(Off-topic) Postwar hauntings: Dana Andrews and Don Draper

 Reposted from 2013 because this is Dana Andrews's birthday. The original post has a comment by Carl Rollyson, who wrote a great biography of Andrews. 

This is probably truly not of general interest to anyone except old movie buffs and Mad Men fans, so if you're neither, feel free to skip it.

If you think about a postwar character, a handsome, modern, alienated sort of man, one whose dark moodiness occasionally gives way to a smile that masks an inner sadness, you may think of Don Draper. As I was rewatching The Best Years of Our Lives a few weeks ago, it struck me that the actor Dana Andrews is the prototype for this character.  Like Don Draper, he's a creature of the time he's been born into yet always distanced from it. 

Andrews is probably best known as the detective in Otto Preminger's famous noir Laura, where he's a detective in the Raymond Chandler Lite mode--that is to say, cynical, hardboiled, with a few light wisecracks masking a serious attempt to get at the truth. This film defines the Andrews persona of the haunted man: here, what haunts him is a portrait, but elsewhere, there are other memories that haunt him. 

The part that Andrews pays in The Best Years of Our Lives is that of a returning war veteran whose high status as an officer disappears once he returns. The only job he can get is his old job, as a soda jerk, in a drugstore that's undergone a corporate takeover. He seemed to have everything--good looks, status, a bombshell of a wife (Virginia Mayo)--but now there's no place for him in this world. His skills as a bombardier are obsolete. Earlier, we've seen his PTSD, nightmares of a fire on a plane, a dream that he apologizes for. One of the movie's themes is that no one wants to remember the war, now that it's over, but that those who lived it can never forget. 

Near the end of the movie, Andrews  sits in the midst of an airplane graveyard, surrounded by the junked metal that a postwar world doesn't need.  He sits in the nose turret of one of the junked bombers, hearing the sounds of the bombing missions he made and realizing that he's also one of the nation's discards.

His reverie is broken by a voice from the future: the foreman of a construction crew that's turning wrecks into prefab housing. If he wants to live, he has to forsake the past, abandon his old identity, and start a new life. There's a happy ending of sorts for the film, but that haunted look is there to stay, along with the inner torment that inspired it. 

Mad Men: Thoughts on the Finale, or Confession is Good for the Soul

SPOILERS!

So what did you think of the Mad Men finale? This is my only break (of a day!) between more stressful travel and stressful conferences, so here is the only thing I actually want to do today, besides maybe go to Big Sur:

• I wasn't doing Mad Men predictions, but I was happy to see two things come to pass: the Coke commercial and Don/Dick's time at Esalen: "Don renames himself Werner Ehrhard, invents EST, starts leading seminars for Stan the FBI agent and Philip on The Americans." I'm too culturally ignorant to know the difference between Esalen and EST, but that was what I was going for. Matt Weiner, you planted those clues just right.
• The Coke commercial: confession time--I had hoped for this ending early on, when Coke became the Big Cheese for Don to land, but didn't think that Matt Weiner would dare to do it. I have always liked the song and even have the non-Coke version on my iPod, proof positive that commercial culture has entirely infected my brain and that I have no musical taste. Note: The Coke version is actually better.
• Fun fact: the Doors' "Hello, I Love You," which was playing in the garage where Don apparently worked, was a huge hit, and it's well known that the fuzz bassline is almost identical to the Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night." The Kinks have apparently dropped into "Hello, I Love You" on occasion in concert to mock/protest/acknowledge/kid/riff on this similarity.
• Speaking of confessions: this was the last of Don's confessions, and, from the perspective of one who was raised Catholic, it was phrased exactly like a confession. We saw this earlier with Peggy's sister when she goes to confession: there's are set phrases and then what you might call the enumeration of sins before the penance and absolution.  
• Look at Don's language in this segment, how oddly formal in language and I-focused it is, which leaves him all the blame: "I scandalized my child. I took another man's name and made nothing of it." Since when does Don use judgmental words like "scandalize"? It's reminiscent of "I took the name of the Lord in vain," which is one kind of common confessional formula.
• Now look at how this scene is framed: He's framed as if he is in a confessional booth, a space of plain, dark wood where people can speak freely. He's in a
  
  partially open, partially framed public space, speaking to an unseen listener.  
• The old confessionals had a screen separating the priest from the person confessing (maybe they still do), so that they could not see each other. He slumps down, spent, after his confession and says he can't move.
• But Peggy, acting as his confessor, absolves him: "Come home. You know McCann would love to have you back. Don't you want to work on Coke?" Earlier in the series, she refused outright to confess to Father Gill.  Now, she is acting as Father Gill, a nonjudgmental one, in absolving Don. 
• Then another woman comes by and says, like Peggy, "yes, you can move. Come with me to my seminar.  I'm late." After all he's done to women, they are the ones who save him.
• Don's prayer of absolution?  If you watch him, he isn't saying "om." He's saying "home." 
• Yes, we're meant to think he returns, reconnects with his family, and writes that commercial. Look at the clothes on the young women he talks to at Esalen (?), all red-tied braids and embroidery (h/t Tom and Lorenzo) and one of the women in the commercial.  
• The big debate on the interwebs seems to be whether this is horribly cynical--great feelings exploited to sell us Coke--or sincere--Don actually achieves a measure of peace and learns that love is not an illusion. The jury's still out, but wouldn't you love to have seen that Coke pitch meeting?
• Speaking of Coke, remember what Steve Jobs said when he recruited an executive at Pepsi to run some early incarnation of Apple: "Do you want to stay here and make sugar water or do you want to come with me and change the world?" He divided the two pursuits; the Coke commercial doesn't, for good or ill.
  
