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).

This Just In From Oprah

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the newest Oprah’s Book Club selection. Set in the Caribbean coast of South America, spanning multiple years, filled with a type of romance and beautifully written. And, yet, I have never been able to finish it. Ever.

I really want to read this book and, I swear, one day I will persevere, but I never make it past page 20 or so. I have started it so many times that I have basically memorized the opening sentence (which, I think, is one of the best lines ever written):

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” (3)

It is the same story with 100 Years of Solitude by the same author (Oprah’s 2004 selection). But, worse, in the case of 100 Years of Solitude I have started it twice as many times!

The Uncertain Hour

The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Being Dead by Jim Crace are two of my all time favorite books. When I saw that both Cunningham and Crace endorsed a new book, I bought it immediately.

The Uncertain Hour by Jesse Browner is a masterpiece and it is impossible to put down. Based on the basic description (a “vivid portrait of life in Rome” and “a gripping entrée into the mind of a great man during his final hours”), I thought there might be parts of it that would be like Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (not in terms of the narrative, but in the sense that the main character in both books are confronting their own death).

It is not. In general, I liked Never Let Me Go (I wrote about it here), but the narrator in The Uncertain Hour is far more philosophical and his anguish more palpable and so the book forces the reader more fully into the story.

I generally require narrative first and writing second (I learned that from Only Revolutions which I wrote about here), but in this book the reader gets both. Plus, it is filled with numerous excellent quotes so these are just a few of my favorites.

On living and death:

We owe so little time to life, and all eternity to death, so let’s pay off our small debts first, Petronius. (32)

On reputation:

A man’s reputation is a delicate vase, vulnerable in equal measure to the malice of enemies, the prurience of strangers, and the clumsiness of friends. (44)

On civilization:

“When it comes down to it, he thought, isn’t all civilization just an exercise in measuring time, in pacing off the foundations on which to build a model of the universe of oneself?” (138)

On love and empire:

“I believe in love just as I believe in empire. They’re both transactions between partners of unequal strength, dressed up in heroic rhetoric.” (170)

It is not often that I read a book and have no complaints, but, in this case, I am unable to think of even one.

A Quote To Live By

It has been almost twenty years since I bought a magnet with this quote on it (attributed to Mark Twain). I think it is useful advice.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Leslie Bennetts, Vicki Iovine and Ayn Rand?

I wrote about The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts here and have been following her various appearances (for example, her debate with Elissa Schappell on BookTV and on The Huffington Post).

She does insist that her book is not another lob in the “Mommy Wars” and I think that is probably true. Beloved “Girlfriend” herself, Vicki Iovine has a similar message (in that she says "it can be done") in many of her books including The Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood where she writes:

About half of all mothers return to work within the first year after giving birth, and another big chunk will return when the child is old enough for nursery school or kindergarten, so you know it can be done. Not only can it be done, it can actually be fulfilling and an essential part of your life, but we Girlfriends feel it’s our duty to tell you:

IN THE BEGINNING, GOING BACK TO WORK WILL NEARLY KILL YOU (emphasis Iovine’s). (223-224)

Now, while lots of people absolutely love Iovine, Ayn Rand is a much maligned voice for a bunch of reasons, but not necessarily known for her thoughts on motherhood specifically. In a giant book (Atlas Shrugged) she managed to insert a couple lines about work and motherhood.

The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley – two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have to look she had seen in the children of the outer world – a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value…(274)

I am not an Ayn Rand expert by any means, but her basic idea is that all work should be compensated with money and not to receive money for labor is to disrespect your human identity. She and Bennetts have a lot in common.

The Funniest Book Ever

A collection of vignettes called Ant Farm by Simon Rich is the funniest book ever. I know that is a big statement, but it is true.

You must arrange to come in to possession of this book, but you can’t read it yourself. You have to find someone to read it to you (and then switch off in all fairness), because it is not readable through the tears of hilarity.

I simply could not read this book to myself. It is that funny.

I chose this quote because it not only illustrates my point, but uses similar imagery.

