"Proprietary Names: The Name / Proprietary Names: The Place": The Twentieth-Anniversary Special

I own that the very notion of writing a twentieth-anniversary essay on “Proprietary Names: The Name/Proprietary Names: The Place” has an air of fatuous pomposity about it—not because it appears to presume that somebody besides the author of that essay takes enough of an interest in it to appreciate an “update” of it, for I suspect that at least a more-than-figurative handful of people do take at least that much interest in it, but because it appears to presume that somebody other than its author has been counting the years since the moment of its completion, and I would seldom if ever presume that even the members of the just-mentioned handful have been doing that. And even if they have been doing that, they will have remarked that the essay bears a 2006 post-date and hence drawn the conclusion that I am innumerate–a conclusion that presumably will have redounded  even more resoundingly to my discredit than the conclusion that I am fatuously pompous (a conclusion that in any case will have doubtless followed therefrom [for I suppose no-one comes across as more fatuously pompous than a fellow who presumes to say anything about anything without being able to get his dates right]). But I can in point of fact clear myself of a charge of innumeracy at least as prosecutable on the evidence of that post-date, for in point of fact I finished writing the essay in 2004, and that 2006 post-date is merely the result of my resignation to my inability to place it with any literary or para-literary journal, online or otherwise, within the first double-dozen months of its completion. (That moment of resignation, incidentally, coincided with a moment of resolution—the sensible resolution never again to bother trying to place any of my essays with any journals of any genre, online or otherwise [not that I am by any means ungrateful to the pair or trio of journals who have seen fit to publish a trio or quartet of my essays on commission, but that it was unsensible in or of me ever to imagine that any essay I had written would hew closely enough to the format of any existing journal to stand any chance of being accepted for publication in it].) Not that this chronological correctness in itself justifies the composition of a twentieth-anniversary essay—no, that composition is justified, rather, by the fact that since the completion of the original essay I have been visited by at least an essayworth or essayweight of certain thoughts (thoughts that strike at least me as cogent and that I have at least not yet been given any reason to believe have already been both thought and published by some other person or persons) concerning not merely the adequacy of my account of the proprietary name in the original essay (for if that had been the case I might have published a semi-retraction of the essay in any gosh-damn year) but, rather, certain alterations in the objective fortunes of the proprietary name that have supervened since that completion; for twenty years is almost—if not entirely—universally thought to be a decorous interval at which to mark alterations in the objective fortunes of just about any entity or phenomenon that typically suffers such alterations at more than geological speed. (Of course, twenty-five years is almost—if not entirely—universally thought to be an even more decorous interval at which to mark such alterations, and if the passage of time eo ipso were no consideration, I would gladly wait another five years to pen the present essay, especially as it would afford me an excuse to style it not merely an anniversary special but a silver jubilee essay in reverential mimicry of my beloved Glenn Gould. But not unlike the philosopher in Novalis’s fable, I think it that in five years’ time, one of us, either the proprietary name or the so-called blogosphere or myself, will be dead [or in the case of the so-called blogosphere, dead again {see the passage on Substack below (but not right away!)}].) Indeed, we have already passed the twenty-year anniversary of another of my essays that has garnered at least a more-than-figurative handful of readers, “O My Friendster, There Is No Friend,” and for all my direly ardent desire to do so, I have not penned an anniversary essay on it, for try as I might (or tried as I mighted), I could not persuade myself that the objective fortunes of friendship had changed dramatically enough in the intervening fifth-century to justify such a screed. To be sure, there was a moment at which those fortunes at least appeared to have changed dramatically enough to justify such a screed, namely a mere five-to-seven years after “O My Friendster’”s completion, in ca. 2010, when Facebook was at the height of its popularity and enjoyed an effective monopoly of the social-medial market-cum-landscape, having long since elbowed out of existence such small social-medial fry as Friendster. At that moment I was indeed wondering if friendship had indeed become exactly what in “O My Friendster” I had stated I feared it shortly would become—namely, an institution on par with marriage in point of its ineluctable publicness, for by then I was routinely failing even to hear about certain social events involving my closest friends (or, to employ terminology less antagonistic to the spirit of “O My Friendster,” “the people, relatives aside, whom I had known longest and associated with most frequently”) because these events had only been announced on Facebook and I did not have a Facebook account. But shortly thereafter, Twitter, Instagram, et al. came along (I mean “came along” as in “came to mass awareness,” not “came into existence,” for I am well aware that Twitter at least has been around since 2006) and both re-fragmented the social-medial landscape and redefined the default social-medial interpersonal connection from one of friend-to-friend to one of “influencer”-to-“follower.” Consequently, friendship has more or less reassumed its old nebulous and unobtrusive ontological contours. This is by no means to say that friendship as a facet of social life is still in as resplendently fine fettle as it was in 2004 but merely that most such friendships as still subsist do so absent the benison or patronage of any social-media platform. For example, within the past year I have encountered some dreary statistic to the effect that some depressingly high percentage (say, 80) of men under some depressingly advanced age (say, 40) reported having not a single friend, and while I do not doubt the accuracy of the statistic to the extent that it is permitted by the just-mentioned nebulosity (which I reckon allows for the deduction of at most 20 points from the just-mentioned percentage to account for the designation as non-friends of people who conceivably merit re-designation as friends), I would be strongly inclined to doubt the accuracy of a statistic reporting that more than a depressingly minuscule percentage (say, 10) of those men did not have both a Twitter and an Instagram account. (I dare not even imagine a counterfactual statistic incorporating the percentage of them that also had a Facebook account, for I am confident that the age cited in the actual statistic was not quite as depressingly advanced as sixty.)

Before proceeding to the official beginning of the present essay, I really ought to address an objection that is not unlikely to have occurred to that pair or trio (I am not so megalomaniacal as to dream of adding “or quartet”) of present readers who have also read both “O My Friendster” and “Proprietary Names: The Name,” viz. that regardless of the number of years that have elapsed since the completion of “Proprietary Names: The Name,” it is inappropriate to judge its follow-up-worthiness by the same criterion I applied to “O My Friendster,” inasmuch as while “O My Friendster” does indeed center on the objective fortunes of friendship, “Proprietary Names: The Name” centers on the subjective fortunes of the proprietary name, on the changes in meaning and metaphysical resonance undergone by the proprietary name as a category and certain specific proprietary names in the present writer’s personal subjective landscape. To this objection I shall not be so baldly bold (or boldly bald) as to rejoin à la Diane Keaton in the words of the filmmaker who cannot be named: “Subjectivity is objective,” but I shall be so receding-hairlinedly unabashed (or unabashedly receding-hairlined) as to rejoin à la presumably a veritable murder of pointy-headed mid-to-late twentieth-century academic scribblers (although I own I that at the moment I can’t think of a single one who has uttered or written this verbatim): “Subjectivity is ineluctably mediated by objectivity,” and “Proprietary Names: The Name” is no elucting exception to the rule formulated in this rejoinder. For that essay was an account, yes, of my subjective experience of the proprietary name, but of that experience as mediated by my only partly subjective experience of reading of Marcel Proust, an experience that had brought to my attention certain objective historical occurrences that had brought proprietary names to greater social prominence and thereby (once I had read Proust) modified my subjective experience of such names. (Naturally, as I have more or less already explained in “Proprietary Names: The Name,” Proust’s account of names in general and of place names in particular is an objective one mediated by his subjective experience of names, an experience that was in turn mediated by certain objective historical occurrences that had brought certain human bearers of names associated with certain places to decreased social prominence.) And I did after all conclude “Proprietary Names” with an appeal to the reader to consider a possibility centered on an objective state of affairs, viz.,—“a proprietarily-named geographical heterogeneity too terrible to contemplate,” viz., the massive hodgepodge of proprietarily named commercial establishments that then dominated the roadsides and streetsides of America’s suburbs and cities. But while I am addressing the objector on behalf of subjectivism, let me assure him that in the present essay I intend eventually to provide an update on the fortunes of the proprietary name in my subjective landscape, that indeed I regard that landscape as being as integral to the prospective constitution of the present essay as it was and is to the established constitution of “Proprietary Names: The Name.”

But on, at last, to the multiply abovementioned objective fortunes: the good news (good at least from a certain subjective and indeed self-regarding point of view, that of the continuing “relevance” of “Proprietary Names: The Name” [not that there is not even something self-regarding about terming what I am about to report “news,” as this implies that I am aware of it and that reader is not, and I freely concede that the reader may very well have become aware of it already {in which case I freely concede the superfluity to the reader of at least the present portion of the present essay}]) is that the proprietary name is as objectively alive and well in the America of 2024 as it was in the America of 2024 and that it shows no signs of “going anywhere,” but I have placed that set phrase in inverted commas not only because it is a set phrase and therefore merits a foregrounded disavowal of any claims of proprietorship by the present “I” but also because taken with literal precision, as it has every right to be taken for all its inurement to being taken figuratively and vaguely, it not only implies but postulates that the proprietary name has been geographically static throughout the intervening period and gives every sign of being geographically static “for the foreseeable future” (a set phrase that I have placed in inverted commas merely because it is a set phrase &c. [and the same goes for all subsequent quotation marks-bracketed phrases unless stated otherwise]), and in point of fact the proprietary name has done a great deal of moving about since 2004 and gives every sign of doing a great deal more moving about even long before the ringing in of 2044. What I mean in asserting that the proprietary name is “not going anywhere” is merely that it is as conspicuously visible, as “in your face,” in today’s America as in the America of twenty years ago and bids fair to remain as “in your face” “for the foreseeable future,” for since then it has undergone or undertaken quite a dramatic internal migration, or perhaps rather an internal dispersal, by which I mean that it is more flagrantly visible in certain places within the United States (and indeed “arguably” within the so-called West insgesamt) than it was then and that it is less flagrantly visible in certain other places therein. In 2004, the roost of the proprietary name had essentially not shifted in location or aspect since the advent of mass electronic media eighty years earlier. Few of the proprietary names of 2004 had survived since 1924, but in 2004 as in 1924, almost all proprietary names one encountered in the quotidian course of an ordinary American existence were the names of the manufacturers and vendors of consumer goods and services. Moreover, in 2004 as in 1924, the frequency with which one saw a given proprietary name varied in direct proportion to the centrality of the good or service subsumed by that name to the American system of life and the market share in that good or service borne by the manufacturer or vendor that owned that name, and proprietary names were consequently quite finely graduated in visibility. One might typically see the name of one of the top purveyors of a diurnally indispensable commodity like fast food—a McDonalds or a Subway—dozens of times a day, the name of a slightly less commercially formidable purveyor of that commodity like Taco Bell or Burger King a mere dozen times a day, and the name of a relatively obscure purveyor thereof like Quiznos or Arby’s a mere dozen times a week, and yet one would still see Quizno’s or Arby’s much more frequently than one would see even the top purveyor of some commodity typically purchased by Americans only at widely spaced intervals—Hertz or Avis, the names of car-rental agencies, or State Farm and Prudential, the names of insurance agencies (not to be confused with car insurance agencies like Geico and Progressive, whose names one did indeed tend to see about as often as those of obscure fast-food vendors on account of Americans’ much feted-and-cursed “love affair with the automobile”—i.e., automobile ownership, not rentership). Finally, in 2024 one tended to see proprietary names most often in the same sorts of locales as one had seen them in in 1924—in newspaper, radio, and (from ca. 1950 onwards) television advertisements, in streetside and roadside signage, and within the walls of the stores, eateries, etc., sited immediately (or, in the case of billboards alongside limited-access highways, a mile or two) behind that signage. In 2024, a very few proprietary names—perhaps no more than a half-dozen, and certainly fewer than a dozen—outshine even the most illustrious of their inferiors to the point of rendering them intermittently invisible, and while all of these names are associated with corporate entities that produce or vend goods or services, in all of them but at most three, this production or vendage is but a sideline to some other genre of undertaking. Meanwhile, the locuses of our encounters with proprietary names—not just the just-mentioned 6 to 12 but all the others as well—have been siphoned from all the old haunts into the successor-electronic media, the wholly digitized audiovisual media mediated by so-called apps. To be sure, much proprietary-name peppered roadside and streetside signage remains (at least for the immediate time being), but we encounter proprietary names much more rarely via that roadside and streetside signage and the stores, eateries, etc. behind that signage, partly because the experience of driving or walking along roads and streets is much more marginal to the American Alltag than it used to be, partly and perhaps even mostly for the obvious reason that shopping is mostly done online now, and partly for the less obvious reason that the strips and clusters of retail establishments behind that signage are less richly stocked and emblazoned with proprietary names than they were yesteryear (a development that I shall address in detail at a more opportune time). As before, most proprietary names (apart from the abovementioned majority of the abovementioned 6 to 11 names) are attached to entities of some sort that produce or vend goods or services, and as we use the just-mentioned so-called apps via which they manifest themselves prevailingly to watch and listen to stretches of media more or less consubstantial in form with the old television and radio programs, the proprietary names manifest themselves thereby in commercials that are formally indistinguishable from the old television and radio commercials (even if they appear one at a time and at annoyingly unpredictable moments rather than clustered together at regularly scheduled commercial break-times as in the old days; presumably they are so placed to thwart the old carefully timed dash to the kitchen or bathroom). But unlike in the old days, there is no graduation of levels of prominence in the name: the named producers and vendors, along with their named products, seem to be either obscure, of very recent origin, or of very limited commercial longevity. Moreover, the advertisements are said to be “narrowcasted” to the viewer by a so-called algorithm drawing on his viewing and listening preferences; in my own experience, and the experience of others that has been reported to me, this “narrowcasting” is quite inept, inasmuch as the advertisements are rarely for products or services one would ever be inclined to purchase, but I do not doubt that it has at least resulted in my seeing a great many advertisements that even the people with whom I speak and correspond with most often have not seen and vice-versa. The net (in two or more senses) result of all these trends is that perhaps for the first time in the proprietary name’s history since the very dawn of journalism we no longer have a common stock of proprietary names to draw on in small talk and its textual analogues. Indeed, apart from the abovementioned ones (none of which one can go a single solar day without seeing or hearing mentioned), I can think of only one non-“legacy”-proprietary name—that I have encountered being spoken or written about in the old, offhand tone that takes for granted the speaker or reader’s ability to catch the reference, namely Temu, and so far I have encountered it therein only once. Of course en quasi-revanche one nowadays encounters jeremiads bewailing the death of the so-called monoculture, by which what is generally meant is a common stock of movies, television shows, pop tunes, and other voluntarily sought-out cultural wares with which everyone is or used to be familiar, but in truth there has never been an American monoculture in that sense. “Not even back in the horrible old days when there were only three television networks and only three television channels via which to watch their programming?” Not even back then. For even back then, one could watch only one network’s programming at any given moment, such that once one had got into the habit of watching a certain program featured by a certain network, one had a deucedly hard time picking up the habit of watching either of its competitors on the other two—especially in the case of programs with running plot lines like sitcoms and drama series. A scene from Barry Levinson’s film Tin Men, released in 1987 but set in 1963, shews how fragmented the monoculture already was even at its most primordially monolithic. Four of the film’s eponyms—i.e., middle-aged aluminum siding salesmen—are sitting at a table at a restaurant (perhaps the eponym of Levinson’s previous Baltimore-set hit, Diner), and one of them asks another, “You watch Bonanza, right?” whereupon the query-ee answers in the affirmative and a bipartite chinwag on Bonanza commences; whereupon a member of the resultant silent duo asks the other member, “You watch Ed Sullivan, right?” thereby precipitating a bipartite chinwag on The Ed Sullivan Show and turning the gathering into the sort of social unit on which Elliott Carter must have modeled his notoriously hard-to-follow mid-to-late-twentieth-century string quartets. (On consulting the network prime-time schedule for 1962-1963, I find that it would not actually have been impossible to be a regular watcher of both Bonanza and The Ed Sullivan Show, as Bonanza started on Sunday nights at nine-o’clock on NBC immediately after the conclusion of the Ed Sullivan Show on CBS, but each network’s marketer-assisted effort to keep viewers tuned into its offerings all night [I’m sure there was some industry-specific bit of argot for the strategy] doubtless resulted in much “siloed” viewing, at least on certain evenings.) But the scene was doubtless included in the film partly as an illustration of the comparative cultural homogeneity of the early 60s vis-à-vis the micro-epoch of the film’s making, the micro-epoch of early cable television with its Springsteen-derided 57 (?) channels, for I can attest that in 1987 I was absolutely clueless about the plotline of Miami Vice or (as my parents did not subscribe to cable television) the choreography of the latest Michael Jackson video, while complementarily I was powerless to bond with my peers over my own enthusiasm for A Prairie Home Companion and certain local AM talk-radio host. All that said, back then, the then of the entire quarter-century stretch between 1963 and 1987, the best-known television commercials provided infallibly reliable points de repère for Americans because they were almost more than figuratively inescapable. Nobody had to gloss Walter Mondale’s utterance of the phrase “Where’s the Beef?” in his debate with Ronald Reagan during the 1984 presidential campaign, and when, on the march from the first act of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker’s being introduced in my sixth-grade music class, one of my classmates began singing “Smurfberry crunch is fun to eat” along to the piece’s tune, I did not mistake those lyrics for a piece of organic schoolyard folk music because although I never went out of my way to watch the The Smurfs I did occasionally go out of my way to watch other commercial-television programs that aired on Saturday morning. But now tout cela est foutu, and I suppose it has been foutu since about 2010, although having been an effective never-television viewer since the dawn of the century, I find it difficult to be even vaguely sure of the date of the foutage. All I know is that when I visited my parents for Christmas of that year, 2010, Dos-Equis’s commercial centering on “the most interesting man in the world” aired frequently through their (by then fully cable-ized) television set, and that on each of the roughly half-dozen occasions I have referenced that advertisement in live in-person settings (all of these settings having themselves naturally been set in Mexican or Mexican-adjacent restaurants), the reference has been met with a chuckle of recognition. Anyhow, presumably this recent disappearance of old-school proprietary names from the stock of common discourse has preempted the germination chez today’s youngsters of the elaborate metaphysical-cum-aesthetic hierarchies of brand-named products I discussed towards the end of “Proprietary Names: The Name”—of the association of certain chain pizzerias with luxury and urbanity and certain others with austerity and rusticity, and the like. I say “presumably” because I have not yet crossed paths with evidence of any kind regarding the metaphysical-cum-aesthetic status of proprietary names among today’s youth. I hope to quiz my nephews, who are both in their teens, on the matter, but so far I am having a difficult time formulating a question about it that is not likely to make me seem to be a complete loony, not only to the lads themselves but also (and “arguably” more significantly) to their parents. And of course I would have to pair that question with one that bids even fairer to make me seem to be a CL, namely, one regarding what it has felt like to grow up under the crushing metaphysical-cum-aesthetic weight of the abovementioned 6-to-11 omnipresent new-school proprietary names. But perhaps even in terming this weight “crushing” I am “projecting” my own attitude to these names onto these youngsters’ mental shoulders. For I do indeed find that weight crushing, but then I was not born into a world in which they had already assumed their present colossal proportions; indeed, I can remember when they were mere pups in the proprietary dog pack—and pups of no colossal breed at that. Back in ’04 I had already had an Amazon account for two years (as Amazon itself has been kind enough to remind me unbidden via my present “profile”), but it did not even occur to me to cite “Amazon” as a contemporarily current proprietary name in “Proprietary Names/the Name,” for at the time Amazon was just one of several online vendors from which or whom I might purchase a book or compact disc (and only ever a book or compact disc) in the rare event that I could not find it at a “brick-and-mortar” bookstore-cum-record store like Borders. The company’s subsequent metamorphosis into my own and everybody else’s shopping destination of first resort for everything but food occurred so speedily that it more vividly evokes the supervention of the atomic bomb than that of any other commercial phenomenon (or even of a more quiescently massive natural phenomenon like the “footprint” of the river for which, qua “not-only-longest-river-in-the-world-but also-river ten times-as-long-as-the-second-longest-river-in-the-world” it was clairvoyantly named by Mr. Bezos). “Netflix” had similarly humble, if slightly later (if still slightly “Proprietary Names/the Name”-antedating) origins in my lifeworld. My earliest recollection of that name is an aurally-sourced one: in 2003, in the course of a small gathering at which I was present, a friend of mine who had subscribed to Netflix’s DVD mail-delivery service (then the only service it or they offered) tendered nous autres a quick description of its consumer-side workings (their dependence on one’s maintenance of a “queue” and whatnot) and a highly qualified recommendation of it: “It’s only worth signing up for if you watch an awful lot of movies.” As I did not watch an awful lot of movies—unless two discs’ worth a week counted as an awful lot, and as my neighborhood video-rental shop and the central branch of Baltimore’s public library system kept me reliably supplied with those discs, I gathered Netflix was not for me, but the company snagged me eventually, in 2008 or 2009, when I developed a yen to watch the BBC’s complete Shakespeare series from the 1970s and 1980s and somehow discovered that while neither the library nor the video-rental shop carried it, Netflix did, and thence commenced perhaps for the first time since my late adolescence a history of interactions with a proprietarily named product that I would come to look back on with nostalgia, and indeed specifically  nostalgia of the intense yet dubious kind I had ascribed to my recollection of caramel Jello pudding pops and Subway steak-and-cheese subs in “Proprietary Names/the Name” (whose dubiousness vis-à-vis both those products has since incidentally only increased owing to the their respective pitchmen’s precipitous descent into universal ignominy). In the kinetic stereograph of my memory, my Alltag as a Netflix DVD-delivery customer, centering as it does/did on my sealing a pair or trio of “iconic” bright-red envelopes and dropping them into the ancient matte-blue USPS mailbox on the sidewalk just outside the downtown-Baltimore office at which I work/worked, is more evocative of nineteenth than of twenty-first-century Occidental meta-postal life—a visual companion piece to the yellow tailcoats of Biedermeier Germany’s postmen, the Trollope-invented red letterboxes of Victorian Britain, and the petits blues of Belle Epoque-Paris’s pneumatic tube letter-delivery system. The sense of anticipation with which I awaited the arrival of my discs in my personal mail-pigeonhole in the uptown-Baltimore apartment building at which I resided, and the disappointment when I failed to find a hint of red therein, also now strike me as very nineteenth-century, evoking as they do Schubert’s wanderer’s elated-cum-woebegone exclamations of “Die Post bringt keine Brief für dich!” and “Mein Herz!”, even as they recall the very late twentieth century in reminding me of the only other period of my life wherein I have felt these emotions so keenly in connection with the regular mail, the period comprising my undergraduate studies in the early 1990s, when I corresponded with my friends by paper letter. But of course this nostalgia has contrived to germinate and effloresce only thanks to the gradual supersedence of Netflix qua rented-DVD distributor by Netflix qua producer-cum-purveyor of so-called streamed content, specifically principally—at least so I hear tell, for apart from certain specials and series centered on Norm Macdonald and Jerry Seinfeld I have viewed nary a minute of it—the sorts of tedious, turgid, profanity-and-nudity-saturated “drama” series that the subscription cable channels had been producing since the late 1990s (which in turn were essentially segmented extensions of the sorts of tedious bombastic, “drama” films Hollywood had been producing since the late 1960s) and that had prompted media critics (never the world’s cleverest or most cultivated people) to proclaim with unanimous onanistic smugness starting in the late 20-oughties, “We’re living in a new golden age of television” or even “we’re living in the first true golden age of television.” And of course the just-mentioned supersedence coincided with the supersedence of the cable channels’ output of such series by Netflix’s, a supersedence that by the mid-20-teens had approached so close to being total that people began saying “Netflix” in contexts wherein they had thitherto said “television” or “TV”—not the respective commercial purveyors of television—“ABC,” “CBS,” “HBO,” etc.