This is funny. Via Belle of the Books, a list of the books that people most lie about reading. (I’ve actually once fibbed about reading one of these. Ahem.)
Blogging whiteness into a book
Well, hats off to Christian Lander, who somehow turned a blog about Stuff White People Like into a book. No qualms about blogging and book-writing for him.
The other thing that must be said, of course, is that he gets it uncomfortably right. I’m whiter than I thought, as found I out here, here, here and here, among other places. Here, too, but then he got the definition slightly wrong. Here is mine.
Editors are human
This is an old-ish piece, from 2001, but it gives a rare peek into the book world from the … editor‘s point of view. In it, Geoff Shandler at Little, Brown, keeps a diary for one week. He gets outbid, he has health problems, he sees the promise and problems in books, he sits through meetings and gets outbid again. He is, in short, refreshingly human. Authors forget that.
A few gems:
Public mention is, for a book editor, like sunlight to a vampire. We don’t want our names on the jackets. We don’t want to go on television. If we’ve been noticed, we’ve failed….
… my least favorite task: beg other writers for blurbs.
(This is becoming an anti-blurb theme.)
Autobiographies are popular, many of them proving that while life is amazing, most life stories are not….
A lot of people go into book publishing because they think they’ll get to read all day. What they don’t realize is that so much of what you read is junk….
A bad review hurts, but a sloppy review infuriates…
“How” books vs “Why” books
This is apparently a widespread distinction in the book industry, at least in non-fiction. I actually think it’s useful.
My book is definitely a Why book.
I don’t think much of How books. I know that some sell well, just as junk food sells well, but neither genre is good for you. How books are like slot machines: they make a fake promise of sudden insight or wealth to the weak-willed and vulnerable, and then don’t deliver. They can’t deliver. The world is too complex for one How book or even a thousand. The best we can do is to try to understand Why and then use our instinct and experience.
A genre closely related to the How books is the List book (or List magazine-article). The formula is simple: If you have nothing to say, no story to tell, no central insight, just make a list! Ten steps to this, seven habits of that, one hundred answers to this, and so forth. In magazines, the one hundred most powerful women, the fifty richest men, the twenty greatest innovators, etc. It’s a mediocre writer’s dream: You don’t actually have to go out and find a story, you just sit around and rank some celebrities or quirky one-line teasers and let the audience debate.
As with everything, there are exceptions that prove the rule. 
The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene, is an intelligent book that is also a list and appears to be a How book. But it’s not. It’s really a Why book, cleverly disguised as a List/Why book.
But my basic point stands. Write Why books. Read Why books. That is challenging and rewarding enough for a few lifetimes.
Churchill on well-disguised impostors
My book is about Kipling‘s notion that success and failure, or triumph and disaster, can be impostors. That does not mean, of course, that all triumphs and all disasters are always impostors. But to say that wittily, we really need ole Winston.
Churchill, as it happens, lived a life that in many ways illustrates Kipling’s impostors, but that’s for another post. Here is today’s anecdote:
After the Brits voted him out of office in the 1945 election (as a Thank You for winning the war–talk about impostor!), his wife said to him that this defeat might be a “blessing in disguise.”
“At the moment,” Churchill replied, “it seems quite effectivley disguised.”
Snarky and confessional? Or humorous and expert?
The folks at Technorati have finally produced their latest “State of the Blogosphere” report, and an interesting tidbit of Day 2 concerns how bloggers describe their own style.
Although there is a perception of blogging as a means for writing a tell-all or gossiping about others, snarky and confessional were at the bottom of the list in terms of blogging styles. Half of bloggers consider their style to be sincere, conversational, humorous, and expert in nature…
Asian bloggers tend to be more motivational and confessional, while European bloggers are more confrontational. Women tend to be more conversational in their blogging style, while men tend to be expert. Finally, those under 34 are more confessional in their blogging style, while those over 35 are more expert in their style. Fewer than one in five bloggers consider themselves snarky or confessional.
In chart form, this is how that looks:
Now, an immediate problem is that this is how bloggers described themselves. I suspect that this chart would look very different if you had asked bloggers to describe other bloggers. Nobody will admit to being snarky, but you might enthusiastically volunteer that blogger who just made fun of your latest post as a snarker.
Be that as it may. I myself try to be (in this chart): sincere, conversational, humorous and yes, expert, but humbly so (what I enjoy most is learning from you guys). If any of you ever feel that the style of this blog is anything other than that, shout it out in the comments at once.
Hannibal’s brother and … Mayonnaise!
Every now and then I convince myself that that I know quite a bit about ancient history, and then I stumble across something not just new but whiplashingly new. Did you know that the word mayonnaise is named after Hannibal’s youngest brother?
According to Livius, it came about as follows: Hannibal’s brother was named Mago (a common Carthaginian/Punic name), and he
… lives on in a most surprising way. On Menorca, he had founded the city that is still called Port Mahon. The typical local egg sauce that has conquered the world is known as mayonnaise.
And while we’re on the subject of Hannibal’s brothers:
Hasdrubal's head (before Roman cosmetic intervention)
Hasdrubal, who was younger than Hannibal but older than Mago, died valiantly in battle against the Romans as he tried to bring a second invasion army to Italy to support Hannibal.
The Romans cut off his head. Then they marched it to the other end of Italy and catapulted it into Hannibal’s camp. Hannibal, who still did not even know that Hasdrubal had arrived in Italy, last saw his brother’s face …. as it rolled toward him.
