I Hate Celebrities

I feel like this book was the required text for a college level course.  The Frenzy of Renown:  Fame and Its History runs almost 600 pages and traces the concept of fame from Alexander the Great to Grace Slick.  Oh how the mighty concept has fallen!  Leo Braudy wrote this book in 1986 and to my mind, things have only gotten worse.

I decided to read this book, because as this blog title boldly states, I hate celebrities.  Steeped at home during my youth in healthy skepticism, I always look for the feet of clay in any hero.  I now find it perplexing:  my mother had outrageously high standards of excellence and nothing less than perfection attracted her praise.  Yet I learned that others broadcasting of their perfection was bound to be suspect.  I thought maybe this book would help me understand my distaste for what I consider to be unworthy poseurs.

Braudy does a scholarly job in tracking fame from when it was directly correlated to military exploits to governmental talent during classical ages.  He contrasts the definition of other-worldly fame with the rise of Christianity.  But the book didn't grab me until he got to the point where the describer of the famous overtook the man who sought fame.  Aha, mespoke.  The rise of the author, the one career I find meritorious of fame.  Braudy starts with Horace, Ovid and Virgil as realizing they could determine and crown who was worthy of remembering and thereby become the arbiters of status, gaining status themselves.  I loved it.

The book goes on and on detailing how individuals' sense of being noticed and remembered degenerated into the outlandish and outre.  Ending as it does in the mid '80s, it has only gotten worse.

The main idea I garner from the book is the conceit that a person's posture or exploits are only performed to attract an audience, the ultimate bestower of renown.  This is almost a Venn diagram of how to become famous:  the actor, the audience, and the time all need to overlay to have a person's "life" and acts live beyond death.

This impulse to "look at me" still strikes me as unbecoming.  I seek anonymity.  I love being a ghost writer, the power behind the throne, or at least the public face.  My efforts still seem transistory and nothing to etch on a tombstone.  I want to live only in the memory of a select chosen few who understand who I am as well as how I present myself publicly and what I "do."  Notice me:  I dress well, I smell good, I am witty.  So are many others (maybe not in this State capital).  But remember me more as a progenitor, not as a "star."