Tag Archives: Nabokov

Parallax For Time, or Measuring Infinity

08 Thursday Jan 2026

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

When I was young my father explained the “error of parallax” to me and today, though my memory is total garbage, that stuck with me for some reason. The error of parallax occurs when you observe something from a skewed angle and misread it accordingly. The simplest example is to imagine yourself in the passenger seat of a car, unable to gauge the speedometer accurately because you’re looking at it from an angle, not from the driver’s seat.

So that’s how parallax works in terms of physical space. I’ve been intrigued lately about how this same bias works in terms of time. When are you really looking at a moment, square and dead on? During it, or some time after?

Adults know how weird it is returning to places you spent time as a kid which seem much smaller than they used to. Physically, you were smaller too. These places were bigger, relative to your size then. I think as a person grows physically, maybe the world around them shrinks.

But also things take on mythical proportions when you’re young, and the passage of time evens this out. That’s why pro athletes seem not just like adults when you’re a kid, but giants. Men. When I was 13, nobody could have been older or more of an adult than Mats Sundin. He was 26. Now, I’m 41.

This is one way I think parallax works in terms of time. But there are other similar distortions too on different scales.

It’s common for every generation to think they had it hard, they were hardcore, and today’s contemporary whippersnappers are soft. We used to walk five kilometres to school in snow this high. There’s always some reason why adults had it rough and kids today are soft. Today’s soft kids will have had it hard as youth, but only once they grow up and see a new crop of young indulged kids.

There’s always some problem society gets fixated on solving, and people are soft because back in my day nobody cared about it. Today we have mental health diagnoses for problems nobody knew existed. This language gives us a framework for understanding behaviour previous generations lacked. Frankly, sometimes I think pseudo-psychology gets tossed around casually, and people sling therapy language around willy nilly, but by and large we understand that conditions people have can sometimes account for behaviour that would otherwise be difficult to us to understand.

This affects how people see a past time and their own. Everybody in their 40s today lived through the 80s, but not as adults. Their perception about what the 80s or 90s were like is no doubt shaped by their age. Is their sense of time skewed by their age? What exactly is the right age to perceive an era?

Today’s adults don’t know what it’s like to live in 2026 as a child. That’s how parallax works in terms of time. It’s unavoidable.  

That’s why all those fiery op-eds about what Millennials or Gen-Z or Gen-X are like seem silly to me. People are always the same. Technology changes, economic conditions change, and people adjust to this matrix of things accordingly.

Baby Boomers shat on social media when it came out, believing you had to be a vapid idiot to use it. Now it’s a cliché that they’re the first to believe the most outlandishly fake crap posted on Facebook. They were never above using social media, it just wasn’t aimed at adults initially. (Originally, you needed to have a university email to use Facebook). People didn’t use a social media platform invented in 2004 back in the 1960s and 70s for obvious reasons.

With physical space, it’s easy to understand what a straight-ahead perspective is and look at something dead on. With time, this is much less clear.

Sometimes, you don’t understand just what you’re looking at until you get a broader context than is immediately apparent. Maybe you need time to process what’s going on. That’s what the phrase “hindsight is 20-20” means. It suggests the moment itself isn’t the best time to accurately grasp what’s going on.

That’s why parallax is different for time. Novelists love thinking about this kind of stuff. This is Proust’s subject, and he called his famous novel, In Search of Lost Time. As Nabokov elegantly describes it, “it’s a treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place is the past.”

In a way, the idea of involuntary memory, where one sudden whiff of a tea biscuit can summon core memories long thought buried, contradicts the idea of hindsight being 20-20. It’s not hindsight that makes the memories come alive, but olfactory stimulation. ie, a smell. Then again, eye witnesses for crimes often remember things they witnessed very recently very incorrectly. Memory and time and perception are funny things!

People talk about the relativity of time, how it can move quickly or slowly depending on what’s going on. One new theory I semi-believe is that everybody is every age at once. Seniors carry with them many things from childhood, and have carried their childhood with them constantly, every day of their life. On the flipside, the way you treat a child today is something that can stick with them for decades, so in a way, you’re interacting with that future self too.

It’s not that they’re literally every age at once, it’s that time is only alive in memory. Sometimes people make up a memory, or misremember something that they genuinely think is real.

