The Wit’s Guide to Bargaining
Or, the Faust and the Furious
The reason they put the bargains in the basement is because it’s the closest place to the head office of the ultimate dealmaker: Beelzebub. You know how they keep the milk at the back of the supermarket because they don’t want to break the cold chain from refrigerated truck to dairy fridge? It’s the same idea for red-hot bargains coming straight from the abode of the damned. I don’t have exact proof of that, but I’m bargaining that you won’t ask for it.
“There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day.”
— Tom Stoppard
And the reason the devil gets all the best lines is that he needs them to talk you out of your soul. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, he materializes as “a transparent man of the strangest appearance.” If that novel had gone with the original title of The Consultant With A Hoof, we would have seen McKinsey & Co coming. “Of course man is mortal, but that’s only half the problem,” the Master argues. “The trouble is that mortality sometimes comes to him so suddenly!” Let’s make a deal, then?
“Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.”
— William Cowper
The devil also has the best music, and not just because he bootlegs it. Earlier this year
did extensive research on blues legend Robert Johnson, who famously bargained his soul for musical virtuosity. In an obscure work of folk history called Hoodoo - Conjuration - Witchcraft - Rootwork, Gioia found dozens of examples of such soul-sale in the American South, and notes that “the most common reason people made a deal with the Devil, according to these accounts, was the desire to play a musical instrument.” Most often guitar, then banjo, occasionally violin or harmonica, but never piano.“When a man is discontented with himself, it has one advantage, however, that it puts him into an excellent frame of mind for making a bargain.”
— Laurence Sterne
Whether you’re negotiating from a point of strength or weakness depends on your perspective. When the boxer Benny Leonard was training in Los Angeles, he ran out of dress shirts. He wired his tailor in New York for a dozen silks but heard back “Cannot ship your shirts until the last ones are paid for.” Leonard wired back: “Unable to wait that long. Cancel order!”
“It is safe to say that no cheap vermouth is a bargain. It will either be raw or noxiously colored with caramel, and it will give off a potent, tricky fume which promises nothing but trouble.
— M.F.K. Fisher
The surest way to get a bargain is to not want or need it. The second best way is to employ Jack Donaghy’s negotiation tactics from 30 Rock, which include the sorcerer’s apprentice, the pirate holiday, the hillbilly auction, speaking very softly, taking a call in front of your opponent, and parrying with an élégante primo. The third best way is to go to Costco, where a hot dog and a 20 ounce fountain drink with free refills is still just $1.50. Is that worth the membership, the lines, the parking lot, and the ludicrous impulse buys? As a thing you don’t need at a price you can’t resist, it’s the devil’s dictionary definition of a bargain.
This week’s Recommendation: MoMa & Pop, eh?
One-time admission to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is US$30 — steep! But for just US$22, subscribers get a full year of Wit Lists, including my pun-packed writeup of all the juiciest bits from their new retrospective on Ed Ruscha, the poppiest pop artist and probably my new favourite painter of all time.
This month’s Riposte Card: Suggestion snub!
Of course I love that illustrator Maxine Kryzaniwsky worked my book into her riff on Virginia Woolf! I’ll be mailing copies of the above printed postcard along with October’s Riposte Card (Andrea Carson by Amy Noseworthy) to my Founding Subscribers this week. For a mere US$60/year, you get a specially commissioned pile of art postcards every month in the mail every month! A true bargain, and you can keep your soul! I don’t have any use for it! Thanks though!
Quote Vote
“If you don’t get what you want, it’s a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.”
— Rudyard Kipling
Obviously I’d like to finish my Elisabeth Küber-Ross trilogy in five parts, summarizing the Wit’s Guide to the stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and, if you’ll deign to accept it, Acceptance.
That was Get Wit Quick No. 228, but I’m still thinking of the Russell’s Conjugations we discovered last time: I negotiate; you bargain; they haggle. A leonine bargain is one where one side has all the power, so named for the Aesop’s fable in which the lion goes hunting with a fox, a jackal, and a wolf. The predators catch a stag and the lion suggests they divide it into four, with the first piece for him as King of the Beasts, the second piece for him as arbiter of the spoils, the third piece for him for his role in the hunt, and the fourth, well, he dares anyone to touch it. Rude! My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting is for the fox; the jackal can have the bun of my Costco hot dog, and the wolves may tap the❤️ below.