Two great Russians

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died, and his happens to be one of the lives I’ve been researching for one chapter of my book. (Lots of reversals between disaster and triumph, obviously, including some non-obvious and subtle ones.)

This won’t make sense out of context, but I’m pairing him not only with Hannibal but also with another great Russian, Mikhail Gorbachev, although I’m just starting my research about him.

Can anybody recommend any great biographies of Gorbachev, especially ones that include his years since power–ie, his time in relative obscurity?

In the comments or by email, please. (The form underneath this page sends me an email.)


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Word lovers

An author named Ammon Shea has just written a book about how he read the entire Oxford English Dictionary.

That touched a nerve, because when I was sixteen I tried to read the entire American Heritage Dictionary (I still have the marked-up copy next to me now). Ammon made it through. I got side-tracked at around P, I think.

Why would I do such a thing? My mother tongue was (is) German, but I was living in America and wanted to get on top of this thing, the English language. My model was Joseph Conrad, who didn’t learn English until he was in his twenties, then became one of the greatest writers in the English language ever.


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Semitic Hannibal

The previous post was about Hannibal’s ethnicity, this one is about his language.

For the record, I love language–whether that means being wantonly pedantic or tracing words to their etymological origins. Let me do the latter now, to show that Hannibal was a Semite. Just to be clear: The word semitic, properly used, has a linguistic, not an ethnic, context (just as, say, Germanic or Anglo-Saxon are terms about language, not ethnicity.)

Hannibal’s clan name was Barca. Barca means ‘lightning’ (quite fitting, don’t you think?). Barca also tells us about the Punic language.

For explanation, I asked Rutie Adler, a scholar and the coordinator of the Hebrew Language Program in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley.

Punic (the Roman world for Phoenician), she said, is a Northwest-Semitic language, and thus closely related to Hebrew and somewhat more distantly related to Arabic. A good family tree is here.

Thus the Punic word for lightning, Barca, is essentially the Hebrew word Barak (as in Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, but not as in Barack Obama).

It is also the Arab word Buraq, which happens to be the name of the winged horse that carried Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem and back during his night journey.

Cool, isn’t it?


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Archimedes beats the Google guys …

… by about 2,200 years. Alright, not quite. But they did fish a thing they call “the first analog computer” out of a ship wreck off Crete, and it now turns out that the prodigious brain of Archimedes was involved in its creation. From the article:

Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms.

Not from the article, but obviously of interest to us here, is how Archimedes died: It was–but of course!– during and because of Hannibal’s war against Rome. The Romans were trying to win Sicily, the large island between Italy and Carthage, and stormed the ancient Greek city of Syracuse. Archimedes, it appears, was so absorbed in the mathematical equations he was just then scribbling into the dust that he did not bother even to look up as the Roman legionaries ran toward him. Not knowing who the genius at his feet was, one young Roman brute plunged his sword into the old man. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.


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The “body” (literally) of the Western Tradition

Yesterday, I ranted on behalf of the classics; today I’m following up with the single most beautiful metaphor I have ever heard to explain–really, really explain–the Western tradition, our tradition. It just so happens that this metaphor is another powerful reason, should any of you still need one, to get off our butts and go back to the old stories from Greece and Rome.

It comes from Professor Phillip Cary, and in particular from Lecture 13 in this course on the Western Intellectual Tradition.

Professor Cary wants to give us an “image that will help conceptualize the whole shape of the Western tradition.” That image is a body, which has a left leg, a right leg, a torso where the two legs come together, a left arm, a right arm, and a neck and head on top. Any old body, in other words. Your body.

The right leg, he suggests, is the Bible, religion, the Judeo-Christian tradition, Jerusalem, Moses, Job, Jesus. We live in a right-handed and right-footed culture, so this is a strong leg. It’s also, he suggests tongue-in-cheek, the leg that right-leaning types in our tradition tend to stand on. It is the conservative leg, the leg that gives quick and certain answers, not the one that asks difficult questions.