—television itself and tout court, as in questions such as “What’s on television/TV tonight?” and “What have you been watching on TV/television lately?” Mutatis mutandis (i.e., setting aside technical differences like the just-alluded-to one of the relative temporal portability of the offerings [differences that would have resulted in the substitution of, say, “this summer” for “tonight”]), the only difference between Netflix and television seemed to be that Netflix was much “cooler” and upmarket, that there was no embarrassment or shame associated with heavy Netflix viewership even among people who fancied themselves super-cultivated; it seemed that Netflix had inherited in perpetuity the entire mantle once bestowed somewhat selectively only on the hippest productions of the supposed new golden age like Breaking Bad and The Wire. In the mid-teens one started to hear a god-awful phrase, “Netflix and chill,” that conveyed the sense that a lifestyle of what would have been disdainfully termed couch potato-ism a generation earlier was now le plus chic on offer. To be sure, one did (and still does) occasionally encounter polemics of the sort that bore (and still bear) a superficial resemblance to the 1960s and 1970s paleosnobs’ jeremiads against “the vast wasteland” and “the boob tube,” but these paid fulsome tribute to their Devil even as they denounced him. For example, in decrying the present American populace’s seemingly ineluctable disinclination to productive civic or economic activity, a pundit would (and will still) write, “After all they’ve got Netflix on tap 24/7; what incentive do they have to get off their keisters (not that anyone any longer employs so winsomely wholesome a euphemism for the fundament as keister [as is attested by the red-underscoring of keister by my fifteen-year-old version of Word {“Speaking of Word, why have you not yet mentioned Microsoft?” Because it was already an ancient proprietary-nominal behemoth twenty years ago (although its commercial kinship with the newer behemoths now in point will eventually occasion my echoing your mention of it)}]) and do something?”, thereby implying that Netflix’s programming is more reliably moreish than stroopwafels steeped in laudanum. I cannot tell you—whoever you are—how demoralizing this implication is for me, inasmuch as I cannot think of anything that might more reliably push me over the edge into terminally suicidal despair than a diurnal ocular-cum-aural diet of Netflix programming. “But how do you know this if you’ve never even viewed a non-Macdonaldian or Seinfeldian minute of that programming?” Because owing to my near-continuous propinquity to Netflix subscribers, I have not managed to avoid hearing millions of minutes of it, and from those millions of minutes I believe I am entitled to infer that it is consubstantial in point of trashiness with the “second Golden Age”-epoch television programming of which I did go out of my way to watch at least a hundred minutes when I didn’t know any better. Anyway, for all my demoralization by what Netflix has become, that demoralization palls by comparison with that wrought in my soul, such as it is or may be, by the third proprietary name of the top trio out of the abovementioned rough half-dozen, Google. Not that I can summon up even a wisp of nostalgia for the Google of yore but that I can at least fondly recall a time when Google seemed harmless and about as meritorious as a so-called tech company is capable of seeming to a paleosnob such as the present writer. The name Google entered my consciousness of the webiverse as that of a search engine in an already very crowded field of them, and to this day I am unclear on how that engine managed to elbow into effective nonexistence its more anciently established rivals like Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Ask Jeeves. Certainly if I had had my metaphysical-cum-aesthetic druthers it never would have won out, for I found the name far less appealing than any of those three. YAHOO!’s bumptious self-presentation in those exclamation-mark punctuated zanily off-kilter italicized capitals certainly did not endear, but I never could have found it in my heart to hate a brand whose name I had first encountered in the prose masterpiece of one of my favorite writers, Jonathan Swift (or, more likel-ly in the 1968 Doctor Who serial The Mind Robber, a serial featuring a self-quoting Gulliver in its dramatis personae, which I first saw in 1985, long before first reading anything of Gulliver’s Travels beyond some child-friendly version of the Voyage to Lilliput). Complementarily, I never could have been very sorry to see Ask Jeeves go, weary as I had been of the cult of P.G. Woodhouse almost since first learning of its existence in ca. 1992, on spying The World of Jeeves on my college roommate’s bookshelf. (I suppose this weariness had simply sprung from my having spent a surfeit a surfeit of time with 1960s TV butlers like Family Affair’s Mr. French and Batman’s Alfred in childhood [for butlers had been omnipresent in the prime-time offerings of the 1960s, reruns of which had constituted the bulk of my childhood televisual diet {and yes, I know Jeeves was and is technically not a butler but a valet, but who really shivs a git about the difference?}]). Alta Vista is probably the combatant that I wish had won the search-engine wars, for while its name certainly has never had any aura of romance about it for me, it at least evokes nothing offensive in my mind’s sensorium, and indeed nothing at all apart perhaps from some unremarkable Floridian housing complex like Del Boca Vista, the one Jerry’s parents retired to in Seinfeld, or Lago Vista, where my paternal aunt and her husband lived back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Alta Vista does after all mean—high view or perhaps more idiomatically bird’s eye view or overview, which is after all what a self-respecting search engine ought to provide to the user, at least according to my quaintly Luddite lights. But Google strongly repelled me right from the get-go, conjuring up as it inevitably did my first encounter with the preposterously long number for which it was presumably named (I write presumably because I have yet to encounter an “origins story” about Google [and in this I am presumably among the last living persons in the Occident {although it is true that Sergei Whatshisname has always been much less interested in publicizing the history of his shop than Messrs. Zuckerberg, Bezos, et al. that of theirs}), namely in an episode of the astronomer-cum-“exobiologist” Carl Sagan’s mutatis-mutandis-al clone of Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, Cosmos, into which the number had presumably been introduced solely for the sake of Sagan’s narration of its own insufferably twee “origins story,” for a googolth of a second’s thought suffices to remind one that no entity peculiar to pure mathematics can afford any insight whatsoever into “the wonders of the cosmos.” Anyhow, I was and am so violently repelled by the evocation of Cosmos because my rabid fandom of that program at the age of about ten was and is a synecdoche for the bad very old days of my childhood membership of the cult of scientism, from which I apostatized at the age of fourteen and a well-nigh-fanatical would-be-scourge of which I have remained ever since (even while finding most strains of anti-scientism too “problematic” in their own right to warrant even my equivocal adherence), all the while knowing that I have been swimming against the tide of the Weltgeist, and certainly the very early years of the present century witnessed a tsunamification of that tide, what with their veritable canonization of the abovementioned Dr. Sagan (d. 1996) as the arch-saint of a New-Atheist movement at least as demographically formidable as any of its contemporaries among the quasi-traditional pop music-centered youth subcultures, and the elevation to unprecedented prestige of so-called geeks, as instanced not only or even mainly by the complete mainstreamification of the internet but also the permeation of fandom of the god-awful sci-fi and “fantasy” “universes”—Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. into the society of nominal adults; such that one cannot help wondering if Google’s victory in the search-engine wars was not preponderantly owing to its possession of the “geekiest” name of all of them. For it must be or at least ought to be remembered that Google’s supposed insuperable superiority as a search engine was slow to be acknowledged; indeed, I believe I can recall someone of at least more extensive interwebbial experience than my own saying in ca. 2001 something to the effect of “you might as well use Google” apropos of some other search engine in much the same tone as one would say “you might as well walk” apropos of some particularly hitch-ridden system of rapid-transit. I own that eventually I started to hear from such people talk of how Google stood head and shoulders above the rest of the pack of search engines in terms of the abundance and quality of results it returned, but in hindsight I wonder if all those people were ultimately just dupes of Google’s (or Alphabet’s [incidentally, I think I learned that Google was but a subsidiary of Alphabet only in ca. 2018, a fact that I find mildly disquieting, inasmuch as I have not since heard of an Alphabet project that was not also a Google project [such that one cannot but conclude that Alphabet is but a so-called shell corporation founded for some nefarious purpose] and probably because Alphabet in its ever-alternating evocation of kindergarten and Godard’s Alphaville is an altogether more sinister-sounding name than Google) marketing department, because they never seemed to get around to explaining exactly what it was in technical terms that supposedly made Google such a superior web-crawler to, well, Web-Crawler [R.I.P.]. Of course now those selfsame people would doubtless say that it was the superiority of Google’s algorithms that did the trick. But what the heck is an algorithm? And if those algorithms of Google’s are so gosh-darned superior, why do they now notoriously yield to the average query nothing but endless repetition after the top dozen or so hits? Howbeit, I have to confess that my Cosmos-catalyzed aversion to Google ultimately failed to “take,” failed to eventuate in an eschewal of the search engine bearing that name, and that over the half-dozen years following its victory in the search-engine wars—in other words between ca. 2002 and ca. 2008—Google won a place in my affections that was more prominent than that of most other proprietary names in my lifeworld and also I daresay much more prominent than the place it then occupied in the affections of that micro-epoch’s Joe Laptop. I can neither forget nor disavow the nearly audible coos of admiration with which I greeted the particolored cascade of postage stamp-sized snapshots of Thomas Bernhard that resulted from my first Google Images query—coos elicited by the reflection that the engine had somehow instantly assembled a postage stamp album-sized collection of images of the writer from every corner of the world at the sole solicitation of the inputting of his forename and surname.  Nor can I forget or disavow the first action I took on first taking in Google News’ presentation of a cascade of journalistic reports updated “within the last two hours,” “within the last 46 minutes,” and so on—namely, to dash off to a pair of friends an email in which I placed a link to the site and exultantly remarked that it showed that we were at last living in the age of “the Hourly Telepress,” that being the name of a presumably electronic newspaper of the year 2000 as imagined in the abovementioned Mind Robber (for despite my abjuration of my boyhood geekdom, I retained a soft spot for Doctor Who qua treasure trove of traditional British values and stereotypes [for this was, after all, a year or two before the 2004 debut of the so-called reboot of the program(me), a reboot whose deliberate desecration of those values and stereotypes eventually indurated that soft spot into the toughest of calluses]). And last but not least in point of exposure of the intensity of my former Google-olatry, I cannot forget or disavow the glow of gratitude that suffused my soul or heart or what have you (and that doubtless simultaneously suffused my face) on my receipt—presumably via my Microsoft Hotmail account, then my only personal email account—of an invitation from a friend (one of the pair of friends referenced immediately above) to establish a Gmail address—or the glow of smugness that suffused that selfsame entity (and that doubtless etc.) on my subsequently hearing another friend, one whom I had just invited to establish a Gmail account in turn, remark with admiration that might just have been not entirely jocular (albeit undoubtedly not light enough in jocularity to be described as “wry”) (for the friend was a seasoned software developer and hence in a position and of a disposition to cock a skeptical eye at all ostensible innovations the so-called tech field), “Ah, you have a Gmail account!” For (vis-à-vis the likely anomalousness to the reader of needing an invitation to start using Gmail) for whatever reason—a reason that will doubtless have long been since shewn to be both astonishingly ingenious and astonishingly diabolical by more dedicated and searching Google-bashers than me—Google chose to “roll out” Gmail slowly, unobtrusively, and selectively, via the distribution of invitations nested in groups of four or five invitees per acceptor, and I was the first person I had ever heard of who had received one of these invitations. Moreover (vis-à-vis the delight I had felt at receiving the invitation), it must be remembered that Gmail featured (and still features) a certain very useful feature then completely new in the realm of electronic correspondence—viz., the searchability of individual emails by subject and recipient regardless of their location in relation to one’s inbox. You (whoever you are) see, up until then, the only way one could keep emails from a certain person or on a certain subject at one’s fingertips had been to set up a subfolder bearing the name of the person or subject and move them into that subfolder one at a time. “Googling” one’s own inbox had not thitherto been an option. Now in hindsight one cannot help wondering if it might not have been advisable to keep the old folder-centered system in place—partly because it encouraged good organizational habits; partly because the old IT adage “garbage in, garbage out” applied just as water-tightly to the “Google”-able inbox as to any earlier data-processing apparatus, such that in the absence of accurate subject-headings to work with, it could not reliably return a concatenation of emails centered on a specific subject, and since learning that their inboxes are “Google”-able (and hence theoretically capable of yielding all emails on a given subject based on their lexical contents, albeit only according to some hopelessly naïve philosophy of language to which presumably nobody actually subscribes [i.e., one according to which each and every message topically centering on, say, triskaidekaphobia, will include more occurrences of the word “triskaidekaphobia” than of any other word] but to which everyone is happy to pretend to subscribe in a meta-epistolary setting because the pretense saves him the trouble of keeping his letters well-labeled), scarcely anyone has been back-bottomed to use subject headings at all, let alone thoughtfully (to be sure, the present writer does his best to use subject-headings frequently and thoughtfully, but as in any system in which scarcely anyone follows the rules, the odd rule-follower is at a disadvantage not only because he spends a quantum of effort on rule-following that his fellow system-inhabitants can devote to other pursuits but also because he loses out on the windfalls of the disorder occasioned by the near-universal disobedience [and so, vis-à-vis the system now in point, the present writer has compelled himself to content himself with ostensibly corresponding with many a correspondent about a subject that originated years ago {and whose original pertinence to his transactions with the correspondent he can now but dimly recall} because to break the “thread” by starting up a new subject would substantially reduce his chances of receiving a reply because the correspondent is apparently in the habit of maintaining one email thread per correspondent of his own and so will never manage to find {or perhaps even bother to try to find} the fresh-subject-headed email]); and partly (and not most minusculely) because the inbox-searching apparatus seems latish-ly to have developed “reliability issues” not dissimilar those which have contemporaneously begun to afflict its web-searching apparatus (and on which I shall descant presently). But back in ca. 2004 that searchable inbox was like a brand-new toy, as they say (or used to say), such that one could not help regarding Google [and Google itself rather than Sergei Whatshisname, for back then one had not even heard of Sergei Whatshisname, at least not often enough even to remember that his first name was Sergei] as a kind of Santa Claus, the figure who had preempted Christ himself as the personification of virtuous benevolence in the heart and mind of an American such as the present writer who had had an entirely secular upbringing and hence had always regarded Christmas as essentially and centrally Santa’s holiday and Christ’s only secondarily and accidentally; whence the feeling of well-nigh religious gratitude with which I reflected on Google’s official slogan “Don’t be evil” shortly after acquiring my Gmail account. Of course I would not even be the millionth interwebbial wag, let alone the first, to remark with a wryness so lacking in jocularity as to be downright rueful that it is supremely ironic that in the span of scarcely more than a decade Google went from adjuring itself not to be evil to being “arguably” the most evil entity in sublunary existence, and so I shan’t remark that remark but merely second it (or million-and-first it), but I think it is just barely conceivable that I am the first interwebbial wag to remark what I am about to remark in connection with “Don’t be evil” (and with massive lashings of sheer a-humorous bemusement in place of any trace of wryness), namely, that in hindsight as a miniature polemic (for that is what it actually was) it seems quite oversized—a veritable mosquito-slaying bazooka—in the light of the characteristics of the evil that it was targeting—viz., the routine self-marketing practices of the Microsoft corporation towards its own customers, and certain unintended knock-on effects of those practices. It was targeting those pop-up pleas to upgrade to the latest version of Word or Excel or Outlook or what have you that would come embedded like dormant jack-in-the-boxes in the CD ROMs via which one installed those programs on one’s PC’s hard drive, and on the formidable technical glitches (e.g., system crashes and freezes and preternaturally slow performance) that would often ensue if one were gullible enough to hearken to those pleas. These practices and their effects were certainly vexing, but there was nothing remotely “Orwellian” (or, rather, to gratify the Tolkienolatrous mindset of the present micro-epoch, “Sauronian”) about them. At their most malevolent-cum-maleficent they might have been not-unaptly described as Barnumian. But by the same token, the slogan’s anathematizing stance was very much in keeping with the Zeitchengeist, for in those days Bill Gates was the most loathed man on earth apart from (perhaps) George W. Bush. One…oh, I guess, not-unwryly notes—one not unwryly notes that all the evil that Mr. Gates then wrought or was even capable of working [(sic) for wrought is indeed the original past tense of work and most certainly not a past tense of wreak] was firmly anchored in user-end offline media, such that not-unlike Elizabeth the First vis-à-vis lesbianism-versus-male homosexuality, one cannot help very wryly wondering exactly what sort of evil an all-online service-provider Google then fancied it might do if it wanted to, such that one further finds oneself unable not to wonder paranoiacally (1. paranoiacally, that is not vis-à-vis oneself but vis-à-vis the collectivity of reckoner-users [altho’ I’m sure many a ninth or tenth-generation Freud-knockoff would say this is a distinction with a difference {or vice-versa}] 2. i.e., super-wryly yet not at all jocularly and hence not at all ruefully) whether “Don’t be evil” was but the bastard thought-child of Google’s wishes for online evil yet to be wrought and already in the works back, or perhaps down [for it was and is in Silicon Valley, no?] at Google HQ. Howbeit, it was by not many—perhaps as few as three and certainly no more than six—years after the roll-out of Gmail, that Google began working such evil in the form of those advertisements that used to appear towards the top of the window in Gmail, advertisements that were said (and, I believe, acknowledged by Google itself) to be customized on the basis of data culled from the texts of one’s own emails and the emails one had received; in other words from a more or less exact electronic analogue [or perhaps, rather, “digitalogue”] of a desk drawer in one’s closet or boudoir, the innermost sanctum of one’s private life, a site whose violation by snoopers had been known to touch off more than figurative riots (e.g., the one touched off by the searching of John Wilkes’s study by agents of the Crown in Georgian Britain). And this simultaneous violation of millions of Google users’ privacies did indeed catalyze something that might not inaptly be termed a riot at least in terms of its widespreadness and obstreperousness (for as far as I know it was not attending by Google HQ’s being more-than-figuratively beset by a more-than-figurative mob wielding non-electric torches). And at least so far as the outward manifestation of their snooping went, Google evidently placated the rioters, for I cannot recall the last time I saw an advertisement of the abovementioned sort (or any other sort) in a Gmail window. Whether the disappearance of these ads bespeaks even the slightest or even the most theoretical or technical renunciation of access to users’ correspondence (i.e., a renunciation analogous in its practicality and non-technicality to that exhibited by the United States and Russia when in the brief post-Cold War honeymoon they ceased targeting each other’s cities with nuclear warheads [for the selfsame news reports in which the de-targeting was revealed also reported that each of the superpowers could retarget every single one of those cities at five minutes’ notice]) is unknown to me and presumably to every other workaday user, and in any case, the pointfulness of seeking an answer to this question appears to have been effectively nullified by the revelation two or three years ago that the U.S. government’s National Security Agency could access any American citizens’ full archive of electronic communications at will; a revelation that nicely more or less exactly coincided (at least chez moi) with the revelation that Google had been intimately involved in the U.S. Defense Department’s (i.e., the department under which the NSA is umbrella’d) satellite mapping, mapping which presumably (i.e., inasmuch as one had learned way back in the 1980s that the U.S. Defense Department’s satellites’ cameras were already capable of reading the license plate numbers of cars) allows for the micrometer-by-micrometer tracking of the “meat-world”-ial whereabouts of every U.S. citizen (and perhaps even many a U.S.