Original essay - I flew from Ohio to Georgia Sunday night

I flew from Ohio to Georgia Sunday night, while the world and the airline industry were still recovering from Friday's mass computer failure. My flight was delayed by about 3 hours. It was the last flight of the evening, and only the second Delta departure on Sunday. They'd managed only one plane Friday and another on Saturday. The Dayton airport was nearly empty when I got there.
 
When I arrived in Atlanta, the airport looked like a refuge camp, or a Circle of Hell. We'd been delayed taking off and rerouted to different gates twice after landing, nearly doubling the length of an otherwise short flight. Every seat in the gate area was full, and most of the floorspace. People reclined, laid down, slept, or tried to stay awake. They looked like they'd been there too long already, and there was no end in sight.
 
I passed a queue of people twenty gates long, stretching from C10 to C30. I don't know what they were lined up for - no one plane could hold them all. Most of the shops had their lights off and security gates locked. Starbucks was closed temporarily while they waited for an emergency resupply. One cart had just arrived, and I passed two more, stacked my height with boxes, as I walked to the end of the concourse. The arrival and departure boards were a sea of red, every flight delayed or canceled. Every gate was full of people, waiting, waiting. A few people ran, to catch connecting flights perhaps, but it looked almost insane to hurry in this place where so few moved at all.
 

departure screens showing flight delays, image by me

 
The plane train was out of order. There was no sign, no announcement, but I gathered from the way no one else stopped to wait for it, and I let myself become part of the crowd, the tide flowing toward the baggage claims and exits. From the moving walkways I saw people lying against the walls. Between the C and B concourses there are museum-like displays, tables covered in text. Each of those prime spots was claimed by a large White man using it as a shelter. One use the plug point to power his CPAP machine while he slept, the mask just visible beneath a baseball cap worn over his face.
 
The next plane train station was completely full. I realized that half the loop was closed, so instead of its usual continuous operation, it was now bussing back and forth along a single piece of track. The train arrived, going our way, the doors opened. Some squeezed in, but there wasn't enough room, not nearly enough room for everyone. I kept walking. Between B and A the lights are dimmed, the decor a mock forest. No one could lay down on these floors because there were simply too many people. People with no gate, no flight, no hotel, nowhere to go, nothing to do but wait. So they sat and hugged their knees, tried to keep their bags close, read their phones or tried to sleep. On the moving walkway, I coasted past them, a fortunate spectator, with nothing but luck and chance to thank for the improvement of my condition over theirs.
 
Past the A concourse an overflowing crowd blocked the exit. The walkway, insensate and mechanical, conveyed us forward at a steady speed, the world's weakest unstoppable force, propelling us into an immovable mass of our fellows. The regular path ahead was closed, everyone was being routed onto an escalator. I saw a man lose his balance and begin to topple backwards, but those in front of me caught him and set him right. Again, the machine worked at its prescribed pace, and dumped us at the top into another too close crowd. I nearly fell, and tried, even as I regained myself, to hurry out of the way, to avoid bumping anyone behind me like a domino.
 
We took an irregular route to the ticketing counters, the baggage claims, the exits. Half the hallway was coned off for cleaning, funneling us more narrowly, claustrophobically than the space itself might allow. Atlanta's security was closed and caged off. No one else was getting in tonight, and the only ones leaving were those of us with somewhere to go. I passed through revolving doors I've never seen or used before, and arrived in the main lobby. A few people waited by nearly empty luggage carousels. Between them, hundreds of suitcases were lined up and cordonded off. The luggage office was full and overflowed, more suitcases standing, waiting, in front of the glass doors.
 
Finally, finally, I took the last escalator down to the shuttle that would take me to my parking lot. I was out.
 
 
Note: I don't know how often I'll write original essays to post here, but this experience was strange enough, and noteworthy enough, that I felt I had to write something down about it.

Part of Your World

 

Part of Your World

by Stephanie Strohm

art by Kelly Matthews and Nichole Matthews

adapted from the novel by Liz Braswell

Disney Hyperion

2018, adapted 2023

 

 

Starting about ten years ago, Disney has begun putting out a series of YA novels called Twisted Tales that are basically like Marvel What If? stories, except for Disney movies. That series is still ongoing, but this year they've also started publishing graphic novel adaptations of the earlier books. Part of Your World is the first of these YA comics. In Marvel style, we might ask "What if ... Prince Eric married Ursula the sea witch instead of Ariel the little mermaid?"
 