One funny thing people post online about macro time, epochs, is that we currently live closer to Cleopatra’s age than Cleopatra was to the Pharaoh Cheops, of Cairo’s Great Pyramid fame, Cheops. That’s how long the Egyptian dynasty was.

On the flip side of this grander scale, in music, I’ve become a much keener appreciation of rhythm. Time can be measured in millennia or measures, bars. Everything is on the one. Some jazz and hip hop beats have a lazy behind-the-beat feel I just love, a type of drawl. A hiccup. The P Funk album Funkentelechy Versus the Placebo Syndrome takes part of its name from the Greek word, entelechy, which is concerned with a being achieving its fullest potential. The way I understand it, P Funk is trying to ask the listener what the state of their funk is now, in the moment that just elapsed, and the next one, and the one after that. Are you realizing your full funk, now, and in the constant now-ness? That’s where the Funk is. It’s on the one, and it’s now. That’s one micro perspective on music I think is cool.

Some musical ideas I’ve had consider time on a small and larger scale at the same time. There are Sun Ra records where the A and B sides are from completely different sessions, perhaps years apart. Maybe this was done unintentionally, as they pressed their own albums and recorded their own music constantly and could have simply lost track of what session was what. Their discography is notoriously challenging. I prefer to think of it as Ra playing with time in a micro and macro sense. Side A is from 1962, side B from the 70s. Greatest Hits albums arguably do the same thing.

What does it mean to have an “old soul”? Usually it’s when a young precocious person likes older, more cultivated art, or seems philosophical beyond their years. But even the way we understand art is influenced by time in a major way. For one thing, older books, movies, or songs have had years of scrutiny, and if people still love them after decades, that’s a test new art can’t possibly get to take, let alone pass. It might pass that test later, but not today.

It’s not just that grandparents aren’t impressed by the music their grandchildren listen to. Louis Armstrong had nothing great to say about bebop, and today, jazz standards written by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are a bedrock part of the jazz Canon.

It’s possible to get swept up by music because it’s current, because it responds to current events or the current moment, but this currentness can also obscure perceptions. Sometimes, topical art speaks to a moment, but isn’t remembered much after that current moment passes. Even that word, current, is great because it invokes water moving in this or that direction, just like the passage of time.  

I saw a post on twitter recently, where someone was lamenting how today’s youth are nostalgic for the 90s, which have passed. Give it up, they’re gone! That was the message. In response, a gentleman I follow posted pictures of 90s albums harkening back to music from the 70s. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill took her cover from Bob Marley’s Burnin’. Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You was the basis for Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night.

Being nostalgic for a time period you didn’t live in is timeless behaviour, if you will. Musicians have always mined the past for sounds and feels, because what else can a musician know but music they’ve heard before? Norm Macdonald made the joke, that “this is a picture of me when I was younger” should be followed by “every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger.”

Musicians can’t be influenced by music that hasn’t happened yet, so the past is the only place to look. Novelists, same thing. It’s a question of how far back you go, and in which directions. Any new art has something of the old in it too, and this is how time moves in two directions at once.

Parallax for space rightly assumes that there is one central point from which a perspective is centred, the correct one to look and measure from. This doesn’t exist for time, or if it does, it’s not straightforward. In a sense, we live in every time that has ever occurred, even if the past is buried somewhere and yet to rise, awaiting for whatever will excavate or summon it.

The Arrogance & Ignorance of “Western Culture” Boosters

09 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by in Literature

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

I’d like to address here a common thing I see, which is North Americans assuming that Western Culture is automatically superior to the cultural output from other countries.

To begin, I will never say a bad word about the literature of the Canon—my point is a more basic one: how can anybody who only reads English possibly judge non-English literature? People judge culture based on its prestige. The literary heroes of the Canon are the best writers from the countries with money. Military and political centres. It is no accident! Let’s not confuse fame and prestige with talent.

Again, I am not taking away anything from Proust, Kafka, Bellow, Nabokov. Love these writers! I do, everyone should. But I can’t read Bhattacharya in his native Bengal, I can’t read Ghalib’s ghazals in their original. Or for that matter, Kafka or Proust, Or Belano in Spanish, or Tolstoy in Russian. When people say Western Culture is superior, what are they actually saying?

Western books are often considered, rightly, to be the bedrocks of literature because generations of writers around the world read the Bible and Homer, Shakespeare and Joyce. Often, an angry type of critic believes that removing these books from the centre of the discussion is nouveau philistine junk. I’d like to pause here and consider a few things.

