“You’ve got to mix with people with money if you want to make money.”
Max Malini. Magician.
Magicians can spout solid career advice. They’re entrepreneurs and showmen all-in-one.
That from the underrated book – David Copperfields History of Magic.
Category: Books
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Twitter isn’t all terrible. Recently rabbi, poet, and podcaster, Zohar Atkins posted a thread of his reflections on the Great Books.
He begins with the question: “What makes for a Great Book? And how should you approach one?”
A great list of the Great Books can be found on the St. John’s College Great Books curriculum page. Many of the titles are intimidating. Like Herodotus’ Histories, and Antoine Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry. But one shouldn’t avoid the intimidating.
There are surprises too. Works like Benjamin Franklin’s Excerpt from several letters to Peter Collinson on the nature of electricity” and Alfred Hitchcock, Selected movies.
Reading one intimidating text, and one surprising text, could be an optimal entry point.
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Here me out. Doesn’t this description of Hendrik Anderson’s World City remind you of Walt Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow?
Under Andersen’s direction, Hèbrard began work on developing the architectural drawings for the World City. They imagined it as a three-mile-long rectangular settlement, three miles long and a half-mile wide, featuring a downtown district marked by broad avenues and monumental edifices. It would include administrative buildings, a bank, and various “temples” (palais) devoted to the pursuit of art, music, drama, and other cultural endeavors. There would be a world zoo, botanical gardens, and a sports center designed to host the Olympics, featuring a large stadium and colossal swimming pool (or “natatorium”). The area between the stadium and the Grand Canal would feature a recreation area, with a ball club, skating club, tennis club, and kindergarten. At the base of the grand avenue lined by the palaces of nation there would be a great circle ringed with the institutions of the new world government: an international court; ministries of industry, agricultural, medicine, and science; as well as the great library and a palace of religions. They all fanned out from the great circle, forming a kind of lopsided mandala around a central Eiffel Tower-like Tower of Progress, a symbolic center for scientific research that doubled as a radio tower to send and receive wireless signals from all over the world.
Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. See pg 130At first, I thought there would be many similarities between Walt Disney’s E.P.C.O.T. and Hendrik Anderson’s World City. But turns out they’re more different than alike.
Design and Layout
E.P.C.O.T.’s design was radial. The “radial” plan it’s called. Think of a wheel. There’s a central hub, and then the spokes flare out to low density housing.
The World City had a radial element to its design too, but its main layout was rectangular.
Both cities had different central themes
E.P.C.O.T. represented the ingenuity of American enterprise and the free market. Shops, restaurants, corporate offices, and low and high density housing were the fundamental infrastructure features of E.P.C.O.T.
E.P.C.O.T.’s centerpiece was a hotel.
The World City’s central theme was sharing cultural ideas, and its grandest ambition – world peace.
Zoos, “temples” dedicated to the arts, botanical gardens, a center of sports, ministries of industry were the key components of her infrastructure.
It’s centerpiece was a communications tower called “The Tower of Progress”.
Local vs Global Perspectives
Walt hoped E.P.C.O.T. would be an example for city design across the globe. But it’s focus was local. It’s central Florida location was chosen to make travel to E.P.C.O.T. easier for American tourists and Florida residents. E.P.C.O.T. also emphasized its capacity for high and low density housing. Work and home life being close together.
As it’s namesake suggests, the World City was intended to be a beacon to the world.
The World City design doesn’t mention plans for residences. Instead it calls for institutions: places of worship, structures for a new “world” government, a “great” library, etc. The hope being, these institutions would foster communication between human beings, and promote world peace.
Wrapping Up
While their urban visions differed, the brilliant similarity between Walt Disney and Hendrik Anderson was courage they possessed to imagine cities in a new way.
Sources:
Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. By Alex Wright
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From Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Two solid paragraphs from Gordon S. Wood on Thomas Jefferson’s endless curiosity.
He was interested in more things and knew about more things than any other American. When he was abroad he traveled to more varied places in Europe than Adam’s ever did, and kept a detailed record of all that he had seen, especially of the many vineyards he visited.
Wood, Gordon S. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. pg. 10Not sure how one measures that Jefferson was interested in more things, and knew more things than any other American, but I trust Mr. Wood here. Also, Jefferson’s record keeping is legendary.
He amassed nearly seven thousand books and consulted them constantly; he wanted both his library and his mind to embrace virtually all of human knowledge, and he came as close to that embrace as an eighteenth century American could. Every aspect of natural history and science fascinated him.
Wood, Gordon S. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. pg. 10, 11It wasn’t enough that Thomas Jefferson owned seven thousand books. He consulted them regularly.
He knew about flowers, plants, birds, and animals, and he had a passion for all facets of agriculture. He had a fascination for meteorology, archaeology, and the origins of the American Indians. He loved mathematics and sought to apply mathematical principles to almost everything, from coinage and weights and measures to the frequency of rebellions and the length of people’s lives. He was an inveterate tinkerer and inventor and was constantly thinking of newer and better ways of doing things, whether it was plowing, the copying of handwriting, or measuring distances.
Wood, Gordon S. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. pg. 11It’s hard to think of any modern, public person, with Jefferson’s insatiable appetite for “all of human knowledge”.
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I have sketched my house at Easton Pierse and marked with a cross my grandfather’s chamber where I was born. If it had been my fate to be wealthy man I would have rebuilt my house in the grandest of styles. I would have added formal gardens in the Italian mode of the kind I have seen at Sir John Danvers’s house in Chelsea and at his house in Lavington. It was Sir John who first taught us in England the way of Italian gardens. I would have erected a fountain like the one that I saw in Mr Bushell’s grotto at Enstone: Neptune standing on a scallop shell, his trident aimed at a rotating duck, perpetually chased by a spaniel. I would have carved my initials on a low curved bridge across the stream. I would have remade my beloved home in the shape of the most beautiful houses and gardens I have visited in my unsettled life, tumbling up and down in the world. But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
Scurr, Ruth. John Aubrey: My Own Life. London: Vintage, 2015. pg 181We should take these excerpts with some reservation. These aren’t John Aubrey’s copied diaries, but rather an original format historian Ruth Scurr uses to deploy John Aubrey’s biography.
John Aubrey is a man who knew what he wanted. We see this in the detailed descriptions of the gardens and fountains he dreamed of constructing:
I would have added formal gardens in the Italian mode of the kind I have seen at Sir John Danvers’s house in Chelsea and at his house in Lavington. It was Sir John who first taught us in England the way of Italian gardens. I would have erected a fountain like the one that I saw in Mr Bushell’s grotto at Enstone: Neptune standing on a scallop shell, his trident aimed at a rotating duck, perpetually chased by a spaniel. I would have carved my initials on a low curved bridge across the stream. I would have remade my beloved home in the shape of the most beautiful houses and gardens I have visited in my unsettled life, tumbling up and down in the world.
Scurr, Ruth. John Aubrey: My Own Life. London: Vintage, 2015. pg 181John Aubrey was a man who embraced his fate. He accepts his fate twice in one paragraph. This was probably a more common character trait in the 1600s. In the modern west we’re taught to battle against our fate. We’re told anything is possible. That if we’re passionate, put our minds to it, we can bend our fate to be anything – yeah, yada, yeah. So when you hear someone admit their fate was not to be a wealthy man, and they accept that, it catches the ear.
If it had been my fate to be wealthy man I would have rebuilt my house in the grandest of styles.
and
But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
Scurr, Ruth. John Aubrey: My Own Life. London: Vintage, 2015. pg 181John Aubrey sketched! It’s not surprising. Photography was still two hundred years away, so people captured images by drawing. They preserved memories by drawing. They dreamed with their drawings:
I have sketched my house at Easton Pierse and marked with a cross my grandfather’s chamber where I was born.
and
But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
Scurr, Ruth. John Aubrey: My Own Life. London: Vintage, 2015. pg 181There’s so much to suss from this single passage!
