Of Fame & Fortune
Trying to sort through the changing nature and duration of what it means to make a mark
As a GenX-er I grew up with one measure of fame being “as big as the Beatles.” As I grew into my twenties, one measure of staying power surely was “as remembered as the Beatles.” To some degree, my notion of what it was to leave a legacy that might continue beyond my immediate family and friends was defined by the likes of not only Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles but also authors like Susan Sontag, Ian M. Banks, and Wendell Berry.
As I grew into my thirties, I understood that my chances of being as famous as the celebrities from the music and films industries were limited: that kind of fame comes when you are young. I also knew that if I wanted to have the reach of the authors I would need to work for it. To some degree, the scope of this “reach” was increasingly determined by my having decided to pursue a career as a humanities scholar and, with luck, a university professor.
Based on what I had seen in my studies as an apprentice, aka a graduate student, my assumption was that some admixture of normative and innovate work would establish my place within my chosen field of study. As almost anyone who has worked in any kind of organization knows, you do the normative to establish that you are part of the group, to let the group know you share their values, their sense of what things should be done and how they should be done.
At the same time, if you are interested in making the proverbial mark, then you have to embark upon something not quite the norm, but you have to do it in a way that the group to which you belong finds interesting. You cannot embark on something too novel: you are asking too much of most members. More importantly, if you veer a little bit one way when the field is mostly veering another, you are going to make a mark in the dark. (Tee shirts should be available later, *Make a mark in the dark*, for those wishing to acknowledge that they work(ed) the wrong edge of the envelope.
Whatever my own journey through a particular field, what I am struck by is how much my sense of that journey was shaped by my notion of what it was to make a difference which was based on an older form of media production: Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles, Sontag, Banks, and Berry were all products of an age when media was filtered through a limited set of producers. They were, I hate to admit, commodities like anything else.
The internet revolution was about democratizing production. All it took was a computer and a connection and you could publish. Later, as computers and connections got more powerful and production technologies (software and hardware) not only got better but also more affordable — the iPhone 15 is a media production studio in your hand! — you could publish texts, images, audio, and video. And more and more and more people were, and are, doing it every day.
I think what’s struck me, hard, is how few know Sinatra et al. Even the Beatles have become inconsequential. I do not know, sitting here trying to process this, how much of this is simply the way it’s always been — 100 years ago, someone sitting at their desk with a fountain pen in their hand might well be lamenting that no one remembers the artists from the late 1800s — of it’s really the case that cycles of fame and forgotten have increased in rapidity and shortened in duration.
