And I’m on the road again. But I’ll try to keep posting. In particular, I’m trying to think of ways to get back on message, the main “message” being the book that I’ve just delivered to my editor at Riverhead.
You recall that my dilemma is the following: I’m not ready yet to start giving away parts of the book as such. (I don’t have a publication date yet and want to start doing that closer to the time.) But I love the story and topic so much that I started an entire blog with the intention of discussing it, not just ahead of but forever after the book launch.
So maybe I’ll start by setting the scene, in a more cerebral and less narrative way, for the main plot and the main characters. The main plot, you recall, takes place during the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome, and the main characters are Hannibal and Scipio. (For some of the more modern characters that appear inside the individual chapters, browse my tags.)
Since the Punic Wars are not exactly common knowledge nowadays (I was born in the wrong generation, by the way), I might start by setting those in context on The Hannibal Blog. What were they? Why were they? How are they still visible all around us today?
Would that be fun?
PS: One of you has let me know via email that he is working on a graphic book about Hannibal. How cool is that? Whenever you’re ready (I don’t “out” people who contact me via email), please share the excitement here on The Hannibal Blog. I’d be honored and want to be the first to link to you…
On the even lighter side (and still off message, but not much longer): one of you has made me aware of an author named William Monahan, who wrote this sentence in the final installment of his serial story Dining Late with Claude La Badarian (reviewed here):
I was able to convince the police, after a few minutes difficulty on the landing (I was coming back from the shower, inconvenienced by precarious towel, soap-on-a-rope in the form of Sneezy the Dwarf), that I was not “Claude Le Bandarian,” blackmailer, but a paperless German anthropologist named Andreas Kluth.
I would be flattered, but No, as far as I know, I cannot have inspired this reference. (Paperless? I try. German? Largely, but that’s between us. Anthropology? More as object than subject. Andreas Kluth? Unequivocally.)
I admit that my name is not exactly household. But you do notice that I couldn’t get the .com or .net domains. I’m aware of a municipal politician somewhere in Germany who has my name. He must be the anthropologist. 😉
So-and-so “graciously invited Michelle and I,” he says. “The main disagreement with John and I,” he begins. Obama, Obama. You and I need to have a word. (But which one?)
All of you know by now that I’m a lover of, yes, Obama, but also of language, words and style. On the spectrum between grammar fundamentalists and libertines, I am closer to the fundamentalists (in this and only this in life!).
So I side with Naomi Baron, a linguist whom I quoted in this story in The Economist decrying the “linguistic whateverism” that is taking over (American) culture. It would make snobs out of people who care about the difference between who’s and whose, it’s and its, I and me, like and as, and so forth.
And so we come to Obama. First–still speaking about grammar–he is of course vastly preferable to the alternative. (Check out these speech diagrams comparing Obama and Palin.) And even though he entered his presidency with a grammatical stumble, that was John Roberts’ fault, not his. (Steven Pinker called it “blowback” for Roberts’ fundamentalism, since the chief justice apparently could not bring himself to “split the verb” and thus mangled the oath of office.)
But Obama is no grammar saint either. Bloggers have been pointing it out, and now Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, the authors of a forthcoming book about language, are opining about it in the New York Times.
One issue is subjects and objects; another is pomposity and naturalness. In turn:
I object
Nobody could possibly invite “Michelle and he” but quite a lot of people would love to invite “Michelle and him“. That is because the inviter is the subject and first couple are the objects (direct, in this case).
Nor could anybody give a fistbump to “Michelle and he”, although I would personally love to give one to “Michelle and him”. In this case the object is indirect (the fistbump being the direct object), but English doesn’t distinguish.
Oh puhleeze
Americans increasingly don’t see it that way, of course. To them you say the word me (him, her, them) whenever you’re being informal and the word I (he, she, they) whenever you’re being formal. Now that is pompous. It’s like eating a hamburger with fork and knife. It’s overcompensating, because a toff is watching.
