Context & Continuity

Your eccentric cousin sends a postcard.

Now that I've lived in San Francisco for some time, I'm able to detect certain currents.  These currents, ebbing out of the bay beneath the Golden Gate, don't flow according to any atlas or chart, but the geography of my career, from New York City to the city by the Bay. 

Bethatasitmay, I've come to notice the way New York views San Francisco.  Now, how shall I characterize it?  The sister who went away to the interesting arts college and makes pots for living?  The cousin who spends Far Too Much Time preparing for the Renaissance Faire?  I could go on but you've travelled this way before. 

I've been holding on to this article from the NYTimes since March 15, 2009.   What we have here is a new urban retreat.  Here's the glimpse:     

A core of 38 men and women — their average age the late 20s — live full time in the retreat center, a shabby-chic loft building in the South of Market district. They prepare meals together, practice yoga and mindfulness meditation and lead workshops in communication for outside groups as large as 60.

But the heart of the group’s activity, listed cryptically on its Web site’s calendar as “morning practice,” is closed to all but the residents.

At 7 a.m. each day, as the rest of America is eating Cheerios or trying to face gridlock without hyperventilating, about a dozen women, naked from the waist down, lie with eyes closed in a velvet-curtained room, while clothed men huddle over them, stroking them in a ritual known as orgasmic meditation — “OMing,” for short.

I am so jealsous!  When am I going to have the chance to juxtapose the words "Cheerios" and "orgasmic" in the same paragraph?  My fondest hope is that New Yorkers will read this, hop on the next JetBlue flight to SFO and part with their precious savings in pursuit of ... enlightenment?  In the meantime, I prefer my Cheerios with 1% milk, please.

[Link to the NYTimes story.]

Passport, please: Travels in the Republic of Letters.

I read a review of this book in the Wall Street Journal, where one frequently finds thoughts about thoughtful books.  This book is Worlds Made by Words and everything about it strikes me as very interesting.  this is from the Wall Street Journal review:

From the early 15th century until late in the 18th, such scholars formed what Anthony Grafton, in "Worlds Made by Words," calls the "Republic of Letters." It was a peculiar republic: "

It had no borders, no government, and no capital." It fostered a lofty notion of equality among the learned but stooped at times to "grubby practices," ostracizing those who seemed to flout its (unwritten) protocols.

And this there's this bit of description Amazon posts about the book:

In this book Anthony Grafton lets us in on one of the great secrets of scholars and intellectuals: although scholars lead solitary lives in order to win independence of mind, they also enjoy the conviviality of sharing a project sustained by common ideals, practices, and institutions. It’s like Masonry, but without the secret handshakes.

Grafton reveals the microdynamics of the scholarly life through a series of essays on institutions and on scholars ranging from early modern polymaths to modern intellectual historians to American thinkers and writers. He takes as his starting point the republic of letters—that loose society of intellectuals that first took shape in the sixteenth century and continued into the eighteenth. Its inhabitants were highly original, individual thinkers and writers. Yet as Grafton shows, they were all formed, in some way, by the very groups and disciplines that they set out to build.

In our noisy, caffeinated world it has never been more challenging to be a scholar. When many of our fellow citizens seem to have forgotten why we collect books in the buildings we call libraries, Grafton’s engaging, erudite essays could be a rallying cry for the revival of the liberal arts.

Now that's reads very appealing.

And then there's this bit, again, from the Wall Street Journal review:

In "The Public Intellectual and the Private Sphere," Mr. Grafton evokes the intense reaction that Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" provoked among Jewish intellectuals when it began appearing in 1963. He even revisits his own family table. Samuel Grafton, the author's father and a respected journalist, tried to interview Arendt for Look magazine, sending her pages of hard questions. Arendt refused to meet with him.

Mr. Grafton reconstructs this episode through his father's letters and notes -- the article was written but never published -- and his own recollections. Mr. Grafton is fair to Arendt, perhaps too fair, acknowledging her formidable intellect while attempting to set her outraged attacks on the Judenrat -- the Jewish councils compelled by the Nazis to assist in selections for death-camp transports -- in some sort of nuanced context. Strangely, he fails to mention her postwar, behind-the-scenes efforts on behalf of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, an unrepentant Nazi who had once been her lover. Arendt's arrogance comes through in his essay but not her duplicity.

Oh, my.  We like that last line, don't we? 

Okay, let's put this book on our list. 

James Purdy, of blessed memory.