So this is like, kind of a fanfic sequel, with the original publisher's approval. I wasn't really sure what kind of quality to expect here. I was initially unaware that Disney's been selling these books for a decade now, but the premise seemed interesting enough, and I was intrigued by the cover art of an adult Ariel decked out as the queen of the oceans, with a crown, breast plate, a spiny conch shell pauldron on one shoulder, the trident, the whole bit.
 
When Ursula won, she transformed King Triton into one of her gross little sea polyp captives, and sent the mute Ariel home in disgrace. Ariel's sisters decided they liked being princesses and party girls, so they made her take on the responsibilities of leadership as penance. Without her voice, Ariel learned sign language, but became isolated outside of her official responsibilities. Back on land, Ursula remained disguised as 'Vanessa,' married Eric, and became princess of his kingdom. With Eric and many of the palace servants beset with a magical confusion that prevents them from clearly remembering what's happened, Ursula takes the reigns and immediately starts the kingdom on vanity projects and wars with their neighbors.
 
Sometimes I think that, contrary to what Tolstoy said about unhappy families, that all bad leaders are bad in pretty much the same ways. They may look different, but that's mostly window dressing. Inevitably, they collect sycophants, punish critics, take in too much of the community's resources and use them to enrich themselves, reward their friends, and build monuments to themselves. They try to crush any way people might form groups that could give them strength in numbers, they drain the trust from society by encouraging spying and snitching. The rules apply only to the ruled. And sooner or later they'll want to send you and your children to die in a land war that is essentially a personal conflict between themselves and some other leader (good or also bad) who wouldn't accede to their demands. All of this is inevitable, even if the statues and slogans look a little different each time. For awhile, maybe this seems okay if you're one of the sycophants or friends, if you don't mind everything being wrecked and ruined around you, but ultimately it's still like having a comfortable seat to watch the house you're inside get burned down.
 
Anyway, Ursula is a bad ruler, Ariel is seemingly a good one, a servant to her people, and Eric is befuddled and spends his time writing operas. As the story opens, he's just written one that accurately recounts the events of Disney's The Little Mermaid, suggesting that he may be regaining his senses. A seagull brings the news to Ariel, who decides to return, although initially not for Eric, but to rescue her dad.
 
With the power of her trident, Ariel can temporarily turn herself into a human without needing extra help, so she does, and goes to sneak into the royal palace. She meets a couple servants, who recognize her and thus regain their memories, and steals back her voice, which Ursula was keeping in a locket. This tips Ursula off, since she immediately realizes what it means when she gets her own real voice back.
 
The next part of the book is structurally repetitive, but the conversations the characters have change enough to keep things interesting. Ariel sneaks onto shore, she doesn't find Triton but does talk to Eric, they achieve some degree of reconciliation, Ariel returns home and talks to one of her sisters, Eric learns more about how Ursula's been ruling while he wasn't paying attention, and confronts her some about it. Ursula keeps threatening to execute various people if Ariel or Eric cross some red line, but never actually stops them.
 
This is the part of the book that felt the most like fanfic to me, partly because of the episodic format, but mostly because it had so much embedded meta-commentary about the original story. Ariel gets to scold Eric for not being able to tell her and 'Vanessa' apart, and Eric gets to offer a possible defense. They debate why mermaids are sexy but octopus women are gross. Eric realizes that Ursula's dependency on contracts makes their marriage vows much more binding for her than they would be for a human wife. It's the kind of thing readers talk about afterward, but coming out of the mouths of the characters.
 
The culmination of all this is that Eric and Ariel come up with a plan to expose Ursula to the public. Meanwhile, she plans a mass human sacrifice of that same public to 'a great old one' whom she invokes by chanting a text she got when she invaded Carcosa, a text that includes "ia ia!" and "phtagan" ... yes that's right, Ursula the sea witch is summoning Cthulhu! There's a great page where the whole crowd grasps their heads in pain as the madness starts to take them.
 
But fortunately, of the two dueling plans, it's Ariel's that succeeds. Triton is freed, Ursula dies, and Eric and Ariel start dating again, both as grown adults, this time on a far more equal basis.
 
I'm definitely not going to read all of these, but as a proof-of-concept, Part of Your World shows that one of these stories can be pretty good, so I might read another if one interests me.