Saying myself is not the answer, by the way. I cannot invite “Michelle and himself”, only “Michelle and him.” But, he could invite himself, although he is unlikely to be so presumptuous.
But it’s me
That brings us to the old chestnut: Which is correct: It’s me or It’s I?
The problem here is that the is is not an action verb but a linking verb.It is being linked to me or I, but neither it nor I are obviously the subject or object. So let’s see how other languages deal with the problem:
C’est moi. OK, the French think it should be it’s me.
Es bin ich. Oops, the Germans think it should be it am I.
The Hannibal Blog only pretended to close off the thread on great thinkers by anointing a winner (Patanjali). This is a blog about a forthcoming book (mine), but also about ideas, so I will keep highlighting the best thinkers I come across.
Today: Linda Stone, formerly a researcher at Apple and Microsoft, and now simply a thinker and a liver of life.
Her idea is called continuous partial attention. It has been the bane of our existence in the rich world for the past two decades, and it is not multitasking. The good news is that the age of continuous partial attention is almost over. I will explain below, but if you have time, watch Linda:
Let me flesh that out a bit with the notes from my interview with her in 2006. (I ended up quoting her, but only tangentially, in this concluding chapter of my Special Report on new media in The Economist.)
From about 1945 to 65, we lived in an era when we “we suppressed our creativity” in order to pay full attention to whatever we were doing. The cultural icon was I Love Lucy: she “talked on the phone with her whole body and did nothing else! Everything in that era was focused on company or family. You were committed. You stayed put.”
From 65 to 85, “we questioned authority and asked for creativity.” This era became “all about me and my personal expression.” We wanted freedom. Divorce went up, commitment down. We paid attention only if we saw a payback. And so we began multitasking. Our motivation was to become more productive so that we might have more opportunities in life.
From 85 to 2005 we became “narcissistic and lonely and reached out for connection“. Technology increasingly allowed us to be “always on” the network, via email, cellphones, WiFi etc. Our motivation shifted from creating opportunities to scanning for opportunity. So we began to pay continuous partial attention. Instead of Lucy, we had Seinfeld, talking on the phone while doing other things, such as making out with his girlfriend. He was not multitasking; he was paying partial attention in case something better came along.
This is the important but subtle key to understanding Linda’s idea. Continuous partial attention (think SMSing while you’re in a meeting) does not come from a desire to be more productive and efficient but from
desiring to be a live node on the network and fearing that you’re missing out on something.
Now the good news
Starting about now, says Linda, we are entering a new era. That’s because we are “overwhelmed” by technology, and
longing for protection and meaningful connections, quality over quantity.
So we consciously forgo some opportunities to savor others, such as dinner with friends. We reassert our power over technology and the network by making our gadgets filter our world to keep out the noise. As Linda says,
The real aphrodisiac in this next era is attention…. What we’re moving into is an era where we value ownership of our time” [and] “discover the joy of focusing”
As you know, I like to keep you up to date from time to time on the debates that we at The Economist have internally about style. That’s because these debates can improve your writing too.
After our last issue closed, we had another round of these invariably edifying and witty debates. It was kicked off by our doyen of style, who sent this missive:
The paper would be easier to read if we used fewer brackets, dashes and semi-colons. These are all fine in moderation, but not in profusion. Brackets are often unnecessary. Try taking them out. Dashes can be confusing, especially if you have more than one set in a paragraph or, worse, in a single sentence. They can usually be replaced by commas. And semi-colons, particularly when used in narrow columns like ours, tend to make readers feel they are struggling through one interminable sentence. They are usually better replaced by full stops.
Another annoyance is the use of “the former” and “the latter”. This almost always obliges the reader to stop, go back and work out which is which.
We then had another evergreen debate, also of interest to all writers: How much knowledge should you assume your readers to have? From the same style guru:
Some section editors assume their readers are as familiar with their subject matter as they are. Tom DeLay, Nancy Pelosi and Rush Limbaugh were all mentioned in one piece this week without any explanation of who they were. Explanations can be tedious, especially in columns, and we sometimes strive too hard, describing General Motors, say, as a car company. But remember that not everyone knows as much as you do.