-based non-citizen!). In short, Big Brother is most certainly already watching us, and whether he is watching us under the alias of Uncle Sam or that of Uncle Sergei is undeterminable and seemingly irrelevant. And in any case, since dropping the abovementioned ads, Google has not confined itself to modes of user-micromanagement that are invisible to the user himself. At some point in the late oughties, Google acquired Blogger, the electronic self-publishing platform that I had already been using for several years, and thereupon assimilated every Gmail-using Blogger user’s (including the present writer’s) Blogger account to his Gmail account (and presumably compelled every non-Gmail-using Blogger user to set up a Gmail account). This acquisition obviously meant that every Blogger-using blogger was thereupon subjectable to as much scrutiny from Google as every Gmail user had thitherto been. As near as I can recollect, I then paid the acquisition next to no mind, although I do recall being mildly annoyed by Google’s acquisition of YouTube a year or two later—this notwithstanding the fact that I had posted no videos to the Tube and had no plans to post any thereto. I suppose my irritation was occasioned by the intrinsic tackiness of the mixture of media—of the textual and the audiovisual—that had not been entailed by the consolidation of Blogger with Gmail, although in hindsight it seems not unlikely that had it not been for the consolidation of YouTube with the other two platforms, the entire so-called blogosphere (i.e., the totality of blogs including not only those hosted by Blogger but also those hosted by non-Google-owned platforms such as WordPress) would have remained unbadgered by censorship to this day. After all, hardly anybody reads blogs (or much of anything else for that matter), whereas practically everybody watches videos, such that the “algorithmic” juxtaposition of Gmail-account holders’ YouTube videos with their respective blog posts must perforce have drawn innumerable blogs to the prying attention of people who otherwise never would have been aware of them at all, and thereupon got those selfsame pryers into the habit of seeking out blogs more generally, including the blogs of people who had yet to post a single YouTube video. “Including, presumably, the blog of ‘the present writer?’” Indeed [how it irks me to have involuntarily just typed a homonym of yet another Google-owned property!], although I somehow managed to escape the prying of anyone bent on making life difficult for me for quite a long time, and indeed [ditto!] I don’t recall being at all worried about attracting the attention of such a person until about 2018, by which point even total obscurities were beginning to be “canceled” for “edgy” comments they had made online. I believe, for example, that it was about then that that employee of a twopenny-haypenny NGO was fired for having jokingly Tweeted that she needn’t fear catching AIDS during a trip to Africa “because I’m white.” But even then, and per the just-cited example, I did not yet envisage Google’s or Twitter’s (for by then I did have a Twitter account) being directly involved in my “cancelation”; I supposed simply that someone would notice something I had posted that was objectionable on grounds of some sort and then draw it to the attention of my employer, who would then effect the cancelation on her (for my boss at the time was a woman) own. But when, in 2019, the explosion of super-woke content (e.g., documentaries seriously entertaining the question of insects’ rights, “science”-magazine-sited pitches for blokes’ participation in women’s sports brutally rubbing shoulders with comedy panel shows devised solely for the purpose of showcasing women and excluding men, and a fully aphasiac “stand-up” comic delivering pre-recorded robot-voiced jokes one eye-twitch at a time) on my news-and-current-affairs source of first (and nearly sole) resort, BBC Radio 4, drove me unprecedentedly to seek news-and-current affairs coverage from YouTube, and what with that content’s hailing by default from a certain range of the political spectrum, I quickly learned of the permanent suspension of many a YouTube user for many an audiovisual sally that did not exceed many a blog post of mine in point of “edginess” or “spiciness.” And so I strongly suspected that the powers that were or be’d at Google would as readily send me as the dude with the Nazi-saluting dog to the Coventry of the blogosphere if they ever took cognizance of my diatribe against fat people in “Gluttony and Panpsychism” or my entertainment of the notion of more-than-figuratively cannibalizing uppity commodity-consumers in “To Russia with Lunch.” Then came the watershed year of 2020, after which a ’Tuber could be flagged or suspended for saying anything that deviated from the consensus of the moment about the presidential election of that year or the COVID 19 virus or any of the “vaccines” for that virus or “climate change” or abortion or transsexuals—“the list went and still goes on and on”—and when those ever-so-helpful links to Wikipedia articles on the pertinent item on the list began appearing like Surgeon General’s anti-smoking warnings just below the viewing-window of first-time deviators. (Wikipedia is of course yet another member of our epoch’s kuchka of new-but-omnipresent proprietary names, and the unprecedented sinisterness of its reflexive participation in Google’s fact-crushing mission [for even a counterfactual precedent of which in preceding microepochs one has to reach for some feeble pseudo-approximation like the notion of Ford cars suddenly becoming equipped with Chrysler-branded airbags] is matched in intensity only by the comic richness of its continuing indispensability as a reference work of soup-to-nuts resort on most topics despite that participation.)  The fact that these links seemed to appear instantaneously, that they were always already present when I went to view offending videos (videos that had generally premiered only hours earlier) led me to assume that the flagging of “inappropriate content” was robotically actuated, which led me in turn if not to assume then at least to suspect that my obscurity would no longer protect me at Blogger (if it ever had done) and to begin proceeding with extreme caution as a lowercase blogger. I had then just completed a very long essay that I had begun in 2019 as a sort of sequel to (albeit by no means a fifth-anniversary special on) “Every Man His Own W.G. Sebald”—in other words an essay on the changes (all of them for the worse) that had supervened in my quotidian street-level life as a Baltimorean in the exact handful of years that had elapsed since the date reported on in that post; but as the so-called pandemic had supervened in the course of the essay’s composition, it had perforce metamorphosed into an essay incorporating an account of my relocation from Baltimore to the Tampa Bay area (as opposed to ending abruptly with my egress from Baltimore, for it was in large measure the nadir of inhospitableness reached by Baltimore in March of 2020 that had precluded my even attempting to ride out the so-called pandemic there, and the riots of the subsequent summer had been instigated by BLM, the same organization that had instigated the 2015 riots in Baltimore that had dramatically accelerated the city’s decline in hospitableness) and hence perforce dealt with COVID and other scabrous topics in a manner guaranteed to make even the drowsiest robot eye see fire-engine red. And so like a dissident Soviet writer, I resolved to make it an essay “for the drawer.” I did manage to screw up the courage (or rashness) to post my next essay (a polemic against Walter Benjamin’s sanctification of storytelling) despite its inclusion of some “spicy takes” on sensitive topics, but I was almost relieved thereafter to find that it required substantial revision for other reasons, such that I had a decent non-cowardly excuse for pulling it and thereby placing it beyond the reach (at least for the time being, at least as far as I knew!) of the robo-censor. Even so, I was either courageous, rash, complacent, or lazy enough not to pull any of my posts that antedated the Baltimore and Tampa Bay-centered one, and so all but an incalculably minuscule proportion of my bloggic output remained visible to all internet connection-equipped eyes human and robotic. Whether upon leaving that proportion in place I prevailingly thought regarding a possible flagging by the censors, “It could never happen to me, because if it could, it would have by now,” (i.e., I was prevailingly acting out of the rashness of complacency [perhaps in complicity with the laziness of laziness]) or “It probably will happen to me, and I just don’t care” (i.e., I was acting out of the kind of rashness that is at least construable as courage [and again, perhaps in complicity with the ell of ell]) is impossible for me now to say; all I know [the “all I know,” by the way, is a tip of the hat to the verbatim evocation of that unit of W.G. Sebald’s style in “Every Man His Own W.G. Sebald”] is that when I received my first censor-flagging, my emotional-cum-somatic reaction to it was one of intense irritation mingled with mild surprise and free of the slightest suspicion of shock. The flagging took the form of an email from Google notifying me that one of my posts, “Notes on William Lovell by Ludwig Tieck,” had been identified as containing “sensitive content,” that it would thenceforth be blocked off from web-users by default and released to their view only on their agreeing to see it despite its possession of such content, and that it would be entirely excluded from the corpus of online content to which user-initiated web searches were directed—in other words, that even its existence would be invisible to everyone in the world except users already in the visual presence of my blog and the link to the post in its side-panel index (an index, incidentally, consisting by default of nothing but a column of the blog’s years of activity in descending chronological order, the individual posts for each year being rendered visible only by toggling one of those Javascript menus activated by tiny cuneiformesque triangles). A day or so later, I received in ultra-quick succession verbatim mutato mutando emails regarding three other posts—“An Uncharacteristically Topical Essay on The Favourite” and two of the four installments of my essay “To Russia with Lunch.” In all candor and frankness, I must own that “sensitive content” is not a substance that has been moderated by Google only since the mid-to-late 20-teens advent of the micro-epoch of “cancellation” and that it has never been moderated exclusively from on high; indeed, I must admit that an option to flag a given post as containing such content has been presented to users in a slender horizontal fillet that has appeared at the top of every Blogger window at least since I started using the platform back in 2004—in other words, since well before Blogger’s acquisition by Google. On first sighting that option way back then, I immediately thought, “Ah, ‘sensitive content’ is obviously just a euphemism for pornographic images,” and as I had absolutely no intention of posting any pornographic images (or indeed, way back then, any images of any kind), my withers were unwrung, and the “sensitive content” fillet soon became effectively invisible to me. It simply did not cross my mind that anyone would flag as “sensitive content” mere strings of words amounting to statements and sentiments insufficiently mindful of the emotional well-being of so-called protected groups—or even such statements and sentiments as were couched in language calculated to offend such groups (e.g., statements containing so-called slurs). Now, as mentioned before, by the time I received the abovementioned emails from Google I had been worrying for several years about being “canceled” for mere words I had written, but I had only been worrying that I would be “canceled” either via a Google-actuated robot or via some living human acting independently of Google, for because I had completely forgotten about the “sensitive content” fillet it had not occurred to me that I might be canceled via the collaboration of Google with some non-Google affiliated human being, that some person offended by—or affecting to be offended by—something I had posted at my blog could get me into hot water of any sort by reporting on that something to Google rather than to my employer. But it is most likely—or at least apparently most likely (for like any other reckoner-user not in the employ of a so-called Big Tech organization [and doubtless even many a user in such an employ] I am not privy to the subcutaneous workings of the interweb, although this lack of privity will not stop me from delivering a conjecture about certain of those workings at a slightly later point in this essay])—such a person acting in such a way that got me flagged for “sensitive content.” Indeed, owing to the timing of the first flagging and the content of the first-flagged post, I am even pretty  sure that after a certain fashion I know who the human complainant was—which is to say, while I don’t know his name, I know certain facts about him that uniquely distinguish him from all other human individuals vis-à-vis their respective relations to and interactions with me. You see, about a week before my receipt of the first email from Google, I pulled from my blog my translation of Ludwig Tieck’s novel William Lovell (a translation that I had posted there in installments back in 2010 and 2011 and that had consequently been continuously exposed to universal public view for more than a decade) in preparation for submitting it to publishers, who understandably tend to be cool to the notion of bringing out an edition of a book that everyone can already read for free. And within three days of the pulling of the translation, I received a so-called tweet (or perhaps, rather, a so-called post [for I cannot remember whether Twitter had already been renamed X by then {and if it had, the “so-called” in front of “post” ought by all rights to be boldfaced (for in such a case the post would actually have been called a post and yet no worthier of being called a post than a so-called tweet of being called a tweet [for the X-post is patterned on the blog-post and therefore doubly ersatz or twice as far removed from a post worthy of being denoted as such without qualification])}]) from someone (I believe the name attached to the tweeter’s account suggested that he at least “identified” as male) representing himself as a student at one of the more prominent Midwestern liberal arts colleges (which he named but which I will not) who had been consulting my translation in connection with his coursework in German and wished to know if now that my translation was no longer available at my blog it was available somewhere else. While I was by no means offended by the request (for the tweet did of course essentially boil down to a request to be sent a copy of the translation), by the same token, within seconds of reading it I was more or less firmly resolved to disregard it entirely. After all, it would have been if not technically then at least rhetorically impossible to open a reply to the tweet without some bluff apology for-cum-explanation of my removal of the translation from the blog, and my reasons for doing that were none of this apparent younker’s gosh-damned business, let alone the business of the Twitterverse at large (even if “ironically” they are very much the business of anyone [including the aforesaid younker {albeit exclusively in the capacity now being described}!] who happens to alight on this essay wherever it eventually finds its public home); and while I didn’t really mind his using my translation as a “pony” for his assigned translation exercises, or even plagiarizing it outright (for “consult” or whichever synonym thereof he employed was obviously the flimsiest of fig leaves for some degree of dereliction of scholastic duty), I did have enough regard and affection for Tieck’s novel not to go out of my way to abet the deliberate circumvention of an acquaintance with it unmediated by my translational intervention. Admittedly, within hours of sending me that tweet (i.e., without hours of my resolution not to reply to it) the apparent younker “followed” me and thereby relieved me of the burden of exposing my prospective transaction with him to the eyes of the Twitterverse at large, but I found that this relief would not adequately indemnify me for an unhappy epiphenomenon of an ineluctable precondition of my privately replying to him—viz., (vis-à-vis the precondition) my “following” him “back” and thereby (and here comes the naming of the epiphenomenon) becoming “mutuals” with him; for, pace my above assertion of Twitter-followership’s supersedence of Friendster-style pseudo-friendship, the much rarer phenomenon of Twitter mutualdom (i.e. two-way followership) establishes a kind of connection that in virtue of its traditional (to the extent that any phenomenon less than twenty years old can participate in a tradition) if contingent dependence on selectivity is much closer to classic real-worldial friendship than Friendster-style pseudo-friendship ever has been, and I certainly did not wish to become even semi-classic friends with the younker. In short, while I harbored no ill will towards the presumptive fellow, I reckoned that I didn’t owe him anything or even that I would be committing any breach of decorum in ignoring him altogether. After all, the worst that could happen to him in consequence of my ignoration would be his having to read William Lovell “with all his eyes” as the French would say (only in French), and the worst that could happen to me was…well, nothing, inasmuch as I had never “doxed” myself in a blog post—but, alas, wie gesagt, I had completely forgotten about the “sensitive content” fillet, which placed instant revenge against me at the younker’s fingertips, and so (so I conjectured upon receiving the first email from Google), when I failed to reply to him within twenty-four hours, the younker, doubtless being a brat of the sordid sort that seems to typify the students of liberal arts colleges these days, a brat who believes he is entitled to instant obedience from “adults” (for these days nobody—and least of all the younkers and younkeresses themselves—seems any longer to make a pretense of regarding college students as adults in their own right), (had) simply reached out and smashed the button in the fillet above the still-available post in my blog closest in content to the Tieck translation itself; and when (so I conjectured upon receiving the other three emails) that first email (had) failed to make me instantaneously relent, he (had) simply smashed the fillet-buttons above a trio of posts that numbered among the most readily locatable because among the most recent I had posted (although I was bemused and remain bemused as to why he overleaped the two very most recent—the essay on the Metropolitan Opera’s 2020 production of Alban Berg’s Lulu and the bagatelle on the Scopes Monkey Trial, especially given that both contained material guaranteed to raise the hackles of a typical liberal-arts student de nos jours—the essay a well-aimed kick at a gratuitously “woke” element of the production, the bagatelle a well-aimed snook at Darwinism [altho’ truth be told, one wonders how much today’s younkers and younkeresses even hear about Darwinian evolution, let alone care about it {for one needn’t know anything about Darwin to loathe Biblical Christianity}]). “So:” (so I said to meself after receiving the first email and recovering from the abovementioned surprise but while still positively reveling in the abovementioned irritation) “I have been flagged for having posted ‘sensitive content.’ How am I now to respond to the flagging?” For while I certainly had no intention of making any substantial changes to my writing just to gratify some twopenny-haypenny functionary (for I cannot but regard whoever or whatever was and is in charge of mediating complaints about “sensitive content” at any organization as such a picayune bureaucraceme) “I ain’t gonna lie to you” and say that if restoring my posts to full visibility had manifestly and unequivocally required one or two un-time-consuming revisions that would not have adulterated their substance (I suppose I am thinking of something along the more than figurative lines of the verse or two about non-Jews that Shostakovich and Yevtushenko were compelled to insert into the lyrics of DDS’s oratorical symphony on the massacre at Babi Yar), I would not have entertained the possibility of making those changes. But to my intense irritation, middling surprise, and—yes—even slight shock, the email was couched in entirely general terms, namely those of Google’s baleful “terms of service” that I had heard so much about from formerly suspended YouTubers (and that I had doubtless myself assented to at my insu by rashly clicking some “I-agree-to” checkbox donkeys’ half-decades earlier). It basically said, “Somebody has complained that you have violated Google’s terms of service, which are as follows: ‘Don’t do A, B, C, D, E aut cetera.’ [with the cetera extending at least far as J and composed mostly of “woke” taboos like spreading disinformation and using transphobic language.] Please revise your post to make sure that it violates none of our terms of service, and perhaps we will then deign to remove the ‘sensitive content’ flag from it and make it web-searchable again.” “Kafkaesque” is of course one of the most heavily abused adjectives in today’s English, routinely employed as it is to describe any disagreeable bureaucratic or quasi-bureaucratic phenomenon, and indeed I have myself satirized this overuse of it by jocularly defining it as “involving a document that requires more than one signature.” But if The Trial may be regarded as an adequate synecdoche for Kafka’s oeuvre as a whole, I know of no real-worldial phenomenon past or present that is worthier of being dubbed “Kafkaesque” than Google’s jurisprudential treatment of blog posts. After all, in what other real-wordlial setting has anyone ever incurred penalties for unknown infractions at the instigation of anonymous accusers, such that he is peremptorily and preemptively excluded from knowing how to go about exonerating himself and how to avoid incurring penalties of a like kind in the future? Anyway, perhaps not quite needless to say, I wasn’t about to remove from the offending posts every single potentially-terms-over-service-violating character-string therein on the offest of off-chances that Google would find at least one of those posts sufficiently terms-of-service friendly to warrant unflagging. And so, to this day (August 9, 2024), probably well over a year after their flagging (I say probably because I am not about to go searching for the flagging-notifying emails via the use of Gmail’s wretchedly useless internal search engine [q.v. above] on the offest off-chances that such a quest turns up those four e-needles from my 22-year-old haystack of Gmail correspondence), all four posts remain flagged. I can to the credit of my fortune at least report that I have so far (touch “would”) received no further emails from Google informing me of the flagging of additional posts. And from this absence of further e-pistolary molestation it seems reasonable to infer that the younker in the Midwest has spent his resentment and will not again be troubling Google to trouble me. Perhaps he has even graduated by now. Perhaps en route to graduation he even took the trouble to read Tieck’s novel in the original German and consequently aced his German class and sub-consequently actually come to feel grateful to me for not having acceded to his request. Perhaps—an outcome far less propitiative of my vanity but not a jot less propitiative of my sense of security—he has for whatever reason completely forgotten the entire episode, my snubbage of him included. But perhaps the temporal propinquity of the tendering of his request for translated Tieck to the flagging of the Tieck-related post was entirely coincidental. Perhaps some other person or persons flagged that post and the three other posts for some reason or reasons as yet even unconjecturable by me. Or perhaps the ostensibly offending posts were flagged (and here comes the above-promised conjecture regarding the subcutaneous workings of big tech) by some sort of so-called bot tasked by Google (or one of its rivals?) with hunting down “sensitive content,” flagging it, and notifying its purveyors in an instantaneously elapsing three-step process—this by way of expediting the expunging of such content from the platform (or for encouraging users to defect to another platform?). In any of these cases, I am by no means confident that I have had my last brush with Google-actuated censorship, and even if I could be thus confident, I would continue not easily to brook continuing to be readily knowable to the world as a supposed purveyor of “sensitive content.” And so I have set about—to the extent that any activity so desultory and dilatory may be justly described as “setting about”—seeking a different online resting-cum-displaying spot for my content” (“content” that now includes two further very long essays that I felt compelled to write “for the drawer”). In connection with this personal virtual Exodus or Hegira (I do not think the meta-religious metaphor is over-the-top by so much as a micrometer, for the move in question is “arguably” the biggest of my life apart perhaps from my move from the Tampa Bay area to Baltimore in 1994 and from Baltimore back to Tampa Bay in 2020-21) I have not even lightheartedly entertained migrating to Blogger’s traditional competitor, WordPress, as although I know nothing even at second hand of WordPress’s censorship policies-cum-practices, I cannot but half-assume (basically because I somehow tend to think of the WordPress blogo-semi-hemisphere as being more thickly populated with bienpensant types than the Blogger one [probably because WordPress, being not absolutely free, has always been slightly more upmarket than Blogger]) that they are at least as stringent and bienpensant-ophilic as Google’s. The most sensible course of action is doubtless to purchase (or somehow otherwise acquire) a web-location of my own that is independent of any preexisting platform, but I haven’t yet acquired the patience to research this properly—i.e., to work out which dedicated-domain dispensers are the genuine article and which are merely Blogger-like entities that grudgingly allow one to do business under the http-beginning string of one’s choice, which of the genuine ones are least likely to be hacked or taken down or what have you, etc. And so I have more or less resigned myself to the seemingly only effective remaining option—that of climbing (albeit ever-so-slowly, feebly, and peevishly) onto the Substack bandwagon.