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In part 1, we learned Dr. Benjamin Rush was a devoted keeper of the commonplace book. In his book Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father, author Stephen Fried details how Dr. Rush kept his commonplace books. In it we learn Rush’s mentor, Samuel Davies, didn’t discourage Rush from taking notes, despite the suspicion of the practice at that time:
Under Davies’s instruction, Rush came to love taking notes: while he read, while he listened, sometimes even while he talked, a pen and inkwell were always handy. Other teachers discouraged this practice, believing that memorandum books caused “the destruction of memories.” But Rush felt strongly that recording facts, and even rewriting entire passages, was a creative process; instead of “producing an oblivion” of facts, “it imprints them more deeply in the memory.” So while he studied the philosophy of John Locke, he did it using Locke’s own preferred format for note-taking and knowledge-gathering, the “common place book” (or memorandum book).
Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father, by Stephen Fried, pg 25,26Rush’s dedication to his commonplace book was relentless. At times, he’d rewrite entire commonplace books to make room for capturing new ideas. Rush was an intellectual bonfire!
Rush habitually wrote only on the right-hand of the page of his commonplace books, so he would always have room to reread and add additional ideas. And then when he filled many left-hand pages, he would sometimes rewrite the commonplace books all over again, leaving new blank pages.
Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father, by Stephen Fried, pg 26Rush was somewhat of a late bloomer in the medicine game. His commonplace book practice would help him catch up:
Between his formal education and his voracious reading, Rush had studied almost everything but science and medicine; now he was trying to learn everything from scratch. Besides taking in the principles of “modern medicine, he learned at Dr. Redman’s side how to compound treatments, how to perform bloodletting, cupping, and blistering, and how to deliver a baby. He also learned how to keep the accounting books for Redman’s huge practice. In all his other waking hours, Rush read the medical books he was discovering and the literature he loved. And he took voluminous notes on both in his commonplace books.
Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father, by Stephen Fried, pg 33These passages are further examples of the power of a commonplace book.
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We take timekeeping for granted. We fail to imagine how fundamental a process it is for coordinating global trade.
Think for a moment. Every clock that tics-and-tocs is a guiding constraint. From a poultry filled cargo plane leaving Florida for a processing plant. To a microchip stocked container ship departing a Singaporean dock for Japan. Or even you, arriving on time at work, to cover the night shift for an ill coworker. Commerce depends on the clock hands of time.
And yet we forget this. But there was one cunning villain who understood the power of timekeeping.
Dracula.
As poet and scholar Hollis Robins points out in her essay Turning Back the Economic Clock:
To the economic historian, the biggest danger of Dracula is his potential disruption of civil timekeeping systems, which would undermine railway safety, mail, contracts, and modern commerce generally. Great Britain’s economic prosperity was becoming increasingly dependent on international standards, such as the global adoption of Greenwich Mean Time and the Universal Day. Dracula, whose powers are governed by the sun and the moon rather than clocks and calendars, threatens to destabilize social coordination. If he gained power, he would bring down the economy.
Turning Back the Economic Clock: the real danger embodied by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, July 15 2022. By Hollis Robbins. From The Fitzwilliam Substack.The count isn’t only a human blood sucker. He is a blood-sucker of progress:
The Count is fascinated by modernity; he has been reading George Bradshaw’s railroad timetables, presumably to help him understand how to navigate a modern city. But why? It is not enough that Dracula turns victims into vampires, as the movies tend to emphasise. He also puts them in a mental fog so that they cannot participate in economic life. “[H]e cannot think of time yet,” Harker’s wife Mina laments, nursing him to health after a close escape from the vampire’s lair; “at first he mixes up not only the month, but the year.” Under Dracula’s spell, humans forget the time, becoming listless and unproductive. Dracula’s objective is not only literally to “fatten on the blood of the living,” but also more broadly to suck the lifeblood of a thriving commercial economy.
