I just finished Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, which was huge last year, and (shocker) it’s all about delight. It’s somewhere between a listicle and a poetry collection; there are 102 short chapters, and they’re each about a different thing that delighted him: a deer, a flower, peeing his pants in his car (true story!), etc.
If you made a word cloud of this book, the biggest word would definitely be “delight.”
But! I left the book unsure what delight is. Gay tries to differentiate it from joy and pleasure, and he gestures towards several things it might be; it probably has something to do with how we’re all going to die one day, he suggests, and how we have an innate impulse to care for each other, ALLEGEDLY.
Really, a lot of words we throw around all the time to talk about good times, like “fun,” are kind of fuzzy. He leaned into that. Perhaps related: He’s a poet (he wrote the viral poem “A Small and Needful Fact”), and poets tend to be better at sitting with uncertainty than me. I can barely watch close basketball games because they’re too suspenseful.
I’m really not a lot like him. Gay gardens (me: no), and buys lumber to build a “raised bed” (idk what that is or what’s going to sleep in it: plants? people?). He has been to Marfa, Texas, unlike me, though I literally try every day and have a framed photo of Prada Marfa on my wall. He loves going to poetry readings?!?!?!?!
And yet, despite his warm, crunchy, non-Mae, “the best things in life are free” energy — several of his delights involve advertising! A delight, for me!
The most striking ad-related delight in his book is “Some Stupid Shit.” It’s about an ad for Embassy Suites, or maybe more accurately Embassy Suites ~brand imagery~, which Gay stumbles upon in an elevator at the hotel.
It’s a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.”
Gay calls this delightfully “questionable” promo for a hotel — I think because hotels are usually more about relaxation than relentless industry? He adds that the quote “especially glows with stupidity and cruelty” because it makes Jefferson sound industrious, and faintly self-made. Really, he relied on the forced industry of hundreds of slaves, who probably woke up earlier than he did.
(Hot marketing tip: Don’t quote slaveowners in your marketing materials?!)
In another delight, about the mediocre-looking crew of musicians in the band Toto, Gay writes in the kicker:
I was recently flipping through The New York Times Magazine, looking at the ads for what I assume are highly coveted brand-name goods. Studying the waifish, despondent-looking children being used to hock these goods (why are they called goods?), I thought, we’re so fucked.
The ad-related delights are some of the tonally darkest material in the book. There’s some writing about signs — like a church sign, “FORBIDDEN FRUIT CREATES MANY JAMS,” which Gay initially misunderstands and thinks is about forbidden fruit being delicious — that’s less antagonistic, but Gay mostly seems to delight in the gap between what the ads want to say and what he hears them say.
I delight in the gap, too — I think it’s how I first got interested in marketing — and that’s not unusual. The hypnotic appeal of the gap is why the “Folgers incest ad” (spoiler: it was not supposed to be about incest) got the oral history treatment in GQ a decade after its release. It’s also why everyone was briefly obsessed with the cursed Peloton ad. Was it sexist? Confusingly written? A gin ad prequel? All three, but also, Peloton wife’s performance definitely had an ~aura of captivity~ that was unintended, and the public loves that. It’s like a corporation showing plumber’s crack.
It’s basically inevitable, too. Ads’ core messages (buy this thing! thing is good!) are too simple for their formats. It’s especially true in video ads, but it comes up in text ones, too, like the Jefferson quote. Words have so many different connotations and meanings! They have their own histories and brands, almost?
So ads often end up meaning more than they want to. Delightfully! Anticapitalist….ly?
Gay thinks so. “It might be that the logics of delight interrupt the logics of capitalism,” he writes in a chapter about gardening.
Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure this is wrong. I wish it wasn’t! But delight has been almost completely commodified; Gay himself has commodified it in his book, for which I paid $23.95 + tax. People constantly pay for delight, and even things obliquely associated with delight. People buy Steak-umm’s “frozen beef sheets” because the company has a good Twitter. Even looser connections can be effective.
Like, look at this deranged waterfall of tweets (every tweet in this sequence is replying to the previous one):
Mr. @iamntshavheni is probably kidding, but still! Buying a burger because Facebook delighted you by using a competitor’s platform… to chitchat with… McDonald’s? McDonald’s is so obliquely involved in that delight supply chain, and yet still (maybe) making money from it!
Now, to Gay’s credit, there might be some minor form of resistance in observing what actually delights you, instead of believing salespeople telling X new gadget you’ve never even seen will delight you if you just give them $290 (<< this link is faintly NSFW).
But I still think delight has been pretty fully integrated with capitalism, and I think the next wave, if not the current wave, of marketing will integrate it further. Major brands, at least, may start putting a premium on delightful, harmless messaging mishaps — so, slightly more innocuous versions of the Peloton ad — that cultural commentators can parse endlessly. Think ditzy marketing. Marketing with a Jessica Simpson, “Is this chicken what I have, or is this fish?” aesthetic.
It could be big!
Because honestly, a ham-fisted ad that doesn’t land the way it was supposed to, that makes viewers feel smart and superior — that’s pretty effective, in the end. It’s memorable, it’s approachable, it gets you “earned media” (press), and it doesn’t make your actual product look bad. You’re just bad at creating a representation of what you do — which, same.
Even Gay can’t, or doesn’t, fully represent his personal, interior experience of being delighted. He shows readers the things that delighted him instead, and hopes they delight us too.
If you need some more delight to distract you from election foreboding, This American Life did an episode inspired by Gay’s book, “The Show of Delights.” It’s really nice! Also (I feel compelled to say this, I’m sorry, I know a lot of you already have): vote!