But intensely irked though I am by this irruption into my lifeworld of Substack as an event-in-itself, I am at the same time grateful for it inasmuch as it affords me the opportunity to revive or revisit the spirit of ’04 by doing a bit of much-needed backfilling, so to speak, in or on (or perchance even to?), “Proprietary Names: The Name/Proprietary Names: The Place,” for it has just occurred to me that throughout the golden age of proprietary names, irkedness of the kind that I have been feeling in connection with Substack is, has been, or was the default reaction of every person to the irruption of a new proprietary name into his lifeworld upon his attainment of the age of discretion; for the (or a) truth would seem to be not only that it is only before we have (or had) attained that age that we are (or were) generally capable of the sort of head-over-heels enamorment with proprietary names that the very young Proust experienced in connection with place names and that once we have attained that age we tend (or tended) to greet newly encountered proprietary names in particular not only without love but even with an instinctive aversion (and hence to be incapable from the outset of the kind or degree of disillusionment that we often and perhaps even virtually always experience [or used to experience] in connection with proprietary names we encountered [or had encountered] before that age), for by then we have after all become (or used to have become) wise to their prevailingly prostitutional habitus-cum-telos, with the fact that proprietary names are (or were) generally deployed with the aim of getting us (or our parents) to fork out more or less large sums of cash to their proprietors. As starry-eyed tiny tots we regard McDonaldland as an Edenic near-utopia and Ronald McDonald, Mayor McCheese, and Grimace as our friends who yearn only to provide us with what is best for us in the form of delicious hamburgers, French fries, and milkshakes and would be able to do so ad infinitum but for the machinations of that polity’s Satan, the pesky Hamburgler; as asteroidy-eyed mid-sized tots we realize that the war between Ronald &co. and the Hamburgler was all along an instance of what in the oversized Punch-vs.-Punch show that is professional wrestling is inscrutably known as kayfabe, a completely contrived conflict; that our supposed friends have all along been in league with the Hamburgler, whose burger-thieving has all along been but a tactical feint in an altogether maleficent strategy, that he has been stealing the burgers only to make them more gustatorily alluring and thereby make us more importunate in our imploration of our parents to procure us those slivers of grade-barely edible beef (along with the milkless milkshakes and fries cobbled together from potato dust) in lieu of more toothsome-cum-wholesome fare; and thereafter we prove impervious to the blandishments of that late addition to the citizenry of McDondaldland, Birdy the Early Bird (and consequently tragically miss out on McDonalds’s excellent breakfast menu). (Sic, incidentally, on the absence of interpolated past-tense verbs from the immediately preceding sentence inasmuch as barring its fleeting reference to professional wrestling [which is in the “natural” present tense because professional wrestling clings to some sort of sub-subculturally orientated existence despite the implosion a decade or so ago of the corporation with which it was practically coextensive {I really know much more about professional wrestling than I should in the light of my near-lifelong aversion to it}], it must perforce be read as being in the historical present tense inasmuch as McDonald’s purged McDonaldland from its televisual advertising campaigns a quarter-century ago.) It is really quite extraordinary how early on in a youngster’s life this de facto sales resistance takes hold and how fierce it instantly becomes. Lest the reader suppose I am disingenuously extrapolating a licentious generalization out of my own experience, I tender the following counterexample. In 1983 or 1984, the Tampa Bay area acquired its second classical-music formatted radio station. Unlike the first one, the local-university affiliated WUSF, the new station, WXCR, was a privately owned entity that funded its operations (and at least attempted to line the pockets of its operators) with over-the-air advertising. Most of this advertising took the form of recorded commercials inserted between blocks of programming, but it also included brief live pitches delivered by the announcers within those blocks. Naturally such a format precluded the complete uninterrupted airing of compositions of greater length than, say, one of the shorter Beethoven symphonies. At the time of WXCR’s arrival in the area, both I and my only friend who was also a classical-music buff, Lang Adams (whom the reader may recall I mentioned in “Proprietary Names: The Name” and whom I am naturally delighted to have found an opportunity to mention in its China-jubilee essay) were eleven or twelve years old. While we lads were naturally pleased to have our wireless listening pleasure nominally doubled, being accustomed as we were to the uninterrupted audition of entire operas and Beethoven’s Ninth-length orchestral works thanks to WUSF’s commercial-free format, we could not but be intensely annoyed by a listening schedule dominated by ten-minute Romantic tone poems and individual movements of symphonies and concertos interspersed with the same sort of eardrum-splitting aural product-pimping that seamlessly insinuated itself into the output of our metro-area’s unregenerately loud-as-heck rock stations (even if, given that ’XCR’s target demographic consisting of retired senior citizens, the products themselves tended to be slightly more upmarket and the pimping slightly more understated). And so, using Lang’s personal stereo-equipment, we recorded a sort of radio play satirizing a typical block of WXCR programming, a dramatization wherein not even the briefest of music-units was allowed to play through to its conclusion without the interposition of a commercial, and no interrupted piece was allowed to resume before the announcer had delivered a live product-pitch.  Sadly, the audio cassette to which we committed this performance has not survived (unless, perhaps, with the recording of some later performance of ours in the WXCR-spoof’s stead [for being obliged as we were to purchase blank audio cassettes with a budget funded entirely by our picayune $5-maximum-allowances, our archival space was even more painfully limited than that of the BBC of the 1960s, and we sometimes found ourselves reluctantly wiping an older recording to make room for a newer one]), but happily, at least for my present purposes, I remember verbatim one tiny fragment of it—specifically, a pastiche of one of the abovementioned live pitches, delivered by Lang in a tone of unsurpassably unctuous rote servility: “This piece is brought to you by Payne-Webber [Payne-Webber being then one of the at-least-locally better-known investment banking firms]. Thank you, Payne-Webber.” And although being then not only virtually impecunious but also legally nonexistent from the point of view of the banking industry, Lang and I could not make a point of taking our portfolios to some other firm, perhaps the well-heeled oldsters at whom the original of this pitch-let was aimed proved to be as resentfully sales-resistant to it as we had, for a scant fortyear later, Payne-Webber was absorbed into the maw of an ungodly behemoth of a Swiss-based bank that still exists and that I will not name if only in tribute to the commercial-phobic spirit of our little spoof.  (I should make it sub-parenthetically clear here, lest I be taken to have been born almost more than figuratively yesterday [i.e., taken to be utterly oblivious of the long and distinguished track record of the advertising industry], that I do not believe that after one has attained the age of discretion it is impossible to fall in love with a new proprietary name, or even to fall back in love with a proprietary that one has fallen out of love with (and indeed, at later point in this essay, I shall, Lord willing, narrate the history of just such a case of re-enamorment {hint, hint: it was not in total disregard of this planned narration that I introduced Mayor McCheese & co. at a slightly earlier point}); that I merely believe that as an older tot and as an adult one does not fall in love with new proprietary names by default and that indeed sales-resistant grumpiness is probably most older tots’ and adults’ default affective reaction to such names.)

But to resume the thread on Substack qua new proprietary name (even while frowardly continuing the thread nominally broken off at the end of the immediately preceding subparenthesis): chez moi at the moment, Substack instantiates what must surely be the most pestiferous of all sub-genres of new proprietary names—viz., the kind attached to a commodity or service that is ubiquitously cried up like the quasi-proverbial brand-new toy even though it is as prosaically old and familiar as the undeservedly unproverbial hills of Humdrumville. For Substack is not—and to the credit of its proprietor (or proprietors?) does not even pretend to be—anything but a new blogging platform, to be anything other than a newly christened vehicle of the oldest interwebbial genre of all barring the un-sub-differientiated personal website or perhaps that genre’s short-lived contemporary, the webzine. And yet a day seldom elapses without my hearing some YouTuber gushing about how Substack has “revolutionized” not only his own modus operandi as a provider of inline “content” but the entire interwebbial-universe’s provision thereof; or eulogizing it as both a genre more aesthetically innovative than the epic and a technology more world-transformative than the printing press. Yes, I understand and appreciate (and have already mentioned) Substack’s present near-indispensability as a virtually uncensored platform for long-form writing. But it is self-evidently not on account of its virtual freedom from censorship that these Chewbers are principally delighted by Substack, for if it were, their praise of Substack would be interspersed with bursts of nostalgia for the days of uncensored old-school blogging. Even Substack’s most vaunted feature, its treatment of readers as “subscribers,” is no sense genuinely innovative. In the old days (as now), if one wanted to keep up-t0-date with a given blog, one needed only paste its root URL into the “blog roll” of one’s own blog, where a link to its latest post would thenceforth appear; or, if one did not have a blog oneself, one could follow it through an RSS-feed reader. The main reason people are so jouissant about Substack, I submit, is simply that it streamlines “content”-providers’ up-hoovering of money from their audiences’ bank accounts.  Ever since the very earliest days of Googlean Blogger, users have enjoyed the option of “monetizing” their blogs via the admission of static algorithmically generated advertisements into the margins of their posts, but the present Blogger user’s minuscule quantum of temptation to overcome his scruples about obtruding upon his readers’ eyes such splashings of meretricious muck was instantly quashed in those days by his discovery that the median revenue generated thereby totaled something no higher than ten dollars per annum; and while the figure generated by their YouTubial equivalent seems to be more than negligibly higher, I have yet to hear of a Tuber with fewer than a quarter-million subscribers who pays more than one of the smaller proverbial bills with YT ad income alone, or even with such income augmented via the recently introduced “Subscribe” button—this in each case because the moneys received by the user have been filtered through the coffers of  the platform-proprietor, who presumably always appropriates the lion’s share of them and passes onto the user only the mouse’s crumbs left over therefrom. If one even cherishes the hope of making a full-time boulot alimentaire of one’s Google-mediated content (or indeed one’s content mediated by any other pre-Substack “content”-provision platform), one must sign up with some money-hoovering mediator like Patreon, sedulously paste a link to one’s personal money-hoovering virtual nozzle into the footnotes of every video one posts ([sic] on bare “video”, as old-school bloggic content perforce precludes the fulfillment of the last desideratum in the present list), and round out each of these videos with an oral plea to the viewer to click on the aforesaid link. Substack apparently cuts out the middle-man (or middle-robot) more or less completely (I say “apparently,” because I am not entirely sure that the platform does not automatically receive at least a minority cut of user-raised-revenues and “more or less” because I am sure-ish that it does require the payment of an-at-least nominal fee from monetizing users up front) and simplifies the dunning of one’s audience-stroke-readership by making every reader by default a non-paying subscriber, as to a newspaper, who receives every one of one’s blog-posts as an email athwart the midst of which—if one has opted to monetize one’s blog—is appended a boilerplate imploration to become a paying subscriber on pain of not reading the remainder of the post and on pleasure of reading that remainder plus the entirety of future posts (at least until the subscription expires). “What’s not to love?” Well, not all that much, I admit, but what wasn’t—and isn’t—to love, from an aesthetic point of view, about old-school blogs? Certainly I have not found my experience as a blog-reader a jot improved by Substack, for it has obliged me to have my email inbox deluged diurnally with showers of de-facto spam merely for the sake of having access to the output of essayists with whom I would on average be interested in “catching up” only every month or so, and with whom I am now effectively incapable of fully catching up anyhow on account of my insuperable constitutional Jack Benny-dwarfing n*****dliness (a n*****dliness, incidentally, that is especially implacable vis-à-vis anything even remotely smacking of a newspaper subscription because despite being one of Thomas Bernhard’s “most dedicated advocates and ardent propagandists,” ich bin kein Zeitungsfresser, and indeed I have never subscribed to either the print or the online edition of a single actual newspaper). “Now don’t get me wrong,” “I need dough like anyone,” and indeed my ethical compass on meta-monetary matters is by no means so narrow that I wouldn’t put it past myself to employ Substack’s dough-manufacturing machinery for my own use, especially if all other dough-manufacturing machinery continues to be effectively off-limits to me (not that the odds of my actually making any dough with Substack are not minuscule, but they can scarcely be lower than those of my securing a dough-making engine by shoving my needle of an application for a job into the midst of a fifty thousand strand-strong haystack of applications from people fortunate enough to have heard of the position ten minutes before I did), but I cannot bear to see or hear a dough-factory cried up as a Geist-refinery. The argoteme grifter has come in for a powerful ordeal of abuse since its revival in the inlineosphere some half-dozen years ago, and indeed, so often has it lately been employed as a term of disparagement by those flagrantly actuated by no more noble a motive than envy that it might now be humorously redefined along the lines of Gore Vidal’s redefinition of narcissist: “A grifter is an inline ‘content’ provider who makes more money from his ‘content’ than you do from yours.” (Incidentally, so far has narcissist been concurrently stretched beyond the limits of its meta-erotic scope that even Vidal’s definition of it as “a person who is better-looking than you” merits recasting as “a person who is more popular than your favorite object of hero-worship.”)  But inasmuch as a grifter as classically defined is perhaps first and foremost a dishonest person and perhaps only secondarily a person who makes money, I maintain that any Substacker who maintains that Substack has effected a genuine aesthetic revolution in inline “content” comes as close to being a grifter in the classical sense as any present-day inline person can do. And any Substacker who while acknowledging the absence of any intrinsic aesthetic innovations from Substack would maintain that Substack-using at least has a strong tendency to improve the “content” provided by bloggers by encouraging them to “tailor their ‘content’ to the needs and desires of their subscribers” is an even more flagitious grifter than the first type inasmuch as the entire autojustification of the inline “alternative-media” universe, the entire raison d’être of that universe in its own eyes, consists in the notion that it provides “content” of a level of quality no longer available from even top-tier so-called legacy outlets like the New York Times and inasmuch as notoriously nothing has contributed more weightily to the decline of such outlets than their transition from being funded principally by third-party advertisers to being funded mainly by their subscribers. From the topick of this decline and its conjectural parallels in the established corpus of Substack blogs it is the easiest of transitions to the topic of the inconvenience and unsalutariness of Substack’s subscriber-centered format to the present writer qua blogger, for while, as mentioned above, I have never yet made use of Blogger’s advertising “capabilities,” I have from the very outest of outsets to the presentest of the present aimed my Blogger-destined posts at a readership at least as broad as any that might have greeted the New York Times in its most heavily advertising-funding all-print days—say, in 1988, when it could be purchased for fifty cents from a vending machine on any urban American street corner (as I know full well, for I purchased an issue of the NYT from such a machine for such a price from a street corner in downtown Tampa in that year). This is not to say that I have ever expected any of my Blogger-“published” essays to be readily understood by Joe or Jill Wine Cooler-Four Pack (i.e., the 1980s’ upper-middle-middle-class analogue to Joe Sixpack, and hence the typical NYT reader of that decade) or some later incarnation of him or her, but it is to say that because I know that my blog is most likely to be first encountered as the result of a general web-search directed at finding “content” on a certain topic rather than at finding the blog itself, I have always been prepared for any of my Blogger-“published” essays to be stumbled upon (incidentally, Stumbled Upon was the name of one of the obscurer engines that lost out to Google in the abovementioned search-engine wars) by such a person. I accordingly do not conceive of my reader by default as my friend; indeed, I tend to assume that he is inclined to be hostile to whatever I assert, however sensible or irenic my assertions may be; consequently, I am always doing my best to anticipate and answer his objections, and this anticipatory-cum-replicative effort has left a by-now-indelible mark on the basic formal constitution of my essays—most notably in the ever-recurring supervention of the quasi-dramaturgical figure of the DGR or Dear Gentle Reader, whose name naturally belies his implacable brutishness and brutality. The Substack blogger, by contrast, in virtue of being obliged to treat every single reader as a “subscriber” is further obliged to treat his readership as an aggregation of friends-cum-patrons. While I am preaching to an invisible congregation, he is preaching to an all-too-visible choir that can change the hymnal whenever it likes. While he is fly-fishing in an artificial pond pre-sized to his specifications and stocked with fish that he has hand-picked, I am “casting a broad net” in the open sea, to import and dilate a metaphor employed by the narrator of Michel Houellebecq’s Extension du domain de la lutte in his apostrophe to a prospectively female reader vis-à-vis her well-nigh-inevitable revulsion from his proto-“incel”-ish account of his history of amorous failure with women. Becoming a Substack-ready blogger would (or will) accordingly require a massive overhaul of my entire modus bloggendi (or bloggandi); it would (or will) require my shifting from manhandling the reader with the brutality of the Jerky Boys’ used car dealer who will not take no for answer (to recycle a metaphor I have already used in describing this modus bloggendi [or bloggandi] in “Against Intralingual Diversity”) on virtually every electro-page to ritualistically soft-soaping or apple-polishing for him (or, rather, them, in the old-school plural-designating sense, for I will [or would] by default expect every essay to be read by a collectivity, however small) “like a guilty schoolboy,” to commencing every post with the sort of half-thousand word exordium of shilly-shallying and hemming-and-hawing with which virtually every extant Substack “article” seems to commence, an exordium rife with formulas like, “I know this is supposed to be a blog about nothing but blancmange thickened with rice flour, but just this teeny-tiny oncelet I’m going to go off-script by writing about a kind of blancmange thickened with corn starch,” and “I’m ever so sorry to you kind folks for alluding however briefly and covertly to the possibility of using gelatin as a blancmange-thickener when there is obviously nothing in the universe less conceivable, let alone possible, than employing such an execrable substance in that capacity,” or “I know this blog has hitherto been called Just Blancmange, but you kind folks have let me know in no uncertain terms that you would rather read about lutefisk, about which I know absolutely nothing except that the very word makes me retch, but you kind folks are after all the boss, as it’s only thanks to you that I can keep the lights on in this wretched little subfusc subcorner of the interweb, so I am herewith changing its name to Just Lutefisk and writing about nothing but lutefisk, and I warmly invite each and every one of you lutefisk-connoisseurs to make fish-paste of me in your comments.” I mean, like gag me with a spoon, as they used to say in the early Usenet days (not that I was a Usenet user back then, but I was a sentient human back then, and I know people then used to say, I mean, “Like, gag me with a spoon” “IRL,” or at least in certain simulacra of “RL” served up on television and radio). I suppose as a Substacker I technically could simply keep composing my essays in my established manner, but then I would ineluctably think of myself as casting my fishing-net not quasi-rationally out into the open sea but utterly insanely up into the open air, for as near or far as I can tell (which is admittedly not very near or far at all owing to my near-total lack of patience to undertake research on such prospectively ephemeral meta-tech-industrial piffle), a Substack blog’s visibility to the ocuverse of search engines (an ocuverse which is of course still dominated by Google) is directly proportional to its level of “subscriber engagement,” such that if I neglect to secure subscribers entirely I shall be entirely invisible to happenstance, upon-stumbling readers. And so I suppose for even minimum visibility’s sake I shall have to go cap in hand via “a pretty-pretty-please subscribe to my bloggy-woggy” message to every single person whose email address I have on file, nine-tenths of whom are probably not even aware of my Blogger blog, and nine-tenths of the probable-remaining-one-tenth of whom I have probably not even recommended a single post to, and nine-tenths of the probable-further-remaining-one-hundredth of whom I have yet recommended only a single post, what with that post’s being the only one the correspondent in question could conceivably both take a smidgen of interest in and not take oodles of umbrage at. “It’s all so tiresome,” as the Chinaman in the so-called meme says. In short, don’t even get me started on Substack. And if, DGR (if I am even still permitted to address you as “DGR” [for as of this date {August 29, 2024} I have not resolved not to post the present essay at Substack]), you are by any chance about to chortle derisively, “It’s a bit late to refrain from getting you started in either sense in point isn’t it?”, please allow me to throttle that chortle before it finishes its journey out of your windpipe, for whilst is true that I have started on Substack in one of the two senses—i.e., the sense of having set up a Substack account—in the other sense I have not yet even begun, for what I have written so far in disparagement of Substack is so minuscule a portion of what I might write therein if I “had world enough and time” that it at most merits being termed a prelude to the beginning thereof. I could if not cheerfully then at least very willingly rail against Substack till all umpteen-million Michigander cows came home to Kalamazoo from Katmandu, supposing all umpteen-million of them had gone to graze in the latter city. But as I haven’t got WEaT, inasmuch as I haven’t even finished classifying the abovementioned 6-to-11 dominant proprietary names of the present microepoch, I shall move on to the conclusion of that classificatory task thus: the last category of these proprietary names, a category that in comprising Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook overlaps with the first (or second?), is the category of the proprietary name that is metaphysically associated at least as closely with the human figure of the proprietor as with the product or “service” (the inverted commas here hint at the alternative possibility of denoting the entity referenced by service as a plague or affliction, a possibility that at least in the case of Facebook I can entertain in all seriousness, being a non-holder of a Facebook account) provided by the proprietary organization. After a certain fashion this category “has always been with us,” or with us at least since the dawn of the assembly line-centered phase of the industrial era, for of course Henry Ford was at least as famous as the Model T car his company turned out in the millions, and of course since the early 1970s every bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken has come with the portrait of KFC’s founder and original proprietor printed on it; and after a certain other fashion it has only really been with us for about a half-dozen years, inasmuch as Messrs. Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg are now far more mediatically and meta-politically prominent than Messrs. Ford and Sanders ever were and a half-dozen years ago they were not even household names—at least not in the household of the present writer, as is partly attested by my theatrically exaggerated flubbing of the names of the proprietors of Amazon and Twitter (then still owned by Jack Dorsey) in To Russia with Lunch. The displacement or “colonization” of the names of these corporate entities by those of their founders or proprietors naturally has the effect of personalizing or anthropomorphizing the entities in our eyes, but because our apprehension of persons is ineluctably mediated by our apprehension of their names, it more basally transposes our private metaphysics of these entities into the more primeval realm of Proust’s metaphysics of personal names, such that our attitude towards the corporations is preemptively shaped by the connotations those names (or names phonetically or graphically resembling them) have acquired in our history of acquaintance with them. Thus I can personally attest that when at some point in 2020 I finally ceased to be able to avoid remembering that the founder and then-still-controlling shareholder of Twitter was named Jack Dorsey, I initially had difficulty crediting the rumors of Twitter’s nefarious collusion with the Democratic party owing to my thitherto exclusive association of the surname “Dorsey” with the clean-cut, smooth-faced, well-bred big-band leader and his equally clean-cut, smooth-faced, and well-bred trombonist brother (and perhaps secondarily to the timeless parity of the diminutive “Jack” with “Jimmy” and “Tommy” in point of wholesomeness); but that once I discovered that Jack Dorsey was in fact a slatternly, would be Rasputin-bearded dirty hippie, I had no trouble whatsoever imagining Twitter to be up to its avian eyeballs in any sort of malefaction or chicanery. But no sooner had the image of this dirty hippie begun to displace that of a white dinner-jacketed-and black tied composite of Jimmy and Tommy than Twitter was taken over by Elon Musk, a man whose surname I found immediately evocative not of prior bearers of it (for I at least had and have never heard of any earlier Musks apart from Elon’s father and of him only in connection with Elon) but of the various non-human entities denoted or described by the world musk—musk itself qua animal glandular secretion, musk itself qua cologne, musk rats, and the general “musky” odor that is not to be confused with the “musty” one and yet is somehow not completely distinct from it. These connotations are neither very flattering nor very sinister or ominous, and not being sufficiently meta-politically ill-disposed to Mr. Musk to decry him or his behavior as rat-like in good faith, I can only say that they have only been reinforced rather vaguely by the dry baritone timbre of his speaking voice and fairly precisely by his notorious predilection for the hallucinogen colloquially known as “skunkweed.” Mark Zuckerberg’s surname is less diffusively evocative of real-world non-human entities chez moi qua part-time reader of German—Zucker of course recalling sugar and Berg a mountain, and the compound-word sugar mountain being so close to Sugarloaf Mountain, the name of a peak in my former home state of Maryland, and a sugarloaf being an object that resembles a Caucasian head at least in outline (at least to me qua reader of Swift’s Tale of a Tub, in which the resemblance is made much of), I cannot help thinking of Mr. Zuckerberg as bearing a head made entirely of sugar, and indeed his soft, pasty complexion and the inconspicuousness of his recessed eyes do much to reinforce this preconception (with his shockette of ginger-adjacent hair perhaps suggesting a summit-crowning dusting of cinnamon qua artistic-confectioner’s effort at evoking the abovementioned mountain in autumn). As for Jeff Bezos—well, the Jeff part of it is even less evocative than Mark, which is at least biblical in origin  although of course far less Bible-evocative than Elon, what with the Bible-evocativeness of biblical forenames [with the exception of Jesus, which of course sounds intrinsically blasphemous to Anglo-Saxon ears] varying more or less in inverse proportion to the prominence in Scripture of persons bearing them), but Bezos is “arguably” the most evocative of all three of the surnames now in point despite its utter bereftness of association in my mind with any specific class of common-named entities in the real world, owing to its –os termination, which, although presumably denoting a Grecian provenance in this case, is for me an ineffaceable bespeaker of the name-bearer’s membership of some race of creatures of non-terrestrial origin (and I am not thinking of angels or demons here), most likely simply because a science-fiction television program I watched religiously in the 1980s, Doctor Who, featured a host of alien beings and alien worlds bearing names terminating in that termination (although, what with Doctor Who’s being a doggedly shameless off-ripper of other science-fiction properties, I doubtless would have associated –os as closely with such beings and worlds even if as a youngster I had read and watched much more promiscuously in the science-fiction “universe”). And in all candor and frankness—i.e., all embarrassment at being in thrall to such a hackneyed and pedestrian trope of pejoration—I must acknowledge that simply in possessing s cue ball-bald head Mr. Bezos does strike me as someone who might very well hail from an alien planet (this doubtless because on account of its notoriously tiny budget Doctor Who would often distinguish an alien personage from his human and quasi-human scene-sharers with the prosthetic-cum-cosmetic aid of little more than a latex bald cap). And in all candor and frankness—albeit with not a jot of embarrassment (even if the attitude I am about to disclose is at least as common and uncontroversial as the disparagement of an individual person by likening him to a space alien)—I must acknowledge that this reflexive interpellation of Mr. Bezos as a space alien harmonizes perfectly with my attitude to Amazon, for I really do regard and experience Amazon as a soul-destroying and dehumanizing force in my own lifeworld and indeed in the collective lifeworld of the present-day Occident. But my resentment of Amazon itself is exceeded in intensity by my vexation at being unable to specify exactly why I am so resentful of it. The at-least-traditionally most obvious explanation of a customer’s resentment of a business entity to which he supplies his custom will not serve my turn, for I cannot in good faith describe myself as a dissatisfied or disgruntled Amazon customer. To be sure, I am incessantly infuriated by the innumerable “nudgy” stratagems that beset virtually every minute of my existence as a user of Amazon’s gadgetry and platformage—the ad for some new bestselling piece of “chick lit” or “young-adult fiction” that greets me every time I flip open either of my two “Fire” tablets, the minefield of icons for mindless arcade-type games that I am obliged to hopscotch just to reach one of the butcher’s half-dozen so-called apps that I have actually deliberately downloaded, the “For You” tab under which my personal library of so-called e-books has been subsumed far, far below an Alexandrian heap of shortcuts to “chick-lit” and “young-adult fiction” novels, etc. But in my near quarter-century as an Amazon customer, Amazon has never fallen seriously short in its provision to me of its core services: it has generally had in stock affordable versions of the products I have wished to find; it has generally delivered these products to me in one piece (or as many pieces they have respectively supposed to have had before their consumer-actuated assembly) and within reasonable temporal distance of the pre-promised arrival date; and when occasionally it has failed in any of these three respects (or at least the second and third of the three, for I am not really enough of a consumer self-advocate to ring up a company’s complaint line just to whinge about their not yet carrying a version of my pet product [pet product here denoting either favorite commodity or commodity for the use of pets [for after all, domestic animal fetishists are exactly the sorts of people who tend to ring up complaint lines to whinge about this sort of thing, are they not?]), I have not had to try very hard or wait very long for some conventionally adequate indemnification for their dereliction of commercial duty—usually a full refund or a free second delivery of the ordered product. Such all being the case, I cannot but infer that I am simply resentful towards Amazon on account its demonstrably lionesque share in the causal nexus that precipitated the far-abovementioned near-disappearance of mid-tier old-school proprietary names from Occidental quotidian life. But I cannot but be not a little chagrined if not dismayed (or a little dismayed if not chagrined, depending on which it is more unpleasant to be) by this inference, for however dimly this may have been perceptible to the reader (however bright he may have been), I intended “Proprietary Names: The Name” as inter alia (if not primum inter alia) a lament at or of the intertwinement of many of the most formative experiences of my formative years with proprietarily named entities, and intended it as such a lament because I at least fancied that I lamented that intertwinement. And why did I fancy that I lamented it? Well, I suppose because, however childishly petulant this may make my adult self of twenty years ago sound, I thought that I had been cheated by the super-prominence of proprietary names, that the super-prominence of proprietary names in the Umwelt of my childhood had caused me to develop a less truthful understanding of the world than I would have developed in a childhood Umwelt in which proprietary names had been less prominent—that it had caused me to overemphasize differences and disjunctions between certain entities (e.g., pizzas of the same culinary style produced and vended by pizzerie operating under different names) and to overemphasize continuities and similarities between certain others (e.g., pizzerie operating under a single name yet hailing from different architectural styles and periods). I also intended “Proprietary Names: The Name” as inter alia (if not secundum inter alia) as a lament at or of my continuing and prospectively unending habitation back then, in 2004, of an Umwelt in which all my fellow-humans, no matter how old, intelligent, knowledgeable, or experienced appeared to remain at least as enthusiastically, starry-eyedly in thrall to the blandishments of the proprietary name as I had been in my single digits—an Umwelt dominated if not exhausted by (not to put too fine a red point on it or keep the red cat in the bag an instant longer than necessary) the inherently meretricious racket known as consumer capitalism, a racket in which the proprietary name was the chief tool (!) of the trade of every bawd or huckster (or, if you prefer a more coolly “dehumanizing” metaphor, in which the proprietary name was itself bawd or charlatan-in-chief). And what was worse, I could not even begin to conceive of the circumstances that might bring this regime of the proprietary name qua tool or bawd or huckster of consumer capitalism to an end, such that, although I knew full well that certain super-prominent entities or phenomena that I had previously taken as unbudgeable givens (notably the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet satellite polities) had come to an end within my lifetime, I all but despaired of outliving the regime, and to be fair to my then-present self, no occurrence or manifestation in my Umwelt seemed construable as a foreboding of the slightest attenuation of the regime, let alone its outright collapse; my neighbors continued raving interminably about the latest proprietarily named flummery and gadgetry, and virtually every day I heard to my inestimable fury some talking head (or, to be more precise, talking voice [for I then derived almost all my so-called news coverage from radio]) intoning, “Consumer spending is the largest sector of the U.S. economy.” To be sure, I did not fancy that twenty or fifty years thence people would still be raving about the I-Pad or the I-Pod or whatever the latest I-prefixed gewgaw was called, but I did fancy that they would be raving as enthusiastically about some other proprietarily named gewgaw of no greater intrinsic interest.  But now tout cela—ce regime là—est foutu. Oh, I assume there are still mega-scads of people not only raving about some proprietarily-named successor of the I-prefixed gewgaws but even about some actual I-prefixed gewgaw—for my abovementioned forced smorgasbord of YouTube commercials occasionally features a spot for the I-Phone Umpteen—but I doubt they are anywhere near(ly) as numerous as they were twenty years ago or that they are raving anywhere near(ly) as enthusiastically as they were wont to do then, because if they were that numerous or that enthusiastic, I would be incessantly hearing people raving about such entities, and I seldom if ever do now. Presumably, like me, almost all my fellow Americans now do the preponderance of their shopping through Amazon; and presumably, like me, they search for a product not by the proprietary name of its manufacturer but by the common name of the product itself; and presumably, like me, on typing in that name they will be presented with a welter of product-specification pages on almost all of which the proprietary name—almost invariably a thitherto completely unfamiliar one—is among the least conspicuous visual elements; and presumably, like me, they will generally choose from among the welter of products on the basis of the quality of the specifications factored by the constraints of their budget and utterly regardless of the name of the proprietor; although perhaps like me, they will occasionally opt for a product because despite not winning gold in the quality-factored-by-affordability Olympics it is associated with a proprietary name to which they are partial for some reason or other, as I opted to buy a pair of Sperry boat shoes a few days ago owing to Sperry’s proprietary association with top siders, the gold standard of casual men’s footwear in my junior-high and high-school days. And I suppose, if I am to be brutally honest—the brutality in question arising from the attendant acknowledgment of a measurable quantum of unfairness in my former appraisal of consumer capitalism—my partiality to these familiar old proprietary names like Sperry does not always arise entirely out of an impulse as indifferent to the qualities of the proprietarily named product’s intrinsic qualities as a sentimental-cum-superstitious desire to propitiate the manes of my boyhood self, I suppose, indeed, that there are a few proprietary names that have subsumed products of such consistently sterling quality, products that amid all the circumambient degeneration of my Umwelt have to their own original noble selves proved so steadfastly true, that like Larkin’s “toad Work” they, both the names and the products, are now affording me a rotating shift of consoling arms as I head “down Cemetery Road.” The Sperry top-siders I bought two years ago have done me yeoman’s and boatswain’s service in the course of the hundreds if not thousands of miles I have since walked along the beaches of Pinellas County and the sidewalks and shoulders of Hillsborough; and now that almost all the people with whom I elected to socialize during the interval between Thanksgiving and Christmas twenty years ago have vanished from my lifeworld, I find nothing more powerfully evocative of the holiday seasons of the early-to-mid 20-oughties than a bottle of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale (although I am now far more often obliged to make do with a can thereof), not only because such a bottle still bears the image of a snowbound log cottage with a wreath on its front door but also because its contents at least seem to taste as good, and as good in the same way, as the contents of such a bottle did back then. But this lingering attachment to a handful of surviving proprietary names from my personal old days cannot account for my nostalgia for the proprietary ancien regime en bloc, unless we suppose that the attachment is  complemented by a sort of phantom attachment to the proprietary names that “didn’t make it” into the present, and such a supposition seems rather implausible, as I do not seem to find myself spending much time positively pining for the absence of certain proprietary names of yore from my lifeworld, although I have been led to understand that such pining is not uncommon chez les autres and thereby to realize that it is not absolutely unprecedented chez moi-même—led thereto, for example, by Michel Houellebecq’s outburst of anguished Sehnsucht for a certain discontinued make of windcheater or parka and a certain superannuated model of early portable computer in his 2010 novel La carte et le territoire, an outburst that when I encountered it in 2011 catalyzed in me the realization that I had been yearning for Starbucks’ recently discontinued (and never since reinstated) chonga bagel. Moreover, it must be remembered that I continue to be not infrequently resentful of the obtrusion of certain new proprietary names upon my lifeworld, as I would not continue to be if I were a dedicated yearner for the resuscitation of the proprietary ancien regime. Such being the case, it seems to me that my resentment of Amazon qua proprietary-named displacer can only have been occasioned by an epiphenomenon of its displacement of proprietary names rather than by the displacement itself, and the only plausible generator of such an epiphenomenon that now springs to mind is the abovementioned fact that “the strips and clusters of retail establishments behind [streetside] signage are less richly stocked and emblazoned with proprietary names than they were yesteryear” (such that the long-ago opportune moment for addressing this fact in more detail has at long last arrived). And the dwindling of the stock of proprietary names in those clusters of establishments has indeed been potentiated and followed by a development by which I am no means pleased—namely, the replacement of those establishments by certain genres of non-proprietarily named establishment that I find mildly unwholesome at best. Chief among these sorts of establishment in frequency of occurrence is the so-called smoke shop, an instance of which, rarely designated by anything more elaborate—either on the streetside sign or the shop-front sign behind it—than the word “smoke shop” itself in sans-serif capitals, is to be found in, I would say, three out every five so-called strip malls I pass or stop by nowadays.  I have never yet, thank God, been inside one of these smoke shops or even close enough to the front door of one of them to see (or, perhaps more to the point, smell) what typically goes on within them—to know, for example, whether any smoking typically goes on therein or they are typically simply sites for the buying and selling of smoking-related products, but I am at least “streetwise” enough to know that the “smoke” associated with them is not the wholesome invigorating sort produced by burning tobacco but the feculent torpifying sort produced by burning marijuana. To say that I am not “the world’s biggest fan” of marijuana-smoking would be something of an understatement and indeed so big a something thereof that I am not even sure that to say that I am “the world’s biggest foe” of marijuana-smoking would be anything whatsoever of an overstatement. Certainly I cannot recall a time when I both knew of marijuana’s existence as a drug and was not repelled to the point of nausea by the idea of partaking of its pharmacological effects in any medium—not merely the idea of my partaking thereof, mind you, but the idea of anyone’s partaking thereof. I have already mentioned my abhorrence of the stench produced by its combustion, and this abhorrence is equaled if not exceeded in intensity by my abhorrence of the characteristic “high” induced by it—a solipsistic risibility that stands at equally distant and inferior antipodes to the alacritous alertness engendered by tobacco and the gregarious good cheer of alcohol-intoxication; of the stubbornly surly stupidity exhibited by its habitual users throughout whatever increasingly slender portion of the day they are obliged to set aside the “roach” or the “bong” to attend, however minimally, to the exigencies of personal world-maintenance; of these users’ hyperslatternly sartorial habitus—the historically unvarying complet of hole-ridden T-shirt, tatterdemalion “cut-off” or “cargo” shorts, and sandals or flip-flops; of the entire goshforsaken 1960s-originating hippie sub-cum-counter “culture” with which the drug has been inalienably associated for the past three-fifths (!) of a century, the subculture of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. (I have more than once been heard to remark that if I could change places with any person from the historical past, that person is or would be Richard Nixon so that I could superintend the dropping of a multi-megaton nuclear bomb on Woodstock in the summer of 1969.) In my boyhood and youth there was but one marijuana paraphernalia-vending establishment (in those days known not as a smoke shop but as a head shop) in all of Hillsborough County: a place known as The Wooden Nickel that was housed in a particularly mesquin and minable strip mall sited on a seedy block of East Fletcher avenue only a nickel-nickel’s throw from Tampa’s officially shittiest neighborhood, Suitcase City (a strip mall that not-unfittingly concurrently housed the Loft Theater, a fifty-seat venue where I once saw a performance of a sort of Rocky Horror-show knock-off called Vampire Lesbians of Sodom [and a venue that was eventually annexed to Hillsborough County’s main theatrical venue, the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, as a sort of Tampan answer to the Vienna’s Akademietheater; thus furnishing yet another example of the pan-Occidental “colonization” of “high-cultural” institutions by trashily degenerate subcultures in the present mini-epoch]); now, in 2024, there must be dozens of such shops in my little corner of the county (the Keystone-Lutz-Citrus Park area, which I would dub “my new Tri-ZIP code area” did it not regrettably contain portions of more than three ZIP-codes and not contain any single ZIP-code in its entirety), a corner whose neighborhoods have for the most part hitherto been as unseedy as any neighborhood in 20^th-and-21^st- century Florida has been capable of being. Of course the proliferation of these smoke shops qua smoke shops is first and foremost a byproduct not of Amazon’s suction of retail traffic from the strip malls but of the gradual de facto nationwide legalization of marijuana over the past decade-and-a-half. But in the realm of personal metaphysics blaming the co-messenger for bad news (Amazon’s co-co-messenger being of course the newly proprietary name-poor roadside signage itself) is not only permissible but ineluctable, and in any case by dint of sheer discursive drift I am no longer discussing my resentment of Amazon but rather the boulversant catastrophe in my personal metaphysics on which that resentment is superstructed, a catastrophe whose chief lineaments I shall limn after slathering a dollop of another artistically exigent sub-hue of shit-colored gouache onto my palette (every other sinister or disagreeable post-2004 development already discussed in this essay, up to and including the proliferation of smoke shops, being another such sub-hue), namely, the non-proprietary-named bit of signage I sight most frequently beside(s) the bit allocated to “Smoke Shop,” viz. signage sporting nothing but the word or name “Botanica,” printed à la “SMOKE SHOP” in sans-serif capitals (although in my memory’s eye, while “SMOKE SHOP” invariably appears in green (just like weed or grass, get it mohn-stroke-dude?) or black, “BOTANICA” sometimes shews itself in red [just like…well you will presently see just like what]). While I have fortunately yet to see (or at least to remember having seen) a “BOTANICA” sign in the pseudo-tri ZIP-code area, each time I am forced to venture into the city of Tampa I spot a “BOTANICA” sign on virtually every block, although the foregoing “fortunately” unfortunately falsifies by default the history of the name-word or word-name “botanica” in my personal metaphysics, for the truth is that before I discovered the purpose to which the shops behind Tampa’s “BOTANICA” signs were and are appropriated, I did not associate “botanica” with anything sinister or disagreeable and indeed viewed it in a slightly positive light. You see, Botanica was and is the name of a bar in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood that I visited at least twice during one or more of my three or four late-1990s trips to New York. I suppose one might even term it my Manhattan local inasmuch as I paid the last or latter of my visits to it on my own and of my own initiative. I took something of a shine to this Botanica because of the dozen or so bars I visited in the course of those few sojourns, it was the only one that even roughly approximated the Vorstellung of a hip New York bar that I had formed as a child and teenager of the 1980s, for although we were then only a year or two into Giuliani’s notorious “Disneyfication” of the Big Apple en bloc, New York’s punk and punk-adjacent subcultures seemed to be already completely “Disneyfied,” at least to the extent that they were embodied in its so-called nightlife, for in the supposedly grittiest neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, the part of the Lower-East side then still known as Alphabet City, I overheard a nose-pierced barman marveling at the “edginess” of Marilyn Manson to a female one, and witnessed a micro-epochally retardataire upright acoustic bass-anchored “swing” combo entertain an audience dressed like extras from Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (but seated in a bar-stroke-nightclub whose name boasted of its being owned by “Handsome” Dick Manitoba, frontman of one of scariest [or at least scariest-named] first-generation punk bands, the Dictators). “Not that there was anything wrong with this” intrinsically [and indeed in these days of universal athleisure the image of a bar filled with people dressed like Metropolitan extras makes me fairly weep with nostalgia], but it was not what I was then looking for in New York. Botanica, on the other hand, although it still fell short of my New Yorkian ideal and indeed even further short thereof than my favorite Baltimorean watering holes of that micro-epoch, the Club Charles and the Rendezvous Lounge, came serviceably enough close to it, being roughcast-walled, dimly lit, and frequented by people attired and coiffed rather like Nick Cave and whichever female 1980s post-punk “icon” favored shoulder-length black hair and black cocktail dresses (the Cramps’ Poison Ivy, perchance? If so, then perhaps I should replace Nick Cave with Lux Interior). The establishment justified its self-styling as a haunt of plants rather than people via the economical and unobtrusive yet eloquent placement of a few oversized potted ferns directly beneath the peripherally situated sources of the just-mentioned dim illumination. Consequently, when I started seeing “BOTANICA”-bearing signs in Tampa, as I found the notion of an entire chain of Tampa-sited SoHo-esque bars too preposterous a notion for my imagination to compass (especially as my first sightings of the signs took place on West Waters Avenue and hence several miles north of Tampa’s own SoHo neighborhood [so called not only on account of its aspiration to be as “arty” as Manhattan’s SoHo but also on account of its situation along South Howard Street, a stretch of road commencing only two or three miles north of the central business district]), I could not help picturing the establishments attached to these signs as downscale, fully enclosed urban versions of the spacious open-air suburban stores from which gardeners and nursery-owners replenish their stock of greenery. But as that notion in turn proved slightly too preposterous to countenance (for the few-dozen square feet of clear glass apportioned to the fronts of each of these shops scarcely seemed capable of affording life-sustaining photosynthetic sunlight to more than a handful of shrublets at a time), I soon found myself asking my mother if she had ever heard of these “botanicas” and knew anything of their purpose or function. She replied that she had not, but as her own curiosity had been piqued by the question, she immediately betook herself to the online reference work of first resort for an answer to it, and the answer that she found could scarcely have been more devastating to someone of my metaphysical-cum-aesthetic constitution.  