The cornerstones of Western Literature were often originally banned in Western countries. Ulysses, Madame Bovary, Lolita. The notion that the West has always embraced what is now considered Western master pieces is simply not true.

With music, its record is worse. America only let Duke Ellington and his musicians enter through the back door of the club, and Jimi Hendrix wasn’t discovered in America. Black American blues musicians had to be validated in the UK before America embraced what it had. Son House, John Hurt, Frew McDowell…

But there’s another side to this. When I was young and the Maple Leafs won a game, I’d say to my mom, “we won!” She would tell me, correctly, “you didn’t do anything.” So when people talk about “our” culture, what do they mean? What did they do? The answer: jack shit.

This so-called cultural conversation is often just people co-opting the prestige of famous books they didn’t write, or even read, because they happen to have incidental geographic circumstances in common with the author.

The point that wealthy countries have their author’s celebrated is interpreted by some as a war cry—it sounds, to them, like what I’m really saying is political concerns should impact, or even determine, aesthetic judgments. This is not what I’m saying! On the contrary, my point is that only the aesthetic masterpieces from rich countries get their due celebrations, while masterpieces from poor countries languish, relatively.

Put another way, the aesthetes are more influenced by politics than they think. They will likely reject this notion, it will offend them, because they think they are driven solely by detached and impartial Eyes for Art.

Western Classical music is rightly beloved, but a lot of people judge other music by its terms, and just sound stupid when they shit talk music they don’t understand. I suspect African poly rhythms were too sophisticated for people conditioned to only understand Western harmonies and rhythms, and they’d criticize it as “savage” or “primitive,” which beyond the racist connotations is literally them just misunderstanding music because it is too complex for them to understand. If you asked such a person to identify the beat or the time signature, they couldn’t. But to them, it just sounds like noise.

People say this of hip hop, a beautiful, rich and varied art form. People relate to art made by people like them, because it reflects them, the listener/reader, and when they approach art that reflects someone else, they think the art is bad, when really what’s happening is, for once, the art they’re looking at reflects somebody else. They are making political judgments, not artistic ones, though it’ll be impossible to convince such a person that this is what they’re doing. They are convinced in their bones they’re viewing Art Only.

An open mind for literature/art isn’t necessary from a political point of view, but from an aesthetic one. Nabokov’s essay about the struggles of translation (fidelity to meaning, rhythms, a million other esoteric things to convert) is required reading for anyone who thinks they can sound off on books written in another language. VN tells us that a writer can’t be judged by a reader who can’t properly pronounce that author’s last name.

Can you pronounce Ghalib properly? Gogol? Tagore? Even Kafka, Proust, Goethe? It’s from an Art perspective that the imperialistic backers of Western art show deficiency. There’s a kind of foundation you need to understand foreign literature that they don’t have, but the international prestige of Western literature (that blessed, blessed thing!) convinces them that any haughty declaration of Western cultural superiority is justified.

“Western Literature” is a funny term, anyway, for suggesting it all comes from one place — the supposed united thing called The West is made up of countries that warred with each other relentlessly for centuries. Even Homer’s Greece had the Peloponnesian War (centuries later, but still), because “Greece” was a bunch of city states, not a country as we know the concept today. France and Germany and the UK went at it forever, and the US fought a war to separate itself from England — suddenly, there is one thing called The West which produces authors who fall under one category?

The authors who excelled from these countries probably did so despite the national influence on them, not because of it. Joyce wrote outside Ireland. Gogol never saw the Russian countryside he appears to have depicted in Dead Souls but from a passing carriage, and fled the country whenever he published a new work. Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Church and was out of favour with the government when he died alone in a train station, even though Putin’s Olympics had a ghastly Tolstoy caricature running around during the Sochi Opening Ceremony. Putin co-opting Tolstoy’s prestige is not very different than a strain of critic I see today, boosting themselves for being born in the same country as literary giants they had nothing to do with.

I don’t like the business of ranking literature—anyone concerned, like me, with art for art’s sake also doesn’t care about ranking. Nabokov judges each book one at a time—he loves Anna Karenin, thinks War and Peace is a rollicking historical novel for children, and thinks Late preacher Tolstoy is mostly garbage except for Ivan Ilyich, a true masterpiece. Gogol’s Ukrainian stories, junk. Dead Souls, immortal work of shimmering genius. What does it mean, that people feel emboldened to make judgments about “Russian literature” when each author is so uneven in their own career? What do the books in the Canon have to do with each other, exactly? Sometimes there is a link, or a direct line of influence, sometimes there really isn’t.

