It's funny how writing that pleases us needs to have obscurities implanted within or at least include associations that invoke the faraway. Even personal names are crucial; some of the sentences in Vollmann's novel Europe Central would be dull as dishwater had the character's name not been the exotic Lyalochka.
And yet there's a superficiality in this rather easy appeal to the unfamiliar. It can be used merely to sell. Witness the Pike's Peak of superficiality: haute couture. The emptiness and dreariness of fashion is shown by designer Valentino's attempts to attach a fig leaf to a naked emperor - he described one outfit as a "Mordore silk laminated ottoman pinstriped pansuit" which was then translated by one sober-eyed journalist as "beige slacks". Fine words prostituted in pursuit of sales is a painful thing to watch.
But consumerism is, in Adam Gopnik's phrase (though written just before 9/11), "this century's winning ism". He writes of an incident in Paris where a British woman was manhandled by an Eiffel Tower elevator operator due to her changing her mind about which platform she wished to exit. She sued, he was fired, and the other operators all went on strike in solidarity, shutting down the tower:
Most Americans draw their identities from the things they buy, while the French draw theirs from the jobs they do. What we think of as "French rudeness," and what they think of as "American arrogance," arise from this difference. But she was just trying to have a good time, we think. But he was only doing his job, they think. For us, an elevator operator is only a tourist's way of getting to the top of the Eiffel Tower. For the French, a tourist is only an elevator operator's opporunity to practice his métier in a suitably impressive setting.
Producerism, [consumerism's] hardy French counterpart, is much less well diagnosed...The French ideal of a world in which everyone has a métier but no customers to trouble him is more practical than it might seem. It has been achieved, for instance, by the diplomats inside the quai d'Orsay, who create foreign policy of enormous subtlety and refinement which has absolutely no effect on anyone outside the building. [Me: Is this not a counterpart to blogging?] It has also been achieved by IRCAM, the modern music institute, which sponsors contemporary composers who write music that so far no one has ever heard. [Me: Yes, we bloggers are indeed like the French!] (When the waiter at the cafe finally deigns to shake your hand, it does not mean that you are now a valued client. It means that you are now an honorary waiter.)
The elevator operator dreams of going to the top of the tower alone in his elevator, while the Anglo-Saxon tourist, in her heart of hearts (and he knows this; it's what terrifies him most), dreams of an automatic elevator. When the two ideals - of absolute professionalism unfettered by customers and of absolute tourism unaffected by locals - collides, trouble happens, pain is caused.
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