Here's That Rainy Day

It's a song from the postwar period, I think. It starts like this:

"Maybe I should have saved those leftover dreams

Funny but here's that rainy day" 

The song is a lovelorn lament, of course. But I was looking forward to the rain, and so was everyone else. We were long overdue for a hearty soaking. Severe thunderstorms were predicted here and there, but for the most part just a gray, wet Saturday afternoon—the perfect time to hole up with a book that I might otherwise have returned to the library, unread.

But now one of my own "leftover dreams" resurfaces. It came to me as a book caught my eye that I'd purchased recently at Magers & Quinn —The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture & Consciousness. I haven't read it cover to cover--haven't read it much at all--but the gist of it is pithily summarized by Steven Pinker in one of the blurbs:  "A brilliant analysis of a major new phenomenon: that people care more about how stuff looks." The book came out in 2003, the pages are yellowing. (I only paid a dollar for it.) But I thought it might offer an interesting snapshot of the era when people were first seduced by the sleek lines and high density plastic of Apple products, for example.

But is this anything new?  For the last forty years at least, some segments of the population have been avidly buying and selling "vintage" artifacts from the 40s and 50s. Evidently that era has a style of its own—maybe three or four. Further examples—deco, art nouveau, Arts and Crafts—could be adduced ad infinitum.

The author, Virginia Postrel, knows this, or course. She knows quite a bit about the history of industrial design, and the efforts made by crafts people and designers to beautify things prior to our consumerist age. But she's driving at a different point:

To say that the 1920s were an age of aesthetics is true in some sense, just as it is true that the 1850s were an age of telecommunica­tions, thanks to the telegraph, and the early 1960s an era of comput­ers, thanks to the mainframe. But everyday life feels very different when such developments are still mostly the province of a knowl­edgeable or wealthy elite. Pervasiveness matters.  

But are the things on sale at Walmart today really that much more attractive than what we find in a Sears catalog from 1902? Maybe not. In any case, it's clear that Postrel is far more interested in those styles that are supported by the expanding affluence of the later twentieth century than in aesthetic values per se. We might "like" the toaster or vase we just bought at Target or Pottery Barn or Conrans, but would anyone actually call it beautiful?

Maybe what intrigued me about the book was simply the association of the two words in the title, style and substance. They usually stand opposed to each other. One is by definition something solid and even weighty, while the other is almost by definition superficial and flighty. "Oh, that is SO last week!" as the saying goes.

In the midst of this train of thought I was reminded of a drawing class I took as a freshman in college. The instructor, Tom Eggerman, required that we read an essay by the artist and illustrator Ben Shawn called "The Shape of Content." I don't remember what Shawn wrote, but I do remember that Eggerman, with his bald head, wry sense of humor, and thick, sandy mustache, gave the game away in class when he said: "The shape of content is form. Isn't that a great formula?"

The substance of style? The shape of content? Even the concept of form leaves open the question of good form versus bad form. Classical simplicity or baroque excess? We're getting a little metaphysical here, which is fine by me. But beyond the demographics of marketing strategies and style trends lies the work of art itself, beautiful and unique, elusive and inexplicable. 

How do we recognize it? We feel it. It captures, in one way or another, the spirit and truth of the life we're living, without actually giving it a name.

The afternoon storm turned out to be mildly thunderous but intermittent—patches of moderate rainfall but no thrashing trees or upturned trash cans. During the heaviest cloudburst the sun was actually shining across the street.

The plants are happy, no doubt. But I was hoping for a little more darkness and drama. (Am I longing for winter already?)

At one point I picked up a slim volume of poems by William Matthews and read one in which he describes golfing with his father, who is stung repeatedly by a swarm of wasps, but insists on completing the round. 

The last stanza goes like this:

I played to keep my father company.

"They're cells. The nest is the real animal."

I pictured their papery cone and tried

to think what the dark surge wasps pass from each

to each inside might be except the fierce

electricity of state, or family.