Turning Back the Economic Clock: the real danger embodied by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, July 15 2022. By Hollis Robbins. From The Fitzwilliam Substack.Hollis Robbins mentions Bram Stoker’s attention to timekeeping in Dracula was inspired from his court clerk day job:
The less academically inclined Bram Stoker, after graduating with a B.A. and M.A. from Trinity College Dublin, was able to secure a day job as a civil servant, with the help of his father. This job allowed him to go to the theatre at night, writing reviews for the Evening Mail. Most biographers skip over Stoker’s time as a court clerk but the experience is key to understanding the deep knowledge he had of time policy and its attendant frustrations.
Turning Back the Economic Clock: the real danger embodied by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, July 15 2022. By Hollis Robbins. From The Fitzwilliam Substack.Dracula’s demise comes not from some chandelier swinging duel. But by a coordinated time keeping effort:
Coordination pays off: knowing about the train timetables, the transportation network, and the vampire’s limitations, the heroes are able to overtake Dracula just in time. Lying powerless in his coffin, he is stabbed in the heart, outside his castle, at sunset. Stoker’s point is made. The danger Dracula poses is the danger of market destabilisation and social dissolution – a transformation of British modernity into Transylvanian backwardness.
Turning Back the Economic Clock: the real danger embodied by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, July 15 2022. By Hollis Robbins. From The Fitzwilliam Substack.Timekeeping and Dracula is a combination I would’ve never joined. But it does put the importance of timekeeping in a new perspective.
Read the essay in full here.
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Alomar came to the United States in late 2008 to join his mother and older brother who had emigrated in the 1900s. The fact that he was willing to leave behind and established career as a writer for an uncertain life speaks to the hopelessness of the situation in Syria even before its decent into open Civil War. He and I made these translations together in difficult circumstances: most were done in the front seat of his taxi in a Chicago suburb heavy with the ache of immigration and the unimaginable pain of watching one’s country implode from afar. With books and dictionaries piled on the dashboard, hoping the taxi line wouldn’t advance too quickly and force us to break our concentration with another “load,” we were able to make some part of that lost world in Damascus live again, however briefly. This pamphlet is some of the fruit of that soul-affirming work.
C.J. Collins, Fullblood Arabian, from the translators note, pg 62.Osama Alomar‘s Fullblood Arabian deserves more attention. It’s a perfect book for returning to the office. You can get through five or six short stories while eating your lunch in the shade. Five or six meaningful stories while eating your lunch in the shade.
C.J.’s depiction of the translator’s life, sitting in Alomar’s Chicago taxi cab, getting through pages, stacked dictionaries on the dash, all the while hoping the taxi line doesn’t move, is a reminder of the hidden work that brings a book to life.
I cherish writers, like C.J. who bring you back to a moment with specific, clear, descriptions. It’s like I was in the backseat of the cab, watching a dream unfold.
Pair with Lydia Davis’ New Yorker essay on Osama Alomar – Osama Alomar’s Very Short Tales
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From The Art of Manliness podcast:
The founding fathers had a general physician. His name? Benjamin Rush. The name sounded familiar, but truth is I knew nothing about him. But after an introduction from Brett McKay and Stephen Fried, I wasn’t surprised to learn he kept a commonplace book.
Brett McKay: Even the founding fathers did it. Something that really… You really hit home. And it really impressed me about Rush. Ever since he was a child, very curious, this self-starter, and something that he did that a lot of young upstarts did back in 17th century, 18th century, is he had a common place book and the guy just wrote down everything. How did that mental habit shape him for the rest of his life?