Where are all the time travelers? They’re on Wall Street, smoking Cuban cigars and laughing so hard that tears are streaming down their fat faces. Meanwhile, we’re sitting around like morons, betting our money on random dogs and horses and talking about how smart Stephan Hawking is. (117)

Of course, if my endorsement is not enough, Jon Stewart is quoted as calling it (among other things) "hilarious".

The Last Sentence

I have often thought that the best first sentence in a novel is in The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. (3)

Prior to reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, I thought the best last sentence was in the published version of A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (though, from what I understand, there are lots of unpublished endings, but I will have to look that up later).

After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. (332).

Now I think that sentence is tied for my favorite with the last one from Never Let Me Go (though, arguably, it is exactly the same in feeling and intent, if not the explicit words or preceding story).

I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. (288)

The Feminine Mistake

I first learned about The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts when I read a review of it in the Washington Post here. Suitably intrigued, I picked it up and read.

The Feminine Mistake darts around like a minnow and continually circles back to a couple of core points. It is a little Momento-ish since each chapter reads like the first, which can be disorienting, but, ultimately, it drives home her main point.

Bennetts main point is that “stay-at-home wives” (a term she uses frequently) risk financial security when they become economically dependent on someone else. Basically, the old “a man isn’t a plan”.

But, this is the thing, “a job isn’t a plan” either. The logic doesn’t flow straight to financial security from staying employed. Lots of people make lots of money and are still not secure in their future because they don’t have an actual financial plan. I think “only a plan is a plan”.

Exercise guru Bill Phillips said “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Even though he wasn’t referring to money, I think that might be better advice to take to the bank.

That all being the case, I did like the general “you can do it” (succeed) theme of the book. It is a welcome message when many people say “it can’t be done”.

The Feminine Mistake is over 300 pages long, but I would say the entire word of caution that she is preaching can be summarized in this giant quote:

Given the likelihood that you will have to fend for yourself at some point in the future, protect yourself against economic hardship by maintaining the capacity to support yourself. Protect your children by making sure you can take care of them financially should anything happen to their father. Protect your future happiness against the nagging doubts harbored by frustrated stay-at-home mothers who can’t shake the guilt and regret they feel about failing to explore their full potential. Protect yourself against the desolation of the empty nest, which inflicts the deepest sense of loss on full-time mothers with no other identity or outlets to sustain them. Protect your older self against the feelings of uselessness and isolation experienced by so many women who didn’t cultivate meaningful work that could nourish them in their later years. (317)

This Book Is As Tight As A Pilates Instructor

Some books don’t wrap it up well (The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve, Becoming Strangers by Louise Dean, A Certain Age by Tama Janowitz and many, many others) and they leave the divination to the book club.

The workplace novel Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is the only book that I have ever read where the narrative is constructed so that one of the characters explains what the book is about to the reader (at the end of the book). The construct sort of works (and it is a surprise). Ultimately, it makes the book tight without a single loose end.

On the back cover it is called the “the Catch-22 of the business world”. I don’t think that is accurate. The book is mostly funny’ish, but mostly it is serious and only a little outlandish (but, here is the thing, not outlandish enough to be funny in a Joseph Heller sort of way).

I really did want to read a book about the workplace that would make me laugh so next up is Company by Max Berry.

Now, even though Ferris didn’t nail the humor throughout, one brilliant part of the book is that it is predominantly narrated by a collective “we” and that is cool and often funny.

Literally, almost all of the book is written in this voice:

Half the time we couldn’t remember three hours ago. Our memory in that place was not unlike that of goldfish. Goldfish who took a trip every night in a small clear bag of water and then returned in the morning to their bowl. What we recalled was that Karen didn’t let up on the story, day after day for an entire week, and when that week was over, we all had a better idea of Joe than we had gotten in his first three or four months. (63)

I like the collective “we” and was annoyed when he reverted perspective to the individual point of view. While I was reading it, I thought the author could have cut out the entire section titled “The Thing to Do and the Place to Be” (so boring it made my eyes bleed). But, then, at the end of book, one of the characters explains why it has to be there and I have to agree (I just don’t like it).

"Antique, Illogical And Democratically Indefensible"

Recently, the Queen of England came and went (Carter had some interesting comments here in a post titled "Send the Queen Home").