• Don's not the only one who confesses. Of course there are all the "seminar" confessional scenes, in one of which Don breaks through his wall of isolation and hugs the man who feels as if he's in a refrigerator and is not being chosen by his family. But the one we've been waiting for is this one: Stan confesses his love to Peggy (on the phone), and she confesses in turn, first on the phone and then in person, the third or fourth use of the episode's title.  The sour commentators over at Slate, whose columns I skimmed in the airport yesterday, apparently wanted more misery for Peggy and less rom-com.  Not me. I'm happy for those two crazy kids.  If you want misery, go watch Game of Thrones.
• What about the rest?
• Joan is not ready to retire and be a plaything. Starting Holloway Harris in her apartment recalls the Season 3 finale when they all worked out of a hotel room. Even Kevin's caregiver sounds more professional.  Joan knows how to run things and especially how to whip underlings into shape. She'll do fine. Roger's visit: there's still a little bit of wistful "the one who got away" in Joan's comment about some woman finally getting the timing right.
• Roger and Marie--Hilarious. Finally, someone who'll be crazy and imperious enough to give Roger the excitement he craves.
• Pete and Peggy. "A thing like that!" is Pete's catchphrase, even more than "What is going on?" Peggy listened to him, maybe the only person at SCDP who did, and says it back to him. To paraphrase what Peggy said, very anachronistically, when she smoked dope with Paul back in an earlier season, they're in a very good place right now. 
• Speaking of catchphrases, did you see Sally channel her mother when she wanted to talk frankly to Bobby and Gene was in the room? "Go watch TV!" Gene says his only word in the series except for "Bye, Daddy"--"No!"--but he goes anyway.  
• Just realized also that Stephanie calls Don out on his catchphrase and overall philosophy of "This never happened."  "I'm afraid you're wrong about that, Dick," she says, sadly, and this time he hears it.
• Pete and Trudy. It's amazing to look back and see how much Pete has always been enamored of aviation.  Sure, Secor Laxatives paid the bills, but what he wanted and could never quite get was American Airlines and Something Aviation.  Now he's got Learjet, Trudy, Tammy, and Wichita. 
• Edited to add: One thing that has always confused me is this:  Betty has a dishwasher in Ossining, and she has one now in her goth mansion (the appliance with the big lever). So why does she do the dishes by hand, wearing rubber gloves, and why is Sally doing the dishes by hand, when they have a dishwasher? I can see if she's washing crystal wineglasses or something, but she and Sally do this for regular dinnerware.
• Also, various sites keep talking about Anna's "wedding ring." It's not. A diamond solitaire is (or was in those days) an engagement ring, not a wedding ring, although maybe fashions have changed. The fact that Stephanie calls it "Anna's engagement ring" when she gives it to Don/Dick is also a clue, wouldn't you say?

Enough!  Back to the stressful part of my life. I've been waiting for my suitcase (delayed in yesterday's travel) to arrive so I can do a wash before heading out at the crack of dawn tomorrow, and it just got here. But I hope you enjoyed the finale as much as I did!

Mad Men: Don Draper, Jack Kerouac, and the Divided Mid-century Self

I know that this is the second Mad Men post in a week, but there's only one episode left, so I won't be writing about it much longer. ("Doesn't this woman have any work to do?" you may be asking.  "Oh, wait--that's why she's procrastinating.")

Does he remind you of anyone?

I'm thinking of a parallel between Don and  Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road the spirit-Bert quoted to Don in a recent episode: "Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

For Kerouac, all that endless travel always led back to his mother, as Joyce Johnson writes about so beautifully both in her memoir Minor Characters and in her biography of Kerouac, The Voice is All.   

According to Johnson, Kerouac's drive to write and to create, to find a voice that could fuse the parts of himself--thinking in the joual French of his French-Canadian parents and writing in the English of the Beats that he would pioneer--was part of this restlessness.  Haunted by the death of his older brother, Gerard, when he was a child, Kerouac was on a continuing quest for some authentic voice that would admit perfection and ecstatic vision to be expressed through language. This and his insecurities led him through some self-destructive behavior, to say the least, including involvement with numerous women and heavy drinking. Oh, and he is drawn primarily to dark-haired women, leading him to tell the blonde Joyce Johnson (then Glassman) that he doesn't usually go for women of her coloring.

Sound like anyone you know? Does this mean that Don will be trying to get back to some state of origin, despite knowing that, as Thomas Wolfe, a great influence on Kerouac, put it,  "You can't go home again?" Don can never get back to his mother, although that doesn't stop him from trying to recapitulate the homecoming experience.  What Kerouac knows/knew is that even if you can go back physically, emotionally you never really can.

I'm not trying to trivialize Kerouac's achievement by comparing it to advertising, by any means, or trying to draw an exact parallel.  But if Weiner and company are trying to capture some essence of the mid-century man and the divided self, they couldn't have chosen a better model. 

***
Just as an aside: wouldn't you like to see the ending be what the writer over at Vox thinks might happen, the Mother of All Don Draper Pitches?

Mad Men: A few bullets of The Milk and Honey Route

• Am I the only person who thinks that Chris Ellis, who plays Bud, the motel owner, bears a striking resemblance to Ryan Cutrona, who played Gene, Betty's father? (I've seen these actors in other things and always get them confused.) They even sang the same song, George M. Cohan's "Over There." Back in season 2 or 3, Don told Gene not to talk about the war (WWI) and the German soldier he had killed. Now, Gene # 2 is telling him to talk about the war.
• A sad storyline for Betty, which now, in retrospect, seems inevitable.  The fortuneteller in the episode"Tea Leaves," when she had her previous health scare, told her that she was much loved and respected, and at that point Betty knew it wasn't true. Now it is. 
• Pete hasn't fared too well in the heartland. Remember Detroit? "Not great, Bob!" But he's right about the corporate clientele for jets, even though he can't see how corporate wealth will rule everything by the twenty-first century.  Now that he's figured out he is better with Trudy than without her, and she's agreed, maybe he has really changed, even if he can't convince his loathsome babe-magnet brother ("Women have always found me attractive") to give up his wandering ways.
• How is Don getting money for these travels? Is Meredith paying his Diner's Club/AmEx bills while he is away? I can't imagine that he still has a job at McCann. 
• Don is confessing and confessing and confessing, although never the whole story to the same person. How many people now know that he's really Dick Whitman? And he's told a version of the explosion where the real Don was killed before, although never with such emphasis on his own responsibility.  But as we learned from Peggy's sister's jealous confession to Father Gill way back in season 2, confession doesn't lead to absolution, just more punishment (for Peggy, once Father Gill hears what happened to her baby). 
• Don looks happy at the bus stop because he has maybe finally saved someone. He tried to save worthless Sad Diana, using his con man persona, and he failed. But he can take the fall for Worthless Grifter Kid and give him his Cadillac and a fresh start.  He has saved one person, even though he doesn't seem to be able to save himself.  Does this mean he can stop the downward slide at last?
• Sadly, probably not. I used to have hopes for some happy ending for Don, but this entire season has been about his accepting a continuing punishment and humiliation in expiation for his behavior the previous six seasons.  He's the scapegoat and takes all the sins on himself, even the ones he doesn't commit. It won't be a quick end because Matthew Weiner wouldn't think that would be punishment enough. Best case: a fix-it shop in a run-down section of a nondescript Midwestern town.  Worst case: Sally trips over him on Skid Row as he asks for spare change.

Mad Men: Random Bullets of Lost Horizon

I should write about writing, about the semester, or about getting ready for a conference, but all I am interested in is the way that I can smell the lilacs when I sit outside to work.

And maybe a little Mad Men.

