Dear Readers, this is just a quick note to let you know that if you looked me up on Google you very likely came across a compelling photo of a stunning women with a penetrating, somewhat sad gaze. As the text below it says “Annette Hamilton” you may have been misled into thinking either that I was committing a very heinous sin of disguise, presenting my persona in an entirely misleading way, or that somehow I had undertaken a full head and neck transplant which as far as I know even Drs Dubrow and Nassif could not manage (if you are a fan of Botched you will know who I am talking about).
No, this is a photo of writer Anna Wiener (37) author of Uncanny Valley, a book I strongly recommended in a post in March 2020 (see Posts).
I still recommend her book as a wonderful example of auto-ethnography, but with everything that has happened in the US over the past 4-5 years it can’t help being a bit past-the-moment. She now writes for the New Yorker as a tech correspondent – her latest pieces are “On video game engines” for The New York) and “On office memoirs” for The New Yorker. The photo above comes from her website.
There are plenty of photos of Annette Hamilton on this site and I think you’ll agree there is no mistaking the two.
As a possibly irrelevant aside, you may come across reference to an Annette Weiner (note different spelling). Annette and I did in fact share a number of elements of personal experience which would make this mistaken identity far more cogent.
Annette Weiner, former Dean of the Faculty of Arts, NYU
Annette Weiner was an outstanding and well-known anthropologist; born 1933 in Philadelphia, she died in 1997 in Greenwich Village, of cancer, at the age of 64. She had an extraordinary career, as Kriser Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, chair of the department and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. She wrote a dissertation on the contribution of women to the economy of Trobriand society.
Annette Weiner was a very generous, kind and fun-loving soul who allowed me to stay in her New York apartment on several occasions. We also met up in Paris, but things did not go well between us there and our friendship collapsed under the weight mainly of my bad behaviour. But, as they say, that’s another story! Perhaps to be told in an upcoming auto-fictional memoir, Paris Vertigo, although that’s not on the immediate writing horizon. I have always regretted what happened between us, although it was probably inevitable. How much of “the truth” I can tell in that book remains to be seen. But please do not mistake me for Annette Weiner either!
(From International Association of Literary Journalism Studies)
As mentioned I have been thinking about inserting the odd Feuilleton here, mainly because I keep finding myself contemplating some strange or remarkable facet of contemporary culture and society which defies inclusion into any other kind of writing I do. By calling it a Feuilleton I hope to indicate that it is a passing phenomenon not of any great social or political importance in itself, although I may be flirting with the Zeitgeist or capturing the temper of the times. My Feuilletons are not about literary culture or contemporary writing or the Kindle or the role of reviewers in the Internet age. But they are not entirely frivolous or meaningless either.
The term Feuilleton comes from French and means something like “little leaf”. Originally it was a small item at the bottom of the literary section of a newspaper, often providing a critique of popular theatre, but in many cases it grew to have its own page. By the 1840s the term roman-feuilleton described a serialized novel published in newspapers, something like today’s internet novelizations, but paid for, not for free. I mean the readers bought the newspapers and the newspapers paid the writers. [Now we barely have newspapers and people publish their writing for free all the time, which seems counterproductive]. The term was used in English by 1845, in the Atheneum.
The term was also handy to refer to small one-page advertisements, like handbills, which might be handed out in the street to encourage consumers to visit suppliers, as in this advertisement for a delicious lunch venue the like of which sadly no longer exists.
If that all sounds cheery and familiar, we must pause at what Hermann Hesse had to say about it in The Glass Bead Game, regarded as the first and only science fiction novel to win the Nobel Prize (in 1946). He was writing against the decline of humanistic culture brought about by “feuilletonism”, which he saw as the antithesis to true writing, and lampooned viciously. His master-work, The Glass Bead Game, was on the Must-Read list of myself along with almost every other proto-boho-intello in the 1960s, and describes the life of future intellectuals living in a cloistered community trying to circumvent the excesses of the age. Thanks to Huxley for bringing the Feuilleton into the present time as another object of knowledge. (https://huxley.media/en/the-feuilleton-era-we-live-in/)
Hesse described the Feuilleton, printed widely in newspapers and magazines, as a source of “mental pabulum” for readers hoping to soak up culture but unable to actually do so due to the lack of education and motivation, and of course being too busy and far too important to sit down and read actual books.
He said:
Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as «Friedrich Nietzsche and Women’s Fashions of 1870,« or «The Composer Rossini’s Favorite Dishes», or «The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans» and so on.
Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as «The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries» or «Physico-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather» and hundreds of similar subjects… we feel surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have helped to «service» this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, «service» was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relationship of man to the machine at that time.”