So it goes, as Vonnegut would say. But those Romans sure had a way of doing things.
Zidane rode for Hannibal
Well, this is really cool. I learned something that has long puzzled me, and I did it through blogging.
You recall that I recommended a blog post by Mathilda, in which she explains the ethnic categories of “Africans” in antiquity. (In a nutshell: “Libyan” = white; “Ethiopian” = black). All of which fascinates me because I want to form the most accurate picture possible of what Hannibal, a Carthaginian, and his Numidian and Iberian allies may have looked like.
And now somebody named Ureus left this comment (thank you, Ureus!) in which he/she explains that:
I am also a descendant of the Numidians, but nowadays we are called Kabyle Berbers.
Contrary to the Afrocentrist view; we are a white Mediterranean race. For the Afro-centrists out there: even the word Africa is of Berber origin; it comes from the word Ifriqiya, which designated the tribal territory of the Berber tribes of Northern Tunisia.
Fine, so how should we picture these Numidians, who were the fiercest horsemen of antiquity (they rode without stirrups or saddles and wrought havoc on the Romans in Hannibal’s battles)? Well, here is one Kabyle Berber you may have seen before:
Zidane, a Kabyle Berber
The Beeb (BBC, for the Americans) has a Q&A on Berbers here.
Now, if somebody could please help me with the “Iberians”, please?
The end of book publishing? Part III
Just as I was running the risk of ecstatic optimism–my book is coming along great and I’m writing it much faster than I had expected–a long but worthwhile article in New York Magazine comes along to remind me that I should really be … dejected.
I have opined on the end of the book business before. In that post, I struggled with the question of whether or not anybody still … reads.
Now New York Magazine cheers us up by asking, among other things, whether or not anybody still sells (book stores), pays (book publishers) or markets (ditto). I’ve pulled out the choicest quotes:
Lately, the whole, hoary concept of paying writers advances against royalties has come under question… [The] money has to come from somewhere, so publishers have cracked down on their non-star writers. The advances you don’t hear about have been dropping precipitously.
(Fortunately, I’ve already got my advance.) Next, publicity:
Traditional marketing is useless. “Media doesn’t matter, reviews don’t matter, blurbs don’t matter,” says one powerful agent.
(I wonder if that “powerful agent” was this one.)
But that’s not enough. Borders Group, which controls about 12% of the entire book-selling market all by itself, is apparently “on death watch”. And then Amazon, the industry agrees, is poised to exert total, Big-Brotherish domination of the market.
Oh vey, oh vey, oh vey…
Pyrrhic victories
Heard about my victory?
You’ve heard of Pyrrhic Victories, which are defeats disguised as triumphs–in other words, Kipling-esque impostors of the sort that I will be describing in my book. But do you know why they are called that?
It’s thanks to Pyrrhus, who is well worth five minutes of your time.
Pyrrhus was the ancient world’s equivalent of a dumb jock whom all the girls loved, who bashed the equivalent of Budweiser cans on his forehead and beat up the enemy football team but never quite figured it all out.
Put differently, he was the King of Epirus in northern Greece, and wanted to be like Alexander the Great, who died a couple of generations before him. (Pyrrhus in turn died a generation before Hannibal was born.) He wanted to be a hero and to conquer. Basically, that’s all there was to it. And he was great at it–brave, courageous, strong. Plutarch says that once, when he was thought dead on the battlefield, he just got up and cleft an enemy soldier in two pieces with one blow of his sword.
One day, an opportunity came up: Tarentum, a Greek city in southern Italy that was fighting the Romans, invited Pyrrhus to come over and fight Rome on their behalf. Pyrrhus was thrilled. As he was preparing to leave for Italy with his army and his war elephants (sounds a lot like Hannibal, doesn’t it?), he had a conversation with the wise Cineas. This is one of my favorite exchanges in antiquity. Here is Plutarch’s version:
Cineas: If we beat the Romans, what should we do next?
Pyrrhus: Why, then we’ll be masters of all Italy.
Cineas: “And having subdued Italy, what shall we do next?”
Pyrrhus: “Sicily.”
Cineas: “But will the possession of Sicily put an end to the war?”
Pyrrhus: “We will use that as the forerunners of greater things” such as Libya and Carthage. Would anybody resist us after that?
Cineas: “None,” for then we can take Macedon and even all of Greece. “And when all these are in our power what shall we do then?”
Pyrrhus: “We will live at our ease, my dear friend, and drink all day, and divert ourselves with pleasant conversation.”
Cineas: “And what hinders us now, sir,” from doing exactly that?
At this Pyrrhus was nonplussed. But left for Italy anyway!
Next, he had his Pyrrhic victories. He beat the Romans, but each time he lost so many men and gained so little that once, when congratulated on yet another victory, he sighed: “Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone.”
Eventually, as he was wont, he got distracted. There was another opportunity for glory in Sicily, so he sailed around a bit there and bashed a few heads. You can see on that map what that trip (dare I say his life?) looked like.
Courtesy PIOM, via Wikimedia Commons
In any event, Sicily also failed to make him happy, so eventually he made his way back to Greece.
Once home, he kept fighting wars here and there. I mean, it’s a hard habit to kick! His end came as it had to come (irony alert): He was in the middle of some vicious street fighting in a Greek city, when an old woman on a rooftop dropped a tile, which landed on his heroic pate and knocked him dead. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.
Have you ever been a Pyrrhus in your life? Do you know any Pyrrhuses?
Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history 