{"id":112019,"date":"2017-06-23T09:44:08","date_gmt":"2017-06-23T13:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=112019"},"modified":"2017-06-23T11:59:03","modified_gmt":"2017-06-23T15:59:03","slug":"corporations-can-teach-you-how-to-fail-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/23\/corporations-can-teach-you-how-to-fail-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Corporations Can Teach You How to Fail, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_112020\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/newcoke.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-112020\" class=\"wp-image-112020\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/newcoke.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"563\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/newcoke.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/newcoke-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/newcoke-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/newcoke-1024x576.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-112020\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A bad idea.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What can we learn from Crystal Pepsi? What does green ketchup teach us? That corporations, our gods, are as fallible as we are; that no amount of market research can prepare you for the brutal realities of the marketplace; that it\u2019s okay to fail sometimes, as long as you can explain it to your shareholders. Above all, every expensive, high-stakes commercial failure carries in it the germ of our collective death, of whatever defect in our society will lead to our undoing. In Sweden, Dr.\u00a0Samuel West, a clinical psychologist, has opened a museum of failure, where visitors can worship at the altar of every dumb letdown that\u2019s ever graced the shelves of Walmart. It\u2019s not about laughing, he says. It\u2019s about reckoning with disaster. Alexander Smith reports, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/storyline\/london-bridge-attack\/museum-failure-opens-sweden-celebrate-our-best-errors-n769666\" target=\"_blank\">They saw marvels such as the Rejuvenique Electric Facial Mask, a harrowing Jason Voorhees\u2013style invention that promises in just ninety days to make you as beautiful as Linda Evans from <em>Dynasty<\/em>, who features on the box<\/a>. The Harley-Davidson eau de toilette was rejected by bikers who felt it damaged the brand, the female-branded Bic pens crashed and burned for obvious reasons, and while the plastic bike didn&#8217;t rust, it also wobbled alarmingly while in motion \u2026 Other exhibits include potato chips made with the fat substitute olestra, which has the benefit of helping weight loss but unfortunate side effect of diarrhea \u2026 Tech giant Apple features in the museum with its 1993 personal assistant, the Newton MessagePad, whose poor handwriting recognition has earned it almost mythical status among the history of bad gadgets \u2026 \u2018The media like to cover the museum because they get to show some funny stuff and write a clickbait headline,\u2019 [Dr. West] said. \u2018But the underlying message is definitely not a gimmick.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Poor Mikhail Bulgakov. He worked and worked and got nothing for it. Boris Dralyuk writes, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.the-tls.co.uk\/articles\/public\/mikhail-bulgakov-dralyuk\/\" target=\"_blank\">A central tragedy of Bulgakov\u2019s life: almost all his efforts to win official acceptance, if not approval, were stymied by his inability to produce\u2014and at times even deduce\u2014what was asked of him<\/a> \u2026 We get a keen sense of this ambition from Bulgakov\u2019s letter to his cousin, sent in 1921 from Vladikavkaz, where he first began to regard himself as a professional writer: \u2018At night I sometimes read over the stories I\u2019ve published previously (in newspapers! in newspapers!), and I think: where is my volume of collected works? Where is my reputation? Where are the wasted years?\u2019 It is painful to consider how little he would be able to boast of after another nineteen years of back-breaking literary labor: one volume of fiction; journal clippings of feuilletons, short stories, novellas, and part of his novel\u00a0<em>White Guard\u00a0<\/em>(1925); as well as a handful of staged plays\u2014many of which were quickly banned \u2026 Toward the end of his life he knew that his masterpiece, <em>The Master and Margarita<\/em>, was doomed to \u2018the darkness of a drawer.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In Beijing, Chinese officials enjoy several long, stewing, deeply drunken banquets every week. These are fun, until somebody dies. Long Ling attended a banquet where a man literally drank himself to death right there at the table, setting off a chain of events that culminated in an ominous cover-up:\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v39\/n13\/long-ling\/diary?