Isn’t it totally absurd that any modern country has a heredity ruler (figurehead, whatever)?

Jeremy Paxon (author of On Royalty: A Very Polite Inquiry Into Some Strangely Related Families) was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart a couple nights ago. Paxon called the monarchy “antique, illogical and democratically indefensible” (after about three minutes of a meager justification – some indecipherable stuff about the embodiment of a nation blah, blah, blah).

It really just makes no sense.

Everyman

While I generally enjoyed the book, the problem with Everyman by Philip Roth is that it is a little inaccurately sold. The book is a collection of memories of a single man (supposedly an ordinary man) that starts with his funeral.

The problem is this: the main character isn’t ordinary. His father is a well-off jewelry merchant, his brother is a multi-millionaire, he has a successful advertising career, he manages to sell some of his paintings and in the middle of his life he hooks up with (and eventually marries) a gorgeous Danish model (oh, plus he is supposedly really good looking).

As I wrote, I did like this book, but it does have one thing in common with For One More Day by Mitch Albom. Basically, if you go out of town (and are doing something that you shouldn’t be doing), your Mom dies of a stroke (or something) while you are gone.

Of course, the main theme, the “everyman” theme, is the angst associated with internalizing mortality. Despite being in good shape (doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t gain weight) the main character has his share of health problems.

He is exposed early to death and thinks (right before he has a burst appendix):

Terrifying encounters with the end? I’m thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you’re seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe! (32)

I think that is pretty good advice (course, poor Mr. Everyman doesn’t actually make it to 75).

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?

A Separate Peace On Elm Street

As compelling as it is, this book totally freaked me out. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a “coming of age story” about the “coming of age” of people (clones) who are being raised so that the vital organs can be harvested.

It is complete with teenage angst, romance and girl infighting (not too different from the movie Mean Girls based on Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosiland Wiseman). However, the backdrop is the life of these clones who “know, but don’t know” that their whole existence is to provide organs to “normals”.

It is probably obvious that a book with this premise would tackle (or at least provoke contemplation about) ideas related to organ donations, cloning, research and even food production (a la the movie Fast Food Nation). It is filled with an endless stream of ethical and moral questions asked in an interesting way. But, that isn’t what got me.

What got me was the metaphor for life. We are born, we become “carers” (part of the story line) and we die (all the while we have a bit of nostalgia for our childhood home and history).

Never Let Me Go brings you along at a fast clip for the most part, but it does get bogged down in a kind of literary self-gratification (the kind that people say “what an excellent way of exposing character”), which gets a little boring:

When I found myself alone, I’d stop and look for a view – out a window, say, or through a doorway into a room – any view so long as there were no people in it. I did this so that I could, for a few seconds at least, create the illusion the place wasn’t crawling with students, but that instead Hailsham was this quiet, tranquil house where I lived with just five or six others. (90)

It is a deep and disturbing plot line, but it has moments of humor:

You could go around implying you’d read all kinds of things, nodding knowingly when someone mentioned, say, War and Peace, and the understanding was that no one would scrutinize your claim too rationally. You have to remember, since we’d been in each other’s company constantly since arriving at the Cottages, it wasn’t possible for any of us to have read War and Peace without the rest noticing. But just like with the sex at Hailsham, there was an unspoken agreement to allow for a mysterious dimension where we went off and did all this reading. (122)

Last, even though the clones know the end of life will come (don’t we all?), the narrator still approaches it in a manner that is void of the context (which, I guess, if it is the only existence you have know, you would do):

And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever. (213)

All in all, Never Let Me Go is super chilling, but well worth reading.

Citizen Vince

Citizen Vince by Jess Walter is outstanding.

It is a well-written mafia thriller chocked full of everything you would expect. It has the really bad criminal, the moderately bad criminal, the smart criminal, several really dumb criminals, John Gotti makes an appearance, a couple of okay people with darker desires, a dude, a lawyer in quotes and (of course!) the hooker with a heart of gold.

All of these characters fulfill what you would expect them to and it definitely delivers on the crime novel aspect, but with a twist.