Fantastic Planet

 

Fantastic Planet

by Stefan Wul

translated by Anthony Georges Whyte

Creation Oneiros

1957, reprinted 2010

 

 

Fantastic Planet is a 2010 English translation of French scifi author Stefan Wul's 1957 novel Oms en serie. Avid followers of the blog might remember that I read the graphic novel adaptation of Wul's book Trapped on Zarkass awhile back.
 

Fantastic Planet is also the English language title of La planete sauvage, the 1973 animated film adaptation of Oms en serie, which has kind of attained cult movie status in the US. That film is the first way I encountered the story, and after reading the book it was based on, I think the cartoon might be the best version of the story.
 
I missed my chance to buy my own copy of this book when it first came out, and now it's basically not available for sale at any price. Fortunately the ILL office at my library was able to borrow a copy for me! The book itself seems surprisingly cheaply made, considering. The author's name is misspelled on the cover. The aliens who are called 'Draags' in the original, the film, and the back cover, are for some reason called 'Traags' in the text. And there are maybe a dozen places where the space between two words is missing, combining them intoone.
 

Fantastic Planet follows the life of a human named Terr on the alien planet of Ygam. Terr is short for 'terror,' but also obviously a pun on the French word for earth, terre. Ygam is the home of the giant Draags, compared to whom humans are tiny, probably the size of a GI Joe or Barbie. The Draags call humans 'Oms' - again, a pun; the French word for humans is hommes - and they keep us as pets. Pet Oms are believed to be unintelligent, although most can learn a bit of the Draag language. Terr inadvertently listens to a lot of his owner's daughter's audio school lessons and learns much more than usual.
 
Terr flees his owner's home and starts living in a giant tree in the city park with a colony of wild and feral Oms. His ability to read immediately helps the colony's scavenging efforts, and soon he sees a sign announcing the 'deomization' of the park, allowing them to flee to safety in time. Terr eventually becomes the leader. The Oms move into an abandoned Draag city, commandeer a trio of boats, and sail to an uninhabited continent, where they build a new city.
 
All the while, the Draag government slowly becomes aware of the growing size and intelligence of the wild Om population. They're aware of where we came from, and fear us becoming a rival, or even the new dominant species of their planet. Terr and the others repeatedly outmaneuver the Draags, repurposing their own technology to use against them. After achieving military detente, Terr asks for equality (and freedom for any remaining pet Oms), not dominance.
 
I mentioned that compared to humans, the Draags are giants. They also live their lives on a different scale. One Ygam day is equivalent to 45 earth days. Thus, each hour for the Draags is like two days for their pets. From the Draags' perspective, they live at the same pace that humans live on Earth, in terms of their lifespan and how much they do in a day. And so from their perspective, the Oms aren't just tiny, but quick, napping and waking constantly throughout each day, maturing quickly, and living for only a fraction of the Draag lifespan, usually only a year, at most two. The Oms succeed in part because they're far more intelligent than the Draags believe (even though they've lost their language, culture, history to enslavement), but also because they simply do everything much more quickly. Whenever the Draags decide at the end of the workday to do something tomorrow morning, the Oms have two or three weeks to run away in time.
 
There are two things I like about the way Wul approaches this. The first is that he establishes the basic difference in scale but doesn't get bogged down in details or realistic consequences. I associate this way of doing things with European scifi, and American literary authors dabbling in speculative fiction. Sometimes the looseness of this approach annoys me, but it really works here. Someone like Greg Egan would surely have spent several chapters explaining the imaginary physics and its implications, and any number of authors influenced by hard scifi, or like, Brandon Sanderson's systematic approach to writing about magic, would've felt honor bound to pantomime rigor. But Wul's more fantastical style works in this case.
 
The other thing I like is that although we're following human characters, the book is organized around Draag time. Journeys and other projects are described as taking hours or days or weeks - when what's unspoken is that this represents days, months, or years of human time. But the Oms think in the same terms and units as their captors. They themselves think of having children as 'breeding,' and when hundreds or thousands die in a single moment, the survivors act as though their own lives have no more significance than ants crushed underfoot. It's a little hard to explain how Wul does this, but when you're reading, it feels like the events are happening really quickly, even though we follow Terr from birth to old age. I would argue that it's this aspect of his storytelling, more than anything else, that distinguishes Fantastic Planet from any other 'aliens conquer humans' stories.
 
Considering the difficulty, verging on impossibility, of finding a copy of this to read, alongside the very faithful weirdness of the animated adaptation, I recommend just watching the film.