I must confess straightaway, that I haven't read any of Mr. Purdy's work.  I think I'll fix that, and I'll let you know how that works out.  But in the meantime, I came across Mr. Purdy's obituary and found within it certain gems such as this:

Wayward and unclassifiable, Mr. Purdy, the author of the novels “Malcolm” and “The Nephew,” labored at the margins of the literary mainstream, inspiring veneration or disdain. His nearly 20 novels and numerous short stories and plays either enchanted or baffled critics with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt and meaningless world, his distinctive blend of plain speech with ornate, florid locutions, and the hallucinatory quality of his often degraded scenes.

My goodness.  what wouldn't any of us give to leave this as a legacy?  So we should note that William Grimes wrote the obituary, someone who writes restaurant reviews and obituaries for the NYTimes.  (And there must be a story in Mr. Grimes, chosen specialization.) 

Here's another extract from the obituary:

Mr. Purdy, whose view of American culture was not optimistic, seemed to regard rejection as a badge of honor. “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me,” he told one interviewer. “I’d think that something had gone wrong.”

And this:

“Reputations are made here, as in Russia, on political respectability, or by commercial acceptability,” he once said. “The worse the author, the more he is known.”

[Link to the obituary in the NYTimes.]

The Economist, 2.26.9: Primates on Facebook

Come on, you knew it all along, didn't you.

THAT Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?

But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

[more]

Ketchum / Ray Kotcher: "Dancing Backward in High Heels"

Ray Kotcher, senior partner and CEO of Ketchum, is one of the most talented and harkest-working people I know in Public Relations.  I was very fortunate to have worked in Ketchum's New York City office while he was the director there.  For me, it was the equivalent of a graduate degree in the profession. 

Mr. Kotcher recently gave a speech in Beijing and his remarks are publishing on Kethcum's webiste.  Here's a taste of what he said: 

Some of you will remember Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a dancing team and the darlings of Hollywood in the 1930s. Fred Astaire today is remembered as an actor, singer and choreographer – but most of all as one of the greatest dancers of his century.

 

Ginger Rogers is remembered mainly as Fred Astaire’s partner, not as a great dancer herself. But it should be pointed out that as great a dancer as Fred was, Ginger matched him step-for-step – and her steps were backward and in high heel shoes. 

 

I think of this when I look at companies from emerging markets that are trying to break into North America or Europe. They face the same barriers to entry as any other company. But like Ginger, they will have to dance just as well as better-known companies. And they must do it backward in high heels. Or in the case of businesses, they must match the performance of their competitors in the context of an environment with long-held stereotypes and misperceptions.

...

This takes me to my next point – nothing is local anymore.

 

In addition to the way that media coverage sometimes reinforces stereotypes and misperceptions, the expanded speed and breadth of coverage also increases the amount of information that people look at.

 

This has created a compelling duality. On the one hand, the speed of communication and amount of information available can result in rapid change in how we see the world.

 

On the other hand, people have a tendency to bucket ideas in ways that we already understand. So, much of the new information that we have to deal with is collapsed into already existing molds.

 

When these two factors work together, new stereotypes can be created overnight, and once established, they are incredibly difficult to change.

I highly encourage you to read his speech.  You can find it here. 

NY Times, 3.6.9: President Sticks to the Script, With a Little Help

Fascinating article in the Friday NY Times about President Obama's use of the Teleprompter.  Read this: 

For Mr. Obama, a teleprompter means message discipline, sticking close to the intended words. While some presidents prefer extemporizing, Mr. Obama likes the message to be just so. After all, he is a best-selling author who has helped write a lot of his major speeches, so he presumably feels a certain fidelity to the crafted text.

Michael Waldman, who was President Bill Clinton's chief speechwriter, said Mr. Obama was one of the few politicians able to use a teleprompter effectively.

“If he were just reading something someone handed him and didn’t understand what it said, that would be one thing,” Mr. Waldman said. “But I don’t think anybody doubts that he’s expressing his own thoughts.”

What's interesting me me is that working with a Teleprompter is not an easy skill to master.  And you might recall how, during the presidential campaign, Senator John McCain couldn't work with a Teleprompter at all. 

Someday, perhaps, we'll read a story about the person who has to "drive" the Teleprompter for the speaker.  Anchors on the network news drive their own Teleprompters with a switch on the desk or a foot pedal.  Politicians can't do that so someone, off to the side, has to advance the copy for the speaker, perfectly in step with the speaker's cadence.  It can be a very intimate -- and very nerve-wracking -- experience.