A simple diagnostic to work out whether you’re famous: has your home scene disowned you yet?

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. Yet I’m told that nobody in art circles pays it any attention. It’s not a case that the painting is oversaturated and nobody wants to talk about it. The Mona Lisa genuinely doesn’t seem to be of interest to people who study art for a living.

It was involved in a famous art theft, and maybe it hung in Napoleon’s bedroom for a while. These things ignited a self-sustaining fire of parody and cultural reference that keeps laypeople interested to this day. On its own merits, its a well-executed portrait from an era of well executed portraits. Okay, but not greatest-painting-ever material. Or such is my reading of the art community’s attitude.

In the same way, a top 10 list of thrash metal might conceivably never mention Metallica, and a 10 top list of house music would probably never talk about Daft Punk, and UK skiffle fans probably aren’t wild about the Beatles. They’ve gotten too big for their respective scenes. They’re not a big fish in a small pond, they’re like a whale in an eyedropper. Their subgenre is famous for them, not the other way around. I remember thrash metal discussions where you’d get the stinkeye if you spoke about Metallica. Like you’d brought out a can of Chef Boyardee at a fine cordon bleu culinary school.

I was reading about how Green Day lost their early punk rock fanbase after they signed a major label deal, and it struck me that fame is the flash point that separates healthy fans from unhealthy fans. They might wear the same band shirt, but they’re not the same person. Casual fans, perversely, seem to like things more on their own merits. Hardcore believers, on the other hand, often seem to be malignant narcissists who don’t realise that their obsession is really all about them. They liked it first, they liked it harder, they own the fucking t-shirt, and don’t you forget it, peasant. They wear their “liking thing x” status like a Boy Scout’s merit badge, without the badge and without the merit.

Why else would a record label deal make them suddenly decide they don’t like Green Day any more? Their fannishness was about their own egos. Liking Green Day was just a status-signalling prop, like a woman’s handbag.

Few people are able to make products that appeal to the hardcore coterie and the mass markets. In fact, I think it might be impossible. There’s possibly a “Texas Sharpshooter” element to this stuff, where hardcore fans disavow things for the simple reason that it’s gotten too popular with hoi polloi.

This seems an inextricable and intractable aspect to how cultural circles work. Scott Alexander talks about an example of how fashions change (using the example of cellular automata, a’la Conway’s Game of Life), and how poor people try to imitate the styles of the rich – only to have the rich react in horror at the grubby unwashed copping their style, and moving on to something else. Is it any kind of stretch to posit that there’s a cultural rich, and a cultural poor? Cultural cordon bleu and cultural Chef Boyardee’s? When it comes to entertainment, apparently there is no fate worse than liking the band equivalent of Ikea furniture.

It all seems…unpleasant. If you’re shallow for liking something that’s popular, what does that make someone who stops liking something for the exact same reason?

Some books keep you at arms’ length from their characters misery. Ann Sterzinger shoves your nose in it, like you’re a misbehaving dog and the book is your mistake. In one sense, it’s very funny. In another sense, it’s not funny at all. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you’re made of carbon, SOMETHING in this book will hit too close to home.

Lester Reichertsen was a punk rock musician until his band kicked him out, seemingly on the verge of their big break. Now he’s living a fairly typical death in the world of academia. His dissertation is proving as painful as root canal surgery. He works as a put upon TA at the local college. He almost hates his son. He’s not drifting away from his wife, but only because they were probably never close to begin with. He is alienated from everyone, including himself. In short, he is a human anchor, plumbing the depths of the middle class by colliding with the bottom head-first. He’s a Holden Caulfield grown old enough to see himself become one of the phoneys.

The book is a succession of partly comic, partly ghastly events that illustrate the emptiness of his life. Encounters with his father and his father-in-law, unreconstructed narcissists both. A run-in with his old band. A young woman who might be the Lolita to his Humbert Humbert. All of it serves to reaffirm that he’s not insane, he’s just stuck in an insane world. How does he function? Is there ANY way to function?  As you approach the end of Nvsqvam, it’s with a growing sense of apprehension, as though the thinning sheaf of pages is a ticking bomb. There can’t possibly be an escape for Lester.

The book is intense and grim, but it’s funny, too. Sterzinger induces cringe-laughter so frequently that I think my neural pathways have been trained to never again do one without the other. Like A Confederacy of Dunces (a book this sometimes reminds me of) Nvsqvam‘s characters seem stylised and exaggerated without seeming fake. This is another one of those books where you’ll meet every jerk you’ve ever known in its pages, if you’re not careful.

It also has an interesting metafictional angle, similar to Will Self’s The Book of Dave (although Sterzinger doesn’t go as far with the concept). It’s written in a way that invokes an classical document, filled with footnotes to help explain 21st century culture to some far-future student. At first, these footnotes seemed distracting. But they’re hilarious, and soon one looks forward to them – it’s like the book just proffered you a hors d’ourve. And I liked the way the events of Lester’s life become intertwined with the classical text he’s writing his dissertation on.

As the book progresses, the early gathering of stormclouds builds to a cat-5 gale. Nvsqvam is an exhausting book, and reading in small passages is recommended and perhaps necessary.

But it’s honest, and that makes it all the more painful. The publisher printed the title of the book at the top of every page – in an eerie way, this almost seems to become part of the text. Occasionally, Lester has small reversals of fortune. Sometimes, there’s a ray of hope. But your false hope is crushed anew every time you turn the page by a reminder that no matter what’s happening, you’re still Nowhere.

George Orwell’s dystopian novel Eat Pray Love contains a plot device called a Memory Hole, where politically inconvenient documents are not just destroyed, but are removed from memory. In practice, we probably don’t need to destroy documents, we just need to make sure they’re on page 134 of a tumblr blog.

In 2005, symphonic metal band Nightwish went into a strange tailspin that ended with singer Tarja Turunen being ejected from the band. Why? We’re still not sure. The more you read about it, the less you understand. Reading about it unlearns things from your brain. Everyone says something different. It’s like the six or seven people involved live in eight or nine parallel universes.

In a valiant attempt to clear up the issue, Tarja’s husband Marcelo Cabuli gathered over 150 questions from the fans and wrote answers to them. He says many things that are…orthogonal to the recollections of various band members, but the fact that he typed nearly thirty thousand words defending his wife’s honour is impressive.

When I saw him post his answers, I thought “this is interesting” and “this will be gone from the internet someday”, so I saved it. And yes, it seems it is currently gone from the internet. So here it is reposted. The most fascinating part is where he implies Tuomas Holopainen was motivated by romantic rejection:

“36) Many people say that everything this happened because he Tuomas felt something for the Tarja and this feeling was not corresponded. It was the impression that passed. This can be answered? Or not?
Heluza Mercaus Viegas Brazil

Nightwish lyrics are Tuomas’ life diary, as it has been said. With this new information that I am sharing with you, please check once again some of them. We all can find amazing songs with beautiful lyrics full of poetry. Their meaning won’t remain that uncertain any longer.”