The left leg is Athens and Rome, the classics, Socrates, philosophy and enquiry. It tends to be the leg that intellectuals stand on, people who prefer to ask probing and embarrassing questions (as Socrates did). But it’s not purely intellectual. It’s also sensual and mythological. Hannibal, Fabius and Scipio are part of it.

The two legs are joined, of course, in the crotch. If you had to give the crotch a year, it would be 313 AD, when the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, thus formally bringing together the two traditions, biblical and classical. The crotch, of course, is a) phenomenally fertile and b) embarrassing and awkward for most people. So has been that union in our tradition ever since.

The torso is the Middle Ages. That’s when the two traditions were thoroughly blended and mixed in our monasteries and palaces.

The right arm sticking out from the top of the torso is the Reformation, Luther and Calvin, the yearning to go back to a purer form of the right side, back to the right leg, the Bible.

The left arm sticking out is the Renaissance, the simultaneous yearning to rediscover the classics, the wisdom of Greece and Rome, their beauty, art, philosophy–and their stories.

On top is the neck, the Enlightenment, which supports the head, Modernity.

So there we are: the head, looking down for self-knowledge, all the way to our toes. Would anybody volunteer to cut off his or her left leg and either topple over or hop around crippled? Didn’t think so.


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Why tell stories that are really … old?

So where is Hannibal in this blog so far, you ask? After all, the book, whatever its final title will be, will have his name on the cover, and he is the main character.

Well, let’s just say that in talking about my book I’ve become a bit shy about crashing in the door with the word Hannibal–as opposed to, say, life, success and failure, triumph and disaster. I try to take my cues from the audience. If I think I might get some blank stares–or, worse, ‘Hannibal, as in Lecter?’–I say that I’m basing it on a true story that happened long ago and leave it at that.

This doesn’t always work. There was this dinner party, for instance, where some of the people at the table loved history (as evident from the bookshelf) and were begging to hear why and how Hannibal in particular fits the theme so well. Then there was another person, of the blank-stare sort. I did an awkward verbal dance–first throwing some red meat to the history types, but feeling guilty about leaving the other one out; then doing a sort of inspirational self-help pitch using the modern examples that appear in the book, such as Lance Armstrong.

So, before we get into the man–the man–and the time and the story, here is what I’d like to say about the classics in general: If you don’t know them and love them, it’s your loss. When I went to college, it had just become fashionable to dismiss all these DWMs (dead white males). What utter nonsense! We don’t study them because they’re dead, white or male. We study them because they made us who and what we in the West are. To live fully in our world, you need to know what, say, a photon is, what DNA is, what a balance sheet is, and so on. You also need to have heard of Alexander and Hannibal and Caesar. You need to have at least a general sense that, for example, Plutarch wrote things that profoundly influenced our founding fathers, who read him again and again to distill his timeless lessons and shape our republic. Harry Truman, who never even went to college, spent his nights on a Missouri farm reading about Hannibal. We’ve started losing our familiarity with our heritage only in the past generation.

So yes, I love the classics and I appreciate people who appreciate the classics. J.K. Rowling is just one example that’s already come up. In that same speech I quoted from, she jokes:

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

Well, she’s got keys to a lot more now. A lot of bathrooms (I’m guessing, I haven’t used them). And much, much more: soul. Here she goes:

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

And since she did not add it, I will: Knowing the classics (whether you read them in the original or take the shortcut through a modern storyteller such as … well, if you’re desperate, yours truly) will help you achieve things inwardly that change your outer reality.

Here is how Rowling signed off:

And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

And here is how I will sign off for now: Having put in a good word for DWMs, dead white males, I will stipulate a) that Hannibal was indeed male, b) that rumors of his death are not exaggerated, but c) that determining whether or not he was “white” is much more interesting than you may now think.

Much more about all that in the coming posts. Stay tuned, and don’t be shy leaving about your comments.


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It’s a stretch to write a book…

… especially when your children are on your back, and a full-time job, and …..

How does Tom Standage make it look so easy?