•  Am I the only person who hears Ronald Colman's voice when I think of Lost Horizon? Or thinks about how Frank Capra staged the snow scenes?
• Way back in "Maidenform" in Season 2, which Matt Weiner has said is his favorite episode, the song "Shangri-La" was played on an organ, as an accompaniment to the stripper. That should put paid to those romantic fantasies about any of our heroes finding a Shangri-La. But a man playing organ music while a woman dances to the music: by comparison, the Roger and Peggy version of this idea was pure joy.
• Alan Sepinwall or maybe Tom & Lorenzo have listed some of the other Lost Horizon references; Don watches the Frank Capra version when he's at Megan's in California, for example.
• Don spent six episodes of Season 7 trying to get his job back after the Hershey debacle at the end of Season 6.  He sat in his apartment all day working. He worked through substitutes (Freddy Rumsen and Accutron, anyone?). As an added bonus, he pitched Ted really hard on the meaning of work and what it was like not to have it.  Now he is going to walk away from it all and blow his career up again in a spectacular fashion? 
• Don has always been very clear about his hatred for the farm and the country.  It's not like he's going to live on a commune somewhere even if he gets to California.  And is he going to leave his kids forever, which is something that Diana the Sad Waitress did and that shocked him?
• Maybe there's hope. So Don's Moby-Dick, is he? Did Jim Hobart read the book? Hint: Ahab doesn't get the whale. The Whale gets Ahab. Twice--once fatally. "Is this what "Coca-Cola" is shorthand for? "To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." 
• Yet Ahab didn't listen to Starbuck, and he misinterprets what Fedallah tells him. Don is just as much an obsessive. He's determined to hunt down Diana, the Sad Waitress even if his spirit guide Bert tells him it's a bad idea. Diana, Don's lover/sister/double, is already dead anyway, isn't she, or else why would the landlord say that the guys could sell her furniture?
• Joan is done, or should I say done in. Richard tells her that she can lawyer up or get "a guy" to talk to McCann-Erickson.  She talks about lawyers, but even in 2015, most women have to take the money instead.  Jim Hobart even negotiates like a Corleone.  Do you remember the part in the book where Michael offers half someone's fee and then offers nothing, because the next step is to have the person killed? Joan didn't have a choice, did she?
• When did Meredith, who could barely walk and talk at the same time, become superwoman?
• Peggy can do swagger, can't she, even in those dark rabbit-warren halls at McCann?
• What's going to happen? What's not going to happen?
• Don goes to Betty, gets insightful therapy, gets cured.
• Don turns into D. B. Cooper, jumps from an airplane, becomes a legend.
• Sally turns up, makes Don understand what's wrong with him; he returns to McCann and leads a happy, well-adjusted life in his new Meredith-decorated apartment.
• Don renames himself Werner Ehrhard, invents EST, starts leading seminars for Stan the FBI agent and Philip on The Americans.
• Don keeps up an endless quest for Diana the Sad Waitress, just as he did for Sylvia for hours and hours and hours and hours of screen time in Season 6. 
• Don has a Willy Loman moment after seeing all those whiteshirt creative directors around the conference table. Biff tells Willy, "Pop! I'm a dime a dozen and so are you!" Don refuses to be a dime a dozen, and he ends up like Willy.
• Updated to add: the theory that Don's hitchhiker is Bob Dylan? Uh, here is a news flash: every single white male hitchhiker in 1970 looked like that and had a guitar. 

Mad Men: Random Bullets of Time & Life

• I didn't realize until tonight that Mad Men has been playing the long game of "false antagonist turned ally" versus "true antagonist." CGC is the temporary antagonist, but going back to Season 1, McCann has been the true antagonist, just waiting to overpower our Sterling Cooper partners with money.  Kill them with kindness? 
• At any rate, they don't have to struggle for Heinz, the Coca-Cola of ketchup.  They now have the gold standard, the Coca-Cola of Coca-Colas.
• Diana the sad waitress is mercifully absent, although Don looks for her.  I fear that she will meet Adam's fate because I have an illogical suspicion that she is somehow Don's half-sister, Archie's daughter.  [Edited to add: Think about it.  Don is born in 1926, and Arch is killed by a horse when he's 10, or 1936. If Archie has another encounter with a prostitute that had resulted in a child in 1935 or so, that would be about the right birth date for DtSW. That's why he creepily believes that he already knows her. Either that, or Diana is going to be Don's Charlotte Corday.]
• But she is also Mildred Pierce, which is what Roger called her, with daughter dead of the flu (check), another living (check), and an ex-husband (check). Mildred would never have left her children, though. 
• When Diana comes on, I keep thinking of Keats's "I have been half in love with easeful death." 
• Why was Megan so angry last week that Don had to write her a check for a million dollars? How had he ruined her life? Giving her a shot at advertising and helping her acting career and financing her pretty lavishly for several years?  I missed the memo where that defined ruination--and anyway, if you look back to the beginning, the moves are mostly all hers. 
• Edited to add, on rewatching S7Ep9 "New Business" (5/2017):  Megan is an operator. 
• She was a secretary--admittedly a good one. She went after Don fairly aggressively, seducing him and flattering him about wanting to be a copywriter.
•  Every time she wants something or he does something for her, she says, "I love you, you know." He sees her as an idealized version of Youth and Motherhood in Season 4's finale, "Tomorrowland," marries her, makes her a copywriter, uses his influence to get her a break in commercials, and then bankrolls her very lavishly for at least two years. 
• He buys her a house on the hills above Los Angeles (Laurel Canyon? I don't know the geography) with a spectacular view. He visits her there, where she now is in a relationship with the red-haired friend from her acting class (or so it's implied) and instead of waiting tables or something has plenty of time to hang out at home, sunbathe, and get her toenails painted.  
• Megan drives away Stephanie, Anna's niece, out of jealousy, yet won't admit to her cruelty. Turning out an 8-months-pregnant woman who has just made her way to your remote doorstep and then lying about it? Come on.
• When Don is threatened with expulsion from the agency and asks to come to California--he's been trying to hold their marriage together after the end of his Sylvia Rosen obsession--she tells him not to bother. Is it a coincidence that this happens only when he loses his job? 
• Megan claims that she will take care of herself, despite Don's offers of assistance, yet a year or so later she is badgering him for more money. She charges him with ruining her life, presumably because she left the soap opera and has never really had another job. If she never had another job, um--isn't the universe, or L.A., or someone, telling her something about where her talents lie, a little less cruelly than her mother had done but equally decisively? 
• Don was a terrible husband, as he told the woman on the plane, but how is he to blame for Megan's failures as an actress? Yet he meekly accepts the blame and gives her a million dollars. Is he to blame for her becoming, as Joan had predicted, "Just another failing actress with a rich husband"?
• They went all the way back to Glencoe, really, to deny Pete and Trudy's daughter admittance to Greenwich Country Day School?  This episode really is about everyone's history and its inescapability, isn't it? 
• Speaking of history, a nice callback:  when Peggy is telling Stan about the baby she gave up, the music in the background is "Stranger on the Shore."  That's the same music that played at the end of Season 2, "Meditations in an Emergency," when she told Pete that she had given up their baby.  What are the odds that it would still be playing on the radio in 1970?  It may have appeared in other episodes, too. 
• I love that Peggy asked Stan to stay on the phone, the way they used to stay on the phone when working late at night. 
• The other thing that this episode was about is people getting something that ought to be seen as good (as Don tells them all) but no one believing it.  
• Also about tantalizing illusions: even if you hope Bruce Greenwood will swoop in and be Joan's true love, that wouldn't be enough for her.  Trudy and Pete back together? Stan and Peggy? Ted and college love? Roger and Marie? The Mad Men overlords won't permit this, I'm sure. 

