuries dominated by the printed word.”

Apparently, we need a new campaign of mass literacy that is paired with a refresher course in critical thinking.

One novelist admitted, around 2015, that since he began to live online, he read about 36 fewer books a year. Holy moly. 

The in between is particulars about how corporations bought print publications, strip mined them for profits, then turned to the web and let the institutions crumble into shadows of their former selves. It’s pathetic, and the consequences are dire.

…

The next chapter is about “self-inflicted wounds”

Yes, members of the creative class, a minority but a sizable one, did do a lot of this to themselves. Even myself to the degree that I worshiped SEO as a false god and let social media steal a few of my best years.

The early part of the chapter discusses how literature has been studied and analyzed over time. Schools of thought constantly clash, and this discourse is fine and productive as each school will over time develop some merit. The issue becomes when certain schools of thought prevail at the cost of excluding most or all of the others because Wall Street (or capitalistic machinations like it) suggests it’s the most profitable course of action.

Post-structuralism and deconstructionism came to America in the late sixties and have defaced far too much and continue to do so.

So what has caused such dramatic declines in humanities majors in the 21st century? William Chace writes, not incorrectly,

“There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to cham-pion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.”

The issue I take with Chace’s statement is that these secondary considerations aren’t really the issue; it’s the exclusion of literature, at least that of the “old guard” being elitist bull-crap. Obviously, books can be written on these subjects which Chace refers to as a scattered array, and such subjects can even be inferred from the reading of “elitist” literature. What happens though, by fracturing literary studies into these disparate and oddly isolated classes is you end up with very frustrated girls and boys who suddenly become very unsure of their own identity and even sexuality, perfect candidates to just settle for whatever job will pay their monthly promissory notes for the privilege of being lectured nonsense at the cost of financial freedom. Once you remove context, everything becomes a chaotic blur.