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=3913&amp;utm_content=usca_subs\" target=\"_blank\">A report of the incident reached the office of the deputy mayor. He decided that what had actually happened was the following: a comrade had died suddenly of a heart condition, brought on by hard work, not drinking<\/a>; there had not been a banquet; the local police station had never received a report of an incident. Since there had been no banquet, no one could be disciplined. The deputy mayor agreed that the dead man\u2019s family should receive a large sum in recognition of the hard-working bureau chief\u2019s sacrifice. The family expressed their satisfaction. On the seventh day after death, the ghost of a dead person returns, so families prepare good food and burn a paper ladder by which the ghost can ascend to heaven. At the appointed time, relatives of the departed went to the entrance to the small restaurant to perform the ritual, irritating the owner, who demanded several thousand RMB in compensation for the psychological harm he had suffered. Soon after this ill-omened event he closed the restaurant and left town \u2026 The incident slowly faded into the past. Only subtle signs in the expressions of colleagues who had been involved satisfied me that it had actually taken place.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Philip Guston\u2019s art was shaped by his love of poetry, writes Cara Ober: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/386454\/how-philip-guston-found-salvation-in-poetry\/\" target=\"_blank\">It\u2019s well documented that, after Guston\u2019s fall from grace, he left Manhattan for Woodstock, and surrounded himself with young poets<\/a>. \u2018They [the poets] see without the jargon of art,\u2019 he said in the March 15, 1980 issue of the <em>New Republic<\/em>. \u2018Sharply. Fresh. Sometimes they are funny or their reactions are funny and I enjoy that.\u2019 The exhibit in Venice includes a number of rarely shown collaborations where Guston illustrated the poetry of his wife\u00a0Musa McKim\u00a0and friend Clark Coolidge into capricious \u2018poem-pictures\u2019 on paper \u2026 The show argues that Guston\u2019s staying power\u2014grounded in fresh oddness, compelling authenticity, and dodgy compositions\u2014was a direct consequence of his relationship with poetic language and form, as well as the ideas of the poets who wrote them. Rather than a romantic inevitability, <em>Poets<\/em>\u00a0offers a pragmatic and collaborative handle to Guston\u2019s career as a prolific artist and maker; it attests to the power of verbal and metaphorical language in nourishing his visual oeuvre.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Jamie James takes another look at <em>South Wind<\/em>, a once-famous novel that no one reads anymore: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/second-read\/south-wind-a-strange-literary-best-seller-a-hundred-years-later\" target=\"_blank\">In the summer of 1917, as German aircraft pounded London with bombs, and the first American troops arrived in France, many readers yearned for escape<\/a>. That June, the polymathic travel writer Norman Douglas published his first novel, <em>South Wind<\/em>, which narrates the misadventures of a motley collection of foreigners living in Nepenthe, an imaginary Mediterranean island that closely resembles Capri, where Douglas lived. The book was an immediate best-seller \u2026 <em>South Wind<\/em> was once a fixture on lists of modern classics. Graham Greene, who befriended Douglas on his seasonal visits to Capri, said, \u2018My generation was brought up on <em>South Wind<\/em>.\u2019 But it has slipped beyond the canonical pale and attracts little notice among scholars today. One reason for this decline, undoubtedly, is Douglas\u2019s scandalous private life. By the time he wrote <em>South Wind<\/em>, his sexual inclination had shifted to a mania for young boys.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s arts and culture news: the Museum of Failure; communist banquets gone awry; Bulgakov\u2019s eternal toiling; and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[22246,5855,1815,3156,2186,14748,12015,29291,11566,14233,29292],"class_list":["post-112019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-banquets","tag-beijing","tag-china","tag-communism","tag-death","tag-failure","tag-mikhail-bulgakov","tag-museum-of-failure","tag-norman-douglas","tag-philip-guston","tag-south-wind"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>A New Museum Memorializes the Commercial World\u2019s Biggest Failures<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news: the Museum of Failure; 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