Stephen Fried: He did. And you know, what’s interesting, I found… I had the same question you had, and then I looked into it and I saw that even then there’s apparently a debate about how memory works. Of course, we’re still debating that, and the debate was, do you take notes and that makes you remember, or do you listen and not take notes, and that makes you remember? Most of Rush’s teachers thought you shouldn’t take notes, but Rush took notes. And so, what’s wonderful was after a certain point, we have them. I mean, a lot of things that Rush wrote are gone, I’m still hoping they will bubble up somewhere, but his commonplace books are wonderful. And part of the value of them is, of course, he did it when he was a kid, he did it when he was a student, and then when he was in the Continental Congress, he kept them about what it was like to be in the Continental Congress.
He would write little sketches about what he thought about the people in the Continental Congress, no holds bar. So he just… He wrote a lot, and so we have a lot of it, and we’re missing a lot of it, but everything we have is… What’s really nice about it also is that he wasn’t a formal writer. So he wrote in a style that we would today think of as almost like magazine writing. And it’s part of the reason that he was such an accessible intellectual and such an accessible writer is because, his writing style and of course, his penmanship were really readable, and when you read them today, they seem quite contemporary.
The AOM Podcast #813: The Fascinating Life of America’s Forgotten Founding Father. Brett McKay and Stephen FriedListen to the interview in its entirety below:
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John Adams kept a journal. Spared no thought or criticism. Emotions splattered on the page:
Keeping as full and honest a diary as he did was part of the inheritance passed on from his Puritan ancestors; but it was also an inevitable response to his acute self-awareness. None of his colleagues and in fact no American in the eighteenth century kept a diary like that of Adams. In it he poured out all his feelings — all his anxieties and ambitions, all his jealousies and resentments.
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Chapter One, Contrasts, pg 25. Gordon S. WoodIt takes courage to keep a diary as Adams did. Surely he must’ve known it would be read by the public at some point in time. To record one’s insecurities and shortcomings is therapeutic and brave.
Wood continues:
Adams used his diary to begin a lifelong struggle with what he often considered his unworthy pride and passions. “He is not a wise man and is unfit to fill any important Station in Society, that has left one Passion in his Soul unsubdued.” Like his seventeenth-century Puritan ancestors, he could not have success without guilt.
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Chapter One, Contrasts, pg 25, 26. Gordon S. WoodJohn Adams was TMI. Thomas Jefferson stayed mysterious:
It is impossible to imagine Jefferson writing such a journal. Jefferson was always reserved and self possessed and, unlike Adams, he scarcely ever revealed much of his inner self. Jefferson seemed to open up to no one, while Adams at times seemed to open up to everyone. He certainly opened up to his diary. “Honesty, Sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,” he wrote, and once he got going his candid entries bore out that judgement.
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Chapter One, Contrasts, pg 25. Gordon S. WoodThomas Jefferson in contrast, ditched the diary. He recorded facts:
Jefferson kept no diary, and if he had, he would never have expressed any self-loathing in it. Instead of a diary, Jefferson kept records — records, it seems, of everything, with what he called “scrupulous fidelity.” He religiously recorded the weather, taking the temperature twice a day, once in the morning and again at four in the afternoon. He entered into memorandum books every financial transaction, every source of income and every expenditure, no matter how small or how large — seven pennies for chickens or thousands of dollars for a land sale.
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, pg 27. Gordon S. WoodNo surprise then Thomas Jefferson kept an array of commonplace books:
He kept a variety of specialized books, including several commonplace books — a legal book, an equity book, and a literary book, in which he copied passages from his reading that he found important or interesting. He also kept a case book and a fee book, for tracking work and income from his legal career as long as it lasted; a farm book, in which he entered, among other things, the births and sales of slaves as well as farm animals; and a garden book. In his garden book, he made such notations as how many peas he was planting would fill a pint measure, how much fodder a horse would eat in a night, and how many cucumbers fifty hills would yield in a season.
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, pg 27. Gordon S. WoodFascinating how John Adams and Thomas Jefferson’s personalities were reflected in their daily writing habits. The pugnacious Adams’ confessionals, and Jefferson’s facts only approach.
From Gordon S. Wood‘s book: Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
Floodlights and Goalposts 