It turned out that these botanicas had nothing whatsoever to do with plants, at least nothing to do with living ones, and that they were in fact wholly appropriated to the vending of objects—candles, incense, and the like—essential to the ritual observance of a voodoo-like cult or folk-religion practiced in certain (or perhaps all) Latin-American countries, a cult or folk-religion the beginning of whose name was coextensive with the Spanish word Santa meaning holy, sacred, or saint. I had in fact first heard of this Santa from my mother—or perhaps from my father—for it figured (and figures) not unprominently in the lore of our family, in our portion of that genre of family lore common to all North American families with still-visible roots in non-North American or non-northern-European countries, the genre treating of all the outlandish events and practices experienced and engaged in by the branches-cum-generations still bound fast to those roots.  On my mother’s side of the family, the half-Italian side, the chief piece of such lore centers on our answer to Seinfeld’s George Costanza’s Aunt Baby, a brother of my grandfather’s who failed to live to adulthood thanks to third-degree burns sustained in a fire inadvertently started by my Sicilian-born great-grandmother as she was distilling some moonshine in the kitchen of their shotgun house in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood during the micro-epoch of Prohibition. On my father’s side of the family, the half-Hispanic side, the corresponding personage is my Cuban-born great-grandmother herself qua part-time celebrant of that Santa-nic pseudo-religion. It is said that she would avail herself of certain purportedly curative charms or talismans of that religion whenever one of her children was ill. I believe it is even said that she passed the secrets of these charms or talismans on to her daughter, my paternal grandmother, and that the latter would occasionally employ them on my father’s maladies when he was a tot. The reader may well be wondering why in the light of this Santa-nic pseudo-religion’s prominence in my family lore I was not delighted rather than horrified at or by the discovery that all those newly sprouted botanicas were intimately associated with it; the reader may well indeed be wondering why in the aforesaid light I did not instantly undertake a pilgrimage to the nearest of these botanicas upon making the aforesaid discovery. But in point of fact, despite being a quarter Cuban in ethnic constitution, I harbor an antipathy to almost all things Latin American that exceeds in ferocity and antiquity even my antipathy to the bongwater-logged sixties subculture-cum-counterculture, such that it is not entirely impossible—what with marijuana’s being a word of “American Spanish” origin, according to my trusty 1990 Concise Oxford Dictionary—that my sixties-subculture-cum-counterculture-phobia must ultimately be regarded as an outgrowth of my Latinameriphobia. Moreover, the ferocity of my aversion to a given piece of Latin-Americana generally varies in direct proportion to that piece’s American-ness and remoteness from organic Latin-Europeana or Iberiana, from things of immediately Spanish or Portuguese provenance (not that I have ever been much of a fan of organic Iberiana: bullfights, acoustic guitar music, paella, and Portuguese men of war [whether ships or jellyfish-impersonators] all elicit from me Lucy van Pelt’s signature exclamation of Blech! [TBS, I do harbor a powerful passion for port wine, but port is “arguably” more of a staple of British than of Portuguese life]). “Woke” cavilers will doubtless denounce this antipathy as a manifestation of “internalized white supremacy,” and for aught I know their denunciation is well-founded (and indeed, mutatis mutandis, I have jestingly entertained this very possibility vis-à-vis my selective restaurant tipping policy and my Italian ethnic heritage in one of the segments of “Every Man His Own George D. Painter”), but even if it is, that is of precious little moment to my personal metaphysics, for my Latinameriphobia is an organic and inextirpable portion of that metaphysics; it as much “a part of who I am” as the fact that I am over five feet tall—nay, “arguably” even more a part thereof, as I was already a Latinameriphobe when I was less or fewer than three feet tall and shall remain a Latinameriphobe even if the cobelligerent efforts of gravity and osteoarthritis eventually reduce me to a near-dwarf of four foot eleven. And the present moment, a moment immediately after my “self-outing” as a person possibly in thrall to “internalized white supremacy,” is probably a better moment than most others to mention something that really must be mentioned before “close of play” in or on this essay—namely, that the metaphysical resonance now in point differs strongly in degree if not necessarily in kind (as well as contingently if not necessarily essentially) from that of the proprietary names discussed in “Proprietary Names: The Name” in that the aura or entity- cluster attached to the name in my mind is also attached to a referent or cluster of referents in the world of the here and now. So, for instance, while as I mentioned in “PN: tN,” the name Little Caesar’s conjured up an aura of late republican-cum-imperial-Roman majesty in the mind of my boyhood self, I never stood any chance of meeting an actual Roman dictator or emperor or any other sort of late-republican or imperial Roman in the Tampa Bay area of the 1980s, I stand a very good chance indeed of meeting a so-called stoner or pot-head in the Tampa Bay area of the 2020s, and that the proliferation of signage for so-called Smoke Shops in this area cannot but betoken (!) an increase in the likelihood of such an encounter, inasmuch as (however insistently the purveyors of the asinine argument that the frequency-cum-widespreadness of occurrence of an activity varies in inverse proportion to the degree to which it is legally permitted, that the relaxation of legal proscriptions of an activity actually decreases the number of people engaging in it and the frequency of their engagement therein) this proliferation presumably betokens (!) a proliferation of cannabis use in the area. And of course the proliferation of the signage for so-called botanicas in the area likewise would seem to betoken an increase in the likelihood of my encountering a practitioner of the god-awful Santa-nic pseudo-religion hereabouts, and this betokening likewise seems to be founded on a proliferation of observance-cum-celebration of the Santa-nic pseudo-religion in the area, especially if certain recent news reports are to be believed, news reports reporting that a sizeable proportion of the millions of recent immigrants to the United States hail from Central and South America and Hispaniola. At this point the “wokester” is bound to interject that what I have been terming a “personal metaphysics” has just revealed itself to be in fact a personal paranoiacs, a paranoiacs ignobly superstructed on the abovementioned internalized white supremacy. But to the “wokester” I would counterdemur that in all candor and frankness and good faith I believe my aversion to the Santa-nists to be fundamentally metaphysical in character, inasmuch as while I undoubtedly am worried (albeit far from paranoid) about the demographic increase in Santa-nists qua potential harmers of my person (and of the persons of my pets!), my aversion to these people and their pseudo-religion is fully detachable (or, if you prefer, alienable) from my fear of them, inasmuch as even the idea of spectating on their rites from a completely safe distance—the distance afforded, say, by a video viewable completely “off the grid,” i.e., beyond the reach of any powers human or robotic that might somehow contrive to notify the Santa-nists of my aversion to them—fills me with loathing and horror, loathing and horror of something I cannot help regarding as evil. In any case, the “horrification” of my personal metaphysics of names by the local roadside signage cannot be entirely reduced to phenomena even “adjacent” to politically scabrousness, inasmuch as it has been partly owing to changes having nothing to do with any ethnos or subculture, and indeed nothing really to do with people as such at all. Take the recent arrival in Hillsborough County of outlets of the supermarket chain known as Aldi. At first blush, this arrival would seem to mark a resurgence of the old proprietary roadside-signic heterogeneity, inasmuch as Aldi is after all an old-school proprietary name attached to a company offering tangible products. But in point of fact, with one invisible or dead or robotic hand the proprietors of Aldi take away a thousandfold with the other, for Aldi is specifically a supermarket chain whose signature gimmick is offering no proprietarily named products—or, what comes to the same thing, proprietarily-nominally-metaphysically speaking, offering products exclusively under names of its (Aldi’s) own invention or proprietorship. The chagrin I felt on learning that Aldi had arrived in the area sharpened into outright dismay on my discovering just a few days ago (as of this writing, September 23, 2024) that the supermarket closest to my dwelling, a Winn Dixie, is slated for conversion into an Aldi and that the conversion will be complete within a matter of weeks. And in this dismay I am compelled to see yet another proof that I am and always have been much more attached to the old-school proprietary retail name than I ever formerly supposed, or at least formerly was willing to admit to myself; for the truth is that I have always regarded supermarket store-brand products (a.k.a. own-brand products) as downmarket and louche and regarded people who do not blush (or at least affect not to blush [if affecting to be incapable of an involuntary reaction be not a logical or physiological impossibility]) to buy them as churls and losers. What is more, on once again reflecting on the proprietarily named products I have loved over the years and comparing them with either actual store-brand quasi-equivalents that I have to my shame been unable to avoid occasionally consuming in their stead or conjectural store-brand quasi-equivalents that I may be forced to consume in their stead in the future, I cannot but conclude that my contempt for store-brand products arises from instincts about them that are fundamentally sound, i.e., that store-brand products generally are inferior to the name-brand products for which they presume to substitute. I own that I cheerfully buy jugs and bottles of Publix-branded water at Publix, my supermarket-chain of first resort because, well, you know, it’s water, which no matter where it comes from tastes like nothing (although of course here the professional valetudinarians among my readers who will assure me that however uniformly null the taste of bottled water may be, there is more than figuratively nothing I should be more concerned with), and I even own that a handful of Publix-branded products (notably their frozen lasagna rolls) have grown so refulgently on me over the years that I should only reluctantly switch to brand-name pseudo-equivalents of them; nay, I even own that I may come to find Aldi’s Trixkit woven wheat crackers preferable to the Triscuits of which they will be a transparent knockoff (for such is the way of Aldi’s treatment of its own-brands: rather than coming up with their own completely different name for one of their alternatives, they substitute a name that is just barely within legally safe orthographical distance of that of the best-known original as if to rub the consumer’s nose in his betrayal of his favorite brand à la C.S. Lewis’s satanic-cum-technocratic totalitarians forcing new members of their society to step on a crucifix), but will it be unreasonable in me to shrink from purchasing B. F. Chung’s Chicken Lo Mein in preference to P. F. Chang’s? Is it not possible that the celebrated restaurateurs whose portmanteau name appears on every box of that CLM have each had a hand in the selection of ingredients for their version of the dish and that those hands were slightly more gustatorily discerning than the hands of the entire Mannschaft of German food engineers doubtless responsible for the recipe of the B.F. Chung version? And what of Sierra Wyoming beer? Will I be able to assume that like Sierra Nevada it has been “family-owned and argued over since 1980” by a clan anciently and intimately acquainted with the American-microbrew tradition of heavily hopped beers? Will I be blamable for assuming instead that Sierra Wyoming is in fact a product of one of the more massig German brewers and that however heavily hopped it may purport to be per its bottle-label, it will always end up tasting like a slightly yeastier version of Miller Lite just like a typical German lager or pilsner? And even as regards German beers, am I not perchance right to ascribe a certain level of infungible quality (quality, that is, both in the sense of peculiarity, Eigentümlichkeit, and in the sense of superiority, Qualität) to the classic familiar brand names and to suspect that that quality will not be found in Aldi’s knockoffs thereof? Am I not perchance right to suspect that Köstritzer’s Schwarzbier, with its famous bottle-swathing alteration of Tischbein’s portrait of Goethe, the one wherein the poet is shown with a glass of the beer itself in his right hand, is “in a certain very real sense” the same beer he consumed in copious quantities two hundred years ago, such that if one were through the magic of time travel to pour him a draught of today’s Köstritzer he would be unable to tell the difference; and that a Schwarzbier that tried to work the same magic on me via the placement of itself (an Aldi concoction perchance dubbed Kostenritzer—i.e., cost-cutter) beneath the formidable schnozz of Schiller as depicted by Ludovike Simanowiz would or will turn out to be chemically indistinguishable from watered-down Bitburger with brown food coloring in it? Perchance, perchance. And am I completely alone in my profound misgivings about these Aldi knockoff-brand products and my ferocious preference for “traditional” supermarkets like Publix that are chock-full of a cornucopiacally diverse array of proprietarily named products (including Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee, my preferred brand thereof)? Perchance, perchance: for I am told that Aldis are wildly popular in every corner of the USA; that today’s Americans welcome the arrival of the first Aldi in their town or neighborhood with all the celebratory fanfare that their ancestors bestowed on the arrival of passenger train service or electric street lights (or even the first McDonald’s) therein. When I first learned of this wild Aldi-popularity, I could not help wondering with a mixture of egoistic glumness and eschatological hopefulness if it did not indicate that the American population en bloc had developed a more wholesome (i.e., because less metaphysically laden) rapport with proprietary names than my own. For after all, these supermarkets shelved with nothing with store-brand products recall nothing so strongly as the supermarket depicted in the 1984 “cult-classic” film Repo Man, wherein every single item was encased in a label displaying nothing but a word or phrase—“Milk,” “Baked Beans,” autc.—denoting the product contained within it (and wherein the filmmakers were incidentally but taking their cues from the so-called generic sections at real-world supermarkets of their time, sections whose minuscule allotment of floor space and swift disappearance admittedly betrayed their marginality to the contemporary American Handelsgeist), unless it be the commodity-scape of The Simpsons touched on in “Proprietary Names: The Name,” a commodity-scape wherein every product bears an entirely fictitious proprietary name understood to be a stand-in for a notorious factual counterpart—and in either case a would-be subversive expression of resentment of the proprietary name’s chokehold on the popular imagination, and of dogged determination not to be drawn into the maelstrom of “product-placement” that had already blighted the Weltdarstellungen of many a crowd-pleasing Hollywood blockbuster (e.g., 1982’s ET, with its foregrounding of Reese’s Pieces qua the eponymous extraterrestrial’s favorite candy). But I soon discarded this line of wonderage on reflecting that the most ardent cooers over Aldi-arrivals I had heard tell of were elderly women—in other words, members of the demographic tranche of present-day America presumably most prone to being ardently smitten with old-school proprietary names, what with its having come of age during those names’ heyday, a heyday when it had consisting of young women and hence the most brand-name obsessed American demographic tranche of that micro-epoch. Presumably these ladies were smitten with the Aldi brand name as they would have been smitten with the name of a perfume manufacturer or fashion designer thirty to fifty years ago, and presumably instead of regarding Aldi’s store-brand products as corruptions of the products of nobler merchants in the grocery trade as I did, they regarded them as they would have done the latest lines of clothing or perfume issued by those standard-bearers of haute couture or parfumerie. For after all, Aldi was (and is) of European provenance, and although German brand names have something of a checkered meta-aesthetic history chez die Frauenzimmer of America (what with these names primarily being associated with cars and precision tools, products typically regarded as objects masculine obsession), Aldi had (and has) long had a sizable commercial footprint in the United Kingdom, and American women are legendarily abject Anglophones, the most supine suckers for all things British—or at any rate, all things traditional-cum-non-working-class British (e.g., tea and crumpets, the royal family, and the Henley Regatta) qua totems or synecdoches of poshness; and today’s elderly American ladies, doubtless not knowing anything about Aldi beneath or behind its bare name, have never had any reason to think of it as in any way tradition-flouting or sub-U. But “I would bet a silk pajama” that none of these ladies, and precious few of their non-young and non-female compatriots, would ever have become smitten with Aldi had they first heard of it in the same setting as I first did—viz., the BBC Radio 4 obituary of the company’s founder, an obituary that could not forbear from mentioning another highly successful supermarket chain founded by that Herr, Save-a-Lot, and especially if they had heard that obituary after having visited a Save-a-Lot as I have once done (and only once, and unwillingly, dragged thereto as I was by a friend far less choosy about his groceries than I have ever been! [the visit, incidentally, is obliquely commemorated in the final episode of “Every Man His own George D. Painter”]), what with Save-a-Lot’s being a super-discount supermarket specializing in cast-offs from more upmarket retailers–chiefly expired canned goods and very-soon-to-expire refrigerated meat; a supermarket wherein most of the products are not even shelved properly but rather heaped up willy-nilly in horizontally orientated wire racks. (Naturally I am aware that my disclosure of the “origin story” of my acquaintance with the Aldi name obliges me to acknowledge that my aversion to Aldi may have been “overdetermined” rather than solely the effect of my discovery of the chain’s bereftness of name-brand goods; even so, I suspect that my aversion to store-brand goods has always been strong enough that I would not have welcomed the Aldification of the American supermarketscape even had I never heard of Aldi’s proprietary connection to Save-a-Lot.) But talking—or resuming to talk—of Aldi’s Germano-British provenance: it now occurs to me that in virtue of this provenance, the proliferation of Aldis ([sic], incidentally, on the absence of the apostrophe, for “Aldi” here denotes “a single outlet of the Aldi supermarket chain” and hence requires the plural number, not the singular possessive) on these shores, or more specifically within the bounds of this polity, the U.S.A., signalizes yet another sinister and demoralizing turn in the fortunes of the proprietary name’s interaction with American roadside signage, for to the best of my limited but not necessarily slight knowledge, aside from Aldi, there is no foreign-originating supermarket chain that has made any commercial headway in the States, and that complementarily Safeway is the only American supermarket chain that has ever made any commercial headway overseas (specifically only in other Anglospheric countries—and that that headway would appear to have been fairly negligible in the light of the minuscule number of references to Safeway by comparison with those to Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Selfridges, and Aldi that I have encountered in UK-originating media over the past quarter-century). The ponderation of the question why supermarkets of all proprietarily named entities (and as notably opposed to soft drinks, cars, and fast-food restaurants) have had such a tough time breaking various international commercial barriers would doubtless yield some answers or at least conjectures with regard to the general history of proprietary names and the metaphysics thereof, but anyway, now that those barriers have been broken by Aldi, it behoves me to remark that in the light of the outsize geographical footprint of supermarkets by comparison with fast-food restaurants and the like, and also in the light of the fact that both strip malls and High Streets tend to be anchored by or to center on supermarkets, an America liberally sprinkled with Aldis is bound to resemble the UK at the streetside-cum-roadside level much more closely than it did before.  And as if this were not bad enough (and there is no denying that the change in question is bad, for we are after all not talking here about a Stateside proliferation of the nice elements of Britain’s human geography; of village greens and quaint little pubs and tearooms in half-timbered houses and the like, but rather of a coldly inorganic element thereof and indeed, given that the supermarket is an American invention, we are effectively talking about a re-importation of Americana whose perversity could perhaps only be matched by a Stateside boom in those UK-originating hamburger joints known as Wimpy Bars), and if reports I am hearing from numerous on-the-spot sources are to be credited, this leveling of the distinction between British and American streetside-cum-roadside geography is being paralleled at the non-proprietary end by a newly originating ubiquity of smoke shops in town centers throughout the British isles. And while I have yet to hear of any UK-sited botanicas, there as here the rise of the smoke shop has coincided with that of a sinister commercial institution likewise associated with an exogenous ethnic cohort—viz., the Turkish barber shop. So far no one has been able to account for these shops’ proliferation in the High Streets; there has apparently been no dramatic uptick in demand among British men for shaves or haircuts alla Turca, which in any case apparently differ from their British equivalents only in being administered by fellows whose facial features lead one to presume that they do not bear surnames like Smith, Jones, and Perkins. It would scarcely be accurate to say that they are popular, because that would imply that they have organically developed a large clientele, that (for example) on stepping into one of them for his shave-and-haircut a gent or chap is obliged not infrequently to wait for the or a barber’s chair to be vacated by the or a customer ahead of him in the queue, as I am not infrequently obliged to do at my local (and non-Turkish) barbershop even when I have an appointment; whereas it would seem that on stepping into one of them one typically finds the sole tonsorial artist contemplating his (presumably self-manicured) fingernails nails behind a single empty chair. Such a classic token of commercial otioseness has naturally prompted speculation that these establishments are mere fronts for so-called money-laundering operations, but nobody has yet been able to begin sussing out an answer to the question, “Money-laundering operations for the laundering of what sort of other sort of operation?” The usual answer, “drug-dealing,” has become effectively chimerical now that the law enforcement bodies of the UK, like their counterparts in every other occidental polity, have become supinely tolerant of the public use and trade of virtually every sort of nominally controlled substance. A fragment of hearsay about a single shop in a tiny Welsh town suggests an alternative answer: on being asked how he had acquired the funds to purchase the shop, the proprietor-cum-owner (who may have hailed from some country other than Turkey) reportedly replied that he had been given a grant by the local council, a grant available only to non-UK citizens hailing from his country of origin (and hence pointedly not available to would-be entrepreneurs among the town’s citizenry). (Naturally this scenario invites comparisons to certain governmental-cum-quangal programs and practices in the US, programs and practices that it would probably be imprudent to specify at least at the moment of this writing [October 1, 2024] when they still constitute an excoriatingly scabrous hot potato of a political football.) In the face of all this recent-to-present horrifyingly degenerative homogenization-cum-deprorprietarization of the Anglospheric streetscape, where in the tangible external human-built world of the present is the British or American survivor of the old proprietary-nominal dispensation to find a modicum of metaphysical consolation, a smattering of a sense of numinous continuity with the world of his own past to the extent that it offered a sense of the numinously good in its own right (for, as I believe I have already made plain in my account of the metaphysical blight wrought by smoke shops and the like, the world of the present does not want for bridges or “portals” to portions of that older world that already offered nothing but a sense of the immanently evil)? Why, presumably, in that smattering of three-dimensional human built places in which business continues to be transacted under the auspices of proprietary names already in existence in the old days. And to such places I have indeed repaired in search of such consolation, but the results of that search have been mixed to say the least. To be sure, there are a few—a very few—still-extant proprietary names whose metaphysical profiles have actually improved chez moi in recent years. Without a doubt the most conspicuous of these is Winn Dixie. In my boyhood, Winn Dixie was simply known as a place where nice people never shopped for groceries. While never quite descending to Save-a-Lot-esque levels of abominableness in the public imagination, its stores were regarded as dirty and poorly stocked with name-brand products, and its own-brand products were assumed to be of barely-edible quality at their freshest and stale on arrival on the shelf anyhow. And from what I gathered from the roughly half-dozen times I had been unable to avoid