The thing for a critic today is to try to squeeze the most possible from every work of art, to narrow the focus. The point is to enjoy the art. This kind of nationalistic bragging is political jingoism dressed up as concern for art, and it strikes me as absurd, laughable, and embodies the smug stupidity it praises itself for being above.

Put another way, everyone bragging about Western Literature should shut up: anybody can read a book, only the person who wrote it is entitled to bragging rights. Let’s be humble, open-minded, and never forget that genius is universal, and that to take any view which limits our enjoyment of literature or art instead of broadens it is needlessly limiting, and warps our critical faculties.

It may strike one as surprising or counter intuitive that readers who emphasize the impact of colonialism on literature are actually more focused on aesthetics in literature than the ones who swear political power has no bearing on literature, and that there’s no room for political concerns in a conversation about art, but this is an odd truth.

It’s necessary to recognize both things at once: Tolstoy was a genius, but he could never have written such novels without having the leisure time on his estate to simply sit there and read and write all day. Sophia helped him with all kinds of things. Women weren’t encouraged to write, and people without money didn’t have the time to. Certain countries aren’t talked about or celebrated for their writers. But of course great writers can come from anywhere.

Because of money, power, race, nationalism, there are lost literary heroes whose names we will never know, and this should bother everyone concerned with art.

 

 

Toronto’s pathetic book culture

06 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by in Statements

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Our city’s book culture is terminally ill, and there is no chance for its revival. Real book culture isn’t about glossy new $30 hard cover books about a woman contractually obliged to put out in sordid ways she never imagined, it’s about the books that are enriching as they are inexpensive. They generate rapture because they are written beautifully. I made a joke months ago after buying toilet paper and paper towel, “paper is only cheap if there’s literature on it,” but after learning yesterday that Frantic City is closing, perhaps my favourite second-hand book store, this joke now contains a very tragic note. Let’s not mince words: if we ever had a literary culture, it is dying slowly, emitting only a thoroughly ignored whimper.

The hardest thing for an individual to bring himself to do now is spend dozens of hours on a book nobody in their inner-circle is reading or talking about. It will in no way boost their status among friends or peers or society at large, and investing so much time given the esoteric pay off is uncommon, or eccentric. There are active forces against reading real books, great literature: we are inundated with friends telling us “you have to watch this TV series,” or we are glued to our various screens, or we read the lofty magazines urging us to try a series of gastronomic hamburgers.

Books are anathema to the marketplace and our consumer culture, and that will never change, and it’s getting worse. Any advertiser’s worst nightmare is the consumer who can cheaply think and entertain himself for great lengths of time. A copy of Anna Karenin can be purchased for $3, and you can spend incalculable hours (YEARS!) reading and rereading it. But this keeps you away from pop-up ads, away from commercials, away from stores, away from restaurants, away from spending money, and so all these things (their presence increasingly ubiquitous) pushes people away from lengthy reading. You earn funny looks if you tell someone you read this stuff. Perhaps they doubt your intention, high-brow scorn, like you can’t genuinely love literature the way people do Game of Thrones, that you’re putting on airs to appear intelligent.

The post-literate generation needs things fast, and the great tomes take time. “Caress the detail, the divine detail!” Nabokov urges us, but he is dead and nobody listens any more. So what we have is dying second-hand stores, and mainstream book merchants stocking t-shirts, various bookish looking kitsch, board games, and somewhere, if space graciously permits, books.

The decrease in real reading coincides with an increase in public bookish proclamations. The book as symbol. There are tote bags with pictures of books on them, people volunteering a love for books in neon letters all over social media, and there was a respectable hullabaloo when Ford, the philistine Goliath, tried to strip the library of funds. Yes, but people aren’t loud when they read, they are silent. Though the above is well and good, none of it convinces me in-depth reading is broadly taking place.

