Book Excerpt: ' And Now a Few Words From Me'

March 4 -- Leading ad critic Bob Garfield says breaking the rules isn't always — or even often — such a good idea in chapter one of his new book, And Now a Few Words From Me: Advertising's Leading Critic Lays Down the Law, Once and For All .

Chapter 1

Rules Are Made to Be Observed

So, you know, I was reading Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust … just reading a little Proust one day … and while reading Proust, I happened upon a line that intrigued me. (Actually, I happened upon it quite often, because I've started that book at least seven times and never gotten past page 175, because this guy was positively soporific. Having a little insomnia at bedtime? May I suggest a little Proust? You'll be out like Rosie O'Donnell within six pages.)

But it so happened that Proust, the nineteenth-century French novelist/sleep aid, made a striking observation. It was about poets, "whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines."

His point was that the rigid poetic form focuses a writer's thinking. The need to contrive a rhyme forces the poet to measure every subtle shade of meaning and to be judicious with every syllable. While a given stanza offers a vast lexicon of options for expressing a thought, it is not nearly the daunting, infinite number of possibilities in the realm of unrhymed blank verse or — more daunting still — unrhymed, metrically unregulated free verse. Bearing no responsibility for meter and rhyme, the author of free verse is free to be sloppy, flabby, imprecise. The author of rhyme must find just the right vivid solution — a solution that, minus the tyrant, might never have otherwise suggested itself.

Rhyme, of course, in incapable hands, can lead to hackneyed couplets like the worst-laid plans. But in the hands of an artist, it can be the stuff of magic.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

That's the first stanza of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and I dare say you can feel the exhaustion of the day's end, which is here a metaphor for life's end. The tyrant, rhyme, here is proved to be an enlightened despot indeed. (Oh, by the way, "lea," pronounced lee, is a pasture. Read it again if you have to.)

The Tyranny of Freedom and Vice Versa

Loosening by tightening; Proust wasn't the only French thinker to observe this paradox. The sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne also considered the liberating beauty of form. (And, as God is my witness, this one didn't come from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, either. I ran across this one reading the collected musings of Montaigne himself. I won't explain to you how this came to pass. I'll simply leave you to be quietly awed.) Anyway, Montaigne noted that the sweet sound of the trumpet results from the physics of constriction: " … as the voice, forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet, comes out more forcible and shrill; so, methinks, a sentence pressed within the harmony of verse, darts out more briskly upon the understanding, and strikes my ear and apprehension with a smarter and more pleasing effect." He and Proust were making identical points: what superficially may look confining is, in fact, the path to liberty. (For the moment we shall ignore that when another philosopher, Nietzsche, ruminated on the ruminations of yet another philosopher, Kant, on the very same subject, the concept of freedom by repression was seized by Hitler as a rationalization for totalitarianism. Arbeit macht frei, my ass.) Here's a little Shakespeare:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,

Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Nice work. It is wrought in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter— three quatrains, followed by a couplet in the rhyming scheme ab, ab, cd, cd, ef, ef, gg. He wrote 154 just like it. That was number 29. Here's number 6:

Then let not winter's ragged hand deface

In thee thy summer, ere thou be distill'd:

Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place

With beauty's treasure, ere it be self-kill'd.

That use is not forbidden usury,

Which happies those that pay the willing loan;

That's for thyself to breed another thee,

Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;

Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,

If ten of thine ten times refigured thee:

Then what could death do, if thou shouldst depart,

Leaving thee living in posterity?

Be not self-will'd, for thou art much too fair

To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

It's hard to say which sonnet is more magnificent, but I'm just curious. Did you happen to notice anything, apart from the rigid constraints of the form, remotely similar in the two works? Similar language? Similar themes? Similar imagery? Actually, I can answer that question: no, you didn't, because the two sonnets, apart from fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, have nothing whatsoever in common. The first is about how even the biggest loser feeling sorry for himself is uplifted by the life jacket of love. The second instructs a handsome young man to have his portrait done, because time is unkind to beauty. So, once again, the Bard of Avon didn't seem too hamstrung by form, did he?

For crying out loud, you needn't turn to Shakespeare or Proust to understand this lesson. Just talk to any child psychologist. Children need rules. The lack of boundaries does not liberate; it enslaves, trapping the frightened child in an anxiety-provoking world of consequences he cannot control. Discipline, a firm establishment of boundaries, relieves kids from the terror of uncertainty. If you want an insecure child, give in to his every tantrum and whim. If you want a happy, well-adjusted kid, learn to say no and mean it. Needless to add, this is equally true of adults. "Good fences," Robert Frost famously observed, "make good neighbors." They also make good art directors.

So why in advertising — when it is well established among artists that there is nothing so intimidating as a blank piece of paper — this preposterous cult of rule breaking? Rule breaking, in fact, if we are to take seriously all the industry's widespread and ostentatious claims of iconoclasm, has itself become the rule. Every corner of advertising, in every corner of the world, is populated with people who imagine themselves to be courageous anarchists. Bob Schmetterer, chairman of Messner, Vetere, Schmetterer, Berger, McNamee/Euro RSCG traveled to Cannes to speechify on "Breaking the Rules." The introduction to the TBWA website proclaims: "Change the Rules." Korey Kay & Partners, the Los Angeles agency, asks prospective clients to declare in writing whether they'd be willing to break the rules. Even DDB chairman Keith Reinhard, the soft-spoken and conscientious midwesterner, claimed, in a speech before the American Association of Advertising Agencies, to be a "rule breaker." All that mischievousness! But wait, there's more! Because the same "philosophy" has spread, like spitting sunflower seeds in the dugout, from the big leagues to the minors.

On its website, the Virtual Farm agency in Pennsylvania has promised prospects great ideas that break the rules. GreenDOT Advertising has used its site to explain it's wise to break the rules, but only if you know what you're doing. (GreenDOT claimed to possess such rarefied knowledge. They all claim to possess such rarefied knowledge.) Fellers & Co., a Texas marketing and advertising group, brags that its creatives "Break the Rules." BananaDog Communications, the Australian web designer, lists as its corporate philosophy, "Our goals and visions are to break the rules." Lines Advertising & Design says that "The Only rule to follow in developing an idea is not to have any rules." Web banner creator Dave Nixon lists ten rules for banner design in descending order, culminating in Rule No. 1: "Break the rules." Corinthian Media, the media-buying company, admonishes prospective customers, "Don't be afraid to break the rules." Self-described marketing guru Dan Kennedy's book is titled How to Succeed in Business by Breaking All the Rules. And how-to instructor Robert W. Bly explains, "The top copywriters succeed because they know when to break the rules."