entering one of these stores, that downmarket reputation was well merited. But since moving back to Florida more than four years ago, I have been obliged to become fairly well acquainted with a specific Winn Dixie, the abovementioned one nearest my house, and I have found it to be a supermarket eminently worthy of the custom of the nicest of nice people (who are by no means to be confused with the sort of people who think Whole Foods a trifle parvenu—people whom I suppose one would have to call neo-yuppies [i.e., because the word “yuppie” itself has lost all currency owing to the absorption of the entirety of the “young urban professional” quasi-class into the subculture of “hipsterism” and the political lifestyle of “progressivism”]). To be sure, its décor is rather depressingly Sovietesque in its virtually monochrome near nonexistence (white walls offset only occasionally by splashes of red and black in the signage and the staff’s uniforms); and to be sure, one cannot get sandwiches made to order at its deli as one can at any Publix’s. Still, the Dietz and Watson-brand cold cuts on offer therefrom are eminently edible (if not quite as edible as the Boar’s Head-brand ones on offer at any Publix deli), and as regards the shelf-and-refrigerator stock, I am able to find an exact name-brand match for roughly eighty percent of the products I would normally purchase at Publix, and for ninety percent of the remaining twenty percent I can find a serviceable enough substitute (which substitute is occasionally even a store-brand product). Essentially Winn Dixie seems to have “moved on up” into the second-place spot in the regional supermarket hierarchy formerly occupied by the now-defunct Kash ’n’ Karry (the chain at one of whose outlets I worked as a bagboy, as mentioned in “Proprietary Names/the Name”), as makes perfect sense given that my neighborhood Winn Dixie was formerly an outlet of Sweet Bay, i.e., Kash ’n’ Karry under the name as which it futilely rebranded itself in the late nineties or early oughties. But all my newfound metaphysical solace in Winn Dixie has of course been foutu ever since my abovementioned discovery of WD’s acquisition by Aldi. Happily the first-place occupier of the spot in the just-mentioned hierarchy, Publix, remains as close to its former self as any retail business obliged to keep up with trends in the character of its retailed merchandise (e.g., in the specific case of the retail-grocery business, the introduction of “organic,” “gluten-free,” etc. product lines) can ever be. Unhappily, the Publix at which geographical propinquity obliges me to shop most often, the Citrus Park Publix, is but feebly evocative of the Publixes (Publices?) of my boyhood, for the shopping center in which it is housed was constructed years after my emigration from Florida, in the late nineties at the earliest, and it remains cast in the mold of a “big-box” store of the millennium-straddling microepoch, being quite expansive not only horizontally (a quality to which I have no intrinsic objection) but also vertically, with visible air-conditioning ductwork snaking along its cavernously or cathedral-esquely high dark-metal ceiling. But I have only to step into a Publix of even slightly earlier construction (as I am privileged to do all too rarely) to be transported into the retail atmosphere of thirty to fifty years ago. In many cases even the signage designating the various sections and departments (Produce, Bakery, Deli etc.) appears not to have changed a jot since the day of the store’s opening—by which I mean not that it seems simply to have been left to its own fortunes since then, for in that case it would be visibly chipped and cracked and covered in layers of dust, but that it looks as new as it must have looked then, which presumably means that the management of the store or the company has gone out of its way to maintain it . (One might almost suspect this to be a manifestation of some cannily twee marketing stratagem, of an effort of the chain to present certain of its stores as miniature retail theme parks, as “postmodern” pastiches of traditional supermarkets, did one not know how foreign any sort of chasing after hip “meta-ness” is to Publix’s Gesellschaftsgeist.) But Publix, although it has recently expanded at least as far northward as North Carolina, remains a Florida based-and-centered retail chain, and I ceased to put an ounce of trust in even the mightiest of Florida based-and-centered retail chains when about ten years ago every single one of the hundreds of ineffably winsome Eckerd’s drug stores—Eckerd’s being a St. Petersburg-headquartered  company that had enjoyed a near-monopoly of the local retail pharmaceutical market—was transformed into a soulless CVS overnight (CVS being a national chain that I had previously witnessed displacing and engulfing [if not quite destroying] another gemütlich regional drugstore chain, Rite Aid, up in Maryland). This has left me no option but to seek out current instantiations of the national chains of yore that are still extant. I can report on success with only one of these, Domino’s. In the 1980s and 1990s, Domino’s was the pizza-delivery option of penultimate resort, the last resort therefor being Hungry Howie’s, whose redneckish aura I animadverted on in Proprietary Names: The Name. While presumed to be of higher quality than HH’s, Domino’s pizza had a reputation for irredeemable insipidity and homogeneity. Certainly one would never dream of ordering from Domino’s if one could afford to spring for a pie from the ruler of the national pizzeriec roost, the substantially more expensive Pizza Hut. But over the past dozen-and-a-half years, Domino’s has undergone a revolutionary improvement in quality and variety that overtops even the one that I have witnessed chez Winn Dixie. Now Domino’s is unquestionably the best of the national pizza-delivery chains, and I would never dream of ordering from a Pizza Hut if I lived within the delivery radius of a Domino’s. But “order from” is very much the so-called operative word here, signifying as it does that Domino’s is a delivery-only restaurant and therefore incapable of providing one with a sense of emplaced proprietary continuity. And so even theoretically practically speaking, I can seek my proprietary-nominal metaphysical solace only at an outlet of one of the stalwart near-exact-handful of ancient national sit-down fast-food chains, and practically speaking, in the light of the Alltag imposed on me by my carlessness, I am left with only the Citrus Park-Keystone McDonald’s cater-cornered across Gunn Highway to the abovementioned Citrus Park Publix (although I do not despair of revisiting the Wendy’s on North Dale Mabry Highway at which I lunched with Lang Adams and his father after taking in a screening of Amadeus or Better Off Dead  at the nearby Mission Bell Square cinema in 1984 or 1985, for I believe I recently spotted Wendy’s signature red locks while riding by the spot where I recalled that eatery’s being sited). This McDonald’s was built at right about the same time as the Northdale Court McDonald’s, the hot pink-heavy “Miami Vice”-themed one mentioned in “Proprietary Names: The Name,” in the very late 1980s or the very early 1990s, although unlike the Northdale one it has featured a traditional earth tone-heavy McDonald’s color scheme from its opening onwards. I have transacted with this McDonald’s only twice since my 2020 move-back. The first time, was back in 2020 itself, when even Hillsborough County, Florida was still in semi-lockdown, such that the transaction perforce took place through the restaurant’s drive-through window and so afforded me no experience of its interior. I mention this first visit only because I did not dine during the second one, such that the first one affords me my most recent memory of the gustation of McDonald’s’ food. I believe I accompanied my French fries with both a Quarter-Pounder and a Big Mac just so that I could acquaint myself with the latest incarnations (and “inpanations”) of both of McDonald’s’ signature sandwiches, so that no one could accuse me afterwards of not really being up to date on the Wirthausgeist of McDonald’s. And I was pleased to register that minus the inevitable slight diminution in piquancy occasioned by in-transit cooling, all three menu items tasted exactly like their most recent counterparts in my memory’s palate—viz., the Big Macs, Quarter-Pounders, and fries I had not infrequently purchased and consumed at the main two-story McDonald’s in downtown Baltimore (which may have shut its doors as anciently as 2010) during dozens of mid-oughties lunch breaks. I was not vouchsafed an opportunity to inspect the Citrus Park-Keystone McDonald’s’ interior until two years later (i.e., two years ago, i.e., at some point towards the end of 2022), when my mother took my two nephews thither for lunch, and I accompanied them. I found to my disappointment that while the restaurant retained a broadly earth-toned color scheme, not a single square foot of it could have been exchanged with a McDonald’s of the very late twentieth century. The McDonald’ses of that quasi-epoch flaunted the syntheticness and prefabricatedness of their facture with dazzlingly shiny plastic booth banquettes and single-hued vinyl formica-topped tables (even if many of them touchingly sought to offset these qualities with fragments of organic warmth like potted ferns and imitation stained-glass booth partitions). The Citrus Park-Keystone McDonald’s of 2022—the first I had entered in donkey’s half-decades—was instead entirely accoutered in a bargain-basement version of a sort of Japanese-cum-Scandinavian interior-design style that I had first encountered at certain mid-to-upmarket Baltimore nightclubs and restaurants during the micro-epoch in which I had been wont to lunch at the downtown McDonald’s—a style consisting of rusticated surfaces of granite or wood that invariably met at the sharpest of right angles. The evocation was not a particularly pleasant one, and not merely because the granite and wood in this case were manifestly artificial (hence the attributive “bargain-basement”), for although I had spent a fair number of pleasant evenings in or at the nightclubs and restaurants evoked (and here it is only fair that I should name a few names: the Café Asia at the Inner Harbor, Sonar in its original Canton location, and the Red Maple in Mount Vernon), I had never found the Wirthausgeist or esprit de boîte of any of them particularly wholesome or edifying. To be sure, they had all been irreproachably hip—as hip as any eatery or danceria south of the Big Apple legitimately could claim to be, but that did not undividedly redound to their credit, for the hipness of the oughties had a decidedly louche and parvenu quality about it that had been absent from (or at least significantly less prominent in) the hipness of the nineties (i.e., the hipness of my Club Charles and Rendezvous-frequenting days). Nineties hipness had been centered on the relatively bookish and stylish Burroughs-and-Kerouac worshiping indie rocker; oughties hipness was centered on the utterly unlettered and fashionless club kid addicted to nothing but the latest so-called designer drugs and the latest trends in inanely repetitive dance music (“drum and bass,” “jungle,” “Bhangra,” etc.). Nineties hipness had been a refined and diversified continuation of seventies and eighties punk; oughties hipness was a coarsened and homogenized reincarnation of seventies punk’s innately and irredeemably naff contemporary, disco (sorry, Whit!). The Nachtlebensgeist of oughties hipness had made going out a drearily demoralizing experience for anyone seeking to cling however tentatively to the always fragile and semi-fictional connection between contemporary hipness and nineteenth-century bohemianism, and the discovery that the McDonald’s of the 2020s had been infected by the décor of oughties hip nightlife could not but have been a demoralizing experience for anyone who had thitherto regarded fast-food dining as an intrinsically  wholesome (if naffer-than-disco) family-oriented or kid-friendly activity. In togging its inner self out in the matte, subfusc sub-finery of oughties nightlife, the McDonald’s of the 2020s seemed to be at once touting for the custom of so-called Millennials already nostalgic for their early majority and urging the so-called Zoomers and Alpha-ers to put away wholesomely childish things in favor of the wafer-thin trappings of a morally and intellectually barren early adulthood. (In all fairness to Mickey D’s, though, I must acknowledge that it is possible that the redecoration scheme now in point was at least in part a so-called knock-on effect of the late-1980s or early 1990s-originating consumer-advocacy campaign that impelled the corporation to scale back its marketing to children via the above-discussed dramatis personae of McDonaldland to the point that Ronald McDonald himself rarely any longer made appearances in television advertisements and Conan O’Brien’s late-night team produced a sketch in which that clown was obliged to seek employment at Burger King; a campaign that absurdly claimed that “fast food was the new smoking” and that hence those characters’ influence was as detrimental to children’s long-term health as the influence supposedly exerted on their buying choices by the notorious and doomed cartoon cigarette mascot Joe Camel.) But even more demoralizing “blasts from the past” lay in store for me at that McDonald’s. First, on stepping into the men’s restroom (for restaurants in the state of Florida had mercifully not yet [and still have not yet] succumbed to the eyechart lobby’s demand for universal urinary-cum-defecatory sexual desegregation), I found that it both looked and smelled of not having been given a thorough cleaning in recent historical memory and that the urinal did not properly flush (i.e., that when one actuated its flushing mechanism it simply gurgled a bit without sending a ripple through its contents, let alone replacing them with undefiled water). To be sure, not having been born twenty-four or fewer hours earlier, I had been obliged to make use of numerous unclean and dysfunctional public restrooms over the years, but those years had not begun until my relocation to Baltimore. My earliest memory of an encounter with such a restroom dates back to the spring of 1995, my first spring of residence in that city, to an extremely greasy spoon in Fell’s Point, the city’s flagship nightlife district, where my visiting brother and I were obliged to make use of the lady’s room because the men’s room was out of order; my second to some unspecifiable moment less than a year later, and to another establishment in Fell’s Point, a “legendary” or “classic” Baltimore bar called The Admiral’s Cup—and aptly so, I ruefully reflected upon gingerly-ly availing myself of its athletic support-shaped (and barely more than AS-sized) urinal ensphered by a cloud of gnats and houseflies. Of course the unsanitary bathroom at my formerly friendly neighborhood Florida McDonald’s was first and foremost disturbing in immediately sensuous terms. But that unsanitariness’ evocation of Baltimore nightlife was only slightly less disturbing, for like the evocation thereof produced by the change in décor it seemed calculated to attenuate the McDonald’s “brand’”s classic aura of kid-friendliness. And as I stepped out of the men’s room and back into the main dining area, my eyes alighted on a sign on the opposite wall that as far as I was (and am) concerned might as well have read “Abandon all hope, ye who exit thence” inasmuch as it actually read, “No loitering. 30 minute time limit on consumption of food.” I had first beheld such a sign more than a quarter-century earlier, and in fact during the selfsame spring-of-95 Baltimore visit of my brother that had witnessed our encounter with the unclean Fell’s Point ladies’ room, in the dining area of the McDonald’s at 29^th and Greenmount Avenue. I suppose we had repaired thither simply because neither of us had much money to spend and because McDonald’s was the closest fast-food outlet to my apartment at 31^st and St. Paul Streets. By then I had already learned that Baltimore was a town with far more wrong sides than right sides and that Greenmount Avenue marked the boundary between my particular right side and the nearest wrong one, but I suppose I had reckoned the McDonald’s name (like the Kentucky Fried Chicken name of the KFC outlet on the other side of Greenmount) was a guarantor of civic normalcy within the restaurant’s immediate precincts. But those precincts had turned out to exude a combination of squalor, unfriendliness, and danger that impelled my brother to dub them (a bit hyperbolically, I admit [and would have admitted even then]) “Gangland USA.” And so perhaps the appearance of the sign within the restaurant should not have been shocking. And yet it had been. And to this day I am of the firm conviction (and not merely convinced [See “Customizing the Corpse for the Coffin” if you are mystified as to why I am one and not the other]) that it was altogether normal and decent of me to be shocked by that first sighting of that sign. Why? Well, I suppose first and foremost because I had thitherto been accustomed to seeing “No Loitering” signs posted exclusively on the exteriors of places of business, chiefly alongside the front entrances of so-called convenience stores, and because it is to such exteriors that “No Loitering” signs properly and exclusively belong. For a business—any business of any sort—is of course well within the bounds of civility to warn against loiterers on its doorstep, inasmuch as the sole purpose of a commercial establishment’s entrance or exit is to facilitate the movement of customers into or out of its premises, such that anyone who insists on lingering thereat is perversely thwarting that purpose and therefore worthy of being interpellated by default as a suspicious character. But for any customer-oriented business to post a no-loitering sign within its premises is an unpardonable affront to its customers, who have in any case purchased or agreed to purchase the right to linger on the premises via the proffering of a sum of money corresponding to the pre-stipulated price of their goods or services offered on the premises. And for a sit-down restaurant, be it ever so inexpensive, to post such a sign is especially gallingly insolent—for the customers of such a business are after all officially and hence more than merely fictionally its guests: not for nothing are restaurants and lodging places collectively known as the hospitality industry. And of course the addition of any time-limit on food-consumption to such a sign in such a setting is perforce trebly galling, and galling in a quasi-literal sense, for the consumption of food is an activity that manifestly requires a certain amount of time whose length cannot be imposed because it ineluctably varies in direct proportion to the quantity and type of food to be consumed and the masticative-cum-digestive strength of the prospective consumer’s organism. Thirty minutes may be more than enough time for a perfectly healthy 20-year-old of average build to consume a single Egg McMuffin, but it is not nearly enough time for that selfsame 20-year-old to consume five Big Macs and an extra-large milkshake or for a diminutive nonagenarian with an ulcer to consume a single small cup of coffee and a small order of fries. Of course it was (and still is) rational and even understandable for a McDonald’s in “Gangland USA” to post such a sign inasmuch as a sizeable proportion of its guests were (and still are) likely to consist of ne’er-do-well hobbledehoys accustomed to convening at sit-down fast-food restaurants chiefly for the purpose of potentiating their e’er-do-ill-dom. But that posting certainly did not redound to the good fame of the polity in which the McDonald’s was situated, a polity that did after all style itself a city as unabashedly as McDonaldland itself did, such that its elected officials were duty-bound to punish ne’er-do-wells as zealously as Mayor McCheese was (or had been) wont to punish the Hamburgler. And so the presence of that sign ineluctably signaled that as a Baltimore resident I was living under the tattered auspices of a so-called (or so eventually-to-be called [for I don’t recall hearing the expression until the late 20-teens at the earliest]) failed state (or statelet [although in truth since about 1950 Baltimore has been more materially governed from Annapolis and Washington, DC than from its own city hall, such that “state” is perhaps the mot juste whether one takes its referent to be the State of Maryland or the US federal government]). “I see. And so you were appalled to see such a sign at the Citrus Park McDonald’s because it signaled to you that as a resident of unincorporated Hillsborough County you were living under the tattered auspices of yet another so-failed state (whether you took “state”’s referent to be the State of Florida or the US federal government).” By no means. To be sure, I was appalled by the sight of the sign, but not because it signaled to me that I was living under the auspices of a failed state. For the Citrus Park McDonald’s was emphatically not sited in a neighborhood that could be styled “Gangland USA” by any stretch of the most dystopia-ridden imagination. To be sure, the strip mall that it fronted had never been the most upmarket of retail locales; indeed, it had been seemingly condemned to lifelong lower-mid-marketdom at its very-late-1980s opening by being anchored by an outlet of the supermarket chain Food Lion, a sort of poor man’s Winn Dixie (but by no means any sort of man’s Save-a-Lot) that went belly-up only a very few years into the present century, and although the Food Lion has been succeeded by an outlet of Ace, America’s largest and most reputable chain of hardware stores, that mallette has always had a hard time holding onto respectable tenants (such that its newest one is a liquor store and its second or third-newest one an accursed smoke shop) and even to stay free of vacancies (and indeed, it has sadly quite recently lost the occupier of its second-largest spot, an outlet of one of my favorite chain bar-restaurants, Beef O’Brady’s [although en revanche, the Domino’s via whose deliveries I have come to experience so much of that chain’s abovementioned metaphysical elevation continues to thrive beside the ex-Beef’s space]). But it is cater-cornered to a solidly upper-mid-market counterpart, the Shoppes of Citrus Park, the site of my abovementioned Publix of first resort. And Citrus Park was by no means an even ever-so-slightly dodgy quasi-town or suburb; it had been an eminently respectable place in which to live and go about the everyday business and pleasure of life ever since my childhood days as a pupil at its eponymous elementary school, when that respectability was still inflected but by no means tainted or sullied by a slightly rural aura emanating from its lingering material associations with the orange-growing industry to which it owed its name, and more lately, beginning in the late 1990s, when the entire Tampa Bay area’s most-upmarket non-strip mall opened there, it had become downright borderline posh. For fudge’s sake (I may have then exclaimed to myself), that McDonald’s was sited a less-than-figurative stone’s throw from another strip mall, the Village Shoppes of Keystone Odessa, that housed both a pho-ery and a craft brewery! How much more infuriatingly upmarket in the most tweely up-to-date way could one get? So the sign appalled me in virtue of its grotesque incongruity and otioseness. But although it appalled me, it did not really surprise me inasmuch as although I had not yet seen it take the form of such a sign, I had encountered grotesque incongruity and otioseness of its specific unsavory flavor numerous times before, starting in the aestivus horribilis of 2020, when dozens of cities scattered all over the United States, including Tampa, were visited by the sort of synthetic so-called race riot that I had previously witnessed only in Baltimore in 2015 and that had in fact been confined to Baltimore and a sub-handful of other cities in the world (notably St. Louis and London [yes, the one in England, in which in 2011 a police shooting of a non-white person had likewise served as a pretext for a looting spree {Obviously my contention that such riots had thitherto been confined to a sub-handful of cities is bound to elicit cries of What about the riots of the 60s? What about the 1992 Rodney King riots? in correction of which I can only point the criers back to the adjective “synthetic,” which act of ostension is bound to elicit cries from a different set of criers that the 60s and 92 riots were synthetic in their own right, in response to which I can only say that it seems to me that if the earlier ones were not wholly organic they were at least appreciably less synthetic than those of the past decade-and-a-half}]). At some point during that summer I had found myself privately referring to this phenomenon as the format-painting of the worst of Baltimore into the rest of America, and I suppose I had latched onto that word-processing term format-painting because it felicitously denoted both the apparently mechanical quality of the method employed and the apparently aesthetic (or meta-aesthetic) motivations of its employers and its beneficiaries. Apparently, I then gathered, certain people had found the extreme civil-cum-civic disorder of the Baltimore of recent years beautiful and had wanted to impose it on the rest of the country. Of course (it now occurs to me) I had already witnessed exercises in this sort of format-painting from within Baltimore itself, whose 2015 riots may themselves have been (as it now occurs to me) partly precipitated by those earlier exercises. The principal and Ur-format of the earlier exercises had been furnished by the Baltimore-set oughties HBO drama series The Wire, which had brought to Baltimore a degree of absolutely unprecedented aesthetically inflected fame and “sex appeal,” inasmuch as no Baltimore-originating aesthetic artifact—neither the short stories of Gertrude Stein (the short stories of Stein’s more famous predecessor, Poe, never having quite been regarded as fully Baltimorean), nor the essays of H.L. Mencken, nor the films of Barry Levinson, nor even the films of John Waters—had enjoyed as much prestige in their own or subsequent epochs as The Wire enjoyed in the oughties. At least throughout the Anglosphere, The Wire was undoubtedly the most prestigious aesthetic artifact of that decade. People who thought even the most prestigious literary figures thereof—say, Paul Auster or David Foster Wallace—beneath their notice blanched at the thought of missing a single installment of The Wire. And so when people came to Baltimore, whether as tourists or as new residents, they expected to see re-creations of the squalid tableaux mourants of The Wire as a matter of course wherever they went within the city. And the city government (doubtless with the full endorsement of the abovementioned Annapolitan and Washingtonian real powers that be’d) was only too happy to oblige these connoisseurs of terminal degeneracy by relaxing law enforcement even in those parts of the city such as the Inner Harbor that had previously been treated as oases of safety and family-friendliness. But of course (I now reflect) the format-painting within Baltimore had not stopped in 2015, and it had not confined its inspiration-sources to the Wire either. One now supposes in hindsight that the squalor and the horror of both that program and the actual riots eventually