Update: NPR tells me  that "Stranger on the Shore" also appears in Season 6, Episode 11, "Favors," but it doesn't fit my Peggy-son theory, so I will ignore it.

Mad Men 7: Random Bullets of a Brief Review

Now that Historiann has opened the voting, so to speak, and to follow up on my earlier Mad Men thoughts, herewith some random bullets of Mad Men 7.1.  I saw it during the regular broadcast time, since there was laundry to fold and since iTunes refuses to download episodes with the season pass that I bought.

• "Is That All There Is?" played 3 times in this episode. We get it. Is Don having an existential crisis? Does he ever have anything else?
• On the other hand, Don wears a striped shirt! The times they are a-changin'.
• If Don came to me as a fortuneteller, I would totally clean up: "You are haunted by a mysterious brunette from your past, and she will return in your dreams. You cannot erase this figure through sexual contact with other brunette women."
• Critics seem to think that Ken would have been better off writing his novel than getting back in the game with Dow.  Matt Weiner says this, and so does Alan Sepinwall, who's the critic most worth reading.  But to do this, Ken has to live on Cynthia's money, and he has always resolutely resisted that. Also, he has said that they have to pay (emotionally) for anything they get from Cynthia's parents and that there are lots of strings attached.
• Isn't living on your wife's money just as corrupting, in its way, as working for Dow, even though it does not involve a hazmat suit? What Ken really has is two bleak choices: Dow's money or his wife's.
• A thought experiment: Did Peggy have a choice in the meeting with the frat guys from McCann other than ignoring their halfwitted remarks and plowing ahead, if she wanted to enlist their help? Should Joan have brought along a flame-thrower? Discuss.
• Note to Peggy: cheering Joan up, or dispensing sanctimony and blaming Joan for the way she looks, in an elevator is always a losing proposition. The decade will declare that "Sisterhood is powerful," but individual experiences might argue "not so much."
• The internet loses its mind about Roger's and Ted's mustaches, and Weiner declares that people in future generations will think that the 2015 beards will look strange. Well, facial hair comes and goes. My bet is that people will think that men shaving their heads over the past 20 years or so will be thought odd, since that's historically a new development in male sartorial splendor, unless you're counting the era when men shaved their heads to wear wigs. 
• Since Season 6 was basically a repeat of Season 4 (fine performances with endless downward spiral), I'm hoping that Season 7 will repeat Season 5, if it needs to repeat anything. I want a happy ending of some kind for these characters.

Mad Men thoughts on the approaching finale of Season 7

It's known as a mind vacation.  You need it at the point of the semester when you know that, whatever task you work on, someone is going to be disappointed or angry, because you can't get everything done on time. 

But in a mind vacation, I can rewatch Mad Men for an hour or two while folding laundry or when I'm too tired to work or need to shut my mind down in order to get to sleep. The press of all the things I'm not doing/haven't done are completely at bay for that time.  Reading isn't a mind vacation any more, because I'm hammered by thoughts that I should be reading for work.

I began with Season 2 and am up to the beginning of Season 5. I'm looking forward with some anticipation and a little dread to the upcoming half season finale of Mad Men. Some random thoughts:

•  In Season 4's "The Suitcase," one of the best hours of the series ever, Don and Peggy have a huge blowup before coming to understand each other. When she reproaches him for never thanking her, he erupts, "That's what the money is for!" She makes a personal or sentimental appeal, and he, as usual, reacts with rage or coldness. 
  
  What I hadn't realized until this viewing is that this is exactly what happened when Conrad ("Connie") Hilton drops Sterling Cooper in the last episode of Season 3, the fantastic "Shut the Door. Have a Seat." Hilton tells Don that he's "cutting him loose," and Don gets angry, making a sentimental appeal about Hilton wanting to kick him around, treating him like a son and then dropping him, etc.  Hilton just stands there and says it's just business (or some other Godfather-inspired thing). They end by shaking hands. 
  
  In "The Suitcase," Don is angry, sure, and upset about Anna, but he's channeling Hilton by telling Peggy that this is about business.  Of course it's about more than that, but what better way to reclaim your power than by channeling Conrad Hilton?  It's a lesson in business for Peggy, in this season of lessons, and by the end of Season 5 (when she leaves SCDP), she's learned to take this power into her own hands.
• Speaking of "The Suitcase," why didn't Jon Hamm win the Emmy for this? I think he lost that year to Steve Buscemi for Boardwalk Empire, and while Buscemi did good work, it didn't touch Hamm's. Since I'm not a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, my opinion doesn't count for anything, though. 
• Every single person in academia would benefit from spending an hour a week with lovable Dr. Edna, the child psychiatrist who sees Sally for a time in Season 4. 
• They (the writers) should have kept Megan at SCDP.  Think about it: she's a naturally gifted copywriter and a decent actress.  Her ascent would have threatened Don in different ways, and it would have made for interesting conflicts with Peggy. We have Joan as a contrast to Peggy (traditional vs. new perspectives on women in the business world), but Megan would have been a different kind of competitor.  From the first, Megan seems a little . . . premeditated in her actions toward Don, and although she seems to love him, or tells him she does, there's a hint that he may be a means to an end.  She's like Jane Siegel Sterling but with career ambitions.
  
  Once Megan went to follow her bliss as an actress, there was less and less point to her being on the show. By Season 6, she would bounce into the apartment once in a while, but you kind of forgot why she was there.  She and Don seemed to have nothing in common; I would spend their scenes wondering what they found to talk about. She devolved into yet another example of his alienation, as if we didn't have enough of those already. Bonus: we could have seen more pitches like Cool Whip.  
• To be honest, I fast-forward through some of the scenes. Lane Price and the pseudo-gangster. Some of Betty's perennial grouches.  The "weight-loss and hair-dye" Betty plotline from Season 6 might get skipped.
  
  Betty is like the reverse Sriracha sauce: a little of her makes the episode better by binding it together, but too much of her makes the episode more bland.

Actually, a lot of Season 6 might get skipped.  The more I think about it and its Misery Theater, the more irritated I get at the wasted opportunity. See Don relive Season 4! See him drink and wallow in misery! See him engage in yet another affair, this one even more formulaic than the rest: 1. Sylvia expresses guilt at their affair.  2. They have sex.  3. Sylvia expresses more guilt and drops a few Pearls of Wisdom. Every. Single. Time.  The Bob Benson plot is fun, as is some of the agency stuff, but the Sylvia plot is irritating. 