The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth

 
 

The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth

Understanding Our World and Its Ecosystems

by Rachel Ignotofsky

Ten Speed Books

2018 

 

 

The Wonderous Workings of Planet Earth is a graphic nonfiction book by artist Rachel Ignotofsky that functions as an introduction to ecology for young readers. Parts of the book are fully accessible to kids, other parts seem designed to supplement what teenagers might be learning in high school biology. Ignotofsky's art is charming, and has a clarity that often resembles an infographic or instructional poster. You could just about use this as a textbook, certainly it could serve as a starting point for other reading to learn more about the topics it introduces.

The heart of Ignotofsky's book, taking up well over half its pages, is a tour through some of the unique, distinctive ecosystems on each continent. In North America, we see the redwood forest, mangrove swamps, and Midwestern prairie. Globally, we take in sights like the Andes, Alps, and Himalayas; the Amazon, Sahara, and savanna; and several that might not've made the shortlist in other books, like the Siberian Taiga, Mongolian Steppes, the Horn of Africa, Great Barrier Reef, and Arctic Circle.

Each system gets a two-page spread with a full-page illustration paired with a page of text. Each illustration depicts the biome inside a terrarium, a motif that's both pretty and emphasizes the way each system is somewhat self-contained. We see terrain, common plants and animals, and diagrams showing how energy moves through the system from the primary producers, though all the consumers, and up to the apex predators. Ignotofsky also discusses the threats that human activity pose to each environment.
 
There are a few more ecosystems too, that fall outside the continental framework - a pond and fallen log, a drop of water, the open ocean and sea floor.
 
Before her tour of these ecosystems, Ignotofsky takes us on a brief tour of introductory biology and ecology, with an emphasis on understanding how each system is made up of multiple populations of plants and animals that fit together in particular ways. After the tour, we learn about the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, and water cycles. We also learn more about how humans have affected the environment, especially through climate change, and the many consequences of a warming planet. Ignotofsky also talks about steps we can take to help, which includes predictable individual actions, but also advocacy to your legislature, and poverty reduction as climate action.

A Magical Girl Retires

 

A Magical Girl Retires

by Park Seolyeon

translated by Anton Hur

Harper Via

2024

 

 

I think there's something of a cottage industry of postmodern novels about former kid detectives who are lost and floundering in early adulthood - Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails and Dustin Long's Icelander in print, Ed Brubaker and Marcos Martin's Friday comics, and The Venture Bros and Dicktown cartoon shows, to name the ones I'm most aware of.
 
Park Seolyeon's A Magic Girl Retires is kind of like that, but for transforming, Sailor Moon type superheroes. In the length of a novella, Park shows us a young woman becoming a magic girl, meeting the larger community, struggles to understand her place in this world, and ultimately (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the title) decides to retire from the superheroing life.
 
This is a deconstruction of the tropes of magical girl fiction, as well as an infusion of mundane reality into their stories. Our hero's biggest problems are depression, unemployment, and credit card debt. She lost her old job because of the coronavirus pandemic. The magical girls have a labor union, and when they talk about saving the world from a threat that could destroy civilization, they don't mean a monster, they mean climate change.
 

A Magic Girl Retires is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator. She begins the book suicidal. She's pushing 30, has no job and no prospects, and owes 3 million won in debt (about 3000 US$, a deliberately small amount, I think). She's rescued at the last moment by the Clairvoyant Magical Girl, who senses her potential, knows she's in danger, and want to recruit her, believing she might be the long-awaited Magical Girl of Time.
 
Our narrator struggles with self doubt, but she also really wants to do well by her new friend, her new opportunity. She tries her best. She makes a totem, learns to transform. She gets a part-time job at a convenience store to try to pay off some of her debt. And when there's a fight, a real all-hands-on-deck fight, she joins in and does her best to help. But she realizes, being super doesn't solve her problems, and her power in particular comes with new problems of its own.
 
I like what Park's done here. This book is short but economical, using only a few episodic scenes to show us a glimpse of a magical world and invite us to imagine what it might be like to live inside, before turning away and shutting the door.

