From a Diary of the Plague Year (13)

Sometimes I'm inside
hiding from the virus.
Sometimes I'm outside
hiding from the virus,
digging in the dirt around
fledgling vegetables
and forming flowers.

Inside or outside,
I also try to hide from
celebrities. Their faces,
peccadilloes, opinions,
and posts swarm. They're
not the norm but the fame
machine tries to make us
famished, hungry for
manufactured news

of celebs. It makes me
febrile, celebraphobic,
vised in by the virus
and the famous. I don't
know who most of them
are but must react as if I do.

Inside, old time reading
helps, hefting a book of words.
Outside, the worms and crows
and trees and fleas are not
famous and I am treated
as just another beast.


hans ostrom 2020

Celebrities

CELEBRITIES IN BED

They itch, scratch, writhe, sleep, snore. Yes,
all right, sex too. Also mites. Mites are a
problem for celebrities as they are a problem
for everyone else.

CELEBRITIES IN PUBLIC

They present themselves like peacocks or rubbery statues; OR
they become sullen and withdrawn like badgers; OR both.

ATTENTION IS THE COIN OF THE REALM

Celebrities didn't invent this system, in which
attention is the coin of the realm, not money,
which is, albeit important, secondary. Celebrities
are attention-capitalists who leverage attention
to acquire more attention. Pay attention!

CELEBRITIES ON THE MOON

It was the result of a mass-expulsion.

ANGRY CELEBRITIES

The mixture of fame, money, entitlement,
indulgence, and self-loathing sometimes
explodes like a souffle.

CELEBRITIES IN THE U.S.

They are represented to us as people we imagine
ourselves being while still being ourselves,
although they know we can never be like them,
and they know why. We know why.

CELEBRITY GRAVEYARD

I asked a tombstone for an autograph.
It refused. I offered mine. It declined.

CELEBRITIES GET TIRED OF BEING CELEBRITIES

Retired from acting, Cary Grant liked to watch
TV and eat a modest meal on a TV tray at home. Greta
Garbo did not want to be alone; she wanted
to be left alone.

CELEBRITY IS A CHRONIC ILLNESS

Society suffers from celebrity.


hans ostrom 2015

Attention, Please

The more people there are
(more all the time)
and the more media there are
(same),
the less attention there is to go
around. Celebrity
diverts rivers of it
like golf courses in a desert.

Whole groups, cities, nations, cultures
crave attention (more than ever),
partly because of the illusion
that they may receive it. An
epidemic of narcissism expands.

We manage ourselves as commodities,
with packaging, labeling, advertising.

It is the other attention-deficit
disorder, the more harmful one.
An insatiable mass-appetite. Add
Americanness to it, and
it becomes exponentially worse.


hans ostrom 2015

"Prizes," by Hans Ostrom

Paradigm-shift 327.B.3 (revised)
stipulates that anyone expressing
or harboring interest in winning
prestigious prizes, awards, honors,
etc., shall receive it or them. Oscars,
Nobels, National Book Awards,
Pulitzers, Grammies, Laureates,
Man Booker Prizes, Woman Booker
Prizes, Dude Booger Prizes, etc.

After a brief period of mass-elation,
everyone will become unenthusiastic
about such crap. Total devaluation
of such prizes will ensue (the process
began long ago, truth to tell).

Whether more important matters
shall occupy us . . . shall remain
something else to hope for.

At least celebrity will come
to look like a deflated soccer-ball
withering on a dry lake-bed.



hans ostrom

What She Realized

She realized one day
that what she had produced
in her field was as good
and often better than
what the famous in her field
had produced. She knew
she'd never be famous.
She understood the machinery
that established hierarchy.
She knew that proclaiming
her work was as good and often
better was a losing ploy,
and she knew that complaining
was the sucker's payoff.
So she chose satisfaction.
According to hard criteria,
what she had done was good
and even excellent. Let it
be that, she thought,
and let the rest go.



hans ostrom, 2013

Culture of Celebrity

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Here's a book I'd like to read, especially given the spectacle of the last 24 hours or so:


Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, by Su Holmes, published by Routledge in 2006.

Someone We Know

Someone We Know


"He's a nobody," people sometimes say,
as a way of saying the person described
should be ignored. Overlooked. Forgotten.
The sentence raises problems.

If the person were a nobody, he or she
wouldn't have a gender, and there'd be
nothing and no one to ignore. Also,
"a" nobody implies particularity,

when indeed we must assume that all
who constitute the mythical Nobody
are indistinguishable. If, however,
"nobody" is used only in a figurative

sense, even more problems arise.
Figurative nobodies--the obscure,
the abandoned, the betrayed, the
common, the exploited, the humble--

approach heroic stature as they
persist in their lives. Think of
an obscure waitress in Canada,
Uruguay, the Ukraine, or Lesotho.

To herself she's not obscure. She
performs tasks well, keeps herself
clean, cares for others, remains
patient and energetic amidst

persistent obscurity and impending
oblivion. How extraordinary. How
utterly not in keeping with the term,
"Nobody." The unknown, exemplary

waitress embodies somebodyness--
in secret, without hope of extraordinary
reward. At a news-stand, she glimpses
a magazine's cover, on which appears

the rendered image of an officical
Somebody, a Celebrity who appears
momentarily to have slain Time and
seized immortality. The waitress, the one

who serves, alleged by some to be
a nobody, smiles. Her smile is particular.
She is herself and specific, standing there,
just like someone we know.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom