and don’t worry about not being clever. Trust rather to hard work, perseverance, and determination. The best motto for a long march is ‘Don’t grumble. Plug on.’ “You hold your future in your own hands. Never waver in this belief. Don’t swagger. The boy who swaggers-like the man who swaggers- has little else that he can do. He is a cheap-Jack crying his paltry wares. It is the empty tin that rattles most. Be honest. Be loyal. Be kind. Remember that hardest thing to acquire is the faculty of being unselfish. As a quality it is one of the finest attributes of manliness.
– Sir Frederick Treves
This from The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Hal and Conn Iggulden. This passage lives before even the table of contents. It’s a gauntlet thrown. A marker that tells you, reading this book will be an adventure.
A brief note on Sir Frederick Treves. He was a radical British surgeon who saved by Edward VII by draining his appendix. A surgical technique not used during that time.
Cities, on the other hand, are marked with specific architecture from specific dates, and this architecture, built by long-vanished others for their own uses, is the shell that we, like hermit crabs, climb into.
COWEN: Your brother aside, who is the best rapper of all time?
GREENE: [laughs] The best rapper of all time. Well, it depends on if we’re talking about lyrics or something else. But I’ll go with Black Thought, who my brother would say as well, who’s the lead rapper for the Roots.
COWEN: What makes him especially interesting?
GREENE: He’s prolific. He’s extremely productive. He’s very smart. He’s not lazy in the way in which he constructs his lyrics, and he manages to be both musical and a poet. This is something that my brother has struggled with early in his career. He’s a poet. He’s not a musician, and he had to learn to be a musician. Trying to combine those things is a rare gift.
For many seafarers, therefore, keeping a log or writing journal was not just a case of navigational necessity – to work out where they were, and where they were headed – but a way of locating themselves emotionally in a world turned upside down. A journal could combat loneliness, fear, frustration, even mutiny. For William Bligh of the Bounty, cast adrift in an open boat, keeping an accurate logbook was important testimony. As he navigated his way to safety through little-known Australian reefs, he took care to describe the men who had abandoned him; his pencil notes of the marks on their skin might identify them in a future manhunt. And despite all the hardships he suffered, he also took time to describe the new shores they touched on. Always exploring, he was an immense mariner and a deft artist, not the the sea-monster Hollywood films might suggest. A small journal helped to keep Bligh and his companions alive.
An “irrepressible reformer” (as his biographer, Wayne A. Wiegand, calls him), Dewey devoted most of his life to pressing for social change: railing against alcohol and tobacco, promoting the metric system, and even agitating to simplify English spelling (even going so far as to change the spelling of his own name to the phonetically correct Melvil Dui). Dewey invented his Decimal Classification while still an undergraduate at Amherst College, drawing on the earlier work of important library thinkers like Cutter and William T. Harris, whose cataloging scheme for the St. Louis Library had drawn directly on the concept of Francis Bacon and his division of all learning into three high-level categories: history, poetry, and philosophy.
Could there have been a librarians version of the PayPal mafia?
Frederick Winslow Taylor inspired Melvil Dewey, who collaborated with Charles Cutter, and both of them were inspired by Francis Bacon’s division of learning.
Dewey didn’t stop after the success of the Dewey Decimal System. He later founded the Library Bureau, the 18th century version of Staples. Which is still in business today!
The forever optimist continues to gift his timely wisdom on his birthday. It’s a tradition that’s become a modern, once-a-year Tolstoy Calendar of Wisdom.
Here’s a few of our favorites from this year:
Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.
Your best job will be one that you were unqualified for because it stretches you. In fact only apply to jobs you are unqualified for.
For a great payoff be especially curious about the things you are not interested in.
That last one though. We’re typically told to follow our interests, our natural curiosities. How does one become curious about a subject they care little for?
One approach could be finding someone who is manically obsessed with the subject and have a conversation with them. Say you hate trigonometry. Maybe you approach the best trigonometry professor in your area and straight up ask them, Why is trigonometry so interesting?
Ostwald also believed in using the methods of advertising to propagate scholarly work. Up until then advertising had served primary commercial interests. Ostwald argued that it could be pressed into the service of scholarship and education, helping to provide a platform for popularizing scientific findings and connecting the general public and the scholarly community. “The engineer cannot talk,” he said, advocating that schools should put a special emphasis on ensuring better communication and what today we might call presentation skills.
Paul Otlet’s contemporary Wilhelm Ostwald understood that to build a “global brain” the general public needed to understand it’s value. It needed to be made, well, popular. And he saw that advertising could be a tool to build public support.
The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience-but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are.
How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne, In one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Sarah Bakewell. Chapter 2 Pay Attention, pg 37.
This could be a productive writing exercise. 200 words describing the closest object near you.
I’ve been waiting months for this podcast episode. Tyler Cowen and Lydia Davis did not let me down.
For a writer of her stature, Lydia openly admits she finds very long books hard to approach:
COWEN: Do you think the late Thomas Pynchon became unreadable, that somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader? Or are those, in fact, masterworks that we’re just not up to appreciating?
DAVIS: Since I hesitated to even open the books, I can’t answer you, because I do find — not all long books — but very long, very fat books a little hard to approach, and some of them, I try over and over. If I sense that it’s really a load of verbiage, I really don’t. I fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one, say, late Pynchon, but I haven’t.
Don’t despair! Lydia Davis also struggled to read Ulysses. It took two cracks and a move to Ireland for her to finish:
I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce, and started it twice, and finally read it when I lived in Ireland, which made it much easier because I had his context. That too — I suppose because it had different chapters, each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way — I found that possible too.
I’m believing more and more, that what great books do, what the internet at it’s brightest light does, is make introductions.
Today’s introduction? The Catalan writer Josep Pla:
There’s a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that’s called The Gray Notebook. That’s very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it, but I’m not reading it all at once. I’m going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project. He took an early, very brief diary of his when he was 21, I think, and it only covered a year and a half. He kept going back to it rather than publishing it. He kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material, and I love that idea. Maybe that’s why I can read it.
Lydia admits the Harry Potter series didn’t captivate her. She preferred the writing in Philip Pullman’s The Dark Materials trilogy. But she understands, Harry Potter’s greatest value is hooking kids on reading:
COWEN: How would you articulate why you don’t like the Harry Potter novels?
DAVIS: That’s fairly easy, although I should have a page in front of me. It’s always better if you have the page, and you can say, “Look at this sentence, look at that sentence.” At a certain point, my son was reading Harry Potter as kids do and did. I think he was probably 11 or 10 or 11, 12, 9 — I don’t know. Also, the Philip Pullman trilogy, whose name I always forget. I thought it would be a lot of fun to read the Harry Potter books because I knew a lot of grownups were reading them and enjoying them. I thought, “This is great. There are a lot of them.”
But when I tried to read them, I didn’t like the style of writing, and I didn’t like the characters, and I didn’t like anything about them. Whereas, I opened the first Philip Pullman book and read the first page and said, “This is wonderful. The writing here is wonderful.” I really think there’s an ocean of difference. I wouldn’t put down the Harry Potter books because, as we know, they got a lot of kids reading and being enraptured with books. I think that matters more than anything, really — getting kids hooked on reading.
Brilliant and insightful. Do give it a listen or read the transcript in full here.
Floodlights and Goalposts 