This is not an argument for reading the Western Canon exclusively. I believe reading should be done widely, according to one’s taste, and that there are only two schools of literature: the talented and the untalented. Ragging on a book because it’s popular is as wildly ignorant as loving a book because it’s in the canon. But for stores to be going out business because they choose to stock great but not in vogue authors’ entire catalogues instead of their number one seller, rather than schlock, is a bad sign, and I am lashing out at the risk of appearing like a snob. (Perhaps I am a snob: suck it.)

Think hard what I’m about to say, or it’ll sound perfectly deranged or offensive. Zizec describes Gandhi as being more violent than Hitler, in that Hitler’s unimaginable atrocity was actually much more within historical context than Gandhi’s unprecedented determination towards non-violence. In this sense, the real revolutionaries aren’t in the streets demanding change with thousands of other people just like them. The biggest act of protest now is to shut yourself off from everyone and read a book in silence without sharing it on social media. This private act is violent!

That my area is sooo hip and cool because of the glossy restaurants and the multitude of watering holes offering extremely local or extremely exotic beer is a sham. Shellacked culture, no rapture. It’s not just condo culture, but the so-called counter culture that’s inane, and I feel let down by it.

Don’t get me wrong: people can indulge in whatever decadent drivel they like, but it stops being benignly amusing when their world, the physical one I share with them, can’t permit for me only a cheap book store that stocks according to taste, not predictable money makers. I want very little, and I can’t have it! At the very least, the current pretence towards a bookish culture during this insoluble literary assault is salt in my wound. I am insulted.

The tomes are entombed. So long, Solon! I am not looking forward to the day, soon approaching, where I have this conversation:

Me: “Hey, do you remember when great books cost a dollar, bought from an actual store?”

Average citizen: “No.”

 

On status, advertising, and bottle service…something I know about

15 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Statements

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Facebook has eroded the actual meaning of the word “status,” a real shame (and no accident) since I think the concept of status is an immensely important evolutionary psychological tool which helps us understand just about everything. This is an immensely loaded statement, so let me qualify and explain what status is, how inauthentic and contrived it can be, and what all this means in regards to advertising.

Status is ever-changing reputation that you wear or live. It has nothing to do with the person’s innate qualities. If you drive a Porsche, whether you can afford it or not, you get heightened status in most communities (not amongst bohemians though…you need rags and a record of activism, imprisonment a bonus, for that). If you’re rich but drive a Honda, your status is equal to all non-rich Honda drivers.

Perhaps you don’t want to be showy, but a CEO would look ridiculous, or have his authority undermined, appearing to work on a bike. Perhaps the guy in a Porsche is just a destitute man having a mid-life crisis. You cannot judge someone without knowing their inner reasons! This piece is about considering our own reasons for buying things, not judging others. But Porsches and Hondas differ hugely in performance, materials, and the quality of construction, so the increased price is warranted.

But the most pure example of headlong waste is bottle service. Nothing signals baller status like unnecessarily paying ten times the price for the exact same drinks. If bottles were sold at $30 instead of $300, they’d no longer be desirable. Obviously people would buy the cheaper booze, but not the same people, and for different reasons. $300 bottles reliably sends the message that the buyer can afford to waste, and this message is no longer sent if the bottle is reasonably priced. I have seen sparklers attached to bottles so everyone sees who ordered: if nobody sees them ball, they’re not really balling. The impression made is worth $270 to some–this is what’s really on purchase, not the alcohol, after all.

This is a silly, irrational remnant of the Pleistocene, where having an over-abundance of resources in harsh times meant guaranteed survival to cavemen and the people in their circle. But today, spending for the sole sake of wasting is tacky and everywhere in bad taste. The most essential thing when considering evolutionary psychology is not to conflate what is in our genes with how we ought to behave. Remember, too, there’s nothing wrong with buying expensive things that are worth the money if you appreciate them.

Facebook’s diabolical genius is letting people control and publicize their own “status” for free. Of course, it’s not really a status they’re posting, but just a message that appears to people on their list. But they called it that for a reason. Facebook is the sparkler attached to the bottle service, without having to buy the bottle. No wonder its mass appeal.

Understanding status is essential to understanding the horror show of corporate branding. To be certain, branding is so successful that any company would be crazy not to do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not absurdly irrational. They give out status by making us feel predictably good about ourselves (or stop us from feeling insecure or bad) or by making us feel like we belong to a desirable set.

To be a company in the present age requires a predictable image, a term I like better than “brand”; The word “brand” falsely suggests the company is innately and permanently a certain way, where “image” rightly sounds contrived and painstakingly designed in advance to appeal to certain masses.

