Dog Days of Summer
We are on the edge of Leo season as I begin writing this — the last hours of Cancer and her watery summer sadness lap at our heels and hearts. A month from now, students will be back in classrooms, and the heat and joy of Leo will be slipping toward the earthy practicality of Virgo. The wheel turns and returns. A year ago, while quarantined because of a false-positive COVID-19 test, I began a book project that I castoff and returned to, changed and discarded, picked up and put down again and again over the long 2020–2021 decade. As I am poised to return to it again — with a new plan and a new way of fitting the pieces together — and flashy Leo season is poised to start, the question of reputation tugs at me.This is not a new question for me or for 2021.
In the winter months, many of us were enthralled by Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton in which the whispers of Lady Whistledown turned the wheel of fortune for the characters. “Cancel culture,” the twenty-first century’s version of a scarlet A, is variously decried and lauded depending on who is being cancelled and on who is doing the cancelling. Beneath Bridgerton, cancel culture, scarlet A’s, and the grape vines of my city lie two related questions upon which this house of cards is built:
What is the value of a name?
What is a reputation worth?
After selling his name for an income of $1,000,000 a year in Netflix’s Halston, the titular fashion designer learns that names are the only thing of real value that we have —
“We’re given one name, Joe. Just one. And that’s all we have while we’re on the earth and it’s all we leave behind us when we’re gone. I wasn’t precious enough with mine and I sold it cheap — I didn’t even think twice about it.”
“Hundreds of millions of dollars ain’t cheap, Halston”
“But it is, Joe. You know how I know? I’d spend twice that to get it back”
— and any number of blackmail cases, whether real or fictional, insist upon the sanctity of one’s name, one’s reputation. Yet, Americans love a story about recreating identity; look no farther than The Great Gatsby or Into the Wild’s Chris McCandless renaming himself Alexander Supertramp. Beyond literature, the late artist Prince suggests a counterpoint to Halston: he abandoned his name and returned to it. When Prince clashed with Warner Bros. who, under contract, owned the name “Prince,” he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol. The name change caused record sales to decline and a myriad of other headaches — how do you talk about someone whose name has no sound? What were the values of the name without the artist and the artist without the name? When he reclaimed “Prince” after his contract with Warner Bros. expired, the artist continued to be one of the savviest innovators in terms of both music artistry and the music business.[i]
Taylor Swift — whose music business acumen mirrors that of Prince — has an entire album dedicated to the question of reputation. However, it’s on her album Folklore that she asks “Tell me, what are my words worth?” Beyond questioning the value of language, the lyric is an allusion to the poet laureate William Wordsworth. It falls among several allusions to the Lake Poets, a group to whom Wordsworth belonged. Unlike T-Swift, my love Lord Byron was rather less impressed with his contemporary Wordsworth:
And Wordsworth, in a rather long Excursion
…
Has given a sample from the vasty version
Of his new system to perplex the sages;
‘T is poetry — at least by his assertion,
And may appear so when the dog-star rages[ii]
Like Swift (and Prince and Halston) Lord Byron was well-aware of the supposed power of reputation. Once “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” by the time he penned the above lines, Lord Byron was living in self-imposed exile in Italy as a result of the scandal surrounding his separation from Lady Byron and rumors of incest with his half-sister Augusta.[iii] Remarkably — for our time, at least — he did not shy away from accepting responsibility for his reputation:
I have been cunning in mine overthrow,
The careful pilot of my proper woe.[iv]
We are now in the days when the “dog-star rages” — a reference to when the star Sirius occupies the same part of the sky as the sun — the time of year that the ancient Greeks viewed as harbinger of change and potential disaster:
Priam saw him first, with his old man’s eyes,
A single point of light on Troy’s dusty plain.
Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.
Achilles’ bronze gleamed like this as he ran[v]
Death is coming for Achilles, for Priam, for Troy. Physical death, material death even as their names, their reputations live on in our words. Of course, a fundamental difference between the likes of Lord Byron, Achilles, and Priam, and the likes of T-Swift, Prince, Halston, you, and me is the lifespan of reputation (or scandal) and the rise of document culture. Sing, goddess[vi] has given way to an era of degraded attention spans exacerbated by fast news, social media, and collective pandemic trauma. In the coming heat-haze of late-summer, reputations feel malleable. A portent: a reckoning is coming, a bluegrass rising. Will my song electrify you or electrocute you? Tell me, what are your words worth? What is that value of your name? And what, at the end of the dog days, does your reputation cost you?
As I finish writing this, the sun is in Leo and the moon is in Cancer. Nostalgia rises, less the “pain of an old wound” that Don Draper told us was nostalgia’s meaning, and more the actual etymology: from the Greek “nostos” meaning “to return home” and the Greek “algia” meaning “a painful condition.” Nostalgia is literally “a painful longing to return home.” This nostalgia is tempered with the knowledge that such a return is likely impossible — “longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.”[vii] Or, to say it another way:
Others because you did not keep
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.[viii]
The Dog Days of Summer are nearly over, as is this essay. From my balcony, I watch new vines unfurl, but I have no answers about names and reputations, pounds of flesh and pieces of silver. My book project calls to me and the weight of all my unspoken, unwritten words presses against my throat.
Listen to me and I will speak: but first swear, by word
and by hand, that you will keep me safe with all your heart.[ix]
The wheel turns and returns; the pen writes and rewrites; we are born and reborn. Return to me and I shall return to you again and again, dear reader. Virgo season — the season of the harvest — is nearly upon us. We must reap what we have sown.
[i] For more information about Prince and his name change, see Jessica Lussenhop’s “Why Did Prince Change His Name to a Symbol?”
[ii] Lines 25–30 of the unpublished dedication Lord Byron wrote for Don Juan
[iii] For those interested, I’ve written elsewhere of Lord Byron and his biography.
[iv] Lord Byron, “Epistle to Augusta”
[v] Homer, The Iliad, Book XXII, lines 31–38
[vi] An invocation to the muses which opens The Iliad (Lattimore’s translation).
[vii] Robert Haas, “Meditation at Lagunitas” and yes, I quote this line often.
[viii] W. B. Yeats, “A Deep-Sworn Vow” (1917)
[ix] Homer, The Iliad, Book I, lines 76–77.