Your thoughts?  

Other Mad Men posts:

• Season 4 
• Positivity and Mad Men
•  Random Bullets of Mad Men
• Mad Men
• Season 5, Of Mad Men and MOOCs
• Season 6, Thoughts on Season 6
• Season 7, Random Bullets of Season 7

The Mad Men Dream Writing Group
Postwar Hauntings: Don Draper and Dana Andrews

Mad Men Season 7: Random Bullets

"Don't worry. It's not symbolic."
"No. It's quite literal."

I treated myself to Mad Men non-HD from iTunes ($22.95) this week. A few episodes downloaded, and then Episode 4, "The Monolith," got stuck. It would not download more than 10 minutes, but iTunes insisted it had already downloaded and could not be downloaded again. An endless loop of frustration? Symbolic or quite literal?

What's the song for this event and this season, Matt Weiner? "Riding along on a carousel, round and round and round and round with you"? Or "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right/ Here I am, stuck in the middle with you"?

Season 6 was not fun. Watching Don Draper double down on what we saw him do for all of Season 4--drink too much, stick with an irritating and sanctimonious Wise Woman of a mistress, and mess up at work--was, well, like being on a carousel, and not in a good Kodak-moment kind of way.

So far this season, we are in for even more misery theater.  Here's how it seemed to me last year: "There's a trend in television now that I think of as Misery Theater: how much can you punish or torture the protagonist for his or her sins and still keep the audience's attention? For you Game of Thronesfans, let's call it the Theon Grayjoy rule, or maybe we should just call it Degradation Limbo: "how low can you go?"

Well, now Theon/Don is reduced to shuffling around the office, doing the bidding of lesser men, as new creative director Lou ("He's adequate!" protests Cutler) is poised to cut down his ideas. Unlike Theon, he literally has all his body parts, but symbolically not so much.

Don has so angered everyone in the office with his antics that they're willing to stomp on his good ideas (new computer account) along with the bad ones. Then again, everyone in the office is in a foul temper all the time, including Peggy, and it's apparently all Don's fault. The only ones who aren't are Roger, who seems happier since he stopped trying to work at all, and Ted, who looks as if someone just stole his beloved puppy.

But the interwebs seem quite certain that the Mets pennant means that Don may be back on track in 1969, and certainly the sight of him typing on a magically restored typewriter at the end gives one hope. If he can write a pitch like Accutron, he's still got the gift.

"Just do the work, Don," Freddy Rumsen tells him. Words to live by, for sure, and I hope for the sake of the show that there's a silver lining to this endless black cloud.

By the way, did anyone else get a kick out of the computer sequence? It's big, it's shiny, it's the future, and no one knows or cares what it can do because Big! Shiny!  Future! I think the model was the MOOC 360.

Mad Men Season 6 thoughts

Spoilers ahead!


Mad Men's penultimate season is over, and except for their making a guest appearance on this blog as my dream writing group, I haven't been writing about them here. There's too much other good commentary on the web (Tom and Lorenzo, Alan Sepinwall) to read out there, and also a lot of clueless commentators (really? draft status as "A-1" instead of "1-A"? Didn't you watch the series at all? It's a draft status,  not a steak sauce.). There was a lot to like this season (Kenny tap-dancing! A merger caper episode!) and a lot that was intended to, and did, make us cringe.

Here are a couple of additional observations about the last episode:

1. Set design for the win: As Pete and his brother sit contemplating their mother's death when she falls overboard on the SS Sunshine, all that's between them is a desk. And a model ship. And assorted other nautical knickknacks that signify old money but become humorously ironic given the circumstances.

2. Tom and Lorenzo probably have this one already, but when Pete and Bob are on the elevator--you know, the "Not great, Bob!". elevator--Bob is holding what's probably Pete's garment bag. It's in a Black Watch plaid that Pete wears often, including in his scarves, and Bob doesn't usually do plaid. He's holding Pete's future, is he? Yes. Yes, he is.

3. When Pete gets in the car at Chevy, the whole thing about going backward if he doesn't know how to drive stick didn't ring true to me.  First, if he didn't engage the clutch, which he wouldn't have because he doesn't know how to drive a standard transmission car, the gear would just make a grinding sound and not go anywhere. It takes practice to get the gas/clutch foot action right. If he did engage the clutch but didn't give it enough gas, he'd get the same sound, or the car would stall. The Chevy guys would yell the traditional "Hey! Grind me another pound of those gears" before looking disgusted by his ineptitude.

 Also, first gear is easy to find, as Bob tells him.  Reverse is always trickier. On every four- or five-on-the-floor standard car I've driven, it's always a little outside the standard H-pattern of the gears (sort of like a subscript of the H) and is harder to engage than the rest: you have to push backwards a little harder. That's to keep nimrods like Pete from engaging it, I suppose. That Pete could find it, get the gas/clutch ratio right, and go backwards without stalling is kind of miraculous, though it made for great unspoken theater.  "How are you at driving a stick shift, Pete?" "Not great, Bob."

4. Lots of commentary out there has focused on the poster (double Dons) and on all the doubling: Bob Benson/Don Draper, Sally and Peggy as "daughters" whom he disappoints, Ted Chaough as "good Don" to bad Don, Jim Cutler/Roger Sterling (and what a bonus both of them are to the show).  One of the best may have been the TV in the bar tuned to Bewitched just before Don punches the preacher. It was focused on Larry Tate, an adman whose sole character trait was being pathologically fearful about what clients would think.  Our Don? Not so much.

But what about Duck Phillips as another double? Don brought him in to Sterling Cooper and then forced him out. The two shared Peggy, Don platonically and Duck physically, and both have tried to poach her on occasion, Don for SCDP and Duck for his own agency after he'd been dismissed for drinking. Duck roams the SC halls and has a fight with Don, which is just about equally matched--two men of about the same age, war vets, alcoholics, with families that they've deserted. Don brings a dog home, and Duck leaves one behind. Both have a scatalogical reference moment, Duck when he goes into Roger's office and Don when Roger yells at him after the meeting.

But Duck is a survivor, a redemption story. Even after he drunkenly tries to get Peggy back to start his own agency and seems absolutely out for the count, Duck resurfaces as a reasonably successful headhunter. He calls Pete and tries to get him to look for another position, and he checks the references of Bob Benson. He's brought in --going up--on the elevators with the new candidate as Don is going down.

5. There's a trend in television now that I think of as Misery Theater: how much can you punish or torture the protagonist for his or her sins and still keep the audience's attention? For you Game of Thrones fans, let's call it the Theon Grayjoy rule, or maybe we should just call it Degradation Limbo: "how low can you go?"  I know that Don has to be punished mightily for cheating, lying, drinking, gluttony, avarice, lust, and whatever else is going on this season, else why would he have been reading *dun-dun DUN!* Dante in the first episode?