Companies can’t exist now unless they are seen to be giving entities which help the world in some small, yet heartening or profound way. So they give a negligible amount to a high-profile cause and take possession of a moral posture. Moral qualities are not for purchase, yet companies lay claim to them and offer moral vindication to consumers as a reward for buying their product. The formula is roughly: Fight hunger by buying this chocolate bar since we donate to so and so.

While on the surface it seems only positive that companies benefit people who otherwise would receive nothing, it’s the exploitation of our craving for status working in their self-interest that upsets me, as well as the impurity of the hijacking of the genuine yearning to do good for only its image. It’s not unlike requiring high school students to perform community service in order to graduate; the charm and the actual moral worth of the action is removed from voluntary service when it’s obligatory. So when companies posture like they care about the world, even if it does help somewhat, it ceases to be charming or genuine when their “giving” is embedded in their price, or when it makes them appear advantageously compassionate. 

You can be certain no company will ever give anonymously, unless they also secretly leak to the right media sources that they were the ones who donated so freely. I predict this will happen one day, as companies seek to appear pure and genuine.

Imagine the CEO of a fortune 500 company venerating the company’s dedication to the environment, or towards humanity, on a jumbo jet en route to Las Vegas where a business deal will be concluded amid unimaginable excess. This blends the two strains of status–exclusivity proved by over-priced gluttony, and worldly benevolence proved by high-profile giving. While I made up the above CEO, no doubt he has many real existences somewhere.

When branding is safely ignored, it’s evident that we only buy products from companies, yet there is an immense chasm between the physical properties of the product, the price at which it’s sold, and our reasons for purchase. Companies increase our status by making us feel accepted in cliques they spend millions of dollars determining we seek belonging. Beer commercials are hilarious in this respect.

The notion of a beer being tastier for a certain demographic (undergraduate party animals, urban sophisticates, etc.) is absurd. People either like it or they don’t, but it tastes the same way for everybody. The combination of barley, wheat and water cannot love hockey or act as a national ambassador for the simple reason that inanimate grains cannot have thoughts or feelings. Yet companies try and convince us that drinking their beer puts us on the “cool male hockey guy” or “patriot” team.

When a celebrity claims to use a product, ordinary mortals who also use it somehow feel linked to their high status, despite knowing they’re paid for the endorsement and might not actually feel that way. But this works in reverse too. Andrew Coyne wrote well on how Magnotta’s picture drinking a Labatt shouldn’t really mean anything:

“The idea that Magnotta’s alleged crimes would somehow have been related to his fondness for drinking Blue is only slightly more tenuous than the idea that drinking Blue would cause hundreds of sexy girls to show up at your parties.”

I’m sure Coyne knows that people aren’t rational, but a brand has a strange hold on people. Nabokov describes a similar cynical humour of the falseness in advertising in even better terms, and I never resist quoting him:

“…the world they [advertisers] create is pretty harmless in itself because everybody knows that it is made up by the seller with the understanding that the buyer will join in the make-believe. The amusing part is…that it is a kind of satellite shadow world in the actual existence of which neither the sellers nor buyers really believe in their heart of hearts…”

But Nabokov wrote before there was a clear demarcation between the real life and the made up world of the advertisement. If this clear line between “ad” and “world” ever existed in Nabokov’s time, it has been fully eroded by advertisers who not only put ads into movies, but make sure their celebrity is candidly filmed consuming a product in the “real world”. The idea is to make the giving and taking of status more authentic by conflating the world of the ad, the art, and the actual world.

This deliberate obfuscation is the most pernicious delusion of all. It strikes me as unfair and as the most profound kind of lie imaginable, approaching the Platonic form of falsehood. The only reasonable response is to distrust every screen–no grain of salt is big enough. We cannot remain innocent in an age where everybody knows advertisers have hitherto unprecedented information about us, and they exist only to find new invasive ways to flatter us (“you’re so charitable and good”) or threaten us (“you’re not charitable or sexy enough”).  

And so, anybody who makes money by selling us something cannot be an impartial status bestower.  Measure your status on your own terms, or by the intimate people in your life who don’t benefit from praising or criticizing you. The people who think buying a product has any bearing on their status or character whatsoever is under a delusion not very different than the hypnotized man who makes love to a chair.