What Would Machiavelli Do?

Stanley Bing is the second reason that I buy Fortune magazine at the airport (the first depends on what is on the cover). Bing writes a column on the last page and (even if the entire magazine sucks that month) his column makes it worth the price of a latte that you have to pay for it.

What Would Machiavelli Do? by Stanley Bing, like the column, is super funny (100 Bullshit Jobs and How to Get Them is also funny). And, while Bing makes it clear (even insists) that you shouldn’t have to bother with reading the actual Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, I started to give it a try (owned it for years).

Before I even got to the text itself, I took a detour. In the foreword to the version published by “Everyman’s Library” the author writes:

The aim is to extract from observed events those recurrent features that provide a basis for practical action. If, as Machiavelli claims, politics can be a science comparable to medicine, then history is its pathology. The decline and fall of the Roman state has always had an obsessive interest for commentators; it could be called the shaping myth of western political thought. (xiii)

Of course, after reading that, I got distracted by Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy. The Prince will wait, I think, a few more years (back to the shelf with Sun Tzu and The Art of War).

A Scientific Romance

When I picked up A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright, I thought I was going to read a steampunk novel. However, what I got included a lot more. In many ways it was like The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier (which I wrote about here) meets V for Vendetta (plus more).

There were so many themes and concepts that it seems silly to list them all, but here goes (in varying levels and not in order of importance):

Civilization, Archeology, Pandemic, Imperialism, Globalization, Time Travel, Industrial Revolution, Morality, Mad Cow Disease, Friendship, Steampunk, Human Society, Fossil Fuels, Monarchy, Victorian Undergarments, Neolithic Societies, Vegetarians, Rome, Evolution, Love, Academia, History, Environmentalism, Shakespeare, Computers, Nature, Science, Religion, Cities, Anarchy, Racism, Betrayal, Mortality, Crime, Plumbing, Genocide and Culture

Things not in this book: the Internet, Feminism and Space Aliens

Anyway, much of the action takes place on a walk from London to Scotland and, since that takes quite a long time, a fair amount of narrative takes place in the protagonist’s musings as he walks. The result is a lot of themes and concepts.

Comedy Central Sells Books (to me)

I have used a Tivo since 1999 and have no clue what time shows are on since I haven’t watched one while it was being broadcast in almost a decade (and not just because time-shifting is a cool term).

Despite that, I do know that Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report are back to back since they are tied together in between the two shows. As a result, I tend to watch them together.

In a single night I bought The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo and Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James after learning about the first on the Jon Stewart show and the second on the Colbert Report.

I haven’t read either yet (and kind of wonder how Cultural Amnesia is different from The Creators: A History of Heros of the Imagination by Daniel Boorstin).

I hope that both books are worth the price of hardcover!

Web 2.0 Social Networking Is A Giant Time Vortex?

I am not sure if Milan Kundera has ever heard the term “Web 2.0”, but in his book (though, he was likely writing it before the term was coined anyway) The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (that I first wrote about here) there is a quote that strikes me as related.

Kundera is referring to a “long forgotten” 1930s Czech novel called The Internal-Combustion Monster by Jaromir John. Kundera says that John’s story is about the maddening sound of cars when they first appeared on the scene (of course, a fraction of today’s cars that we don’t even really hear anymore).

Using this story as a starting point, Kundera points out:

We can deduce a general rule: the existential import of a social phenomenon is most sharply perceptible not as it expands but when it is just beginning, incomparably fainter than it will soon become. (121)

He goes on to give an example from Nietzsche and then writes:

Bureaucracy in Kafka’s time was an innocent babe compared to today, and yet it was Kafka who revealed its monstrous nature, which since then has become routine and no longer commands anyone’s interest. (122)

Kundera is writing about “social phenomenon” in the context of art in general with the novel as the centerpiece specifically. I am not aware of a novel that uses Web 2.0 as a backdrop, but Kundera’s observation made me think about “Web 2.0 social networking” as a phenomena that is just beginning. How is it different from what came before?

