CSotD: Getting it
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Sometimes you see a cartoon that is so clearly too smart for the room that you have to assume the cartoonist knew it but was so tickled by the concept that he did it anyway. Such, Dear Reader, is the case with today's Bliss.
Hint: Don't focus on the conversation. The joke is in the caption. And if you weren't an English major, that probably won't help, while, if you were, you probably didn't need the hint.
And for those who believe in synchronicity and planetary alignments and harmonica virgins and suchlike, I offer this: After writing the above, I was looking around for a quick cheat-sheet to let non-English majors off the hook, and among the candidates was this, which by-golly includes this paragraph:
Melville’s not kind to his readers. He doesn’t feel the obligation to pamper us, in fact, probably because by the time Melville wrote "Bartleby, the Scrivener," he was almost as poor as Bartleby. And he wasn’t sure he had any readers anymore anyway, and so he just spoke the truth.
Which is pretty much what I was about to say about cartoonists, or at least, some of them.
Greg Cravens, of "The Buckets," has some dour reflections on the industry that have been being passed around within the biz and possibly a bit further. I've spent some time with Greg in Kenosha and he's a very nice, upbeat kind of guy, so it's hard to imagine what darker souls are thinking about the state of affairs.
But one of the good things about the new phase Greg discusses is that you can identify and play to your own audience, with the trick being to make sure they find you.
That's a helluva trick, and, even if you bring in as many people as could possibly care about your stuff, the Thomas Kinkades will always outsell the Vincent Van Goghs.
But listen: While I'm sure he didn't agonize over his work the way Van Gogh did, I'm equally sure Kinkade didn't go home at night and said, "I tricked them into buying more of that maudlin crap."
When I was a perspiring novelist, people would often say, "You should write a (some genre) novel. They're really popular!"
The problem is, it's hard to produce convincing drek if you don't believe in it. You don't have to take it seriously, but you do have to respect it.
I would prefer not to.
In fact, I would prefer to make tall tazo chai lattes with soy milk by day and do what I care about at night.
And speaking of connecting with your audience
Fastrack cracked me up this morning because Facebook is constantly urging me to throw money down the rathole of their advertising program.
I have done so, and the only benefit I found was that advertising is a deductible expense.
Facebook is a good way to remind people that you're here. But, as advertising, it's no different than direct mail or broadcast or anything else, and the apparent chumminess of the place should not fool you into thinking you'll get a better response rate there than with any other type of advertising.
Meanwhile, I've learned that there is no relationship between the number of "likes" a post gets there and the number of hits I get here. Ditto when I've spent money to "promote" a posting.
The reminders matter, but primarily in the sense of maintaining audience. Any build-up is so incremental that individual actions are inconsequential.
This means you can get roughly the same benefit spending nothing as you'd get spending a modest amount.
I've certainly seen times that an artist has posted some item and had a very strong response. But not because it was "promoted." Because it was cool.
So save your money. Zuck will get by without it better than you will.
Combination of the two:
If we wrap "too smart for the room" and "ultrarich people who want your money" together, we get Alex, who is currently at the Grand High Summit of Rich Folks or whatever the hell it's called in Davos.
Dilbert is for shipping clerks. Alex is for middle management.
Dilbert is a broad-brush cartoon for people who hate their bosses, which is pretty much everyone.
Alex is for people who are close enough to the top to be able to see why it's going so badly.
My grandfather began his career in iron and steel going down in an elevator with a lunch bucket and wound it up going up in an elevator with a briefcase, a major player in a major steel company, his salvation being that he retired in the 60s before things got totally out of proportion.
Retirement did not take him entirely out of the loop, however. He retained a lot of contacts and friendships in the business, and so we paid attention when he remarked, at some point in the 70s, that, if the steel industry had taken the money they spent fighting the clean air and water acts and put it into cleaning up their factories instead, they'd have solved the problem easily.
At the time, we didn't know where it was all going or where it had all come from.
He lived far enough into the 80s to shake his head over what was going on. We asked him, once we were starting to make more than we needed to get by, what to do with our money. He said, "Spend it." He could see the train wreck coming.
I don't know if he'd have found today's Alex funny, but he'd have certainly recognized the way the fellow isn't dismissing climate change so much as simply not getting how anything that doesn't affect him personally right here right now even exists, much less matters.
Here's the thing: If I make a joke about a character in a Herman Melville short story and you don't get it, that's okay.
There are far more troubling ways in which people just don't get it.
Yes, I've posted this before. And yet …
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