The Armed Garden, and Other Stories

 
 

The Armed Garden, and Other Stories

by David B

translated by Kim Thompson

Fantagraphics

2006, reprinted 2011

  

 

There's a rare pleasure in wandering stacks of bookshelves, picking out a volume because it somehow catches your eye, discovering that you've never heard of this title or author before, flipping through, and feeling that spark of interest and curiosity that makes you want to take it home. Librarians call this 'serendipitous discovery,' and in this age that overflows with reviews, recommendations, suggestions, referrals, coming soons, see alsos, and curated lists, it's not how I, or most people, find most of the books they read, but it's how I found David B's The Armed Garden, and Other Stories, in a used bookstore in Portland, tucked between trade paperbacks of Aquaman and The Avengers.

Rare too is the pleasure of reading a book you found this way, discovering something unlike what you usually read, maybe unlike anything you've ever read before, discovering something of quality, something you really enjoy, and that you found by happenstance, that you wouldn't have found any other way. That sort of thing doesn't happen every day. You want to savor it when it does. The Armed Garden is something special, and I'm glad I picked it out.

This is a graphic novel, a collection of three short stories, fantasy stories set amid the historic past. All three are medieval. Not in the sense of high fantasy, with princesses and knights. There are rulers, yes, and soldiers, but also fervent religious faith, competing heresies, and deeply weird magic that operates on a kind of fairy tale logic, outside of human control. These stories resemble tales from the Bible, or folk tales, stories that people might've shared alongside gossip of a neighbor's house-sized vegetables, or the miraculous birth of rabbits to a virgin one village over.

In the first story, 'The Veiled Prophet,' the wind blows a piece of cloth onto the face of a fabric merchant. It gets stuck there, allowing him to assume the forms of Jesus, Adam, Moses, but anyone who sees his true face dies. He amasses an army of followers, and the attention of the caliph, who sends his own army.

In the title story, 'The Armed Garden,' a crusader receives a vision that compels him to strip naked and find a new Eden. Many people join him, in his nudity, and his earthly paradise, including wild animals, and even walking trees, all carrying swords. Other crusaders come to destroy the garden, though its leader has become a star.

In the last story, 'The Drum That Fell in Love,' a mercenary captain is killed in battle, and his company has him, skinned, tanned to leather, and stretched to become a drum skin. When the drum is played, he returns as a ghost. The mercenaries carry the drum into battle, but eventually they're defeated, and the drummer, who's fallen in love with the ghost, runs off with the drum. The girl and the drum have more adventures together, including finding the physical location of heaven.

Each story has a weird, dream-like quality to it. There's none of the systematic, almost science-like logic that many contemporary fantasy stories apply to their magic. This is like something older, something pre-modern. David B's art is mostly black and white, with a bit of sepia shading. There's a very good match between the feel of the art and the tone of the stories.

Status and Culture

 
 

Status and Culture 

How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

by David Marx

Viking

2022

 

 

David Marx is not a professional sociologist, but his book Status and Culture very effectively summarizes and synthesizes existing social theory and research into an account of the human desire for status, how we all use cultural objects to signal our status to each other, and how the way that we navigate each others' signals helps to drive cultural change. He marshals a lot of examples, connects dots that are often left separate, and writes accessibly for an educated but non-expert audience. There's real value in this kind of science writing, though it's more common to see a journalist sharing insights from physics or biology this way, and I think Marx has made a contribution here by bringing these things together and showing the steps of the larger process.
 
Marx's overall goal is to solve what he calls 'the grand mystery of culture' - basically, why do we agree to do some things and not others, and why does what we agree on keep changing, particularly in areas of life where we can't possibly point to a linear narrative of scientific advancement or technological improvement as an explanation? And his answer is status. High status people make certain choices to distinguish themselves, most of the rest of us try to imitate them to try to attain higher status for ourselves, us doing so reduces the status-value of those choices, and so those high status people move on to something new, starting the next lap of the chase. Some lower status people who don't have much hope of doing well in the race try new things that let them gain a bit of status locally, and a few of those attempts end up well-known when higher status people choose them for their own next round of distinction.
 
In the first part of the book, Marx talks about status, which is like, the esteem your fellow humans feel for you. You can have normal status, high status which means others consider you a 'good person,' or low status which means you're considered 'bad.' One source of status is possessing rare talents that are beneficial to the group; then higher esteem is your reward for helping everyone, and an incentive for others to do the same. But also, a lot of our status is determined by group membership, which we're likely born into, and only modified somewhat by our behavior. A mediocre aristocrat still outranks an excellent peasant. How much each component matters varies over time and place. The rewards of status are things like respect, deference, attention, praise, and access to scarce resources. Status feels good, so everyone has an incentive to want to maintain at least normal status, and to try to improve their position.
 
