[theoh]

Specifically Bukowski "wants to seem" a particular way, which is the essence of glamour. Virginia Postrel is very good on this expanded sense of glamour, finding it almost everywhere in professional culture (including space travel, and maybe not so surprisingly, the military).

But the basic desire to project an image of being somehow special is the key ingredient that leads to glamour. Glamour is essentially mediated charisma: always constructed, to a degree, always something artificial rather than a direct encounter with someone's real self.

Postrel's politics lead her to let glamour off lightly. IMO, though (on the other hand), manifestations of glamour (and its pursuit) are closely tied to narcissism, and something we should get tough on.

The "hacker" image, by the way, is a glamourous MacGyver kind of deal. Calling hackers "coding bums" as Dijkstra did, is the antithesis of that. The former term glamourizes what the coders are doing, the latter mocks it.

[pm90]

How do you get tough on the pursuit of glamour? Should we? Are you saying that we should criminalize narcissists?

[theoh]

Narcissists are a danger to everybody, but the consensus seems to be that narcissists themselves would be happier if they were treated. It's a pathology, so I don't think there's any problem with pathologizing it. How to treat it seems to be a largely unsolved problem, though.