When the Web browser was invented a lot changed, but one of the characteristics was that the Web made many economic activities more efficient and time more productive. Granted, “surfing” used up a lot of time and instant messaging was a time black hole for sure (though, a pale comparison to the time black hole that is Twitter), but, for the most part, the “broadcast Web” and many of the first applications saved time.

Last Fall I attended the Web 2.0 Summit. At the Summit they had a panel of late teens and early twenty-somethings talking about their Internet-related habits. A number of the participants claimed that they spent about 4 hours per day on mySpace. I mentioned this comment to several people that I know and the reaction was “what do you do for 4+ hours?” Someone responded with, though in jest, what is probably pretty telling “oh, they are making purple ponies fly across their page”.

So, there is the rub: Web 2.0 takes a lot of time (more than television?). Endless bookmarking and blogging and futzing with mySpace or Facebook, takes a lot of time. But, it isn’t really productive time. It is truly “social” time.

From a literary perspective, I wonder what the novel would say about Web 2.0 here at the beginning of this social phenomenon. For that matter, what would it say about the Web in general?

A last thought for this post, Kundera writes:

The novelist’s ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say. (15)

What has not been revealed?

Two History Books The Armchair Historian Must Have (And Read)

The first one I bought about twelve years ago at the Kramer Books and Afterwards Cafe in Washington, DC (the store had its 15 minutes of fame about three years later).

Anyway, A History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren is an exceptional overview of world history through the lens of all that humankind has created, imagined, invented, admired or otherwise loved.

The book becomes especially fascinating when Van Doren details massive intellectual leaps that were considered ludicrous at the time (a variety of religious, scientific and artistic ideas).

It is a history of civilization, but it is easy to read and absorb. Other benefits include improving your trivial pursuit performance and sounding smart (ish) at cocktail parties.

The second book is called Freedom: A History of US by Joy Hakim. It is a companion to a PBS series by the same name (which I never saw). I love this book. If you find yourself completely forgetting your US history, pick this one up and you’ll feel high school flooding back (without the Monday morning test).

If you are an American, it is a reasonably good read most times of the year, but it goes especially well with July 4th (if you are reading anything at all at that time). That stated, while it is driven by pride, it is a balanced perspective.

Some Of The Best Of Immortality

Milan Kundera published a work of non-fiction called The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts.

Let me start by making it clear that I love every word Milan Kundera has ever written. I think he is brilliant and his books (since the ones that I have read are translations) are almost enough for me to devote a large part of my day to learning Czech (almost).

I do have a friend who learned to read German so that she could fully appreciate and enjoy the writings of Franz Kafka. After reading The Castle, I decided that she must be partially insane, because it must be even worse in its original form. Or, at least, make the reader more nuts.

Anyway, back to Kundera, The Curtain is a non-fiction book about the art (or the place?) of the novel (I won’t regurgitate the synopsis here, but it sounds great) and I will read it in short order.

In the meantime, I will provide a couple of my favorites from Immortality (over the next weeks or maybe months, I’ll quote the others, but, for no particular reason, I am starting with Immortality).

On burning old letters and diaries:

Imagine yourself in her place: it isn’t easy to burn intimate documents that are dear to you; it would be like admitting to yourself that you won’t be here much longer, that tomorrow you may die; and so you put off the act of destruction from day to day, and then one day it’s too late. Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death. (74)

On politics, terrorism and lines:

He never expressed his opinion about Palestinians, Israelis, the October Revolution, or Fidel Castro, or even about terrorists, because he knew there existed a border beyond which murder is no longer murder but heroism, and that he would never be able to recognize just where that border lay. (105)

On self-perception:

He suddenly realized, too, that people saw him differently from how he saw himself or from how he thought he was seen by others. (124)

On perceiving others:

She was therefore certain that she knew him by heart and that nobody had ever known him as well as she. The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other. (132)

Another on self-perception:

As for her, she saw her inappropriate behavior and rash words as marks of her personality, as the charm of her self, and she was happy. (147)

On history and death:

I refuse to die with this day and its cares, I wish to transcend myself, to be a part of history, because history is eternal memory. (164)

On time and youth:

When someone is young, he is not capable of conceiving of time as a circle, but thinks of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons (275)

One that is just plain interesting:

Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you. (305)

Next up, quotes from Identity.