But come on, Matt Weiner. It's getting to be too much. We want to see more pitches, maybe, or some more mergers, or maybe just to see Don get a clue or Peggy and Joan catch a break.  We don't want this to turn into Breaking Don or Game of Accounts. Season 4 was grim and had Don hitting bottom and being redeemed, or so we thought. Then--fooled ya!--he's back hitting bottom again, doing the same things that destroyed him the first time. I don't think we can take another season of this kind of destruction without relief.

6. Speaking of injustice, in what world is it right that Jon Hamm has never won an Emmy for this role? He is brilliant in this series.

Your thoughts?

The Mad Men dream writing group, SCDP/CGC version

If you don’t have an in-person writing group, your dreams will apparently supply one.

I was working for a firm that turned out to be an academic version of Sterling Cooper Draper Price/Cutler Gleason and Chaough from Mad Men.

Someone stopped by my office to tell me that the read-through was today. "Read-through?" Yes, employees who requested it, and apparently I had, could get the firm together to discuss what they were working on. The meetings were only an hour, but they'd all give feedback.

We all gathered in a room--fittingly, Bert Cooper's office*--and sat in a circle, some on the floor and some in chairs, crowded together. An anonymous junior copywriter began to read it, with feeling and slowly.  Mercifully, Roger Sterling wasn't there, but Peggy and Ted Chaough were giving it their most earnest attention. Don was, as usual, AWOL.

As he read, people began to wonder aloud "why are you talking about this now? Where is this leading?" I lunged over to Cooper's overflowing desk, grabbed a steno pad and a ballpoint pen that was running out of ink, and started taking notes on their reactions.

"This reads pretty well, but I still don't know why you're telling us this."

Then another reader took over and said "This has some rough language." They all nodded, and she began to read and even to sing parts of it. She read the parts where it said "insert reference here" and "talk about that other instance of the same idea." Loudly. With feeling.

I tried to say things like "I didn't know you'd read this particular draft" and "It's not quite ready," but no one paid any attention.

The hour drew to a close, and I had not yet sunk through the floor. I had pages of scratchy handwritten notes and reactions written down in the steno pad.

Gene Siskel, who apparently worked at SCDP/CGC, stood up. "I have to go. I think this has  promise, but you should get to the point sooner. Right now I'd give it a thumbs-sideways."

Peggy smiled, and Ted Chaough said, "Don't worry. At my first meeting, I thought I would have to quit and become a professional babysitter. It's pretty good."

Bert Cooper said, "That's all right, dear."

Meeting adjourned.

*For those who don't watch: Bert Cooper has no office. 

(Off-topic) Postwar hauntings: Dana Andrews and Don Draper

Reposted because this is Dana Andrews's birthday. 

This is probably truly not of general interest to anyone except old movie buffs and Mad Men fans, so if you're neither, feel free to skip it.

If you think about a postwar character, a handsome, modern, alienated sort of man, one whose dark moodiness occasionally gives way to a smile that masks an inner sadness, you may think of Don Draper. As I was rewatching The Best Years of Our Lives a few weeks ago, it struck me that the actor Dana Andrews is the prototype for this character.  Like Don Draper, he's a creature of the time he's been born into yet always distanced from it. 

Andrews is probably best known as the detective in Otto Preminger's famous noir Laura, where he's a detective in the Raymond Chandler Lite mode--that is to say, cynical, hardboiled, with a few light wisecracks masking a serious attempt to get at the truth. This film defines the Andrews persona of the haunted man: here, what haunts him is a portrait, but elsewhere, there are other memories that haunt him. 

The part that Andrews pays in The Best Years of Our Lives is that of a returning war veteran whose high status as an officer disappears once he returns. The only job he can get is his old job, as a soda jerk, in a drugstore that's undergone a corporate takeover. He seemed to have everything--good looks, status, a bombshell of a wife (Virginia Mayo)--but now there's no place for him in this world. His skills as a bombardier are obsolete. Earlier, we've seen his PTSD, nightmares of a fire on a plane, a dream that he apologizes for. One of the movie's themes is that no one wants to remember the war, now that it's over, but that those who lived it can never forget. 

Near the end of the movie, Andrews  sits in the midst of an airplane graveyard, surrounded by the junked metal that a postwar world doesn't need.  He sits in the nose turret of one of the junked bombers, hearing the sounds of the bombing missions he made and realizing that he's also one of the nation's discards.

His reverie is broken by a voice from the future: the foreman of a construction crew that's turning wrecks into prefab housing. If he wants to live, he has to forsake the past, abandon his old identity, and start a new life. There's a happy ending of sorts for the film, but that haunted look is there to stay, along with the inner torment that inspired it. 

Of Mad Men and MOOCs

Of MOOCs: Once again, with the UVa mess, we have a group of privileged people who presumably reaped the benefits of face-to-face higher education in the humanities anxious to ensure that others do not receive the same benefits (go read the links at Historiann's or IHE). Once again we have wildly enthusiastic cheerleading with no critical analysis from the Masters of the Universe at the WSJ:

This challenge can be met. Over the long term, online technology promises historic improvements in the quality of and access to higher education. The fact is, students do not need to be on campus at Harvard or MIT to experience some of the key benefits of an elite education.

The WSJ and the U.Va. board members cited Head Cheerleader David Brooks, so no surprises there. And this:

Institutions such as the University of Phoenix—and it is hardly alone—have embraced technology aggressively. By integrating online courses into their curricula and charging less-than-elite prices for them, for-profit institutions have doubled their share of the U.S. higher education market in the last decade, now topping 10%.

Aside from showing an astonishing lack of awareness that just maybe traditional institutions are also promoting online courses and maybe, just maybe, have also pursued technological innovation, this is the "if it makes money, it must be good!" school of logic, the kind that says that a summer blockbuster is better than an indy film because it makes more money.
And this:

College X can thus offer stellar lectures from the best professors in the world—and do locally what it does best, person to person.

No one is asking whether College X can continue to exist if it focuses only on high-intensity, high-cost person-to-person classes without the lecture classes to support it. Is a state legislator going to fund those courses in this continuing Great Recession?

Of Mad Men (season 5 spoilers ahead):

• Great concluding scene. Great music.  After the two James Bond music cues, I expected to have him say, "Draper. Don Draper" to the girl at the bar. 
• One parallel between Lane Pryce and Adam Whitman, besides the manner of their deaths and Don's guilt, is that they are both redheads. Should any male redheads on this show worry about their longevity? Or is that any redhead of either sex except Joan, given that the woman Don strangled in his fever dream had red hair (as did Megan's friend who got fired from Dark Shadows)?
• Weiner & co. are paying attention to physical similarities this season even more than before--hence Pete & his virtual twin Beth with their youthful looks and twice-discussed blue eyes.  No wonder Pete fell in love: she's the female Pete physically as well as emotionally. Megan, dark hair and sexy good looks, is a young advertising wunderkind like Don who uses her sexuality to control him. Roger has met his match with Marie  "don't bother me with commitment" Calvet. Is Weiner saying that men can only fall in love with female versions of themselves? 
• Megan tells Don she loves him more frequently than Betty ever did--but it's always in the context of something he does for her.  He gets her an audition: "I love you, you know." Is it just a way of thanking him, or does she mean it? 

