Have I Become a Watch Snob?

Sometimes, people who hate Rolex are referred to as as snobs.

I've never thought of myself as a watch snob -- for example, I completely agree with a lot of both the negative AND the positive things which are said about Invicta (negative: their marketing strategy of giving their watches MSRP's 4 times what they intend to sell the watch for, and then pretending that, TODAY ONLY, they're offering an incredible deal, when it's the everyday deal; and using way too much gold plating. 

 

Positive: making some watches which actually function pretty well, and drawing the attention of a lot of first-time watch owners to a wonderful hobby)  -- but it's very hard for me to imagine myself ever wearing a Rolex. I would much rather be seen wearing the garish Invicta in that photo. 

As loyal readers of this blog know, this represents a complete change from 5 years ago, when I lusted after the platinum Rolex Daytona. What happened in those 5 years? I've learned a lot about watches. I know Rolexes are good watches, but today, they're overpriced to the point where it seems to me that you either have not know very much about watches, or ignore a lot of what you know, in order to shell out that much for a Rolex, when you can always, ALWAYS get a far superior watch for the same money. I just can't separate my reaction to the marketing and the prices from my reaction to the actual watches.

If that means I'm a watch snob, well then, I supposed I've become a watch snob. Even though my annual income is less than the average selling price for an entry-level Rolex, which is much, much higher than the MSRP for that Rolex. 

I personally don't think it's snobbery, it's actually concern about people being ripped off, and people investing in a risky bubble -- assuming that the Rolex bubble actually will burst at some point. And of course, it's POSSIBLE that it actually will NEVER burst. Financial bubbles, by defintion, are built on irrationality, and irrationality has never run to a sensible timetable.

Gore Vidal, Political Populist and Literary Snob

Gore Vidal's essays on politics and those in the form of memoir are glorious, but he more than makes up for it with his literary essays, which basically consist of contempt for writers and their readers who are not of his aristocratic class and or, among contemporary writers, his personal friends. In the essay collection At Home there is a Part I, consisting, oh boy oh boy! of delightful telling of anecdotes from Vidal's amazing life, peppered with good angry funny political populism, and a Part II consisting, oh Jesus, oh no, of Vidal pompously and dully lecturing the reader about American writers who have had the nerve to win more awards than he has, and to make ends meet by teaching, instead of from coming from a wealthy family like he did, the barbarians who *cringe* went to public schools -- the bad American kind, not the good English kind which produced some of Vidal's friends who it's an outrage they didn't get the Nobel Prize cause it's all a conspiracy of mediocrity among people who weren't taught the classics and have an (understandable, of course) envious rage against the cool kids like Gore.

Oy.

Except that one of the essays in Part I belongs in Part II because it mostly consists of spleen against those of us who waste our lives with trash like Gaddis and Gass, and, oh dear, even uncouth types such as Pynchon, instead of having the common decency to love Louis Auchincloss for having continued the tradition of George Eliot, Henry James and Edith Wharton. (Never mind that Gaddis and Pynchon are just as upperclass as Vidal, Pynchon maybe even a little more, but Gaddis committed the crime of becoming good buds with that professor Gass, who lives in St Louis, my God! and Pynchon, worse still, often convincingly writes in the cadences of us regular folks.) I'm talking about the essay "Frederic Prokosch: the European Connection." Prokosch was cool with Vidal because he came from that same American boarding-school background, was an expat like Vidal is part-time, and, most important of all, because he dripped with the same instinctive contempt for non-snobbish writers.

I just want to talk about the end of the essay: Vidal has taken his friend Prokosch (why??) to a party chock-full of his bêtes noires, American poets who have won awards and who teach college classes. Vidal's description of these people is petty and gratuitously cruel, and, twenty-some years after first having read it -- pardon me, folks, sometimes I'm slow -- it only now occurs to me to wonder how accurate his descriptions of the persons are. (His descriptions of their books are pretty much completely worthless.) He writes that all these boors have just agreed that the classics are worthless -- Did they? It occurs to me, unforgivably late, that this is the sort of thing I tend to encounter in Vidal's depictions of writers he hates, and nowhere else; for instance, nowhere in the writing of those writers -- which inspires Prokosch to the classy act of reciting some lines of Vergil, after which he will calmly inform these tenured unwashed where he used to read them every day, carved in marble in the gardens of the Villa Borghese "at Rome," so there! And he will go on to say, "I'd think, that is what poetry is, something that can be carved in marble, something that can still be beautiful to read after so many centuries."

The implication, which of course Prokosch was too cultured to say, and Vidal too cultured to write, being that centuries after the world had forgotten this entire roomful of college-teachin' boors, the best people would continue to read Vergil and Prokosch and Vidal.

Yeah, maybe so. Vergil, anyway. But as I said, I wonder whether those people Gore Vidal hates so much really did say anything like "The classics are worthless." It has been known to happen that a party guest was so choked with booze and bile that it affected his hearing. According to Vidal, as Prokosch began to recite Vergil, a "full professor" murmured to his "full wife," "It's Dante." (Hey, Gore, you're fat too! Sometimes you act like you don't know it.) Cause he wuz just what passes for a full professor in Amurrka these days, and ain't never even been to no public school and cain't even tell no Latin from no Eye-talian! hyuck hyuck hyuck...

This was the point and peak of Vidal's punchline in the joke he made of these partygoers. But maybe in reality it was all very different. Maybe these professors and their spouses -- according to Vidal it was all professors and their wives, as if there were no female professors and no gay professors to be found in the Hudson Valley in the 1980's. Add that to the list of unrealistic details in Vidal's portrait of American academia and American prizewinning literature -- maybe they appreciated the classics very much, and were also bright enough to perceive Vidal's and Prokosch's misguided disdain, although too polite to return it in a manner pointed enough that Vidal could perceive it. (Why were the two of them there? Is it completely farfetched to wonder if they might go to a party full of American professor-poets solely in order to wallow in their own disdain?) Maybe that man knew quite well that Prokosch was reciting Vergil, and what he really whispered to that woman was something actually quite witty, like, "We're officially going to Hell now. I feel like Dante."