Good heavens! This is exactly the flavour of the endless parade of pablum from our own Machine, the Internet, much of which we now call “clickbait”. But Feuilletonism goes so much deeper than trying to persuade people to buy stuff they don’t need from people they don’t know manufactured by unspecifiable techniques at places which don’t exist. The Age of the Feuilleton is completely dominant today, ever more so with the consequences of AI development and universal internet access on every phone – the mastery of the Machine indeed.
I don’t see my contributions to the Age of the Feuilleton as necessarily despicable, as Hesse might have done. By proposing to include a few remarks under the heading of a Feuilleton, I am going with the diverse flow of contemporary knowledges, and playing a little with the scary bizarritude of the fragments flowing through the ever-open channels of our time. It is true that there may be an academic flavour to the analysis, but maybe that is a necessary correlate of talking about anything in modern culture at all, rather than just participating in it. And a rich and full array it is.
So in my occasional Feuilleton I will remark on various ephemeral incidences, moments or events, usually conveyed in media, sometimes in performance. I notice things as I trawl through my reading and writing. Someone, generally much younger than myself, draws my attention to something I have never thought of before, and didn’t know existed. Or I am struck by some change in the discourse and behaviour in the everyday world around me. Often these moments are so peculiar in flavour and signification that I am reminded of my old father’s frequent exclamation: “Well blimey, you just wouldn’t read about it”. Now, these days, it turns out he was plain wrong. We can read about it, and moreover see it, all the time, every hour of every day. By adding a little more to it I hope to do no harm. I will identify those pieces which belong in the Feuilleton category, so you can skip over them altogether if you like.
Check out Stoddard Martin’s essays, with insights from the old and new literatures of several countries – aesthetics, musicology, mythology, philosophy, poetry, politics, and psychology.
Monstrous Century: Essays in ‘the Age of the Feuilleton’ Paperback – October 15, 2016
Insights from the old and new literatures of several countries jostle for space in this work – not to mention aesthetics, musicology, mythology, philosophy, poetry, politics, and psychology. The subjects, even when unsympathetic in themselves, are viewed in the round, and judged with humanity (from the publisher’s blurb).
«THE GLASS BEAD GAME». FRAGMENT FROM THE WORK
«We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather «chatted» about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors.”
[The first part of this post was published as part of the previous post: I have been thinking more about reviewing and republish it here as it prompted some more thoughts on this topic].
When Amazon Kindle was first a thing you had to buy the books you wanted to read and download them onto an early-generation e-reader, nothing else worked other than your actual computer. Take a look at one of the early Kindle versions here:
You couldn’t put them on your IPhone or on an I-Pad and there was no such thing as Kobo or Apple Books. This led me to feeling very enthused about reviewing. I love to read a well-crafted and considered review, and enjoyed the challenge of writing them myself. I knew an author’s success depended to a great extent on what the reviews said, and as a reader myself I read at least a good selection of reviews, both positive and negative. One’s reviewing name is not one’s own name, so there was some protection of identity when you didn’t like something. I felt it was a kind of community thing, to share views with others. I reviewed certain author’s books without fail. Then there was Goodreads, which at some point was taken over by Amazon, and that became overwhelming, so I stopped using it altogether, although they still send me emails all the time.
I don’t know when it dawned on me that the whole review process had become distorted and corrupt. Review-farming was a thing. Somehow authors could pay money – a lot of money, maybe hundreds of dollars – to have their books reviewed by a group of people who apparently got some reward for reviewing them, although I never knew how that worked, or how it met Amazon’s terms of service. The system became hyper-alert to reviews from anyone even vaguely connected to the author, relative, friend, Facebook contact, whatever and those reviews were banned. Other anonymous people however were free to say whatever they liked and post one star reviews because the book was delivered late, or was about something they hadn’t expected because obviously they hadn’t read the blurb.
Now I don’t review at all. I often feel I would like to comment on books I really like, or make suggestions to authors about something they could do to strengthen the work, or whatever. But I know now that the majority of successful Amazon authors are turning out books once every couple of months. Some are using ghost writers. Others treat writing as a kind of supermarket shelf-stocking – each book a basic product fitting a particular genre run through one or more editing programs to check for grammar and spelling, off to a human editor perhaps, covers designed strictly by genre convention which somehow everyone understands, and book is “launched” with money lavished on Amazon and/or Facebook ads and now Tik-Tok reels three times a day. Why bother reviewing? It is like reviewing cans of identical soup. And authors are devastated if the reviews they do get are not five-star.
This is clearly reflected in the command “Write to Market” which I will talk about in another post.
Annette Hamilton - Writer 