(More David Brooks: https://www.chumplady.com/2019/04/ubt-the-second-mountain-the-quest-for-a-moral-life/)

Writing inspiration post, Mad Men-style

Don, help me out here; I need to get this thing written.

 Don Draper via Henry V speech from Evangeline Morphos at WSJ:

This day is called the feast of Crispian…
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…
Prepare to take a great leap forward…
Every agency on Madison Avenue is defined
By that moment they got their first car.
When we land Jaguar, The world will know–
We have arrived.

(Shakespeare, Henry V Act IV, scene 3)

"If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation."

"If you think a lot about it and then stop, the answer will come to you." (Don said it better, but I can't recall the exact words.)

"Fear stimulates my imagination."

I'll write a real post soon, once I get the thing written. 

Still not an academic post: random bullets of Mad Men

After a hardworking but very discouraging week, I just don't want to think about academics. Here instead are some observations on this season of Mad Men. If you haven't seen it--spoilers ahead. If you're looking for a more academic blog post--look away, look away.

• Many internet words have been spilled on the issue of Don's birthday as celebrated with Megan's sexy song versus Don's actual birthday, with the consensus being that Dick Whitman is six months older than Don Draper. Say what? In an earlier season, when Don goes to the doctor and promises to cut down on smoking, the doctor tells him that he looks pretty young for a 45-year-old man (the real Don Draper's age). It emerges later in the episode that Dick Whitman is actually 36, and in the Korea flashbacks, the actor playing the real DD was older than Jon Hamm/Dick Whitman. In this season, has Don/Dick settled on his own real age (40) but the real Don's month and day of birth?
• Not one but two lovely moments of name-forgetting and remembering: neither Don nor Megan can remember the name of Ken Cosgrove's wife, and when Ken calls her by name, Megan blurts out "Cynthia" a few seconds later. There's another moment, though: when everyone at the dinner party is talking about the UTexas shootings, someone says that the shooter's name was "Charles Whitmore." "Whitman," Don corrects him quietly, and given that that's his real name and we saw him kill someone in a fever dream last week, he should know.
• Here is a question of vital importance: at what point did Dick/Don the "whorechild" and his mother come to the Whitman household? Last night he alluded to being raised in a brothel, yet every time we saw a flashback, he was on the family farm.
• Did anyone else think that the monstrous maple entertainment center--"Seven feet long! Wilt Chamberlain could fit in there!" Pete says proudly--when put in the center of the frame looked exactly like a coffin? Poor Pete, entombed in suburbia.
• Pete cranks down on the water valve, thinking that tightening down on the pressure will cure the problem--until it sprays out of control. Only Don knows how much tension should be applied and how to fix natural forces like water effectively (and look great while doing it, as anything that caused him to shed that jacket would have). I think we have a Symbolic Objects winner, ladies and gentlemen.
• After seeing Don humiliate himself so thoroughly last season, it was nice to see Don the Superman reemerge not once but twice: fixing the sink and declining the services of the brothel. All this AND wearing the hideous jacket that Megan wants him to wear: he really is a changed man, at least temporarily.
• Show of hands: who else wants to hear some of Ken Cosgrove's science fiction, which sounds to my inexpert ears perfectly pitched to the kind of scifi being published in the mid-1960s? Who else felt like writing after seeing him propped up in bed writing after what's her name Cynthia had gone to sleep?
• Historiann has a post (Mitt Romney, or Don Draper?) with clips, and in them, Don Draper looks like a baby compared to how he looks now. The presidency doesn't age a person nearly as fast as being in advertising, it seems.

Anything else?

Off Topic: Positivity and Mad Men

Note: I don't think there are any spoilers here for those who are now up to speed on Season 4, but you never know. If you don't like Mad Men--nothing to see here.

In keeping with the pre-semester theme of positivity I'm trying to maintain, I thought I'd see whether the language of the characters on Mad Men has any words to live by.

Don Draper. Despite the sad train wreck that his life is becoming this season, Don has two habitual speech characteristics. The first is one that's in keeping with his life: "This never happened." As he tells Peggy in Season Two, "You'll be amazed at how much this never happened." This particular idea, like the past, is coming back to haunt him this season, as it's haunting Peggy in her recent interactions with Pete.

The second one is a little less obvious: Don is emphatically positive in his speech; he always goes one step beyond. Example: If someone asks him a direct question, he says "Yes" with no hesitation. Where a simple "yes" would do, he's given to saying things like "I do" or "I am." "Are you meeting Roger for drinks?" "I am." I can't recall a scenario in which he says "I don't know," maybe because he's always got a story worked out in advance. If he doesn't, he just says "This will be fine," as in "There will be good years, and there will be bad years, but it is always going to rain" (to the London Fog people). This may be because he's living a story, but the writers have been very consistent about his speech patterns. They're as choreographed, in a way, as his movements.

Betty Draper. "Go watch tv." "Go upstairs." "Carla! Take the children to the park." Then there's Betty, our Queen of Denial. Betty's about as eager to have her children around her as Henry Francis is to have the dog in the house. I would like to think it's because they distract her from a deep inner life of figuring out what she wants a la The Feminine Mystique or Priss in The Group, which she read a few seasons ago, but they aren't words to live by.

Joan Holloway Harris: "Look at you." All the characters in Mad Men say this at one time or another, but Joan is especially given to it. Joan usually uses it not as "Look at you--you're a mess" but "Look at you--you've finally figured out something that I knew already" (but not in a snarky way). It makes Joan a reflector of others who's so good at what she does that no one else sees it. They all look at Joan in that va-va-voom way, but they don't really look at Joan. It's in keeping with the show's premise that she's not only the heart of SCDP but that she knows more about just about everything than just about anyone--and no one gives her enough credit for it.

Peter Campbell: "What is going on?" Pete is the the forward-looking Cassandra, providing cues to the future that SCDP is slow to comprehend. He has evolved from his chronic foot-in-mouth disease of Season One. He's become more adept at blackmailing (his father-in-law this season versus Don in Season One) and has become more sympathetic as a character. He's still not adept at nuances, though--hence the classic moments in which he turns to someone and asks "What is going on?" or "What are you telling me?"

The other characters have speech patterns, too, but nothing I can pinpoint: we know Roger will say something funny and maybe outrageous, that Bert Cooper will have something pithy and Ayn Rand-ish, etc. Peggy's loosened up and gained a sense of humor this season, too, which is refreshing. But is there anything to carry forward into the new semester? Unlike Don, I'm not sure.