Civilisation My Arse, Sir Kenneth! [PLEASE READ THE PS!]

Kenneth Clark, 1903-1983, the art critic and historian, OM, CH, KCB, FBA -- in other words: about as upper-crusty British as one could be without actually belonging to the royal family -- probably best known, like Carl Sagan and J Bronowski, for a public-television series, in Clark's case entitled "Civilisation," and the book associated with the series, Ah say Ah say Kenneth Clark seems to have been a very nice, very charming man. I probably would've liked him if I'd ever known him, it seems that most people did. But then, would a common "unwashed" American "ethnic" person such as myself ever actually have met Clark? He may have had staff members charged primarily with the duty to see to it that such meetings never took place. He may well have spent most of his time in the company of royals, and very little time with anyone who was not titled.

Such insulation would help to explain the nature of his work. I do not like Clark's work. I do not like it in a tree, I do not like it with a bee, I do not like it with a crutch, I do not like it very much, I do not like it here or there, I do not like it anywhere, I do not like it with grape jam, I do not like it, Sam I Am! Bertrand Russell boldly asserts that the ancient Greeks invented philosophy. Whatever the Egyptians and Chinese and Indians and other were doing before Thales & Co,. it wasn't philosophy, according to Russell. I think Russell is wrong about that. Way wrong. Well, Clark goes Russell one better and asserts that the ancient Greeks invented civilisation. What is often referred to as Western civilisation is the only truly civilized state of things, according to Clark. Clark also repeats the traditional Western mistake of missing how tenuous is the connection between ancient Greek and the modern West, and not only tenuous, but very much dependent upon the links of Moslem and Byzantine culture, which kept the legacy of Greek philosophy and science and literature and art alive while the West sank into very deep and dark barbarism indeed. Islam is cited only 3 times in the index of Civilisation, China and Japan not at all, Africa only that one time at the beginning, where Clark politely puts down the civilisation represented by that African mask about which he apparently knows nothing, about which he clearly wishes to know nothing.

At this point people may want to defend Clark by saying that "Civilisation"/Civilisation is only about Western civilisation. Yes, clearly it is. But Clark could've called it Western Civilisation. He didn't. He also doesn't mention all the long list of things that the West has taken from other cultures and then claimed as its own. No, he's one of the ones ignorantly claiming them.

At the beginning of Civilization, the book and television series, Clark is in Paris, the center of his idea of civilization. He talks about how in the 9th century, Vikings -- not civilized, according to Clark -- almost captured Paris, and oh what a calamity that would've been! Then he shows a picture of an ancient Greek sculpture of Apollo, and asserts that it represents a much higher state of civilisation than an African mask. (If Clark had any idea what part of Africa the mask came from, or what it represented, or anything else about it, he kept all that info to himself.) (That is my sarcastic way of pointing out that Clark was pretty ignorant of the African culture he was disparaging in his pleasant and polite way.)

Clark asserts that civilsation is something you can feel. In, I think, a very similar way, Oswald Spengler asserts in the Untergang des Abendlandes that race is something you can feel. I don't feel what Clark or Spengler is feeling, but in both cases I feel the presence of bigotry.

Let's get back to Paris and the Vikings -- would it have been such a calamity if the Vikings had taken Paris? Would that act have threatened to extinguish civilisation, as Clark implies?

What the fuck was so civilised about Paris in the ninth century? The Carolingians were busily waging war against each other and destroying the Empire Charlemagne had established. The kings and nobles were not caring well for their peasants. The economy was still mostly barter. A lot of people starved to death. Civilisation my ass. Having the Vikings take over could've actually improved things in lots of ways. They didn't want to plunder and destroy like the Huns or the Conquistadors -- or like the Carolingians were still for the most part attempting to do, except that Charlemagne's descendants weren't nearly as good at waging war as he was, and were primarily waging futile war against each other, whereas Charlemagne at least had pacified the very large area under his control -- the Vikings wanted to rule, and they ruled pretty well, from England to Russia and lots of places in between.

In the ninth century the Vikings were still un-Christian and illiterate. I don't think the non-Christianity was a bad thing. I would agree with Clark that literacy is a good thing. However, I think it was a bad thing that the Christian Church had such a thorough monopoly on literacy in Western Europe at the time. For one thing, the contemporary accounts of encounters between Christians, such as those in and around Paris in the ninth century, and illiterate non-Christians such as the invading Vikings, were all written by Christians. Lately it has occurred to historians how one-sided such depictions were, how distorted at the expense of the non-Christians. Clark was not part of the re-assessment and correction of the traditional Western view of the world. He was a staunch traditionalist. Where the West encountered literate peoples, whether Byzantine or Arab or Copt or Syriac or Chinese or Mayan or what have you, Clark does not avail himself of the non-Western records -- well, it's very hard for anyone to avail themselves of the Mayan records, since the Conquistadors burnt almost all the Mayan books and killed all the Mayans who could read them. Oops! -- and does not seem to be the slightest bit interested in the possibility that his traditional, pro-Western view of the world could be wrong.

It is wrong. Way, way wrong. It wouldn't have been cutting-edge in the 18th century, let alone the 20th.

PS, 26 October, 2019: This post is completely wrong. Clark was the opposite of a snob. I should have read past the first half-page before shooting my mouth off. I'm sorry.