The protagonist (Vince Camden) is in the witness protection program and finds himself able to vote for the first time in his life. So, all the crime thriller stuff happens with the backdrop of the 1980 Presidential campaign.

It is hilarious. As you might expect, Camden thinks (and takes it incredibly seriously throughout the entire novel):

Which of these stupid fucks are you supposed to vote for? (39)

Who hasn't thought that once or twice?

The downside of the book is that the bad guy is just a little too bad and the hooker with the heart of gold is a little too good, but I am able to get past that and enjoy the story.

My favorite line is the stated reason for why Vince only starts books (a habit he picks up after learning – in prison – that Great Expectations has more than one ending):

After all, a book can only end one of two ways: truthfully or artfully. (50)

What is the literary obsession with truth?

Next up, The Zero

PS - Citizen Vince ends artfully

As A General Rule

As a general rule, I don’t think that The Hours by Michael Cunningham has much in common with Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. But, the following quotes have a similar feel and message.

From Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart contemplating while she is waiting for Hank Rearden:

The hours ahead, like all her nights with him, would be added, she thought, to the savings account of one’s life where moments of time are stored in the pride of having been lived. The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one’s life. (343)

From The Hours, Clarissa’s thoughts towards the end of the book:

There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. (225)

Living Life in Reverse

This quote has been making the email rounds (I did a brief search and could not find the author. If anyone knows who wrote this, I would love to know):

I want to live my next life backwards.
You start out dead, and get that out of the way.
Then you wake up in an old age home, feeling better every day.
Then you get kicked out for being too healthy.
You enjoy your retirement and collect your pension.
Then, when you start to work, you get a gold watch on your first day.
You work 40 years until you're too young to work.
You get ready for high school, drink alcohol and party, and are generally very social.
Then, you go to primary school, become a kid, play and have no responsibilities.
Then you become a baby.
Then, you spend your last nine months floating peacefully in luxury in spa-like conditions, central heating, and room service on tap.
Then, you finish off as an orgasm.
I rest my case.

-Author Unknown-

It reminded me of one of the best books that I ever read: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer. Max Tivoli is born as an old man and grows younger over time. On the surface it sounds totally absurd (kind of "you lost me at born an old man"), but Greer makes it work and the suspension of disbelief required is not as impossible as you might think.

While the context for the book is the biography of a man living in reverse, the book itself is really about unrequited love, loss, abandonment and loneliness. Max Tivoli is a creative classic.

Running (Screaming!)

Let me just start with the obvious. Only Revolutions is a visually stunning and beautiful book. The words are arranged in such a way that I am certain that an audio version of this book (if it were possible to make) would actually sound like music.

But, this book is nothing like The Crying of Lot 49. In fact, it makes Lot seem positively Zoetrope (i.e. story driven). In Revolutions, there is no real narrative. None, that I am able to follow (in fairness, it might be there for the super, super smart).

It is as if, while writing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce had gotten hit extra hard with a crazy stick and repeated the style of the lines from the first page (over and over again) throughout the entire novel.

For example, and, I suppose, some would see this as praise, Only Revolutions sounds like lines from the first page of Portrait (forever):

His father told him that story: His father looked at him through a glass. He had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: She sold lemon platt. (3)

Does that make any narrative sense to you? Maybe?

But, see, this is the thing.

Even though Portrait picks up and I once resorted to purchasing an extremely attractive hardcover version as an incentive to finish it, I have never been able to understand Portrait (despite writing an excellent paper on the role of the father figure in said novel).

Why? Because, it is beautiful, but hard to follow.

Stephen had turned his smiling eyes towards his friend's face, flattered by his confidence and won over to sympathy by the speaker's simple accent. (247)

Mesmerizing.

But, this is supposed to be about Revolutions. So, I'll leave you with this (and maybe quote it a couple of other times in 2007):

Though bets are still cast,
Buccaneers on a roll, while
Caterers circle and Top Hats,
Stickpins all blingbling, continue
their stroll. At least I’m
with her, carry these trembling wings from the ball.
She knots up my hair, slurps
on my shoulder, so sobsloppily
tortured with shame and
remorse, though I’m the only one here to blame of course. (95, I think)