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Mr. Cogito loved the last emperor –it nails the genteel and bittersweet tone of its subject! The sic transit feeling reverberated so far beyond the monde fash, too…
In books the same thing is happening… the “couture equivalent” of prose seems increasingly marginal. One wouldn’t call fine writing ‘irrelevant’ by any means… but given how desperate it feels, it can be tempting to declare as much. (Some of us do so with divalicious frequency, anyway…)
Mr. Cogito also loved the film’s take on one of his favorite themes: No Future in Being a Peon! Harried seamstresses, fabrics fit for Romanovs, parties peopled by some new chapter of the Almanach de Gotha. Mr. Cogito thinks its high time to emerge for his big-time, second act: a sort of literary Lady Gaga. If everything proceeds apace, he’ll have accomplished this by New Years!
In all seriousness: the women who sew Valentino’s swirling visions into life are geniuses in their own right… I sympathized extra hard when he mentioned they’d hand sew “millions” of sequins onto a dress, as if announcing the advent of simplicity itself! Its like having a snarled 500pg MS thrown casually on your desk … Ultimately, its just patently true: being really good in a functional role is never going to get you anywhere! You have to constantly be hustling for it.
if one is bent on rising to greatness, it is good/irritating to be reminded of this… as if one needed to be reminded… “no one ever got anywhere just by being a really great assistant!” Yes, Mr. Cogito is aware! Mr. Cogito wants to be a professional genius! Mr. Cogito hasn’t figured it out just yet! Mr. Cogito is still working on it…
… Mr. Cogito worked in a very large publishing house, in a surpassingly large city, in an amusingly small apartment, in the least desirable part of a more desirable neighborhood, with far too many books, on a comedically penurious salary. He was given to dreamy and unmanageable reveries– of moving to Europe, become a chef, starting a newspaper, opening a bookstore, of painting miniature paintings, getting a dog, deleting all his email, marrying for love.
Mr. Cogito likes to stay anonymous, since he’s a cog in a ravenous, book-making machine, a machine that frowns on public diaries. A peon, Mr. Cogito is truly tops. But since his corner of employment is rapidly dissolving– like a clump of seawall decamped into the bay– he’s decided to talk about it, for whoever wants to read. It makes Mr. Cogito feel better.