Off Topic: Mad Men

As a counterpoint to work, I've been rewatching Mad Men, which is a dessert/chaser so that I don't have bad conference dreams all night long. At its best, it's like a good novel, and thinking about it has banished a lot of 4 a.m. obsessive work thoughts when I wake up too early.

Last night I watched the premiere, and here are some thoughts--with spoilers, so stop if you haven't seen it or don't care about the show:

. . . . .

Ready?

. . . . .

On the positive side, the pace was good, with a new office and a new energy. The light and one of the views in this new space actually echoes the opening credits, which was interesting. The only trouble is that the show has always included some brief pauses or silences to let the multiple motives of the characters and the implications of their actions sink in. That's missing.

On the other hand, they've converted Don from a part-time SOB with a troubled interior life to a full-time SOB with none, or none that we care about. He's all brisk surface, and none if it is pretty, even if the character is played by Jon Hamm.

Speaking of pretty, the new lighting washes out the planes of the characters' faces, making them look older, pasty, and not good. If your lighting makes people like Jon Hamm and Christina Hendricks look bad, there's something wrong.

This episode had three plots: a sitcom plot with Peggy and assorted ad hijinks; a grouchy melodrama starring Don; and the beginnings of a tragic melodrama starring Betty.

The thing is, I didn't feel that I knew any of these people, even though I've seen every previous episode, and, what's worse, I didn't want to know them. There has to be a sympathetic or somewhat likable character somewhere, doesn't there, to engage the viewer? Maybe this isn't true in postmodern fiction where we're too busy being dazzled by the intricacies of the author's cleverness and self-referentiality to care, but thinking about character is what chases the work dreams away for me. When I woke up at 4 a.m. today, I chased the work dreams away by composing this blog post in my head.

Any thoughts?

Winding down

As this sabbatical winds down, I'm doing two things:

1. Obsessively checking the enrollment stats for next semester's courses. Here's an academic conundrum: I (and we, really) want the courses to fill, because, like Sally Field, I want reassurance that "they like me! They really like me!"--conveniently ignoring that what they like, really like, may be a noon class or whatever fits into their schedules. Yet more students = more grading authentic assessment and hours of time devoted to it next semester. But I still can't stop checking the stock market of enrollment, as someone called it a few years back.

2. Frantically trying to get some more writing done before it ends while realizing how woefully short I've fallen from the rosy sabbatical plan I laid out.

What the sabbatical has given me more time to do is harder to measure than a simple word count. It's allowed me to read more, including primary texts, than I've been able to do in years, and it has allowed me to conceptualize the work I'm doing in a different way.

Here's an analogy from, you guessed it, Mad Men. In rewatching Season One, I noticed that amid all the retro flash that had the critics agog, every time the copywriters brought something to Don Draper (the creative director, for those who aren't MM fans), he'd ask them two questions about the product before pouring himself a drink. The first one was "What are the features?" and the second one was "What is the benefit?" The copy they produced had to make sense in terms of both of those questions.

As we all know from the Microsoft jokes ("It's a feature, not a bug!"), they're not the same thing. The first part, I think, appeals to the "ooh, shiny!" brain area, but the second one, the benefit, is the real reason for creating the product in the first place--or should be. One of the things that the sabbatical has let me do is to think more seriously about that second question in relation to the project I'm working on: not just "how is it different?" but "what is the benefit in thinking about the entire concept in this way?" I had ideas about this before, of course--no one writes without a purpose--but I've been able to think about it in more different ways, and, I hope, more creative ways that I'd done before. And although the report I write after I get back from sabbatical won't mention Don Draper or indeed this kind of thinking, it's one of the most valuable things that the sabbatical has given me.

Slowcoach writing

I think I first heard the term "slowcoach," as in "Slowcoach McClellan," in the sonorous tones of David McCullough. At any rate, I think I'm going to adopt it as a cautionary epithet.

Tenured Radical, a blogger I admire, said something in passing this week a couple of weeks ago that made me think:

But I should think that participation in group blogs that serve a field or a discipline should be taken into account as much as book reviews or encyclopedia entries, which everyone lists in endless, boring detail on their vitae as if they took more than a day to write. [and in the comments, in response to someone who challenged that timeframe] Two days. And seriously, why would they ask you for the entry unless you were an expert in that field?

I agree entirely with her main point, but the "one day" or even "two day" timeframe gave me pause. That pause was filled with writing speed envy.

Book reviews--okay, yes, those can be done quickly. Blog posts--nobody drafts those ahead of time, do they? Reports? Piece of cake. I can churn out administrativese at the speed of light.

But encyclopedia articles, even when I know the material, take time (at least at a slowcoach writing speed), which is why I've been turning them down lately. Here's what goes through my head with every single sentence:

1. Is it true? Am I misrepresenting the subject or the text in some way?

2. Is it useful? Is there a better example that I could use?

3. Is it new? Or am I just unconsciously plagiarizing myself or someone else?

4. Does it explain the concept efficiently and (let's hope) gracefully?

5. Does it relate to the sentences around it?

6. Does it hit the right balance of detail to generality?

Most of these questions apply to regular scholarly writing as well, which is why it's possible to wrestle with writing and rewriting a paragraph for an entire four-hour period and still not be entirely satisfied. But it's good to have comparisons of how it could be done if I were more efficient. If I don't speed up, someone's going to remove me from the Peninsular Campaign.

Don Draper Matt Weiner cures your writer's block

Conversation on a day when all I've done is read, take notes, think, and write? I got nothing.

But Matt Weiner can solve your problems. From Los Angeles Magazine (broken into bits for easy reading):
“I don’t get writers block. I really don’t. I’m not trying to be obnoxious about it. What I have is an idea I have not worked my way through. I’ve learned to have confidence in the fact that if I’m having trouble writing it, it’s not good and it’s not done and I need to do something else and loosen the machinery.

And I don’t care if it’s gambling or drinking or just talking a walk, which is probably what you’re supposed to do, but you need to change your state.

And I talk to people. I tell the story over, and over, and over again. . . . And you know, I bang my head against the wall and you can bang your head against the wall and do fine, but it’s the advice Don gave to Peggy: Think about it intensely and then do something else and it will be right in front of you. You can’t force it.

I also work well with a gun against my head. I’m not trying to invite writers block, but usually what writers block is, is imaging all the possibilities of a blank page.

And the other thing I do—oh my god, I can’t believe I’m about to say this—I have an amazing way to get over this, which is that I do not sit down at a typewriter and write or a computer. I dictate.

Now even if I’m on the phone and doing all the procrastinating things, when I’m dictating Don comes in, he sits at the typewriter…It works just like that. I get into the scene and at the end of the day I can write an entire draft in a day. It might be garbage, but I can rewrite it."