proved too prosaic or low-key for the local connoisseurs, as if the urban disorder portrayed and actualized, respectively, by the two phenomena had not been spectacular or catastrophe-ridden enough, for as I mentioned in an earlier essay (an essay in which I also treat of the Wire-ification of Baltimore, albeit without explicit recourse to the concept of format-painting), the interior of the more-than-century-old cinema palace the Parkway when it reopened in 2017 was patently evocative of the 1982 dystopian horror film Escape from New York. Instead of restoring to the interior its inaugural Belle-Époque glory the reopeners had left it in the appalling state of dilapidation into which it had fallen when it had closed its doors in the early 1970s after many ignominious years of service as a pornography theater, such that when one went to see a film there, one felt as if one were among the criminal squatters who are seen confabbing with and stabbing each other in comparably ancient-cum- formerly splendid architectural surroundings in Carpenter’s film. And of course (it now occurs to me), the redecoration of the Citrus Park McDonald’s was itself an instance of format-painting and moreover an instance-thereof doubtless initiated by the same Millennial cohort that had initiated or was to initiate (for regarding the date of the redecoration I can of course only specify a terminus ante quem of late 2022) the summer-of-2020 nationwide format-painting campaign. After all, oughties Millennial hipsters loved snorting cocaine in the bathrooms of dance clubs as much as they enjoyed watching lowlifes shooting up heroin on the streets outside those clubs–so why should they not have sought to impose both the interior and exterior tableaux of their collective nostalgia-scape on America simultaneously? And of course (and here my present reflections merge with those of two years ago) all these non-verbal exhibitions of format-painting have been directed not only and perhaps not even principally at people who shared the aesthetic habitus of the painters; to the contrary, they have been partly or perhaps even mainly directed at people whose aesthetic habitus is diametrically opposed thereto—nice, normal, wholesome people who like to be in clean, well-lighted surroundings occupied by other people engaged in nice, normal, wholesome activities. They have inculcated on these nice, normal, wholesome people an art-appreciation lesson that may be verbalized as follows: “You may not live in the big city, but that is entirely to your discredit and shame, and so you must have the big city in all its gritty, shitty, bloody anarchic malodorousness shoved directly into your face. You may even live in the big city but think that city life need not be grittily, shittily, bloodily, anarchically malodorous, but in this belief you are woefully mistaken and so must be apprised of the erroneousness of your belief.” And the deterritorialized McDonald’s “no loitering” sign has extended that lesson into explicitly verbal territory without being reducible to the message that it explicitly verbalizes, for in being formally situated in the context of the ensemble of format-painting exhibitions, it perforce must be regarded as a kind of museum title plaque-cum-museum-program book for that ensemble-exhibition, a program book whose text may be summarized as follows: “You may think that in virtue of your preference for clean, well-lighted surroundings occupied by other people engaged in nice, normal, wholesome activities you are a better sort of person than an obstreperous, belligerent, gun-and-knife-happy hobbledehoy and that in virtue of your superiority thereto you are entitled to take as long as you please to consume your meal, but in fact your preference for clean, well-lighted surroundings occupied by other people engaged in nice, normal, wholesome activities bespeaks your abysmal inferiority to obstreperous, belligerent, gun-and-knife-happy hobbledehoys, and so you ought to be grateful that we have vouchsafed you the full thirty minutes instead of a mere quarter-hour. But as we already know that you will not be grateful therefor, we hope you choke to death in your effort to adjust to this new gustatory constraint (for we also already know that despite your ingratitude, in being a nice, normal wholesome person you will do your best to respect the rules of our establishment even if it kills you). To repurpose our 1970s jingle for these more enlightened times: You deserve a break today: not a mere temporary break from cleanliness and wholesomeness but a permanent break from life.” As I mentioned before, I have not been inside the Citrus Park McDonald’s since that late-2022 visit, but I have since passed by it hundreds of times, in the course of my weekly trips to and from the Publix at the Shoppes of Citrus Park. During one of the more recent of these trips I was particularly struck by the condition of the restaurant’s two roadside signs, the only identifiers of the restaurant to passersby on Gunn Highway. These signs are about three feet tall apiece and in design consist simply of the signature “golden arches” above a rectangle displaying the name “McDonalds” in white against a field of solid red. Even when brand-new they could not have been especially eye-catching, and now they are both in a positively eye-repellently unprepossessing state. The northernmore of the two is both faded and completely covered in mildew that one might mistake for hoarfrost if one didn’t know better about the local climate. On the other one the “golden arches” have been sun-baked and smoked into a sinisterly dark shade of orange. The sign’s rectangle remains defiantly red, but here and there the underlying white half shines through in a manner reminiscent of nothing more strongly than the surface of a dinner plate half-visible under the more aqueous portions of a dollop of the least dispensable fast-food condiment, ketchup. My recollection of the world of twenty five-to-fifty years ago is too limited and hazy to furnish any support for the conjecture that I am about to hazard, and I can think of no fool-proof means of fact-checking it that would not entail ransacking thousands of people’s personal photo albums (i.e., in search of, say, vacation snapshots with McDonald’s signage fortuitously present within their frame, inasmuch as one could hardly trust any picture “curated” by the company itself or its detractors to be representative), but here goes: surely the McDonald’s corporation of the late twentieth century or even of the first decade of the twenty-first never would have allowed any of the roadside signs of any of its franchises to cease to pass for brand-spanking new, let alone to fall into such a state of flagrant disrepair as the one now shared by those Citrus Park-located ones. Of course I am strongly tempted to assimilate the wretched appearance of those signs to the anarcho-tyrannical Gestalt of the restaurant’s interior, to infer that the malevolent-cum-maleficent powers that now be have knowingly forborne to renovate or replace the signs, that they have allowed them to become as hideous as they are lest any customer should escape his obligatory Two Minutes Demoralization by confining his custom to the drive-through. But even if the deterioration of the signs has resulted from nothing more or other than the passage of the reins of the McDonald’s corporation into more negligent hands, this passage in itself is balefully significant in the light of McDonald’s’s historic prominence—and perhaps even pride of place (for the most obvious alternative contender for that position, Coca-Cola, has by now acquired a quaintly quasi-antiquarian aura; for however often one may see or consume a can or bottle of Coca-Cola, one now thinks of a Coca-Cola advertisement by default as something appearing on an enameled tin sign posted at a roadhouse of the 1930s, not on a CRT television screen of the 1980s, let alone an LCD phone screen of the 2020s)–in the firmament of Occidental proprietary names. For the McDonald’s corporation of the late twentieth century would not have suffered itself to fall into negligent hands and indeed never would have felt in peril of falling thereinto, as it could then count on the most talented and conscientious business minds in the world’s vying ruthlessly with each other to become its CEO. And it could count on such ruthless competition for its CEO spot not only because nearly everybody in the world appreciated a Big Mac and fries but also because nearly everybody into the world was smitten with the mystique of the proprietary name qua reliable bespeaker of purchasable fungible infungibility—of the entity that is both completely indistinguishable from all others of its kind and completely unmistakable as an entity of any other kind. And so it seems entirely fair to regard the dilapidation of the signs in front of the Citrus Park McDonald’s as a certificatory seal on the suspicion I have already voiced in this essay—viz., that the retail proprietary name is being rapidly sidelined and that this sidelining is wittingly or unwittingly serving as the helpmeet of the supersession of the terrible proprietary heterogeneity I decried at the end of “Proprietary Names: The Name” by a de-proprietized homogeneity far more terrible. For call me old fashioned (“or something far worse than old fashioned,” as I am wont to append), but I happen to think that wolfing down a burger and fries and then picking up some clothes or toys for the kids or a new living-room couch or any of the other umpteen-quadrillion commodities on offer at the American strip mall in its heyday is a more wholesome way of spending a Saturday afternoon than smoking kilograms of marijuana or burning incense to a demon or having one’s hair ineptly trimmed by a surly money-launderette attendant. And even if the worrying demographic trends that the street-level advent of businesses facilitating these activities seems to register fizzle out completely, we shall still have to cope with the terrible problem of what to do with all that empty retail space. Per Philip Larkin, we Occidentals have been separated from each other by “acres of housing” for more than half a century. How are we going to be able to congregate in even potentially productive and agreeable ways, be it ever so rarely, once those acres of housing are further separated from each other by acres of vacant shopping malls and high streets? I am not thinking here of such supposedly “meaningful” and “community-building” but actually oppressively vacuous phenomena as the mid-twentieth-century bowling meets extolled by Robert Putnam (and thoroughly disparaged by the present writer in his 2009 essay on David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd); I am thinking, rather, of such classically mundane experiences as occasionally running into a friend or acquaintance by chance, a universally familiar experience even in the late-twentieth century heyday of the non-strip suburban shopping mall, then regarded as the absolute apotheosis (or nadir) of soulless massification, a mere holding pen of the parenthetically just-mentioned lonely crowd. At some point in the nineties, a very-late-twentieth century establishment cultural critic, a proper “shoeshine boy of the ruling elite” (no, not Tom Friedman, but someone of more or less the same unctuous bent) extolled the non-strip shopping mall as the reincarnation of the pre-industrial English village green. At the time this paeanette elicited many a groan of contemptuous incredulity from many a snooty “elitist” including the present writer, but now it seems as spot-on as an English village’s market cross, even if (per one of my essays on Johnson and Boswell) in pre-non-strip-shopping mall days the specific type of interaction I am extolling was as likely to occur in the biggest of big cities as in the tiniest dorflet. Certainly it would be preferable for people to run into their acquaintances in settings at least partially purposed for something other than spending and getting ([sic] on the inversion of Wordsworthian word-order), but if the alternative is for them not to run into them at all, I am happy to settle for a dedicated wallet and handbag-hoovering site as a sufficiently serviceable pis aller. For the time being, most Americans are still obliged to interact with each other in person fairly regularly owing to their continuing frequentation of supermarkets, but this frequentation continues only because most Americans find the home delivery of perishable groceries (for of the delivery of the imperishable ones Amazon has already got the market half sewn up) too expensive to justify its convenience, but will they continue to find it so when the alternative involves driving through permanent more-than-figurative no-man’s lands? And once they cease to find it so, how will the suburban supermarket find its survival any less precarious than that of its “inner-city” counterpart has long since proved to be?  Adorno’s apercu to the effect of “The ghost town bespeaks the rise of the nearest boom town” has probably already given up the ghost of general applicability, for while new suburban developments continue to sprout up on the fringes of our metropolitan areas, the ratio of commercial retail space to residential space in these new developments has presumably dwindled to near nullity. And nobody seriously believes that we can reclaim even a tiny fraction of the umpteen-zillion square miles occupied by empty strip malls for everyday human use by turning the former shops into youth clubs or old people’s housing or bulldozing them and replacing them with dog parks and nature trails. Not that we seem yet to be in any danger of having such doomed reclamation attempts forced on us en masse, for precious few people even seem to notice the increasing desuetude and abandonment of our retail geography, let alone the threat that it poses to our social cohesion. Indeed, bizarrely and disturbingly, the polemic against increasing proprietary name-mediated geographical homogenization that I decried at the end of “Proprietary Names: The Name,” a polemic whose minimum tenability is predicated on a burgeoning retail geography, continues in full vigor. Twenty years ago this polemic was completely wrongheaded in meta-metaphysical terms because it was predicated on a categorical error—viz., that of classifying units of commercial suburban real estate in terms of the genre of business occupied by them; thus it would view two suburban strip malls at opposite ends of America as metaphysically interchangeable with each other qua embodiments of homogenization because each of them consisted of two fast food restaurants, a video rental store, and a supermarket; thereby failing to appreciate that because the one consisted of a Mc Donald’s, a Subway, a Blockbuster, and a Piggly Wiggly whereas the other consisted of a Taco Bell, an Arby’s, a Hollywood Video, and a Giant, metaphysically speaking they might as well have been situated on separate planets as in separate sub-national regions. Twenty years ago this polemic was, I say, meta-metaphysically wrongheaded, but at least its meta-metaphysical error was predicated on an actual state of affairs inasmuch as proprietarily named retail establishments were still proliferating across the USA as speedily as they had been doing since the middle of the twentieth century. Now that American proprietarily named retail establishments are going out of business like nobody’s business (least of all their own), this polemic must by all rights be styled a “zombie polemic,” although the style is somewhat misleading inasmuch as it suggests that the polemic’s exponents of today are metaphysically identical to its exponents of two decades ago. It suggests, in other words, that the set of these exponents consists of a combination of old and middle-aged lefties who were young or middle-aged lefties back then and young lefties of today who have inherited or adopted the mindset-cum-agenda of the older ones. But in point of fact the left has lost all interest in attacking proprietary homogenization just as it has lost interest in almost all other causes not immediately associated with the safeguarding or fostering of sensual libertinage, and all of today’s proprietary homogenization-bashers—at least all of them I have ever heard of—hail from well to the right of center. This means that they are all vociferously opposed to many of the phenomena that have at least coincided with the sidelining of proprietarily named retail establishments—chief among them, mass immigration. Indeed, the most vehement and prolific proprietary homogenization-basher known to me is my informant regarding the penetration of Turkish barbershops into the Welsh hinterland, a man deemed too “controversial”—i.e. too far to the right of the so-called Overton window—to appear as a pundit on the allegedly far-right television station GB News. Like all his left-wing forebears he has chosen old McDonald’s as his whipping boy-in-chief. He pities the poor citizens of Cairo for having to behold the golden arches alongside the kebab shops and hookah lounges of their naughty nursery-rhymed streets. It seems to me that even if McDonald’ses were still proliferating in Cairo and had already proliferated to a point at which they outnumbered kebab shops and hookah lounges, the Cairo-ians would have bigger problems to cope with—chief among them the proliferation of their fellow Cairo-ians at a rate that has seen the population of the greater Cairo megapustule double over the past thirty years. Another of these fellows, a friend of the first who is known as the so-called dissident right’s leading “opinion leader,” has said that nothing makes his heart sink faster than his first sighting of a McDonald’s after touching down in Tokyo. As if anything could be more authentically Japanese than a Tokyo McDonald’s (apart, perhaps, from a Tokyo garage-punk band)! And as if any sort of entity in the present world stood more sorely in need of the services of a global version of the Village Green Preservation Society! These dudes’ party may affect to be a wake, but they are affecting to mourn the wrong decedent; they are partying as though it were still 1999 and the ghost of Emmett Kelly rather than of Ronald McDonald were being laid to rest. That they are doing so is perhaps understandable if not entirely excusable, for as unabashed right-wingers they are essentially duty-bound to defend what they love via an undialectical appeal to “tradition” (i.e., because all other defensible qualities such as “humaneness” and “justice” have been monopolized and corrupted by the left) and hence inclined by default to wrap themselves in the mantle of any entity or practice traditionally regarded as traditional. But as David Riesman pointed out nearly three-quarters of a century ago—i.e., when the McDonald’s empire was not yet a twinkle in Ray Kroc’s eye even if the Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain was already foreshadowing the Golden Arches’ roadside ubiquity—all modern Western societies have been post-traditional from their inception, which obviously does not mean that they have had no use for “knowledge handed down from generation to generation,” but it does mean that within them knowledge has never been simply unquestioningly handed down as “what we do” or “what we believe,” that within them there has always been an explanation or apologia attached to the transmission of every activity or belief, that within them one must always be told that one has got believe this or that or how to do this or that because it is the useful or morally correct thing to believe or  (almost always, let it be added, in cautionary contradistinction from people in other societies or within one’s own society who refuse or fail to learn how to do it or believe it and are understood to have consequently come to a bad end [in other words, always with an implicit understanding that an entirely different way of doing things or understanding things is at least in principle eminently entertainable {in this respect the Occidental collective who live in the most “traditional” manner, the Amish, are the most post-traditional of all Occidental subcultures}]). Accordingly, since ca. 1500 all naked appeals to tradition tendered within the Occident have either been erroneous or disingenuous. My informant about the Welsh Turkish barbershops, while presumably oblivious of the post-traditionality of the modern Occident insgesamt, is at least willing to concede that the Occident of the present is post-traditional, for he styles himself a postmodern traditionalist in ostensibly rueful acknowledgment of the practical impossibility of his living exactly in the manner of an inhabitant of what he regards as the golden age of tradition, which he would appear to regard as extending at least as far into the near-present as the 1950s. But as sadly mistaken as he is in supposing that his manner of living is traditional to the extent that it resembles that of a man of the 1950s, he is no less sadly mistaken in supposing that in living like a man of the 2020s to the extent that he cannot avoid doing so he is being “postmodern,” for in the 2020s “postmodernism” is as much a dead letter as Socinianism was in the 1820s. To be sure, its name suggests that it denotes some sort historical ultima thule, that in being postmodern one is as up-to-date as it will ever be possible to be, but this is (or was) all “branding,” and even the devisers of the postmodern “brand” could not have expected postmodernism to “blow up as big” as it has, for the “modernism” to which it was a “post” was itself a “brand” for a specifically artistic movement whose connection to modernity writ large was as contingent and debatable as any competing ism’s early twentieth-century artistic movement’s connection to its namesake (e.g., futurism to the empirical-historical future, fauvism to actual wild beasts in the jungle, and Dadaism to anyone’s dad). In any case, whether one defines it is as a body of thought or a phase of the Weltgeist postmodernism is a phenomenon indissolubly tethered to the last three decades of the twentieth century, a phenomenon inalienable from the conditions and relations of production and consumption that obtained therein and that have seemingly decisively ceased to obtain since. The postmodernists were united in their smugness at having supposedly revealed that the world of the late twentieth century was defined by its super-saturation with signs, by which they did not mean fixed, tangible information-bearers like the signs outside the Citrus Park McDonald’s but infinitely portable and replicable symbols; but at least the most illustrious of these signs turned out to be more implicated in certain fixed tangible realities than they imagined. The godfather of postmodernism, Jean-Francois Lyotard (d., significantly, 1998) is said to have positively reveled in the fact that the professorial chair he occupied at Emory University was funded by the Coca-Cola corporation because in his view a bottle or can of Coke was the apotheosis of the postmodern sign and the ultimate two-fingered salute to every notion of “authenticity” as a function of local provenance and situatedness.  But in truth, and as I have impressed upon the reader at several points in both this essay and “Proprietary Names: The Name,” although its disembodied and dislocated likeness was encountered in a myriad intangible forms and settings—on countless ubiquitously disseminated billboards, television screens, T-shirts, and the like—the bottle or can of Coke was “in the last instance” a concrete and only finitely fungible object that although it could be found in every country and region of the world could only be obtained at a handful of point-of-sale types in any given country or region—vending machines, convenience stores, supermarkets, and the like. Moreover (and as I have not yet made a particular point of emphasizing in either essay), the dissemination of all the billions of bottles of cans of Coke to their respective vending-sites around the world required a massive and massively well-organized system of materiel and personnel—of factories, bottling-plants, workers, shipping clerks, shipping containers, distribution centers, trucks, drivers, et al. etc.; a system of which every consumer of Coke was at least dimly aware in virtue of having to repair to one of the abovementioned points of sale to gratify his Coke jones, and consequently occasionally having to behold a Coke truck being unloaded or a pallet of Coke-cans or Coke-bottles being shelved. In today’s post-postmodern economic-cum-metaphysical dispensation, an entity like a bottle or can of Coke seems as impossibly quaint or as charmingly old-fashioned as a Chippendale armchair or a piece of Wedgwood stoneware. To be sure, as I have relentlessly impressed upon the reader throughout this essay and its predecessor, for all my lingering and not entirely remorseful metaphysical attachment to certain entities of the Coke-can or Coke-bottle type, I am at bottom (in two or more senses) a foe of the fetishization of such entities; indeed, not to put too fine upon on it, I regard such fetishization as a form of idolatry. All the same, I am even more wary of the class of entities that have all but completely displaced entities of the Coke-can or Coke-bottle type as foci of metaphysical investment in the present century—entities whose presence is not merely temporarily but permanently exhaustively deputized for by their semblances on television screens and these screens’ smaller and more portable younger siblings; entities that, moreover, hail from no specific place or time but are rather exquisite corpses assembled out of the disjecta membra of entities strewn about every corner of the globe and along the entire trajectory of history, such that it is impossible to “access” them by repairing to such-and-such a place at such-and-such a moment (or even, as in the case of historical personages or obsolete technological artefacts, to know that had one been at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a moment one could have “accessed” them). I am especially wary of these entities not only because I regard their detachment from temporal and geographical actuality as an evil in itself but also because, however vociferously well-“platformed” techno-loonies may continue to cry up the uploading of our minds to “the Cloud” as a supposedly imminently practicable project, we early twenty-first century Occidentals are and show no credible sign of ceasing to be as abjectly dependent on the compliance of our temporally situated material surroundings as our forebears of five hundred years ago or even five thousand years ago were on the compliance of theirs (“the Cloud” itself’s dependence on sprawling and towering quanta of real estate and massive influxes of electricity being a case in point of illustration of this supinity), and the extinction of our interaction with entities of the Coke-can or Coke-bottle type in those surroundings owing to the withdrawal of conventional retail establishments from our shopping malls, strip malls, and high streets, is causing an atrophying of our ability to cope with those surroundings, even as the smattering of unconventional retail establishments that have taken a tiny proportion of their place—the botanicas, crystal shops, and smoke shops—are only potentiating our engagement with the abovementioned phantasmagoria of exquisite corpses. And while I admit to being utterly at a loss for “effective strategies” for restoring that ability, I can assert with certainty that continuing to party as if it were still 1999 is not one of them.

THE END