Fuhgeddabout It.

I knew her as Mrs. Chapin.

Almost 55 years ago, I had an English teacher who I could safely say fairly changed my life.

I had no real parents growing up. Mine were either drunk, drugged or missing. Sometimes all three. And I grew up in a world devoid of love, care, and nurturing. 93% of the time my human contact was a swat in the head or a literal knife to my throat. (The good ones--the ones you had to wash by hand.)

Mrs. Chapin (I would never ever thought of calling her Anne) saw I was bored in school--and troubled. She would give me, in addition to our class' regular reading, a pile of books she demanded I read. She was one of those people who innately understood how hard it is for curious people to stick to a narrow curriculum. She would therefore give me a panoply of books and just say "read these." 

One week I sat alone in the school library while everyone else was going to class. I read John Hersey's "Hiroshima" one day, and John Gunther's "Death Be Not Proud," the next and Richard Wright's "Black Boy" after that. 

Through that belief in me she made me who I am.

Because I listened to her. Because she showed she cared.

Once, Mrs. Chapin was mad at me. I guess I fucking up in school, maybe even in her class, flirting too much with Bev or Robin. 

She wrote me a poem that not-so-gently screamed at me. It had this couplet in it, that I've remembered for more than half a century.

"If praise from me you wish to brook,

Go stick your nose inside a book."

It's safe to say, I adopted that imperative--Go stick your nose inside a book--as my code. It's how I live my life. 

I read all the time--widely and voraciously. While everyone else in the advertising industry seems wholly concerned with pop-culture--and being a part of culture (I haven't really figured out what that means) I look, I think, for deeper meanings and themes. Flattering myself, what Mr. Bernbach called "simple, timeless human truths."

Six and a half years ago, I read this article. I've carried with me ever since. I think its analysis of the power of books is pretty important. Mrs. Chapin would approve.

The author, Brian Morton, led the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. He introduced me to the notion that reading widely allows you to "time travel."

The whole essay is worth reading, but for me, here are the phrases that pay:

"I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around. 

"The difference in perspective, the clarification of who exactly is doing the traveling, might lead to a different kind of reading experience."

Right now, I'm reading the book below by Joel Kotkin. My three word review is "Infuriating and Informative."

I bring all this up because last night I got to this section. Which, like so much else, reminds me of the decline, fall, and absolute collapse of the ad industry. 

Or what was formerly known as the ad industry. Now afflicted and destroyed by "An Age of Mass Amnesia." 

Much of that amnesia is the result of what happens when a culture no longer reads--especially can no longer harken back and learn from the past.

To my old but acute eyes, I'd assert that the ad industry has almost completely forgotten what makes a communication strong, memorable, impactful and valuable. I'd wager, even readers of this blog, haven't absorbed the "Wisdom of Trott."

Or the wisdom of the Ages, as brought to you by my compadre, Rob Schwartz, in his wise substack. Especially his recent piece on Carl Ally.

In short, we've forgotten how to do it. We've forgotten why we do it and why agencies used to be profitable. We've forgotten who in the past can teach us. We've forgotten what advertising can do--how it can impart a brand with importance, meaning and lust-after-ableness.

Below are a few Kotkin passages that led to this screed. If you can do some word substitutions and swap university and students for advertising and creatives, you might get the idea.

Though in the spirit of mass amnesia, forget I said anything.

Maybe the worst of all this can be summed up by this passage from Kotkin:

"We know more and more about less and less. And we specialize in obscure topics of little interest to anyone outside of" ...our industry.

That sounds like an epigram that captures the lunacy of an industry in the thrall of a meaningless award-industrial complex.

When Mark Read fired me and said it was because I harkened back to the eighties, he did worse than highlight my age. He underscored his own backward stupidity, cupidity and myopia. His own amnesia.

We've forgotten how to do it.

We've forgotten why.

That's why we've collapsed. 

Forgetting the past has foreclosed our future.

Wisdom. John Stingley-style.