This made me smile, because I’ve often mocked us for saying things like “Microsoft, a large software company” (notice that it is not “the large software company”, since there are other software companies). Why not “America, a large country”?
As I was smirking, a colleague, tongue-in-cheek, pointed us all to no less an authority than our Wikipedia page, where we are taken to task for exactly this:
The newspaper usually does not translate short French quotes or phrases, and sentences in Ancient Greek or Latin are not uncommon. It does, however, describe the business or nature of even well-known entities; writing, for example, “Goldman Sachs, an investment bank”.”
The two Freakonomics gods of economics, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, have now joined in the debate about whether or not micropayments are the future of newspapers, a debate I first pointed to last week.
Unfortunately, so far they have only sampled views from the people I’ve already linked to. I hope that means they are getting ready for their own economic analysis of the issue. A lot rides on it.
Personally, I still think that the Kindle and its ilk point to the future. Technically, it is not a micropayments platform yet (micro = thousands, not hundreds, of a dollar at a time). But it begins the process of news publications charging modest amounts for a new reading experience, and that is what this is about.
I was catching up with Orville Schell, one of my mentors, last night. That’s always fun, but I was especially delighted by how he immediately got the plot of my book as I told it to him. (I’m not quite ready yet to start giving it away on the Hannibal Blog, but I’m getting closer.)
At one point, Orville says: “Oh, so it’s like Plutarch.”
Now, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know why this made me happy. First, to be compared to Plutarch is tall praise for any writer. But in my particular case, it means a lot more.
Plutarch, you recall, was the first biographer. More to the point, what he did was to pair one Greek and one Roman at a time in order to draw lessons and comparisons from their lives. Alexander and Caesar, for instance. He assumed that we would be able to apply these lessons to our own lives.
One way to express the idea for my book is to call it a “modern Plutarch”–although I would never say so unless prompted, since “Plutarch” doesn’t mean much to most Americans. But the idea is quite similar:
I don’t have pairs in the sense of twos, but I do follow my main characters–Hannibal, Fabius and Scipio–through their whole lives and, in each chapter, pair them with other figures. (Amy Tan, JK Rowling, Tiger Woods, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ludwig Erhard, Cleopatra, the Dalai Lama, and so forth.)
In each case, or so I hope, it will be so obvious what the theme of the chapter is that the segues are fluid and natural. Hannibal went through X; and so did Einstein. Scipio responded with Y, and so did Steve Jobs. You get the point.
So, for Orville to listen to some of these individual comparisons and instantaneously blurt out “Plutarch” is a great vote of confidence that I executed my idea well. But I’m still waiting for my editor’s reaction; he has the manuscript right now.
Story-telling: So far in this thread about stories and their telling, we’ve had highbrow and lowbrow, ancient and modern, written and spoken. How far can we stretch it? I think that every form of human communication involves story-telling. So ads, if they’re good, are stories too.
Consider the following, which is arguably the most famous single ad:
Ira Glass would commend it for immediately making us fell that:
“something is about to occur”
we are “heading in a direction” and “can’t get out” of the story now
there is “a bigger, universal something” (Orwellian oppression vs individual expression)
there is “action, action, action … and then thought”. (IBM = Big Brother; Apple = freedom)
Homer, as I said in the previous post, is one of the great story-tellers because in The Iliad he gave us a heart-rending and timeless look at wrath. Now look at what he did in the Odyssey! Wow. Those two stories could not be more different.
There is a theory on the periphery of academia (is that a redundancy?) that the Iliad and Odyssey were actually written by different authors. The Iliad, in this theory, was authored by a man; the Odyssey by a woman. I don’t know and I don’t care, but the mere hypothesis is telling because the two stories are so very different.
The Iliad is about young men being heroes. They either win or die, heroically. It is a story written, if not by a young man, certainly for young men.