Among people who know you well, your status is determined by your category and actions, but among strangers and acquaintances, it's going to be based on who they think you are from the limited information they have available. So it's going to be based on cultural signals. It's difficult to lie with your signals, because you probably lack the knowledge and money to depict yourself as much higher status than you are, and being perceived as false or inauthentic is discrediting. But everyone has an incentive to present the best plausible version of themselves, to try to secure as much good treatment from others as they can.
 
In part two, Marx looks at the most common strategies for using culture to signal status, based on social class. People with new money fortunes signal their status with things that are obviously expensive and have low symbolic complexity, and thus can be understood by anyone who sees them - things like big houses, sports cars, flashy jewelry.
 
People with old money have less liquid cash, but more cultural knowledge, and have the prestige of having had their fortunes for a long time. They signal with things that are expensive but in ways that are less obvious to people with less knowledge - art, antiquities, and things that are very well-made. This provides what Marx calls an 'alibi' - they can tell themselves and others that they aren't buying these things for their status value, but for their high quality.
 
Professionals tend to imitate old money; they can afford some artisanal goods but mostly at the lower end, and not like, family estates. People without much capital tend to imitate the new rich, with things like sports logos, pricey sneakers, custom-decorated cars.
 
Historically, old money and professionals have insisted on the inherent superiority of high-complexity symbols, though as Marx notes (as did Bourdieu before him,) people with low capital have been denied the opportunity to receive the education needed to enjoy complex cultural objects. Low-complexity symbols require no special training to enjoy.
 
Attempting to increase your status outside of these strategies is riskier. It can pay off if you do something innovative that ultimately gets accepted, or it can result in lowered status if people think what you're doing is ugly or immoral. Subcultures are usually low-status young people trying to invent a new criteria for judgment, one that favors them. Although Marx doesn't mention it, sociologist Shyon Baumann has written about how both social movements and art movements are attempts to claim greater respect by elevating a particular social group or artistic medium up into normal status.
 
In the third section Marx shows how status drives cultural change, following the steps of Everett Rogers' model of the diffusion of innovations. Marx argues that while new cultural innovations can occur anywhere, it's only when they follow the path he's describing that they end up as society-wide trends. Already high-status people start the cycle by innovating some new cultural symbol as a mark of distinction. Historically, anything that uses rare materials or is expensive to make - because it needs a lot of time, labor, or skill - is a promising starting point. The innovation could also be lifted from a subculture or an artist. The point of every new trend is to mark its trendsetters as different, and better, than everyone else.
 
In order to reach a larger audience, the trend has to be reported on in the mass media. Initially, these reports will be limited to elite, tastemaking publications, where they will be seen by people outside the elite who want to emulate them. As a book critic, I'm participating in this step of the process, albeit in the least effectual way possible. Because the trend, in its initial form, is probably too complex and too expensive, it will be simplified as it passes from its innovators to the early adopters. It becomes a bit more standardized and defined. One of Marx's original insights is that trends necessarily change as they pass to larger audiences.
 
Once a trend is established among the early adopters, companies realize there's money to be made in mass production. This involves simplifying and cheapening again, but also allows a proliferation of (more-or-less formulaic) variants. The early majority mostly doesn't take their cues from the press, but from what they see on the shelves. To they extent they are reading reviews, they don't want to know that something is cool, they want to know that it's good, and why. (Actually, it's possible that my reviews fall here...) The early majority are people who fear losing respect due to following a trend that their peers will think is bad, but are happy to engage with something that is itself sliding down from high status to normal status.
 
Once something is fully normalized, it's also picked up by the late majority, who adopt the trend because they fear being perceived as low status if they don't. By this point, the original elite innovators have already jumped ship to the next new thing that will give them distinction again. At this point the trend has reached its simplest form and become ubiquitous as mass culture.
 
In Marx's final section, he talks about status and culture in the age of the internet, when trends no longer seem to mark the passage of time by replacing each other in succession, but instead appear to pile up in a perpetual now.
 
I thought this was a really effective overview of what social scientists have learned about status and culture, and that Marx put these ideas together in a more complete way than you usually see them. He also drew attention to lesser-discussed features of theories, and added his own insights, in ways that enlarged the value of the project. He also used a wealth of examples from nearly every domain of culture - fashion, music and art, food, etc in a way that helped illustrate the processes he described.