DePaul: becoming people that stand in front of things that you actually want to look at.

1) The New Yorker fiction this week tackles the problem of a self-as-sieve-for-consumer-purchases. It's almost disarmingly direct in pointing out that the equation "staying cool through having cool things and going to parties with cool people who know about Dadaism and ironic symbolism" ultimately veils you from the world and injects into your life same kind of alienation that befalls less couture lifestyles (blue collar TV watching with bowling on Tuesday?).

The story is not good, nor is it really bad in the sense of being poorly constructed or not offering up a polyglot array of characters (although they come off a bit precious, at that). It's an exercise in realism, to the degree that it portrays a flat, empty existence through the depiction of flat, empty characters, the narrator being the exception, sort of. The narrator discovers (or thinks he discovers) that his fashionable friends are all essentially salespeople whose particular idiosyncratic hipster affectations are actually akin to product placements in the sea of sweet coolness in which they circulate. The conflict of the story - if I recall correctly - revolves around the narrator's sense of disorientation that follows closely in the wake that his friends are all billboards. He gives away his stuff, intends to murder the guy whose machinations first revealed to him that the styles or values he had embraced were really more like window dressing, and - at the end - seems to shrink back from the intention to get past the kind of life to which he had devoted himself.

I'm not sure if I misread the ending here - I took it to suggest, essentially, that knowing you live in a self-constructed jail and accepting it is somehow better (or easier?) than exiting it. The assumption being, exiting one jail is entering another? I don't know. That the story appears in the Fashion issue lends it a little bit more traction, at least through the collision of its fictional world and the world portrayed through the ads of the other magazines.

Here is more food for thought on the general problem the story attempts to get its glossy paragraphs around.