The Odyssey is a story about and for older people: It is about trying to return to something lost and traversing a liminal realm known today as the midlife crisis. (Just think of the main character in James Joyce’s Ulysses.)
Returns
The return is a classic theme of the monomyth theory by Jung and Campbell. For example, there is an entire genre of plays and stories that have to do with the heroes of the Trojan War, now as older men, trying (and often failing) to return home. Agamemnon comes home to be murdered by his wife in his own bathtub. Aeneas wanders all around the Mediterranean. Ditto Odysseus.
I’ve heard that the Odyssey is often used in seminars for Vietnam vets. Apparently the story speaks to them in a particularly direct and intimate way.
Midlife liminality
Limen is the Latin word for threshold. The Greeks and Romans often put little statues of Hermes/Mercury near their thresholds, because they believed that crossing thresholds was of particular significance and had its own divinity. The biggest thresholds are death and middle age (the “death” of the young hero and “rebirth” as old man.)
The Odyssey is about this extended liminality of midlife. Odysseus (like Aeneas) literally walks through Hades, the underworld of the dead, with Hermes. For ten years, he has a full-blow midlife crisis: Dangerous women, crazy ideas, irresponsible behavior. But he also yearns for stability and reconnection with his son, Telemachus, and wife, Penelope, whom he last saw twenty years ago. His home is in chaos; his status is in question; he no longer knows who he is and must redefine himself. This is midlife!
So don’t be fooled by the colorful stories of Sirens (pictured above) and Cyclops and what not. All of those famous adventures are part of a story within the story, a speech that Odysseus himself gives to his hosts to explain what he has been through. It is assumed that he is spicing some of his adventures up for the telling.
But most of the Odyssey is about his son Telemachus trying to find his absent father, about Odysseus trying to come home, and then about trying to reestablish himself at home.
So how does my story-telling theory fare? The Odyssey is less simple than the other stories I’ve featured so far, but that’s because it aims at older audiences that savor complexity; it has great momentum; and, yes, it has a universal idea.
What an intriguing cast of characters this thread on story-telling is becoming: Scheherazade, Ira Glass, Herodotus and Truman Capote, the Grimm Brothers… I like this mixing of high-brow and populist; grown-up and children’s; oral, audio and written; ancient and contemporary…. After all, it’s all story-telling. So let’s move on to Homer.
What makes the Iliad (and, in the next post, the Odyssey) such an enduring story?
For the time being (because you’ve not yet dissuaded me), I will continue to apply my emerging theory: the Iliad is a great story because it has:
simplicity
momentum and
universality.
What could be simpler than to tell your audience what your story is about in the very first word! The first word in the original Greek is menis (as in mania), which means wrath. The wrath of Achilles and of all mankind is what the Iliad is about. The Trojan War is “merely” the backdrop.
We meet the characters: Achilles and Agamemnon, childish and vain, but awesome to behold. Here is our hero and he is … sulking! We get tense. This isn’t good. Something awful will happen. But what?
Then, a delay. And what a build-up. We have looong sections listing all the heroes and ships that sailed to Troy. To us this is boring, but to the ancients this was an occasion for cheering, because each and every Greek was waiting for his ancestor to be named. The list signaled the grandness and the inclusiveness of what was about to unfold.
Then, action: Gory, individualized fighting, with spears piercing through breasts and swords cutting off limbs. The excitement and horror build.
Before long, we are disgusted. Achilles takes things too far. He defaces Hector’s corpse, and one just doesn’t do this. We sympathize with both heroes (Achilles = wrath; Hector = duty) and both sides in the war at this point. We suffer as humans, because we see how wrath has destroyed civilized behavior.
And this is the thought that gives the story universality. We come down from the thrill of the violence and are exhausted. We yearn for civility. And we get it. The Greeks stage funeral games for Achilles’ fallen friend, and now at last we see conflicts resolved without violence. It is as though everybody, even Achilles had learned.
Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history 