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Impostor Success, Part I: The Nobel Prize and pontificating windbags

After that digression (not the last, rest assured) about books in general, back to the book. I still haven’t introduced my main characters–Hannibal, Fabius and Scipio–but instead I’ve given two examples, Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling, of failure being an impostor. Let me now give you an example of Kipling’s other impostor, triumph–because the book is emphatically about both impostors, just as a book about night must also be about day.

The immediate and obvious category that jumps to mind is hubris, the theme that so fascinated the ancient Greeks. Hubris is that arrogance which brings down the successful and powerful, from Xerxes the Persian to Ken Lay of Enron or Eliot Spitzer or … take your pick. So, because it’s so obvious, let’s not take an example of hubris. Instead, let’s take a more subtle example: The Nobel Prize.

Paul Samuelson is an economist who won that prize, in 1970, and who, thirty-one years later, reflected on the institution. Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and inventor, had established the prize in 1895 to recognize the best work done in a given field and thereby to “subsidize and support the young winner’s research efforts for the rest of his life.” By rewarding success, in other words, the prize was meant to create even more success.

Instead, says Samuelson (emphasis is mine):

the reverse of Nobel’s wish is what actually happens. After winners receive the award and adulation, they wither away into vainglorious sterility. More than that, they become pontificating windbags, preaching to the world on ethics and futorology, politics and philosophy. At circular tables, where they sit they believe to be the head of the table…

Breaking it down another level of nuance, Samuelson goes on:

An acquaintance of mine in biology regarded his Nobel year as the worst one in his life. Being a research wet-lab worker, he hated the press interviews and hoopla. Others I’ve known have gloried in it: so to speak they sported their bauble on the January subway. One wife of a physical scientist attributed her divorce to the Nobel Prize. (Her spouse has not recorded his opinion.) …

Not to get too deep about this, but can we agree with Samuelson that the Nobel Prize is a) a personal triumph for its recipients and b) probably, if not certainly, an impostor? For today, I just leave you with this delightful phrase: pontificating windbags. Ever met any?


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The end of book publishing? Part II

I return to one of my threads, which is: What on earth were you smoking, Andreas, when you decided to write … a book?!?

So this is the second in what promises to become a series of occasional musings about the book industry, the first being here. As you can tell, there is an ongoing tug-of-war in my mind between pessimism and optimism.

Most writers, publishers, agents and even readers froze in shock this January when Steve Jobs, never one to mince words, seemed to sum it up perfectly: “People don’t read anymore.” (He was simultaneously dismissing Amazon’s new Kindle, an electronic book reader, and explaining why Apple does not have anything similar–an iPod for readers, say.) If you need academic gravitas, the National Endowment for the Arts gives the same verdict. (Thanks to Steven Harris, librarian at Utah State University, for the link.) So here I am, writing a book, just as people have stopped reading books. Great.

Now, the irony is that there seem to be more books published every year. I forget the numbers (anybody have a link?), but they are daunting. So we have: Fewer people reading books + more books than ever published. Greeeeat!

Now, I’ve always thought that the picture must be more nuanced. And there are several issues intertwined.

One is the issue of how we read, meaning what format we use. Many of us read more than ever before if you count screens (email etc), but less on paper, especially when it happens to be bound between two hardcovers. For example: More Wikipedia, less dead-tree Encyclopedia Britannica. So some categories and genres of books will disappear, others may disappear, and others yet will simply change, as I argued in The Economist last year; but some categories and genres of book may never change, and may even thrive in this new era. So the trick is to write a book that falls into these genres. Great. Easier said than done.

Another issue is how we read, meaning how our brains process the words. Whether reading online makes us lose the ability to read offline is an intellectually fascinating question. But will or should posterity care?  I doubt it. How many of us today still share the depression of that Renaissance monk who committed suicide because a new technology (Gutenberg’s printing press) had flooded the market–his market!–with a new text medium, leading to a drop in appreciation for monks transcribing Aristotle by hand (as in manuscript) in their monasteries, in between getting sloshed in the brewery vault downstairs?

As a book writer I commiserate with that monk, but I’d rather find a different solution than he did. So, besides writing my book, I’ve decided also to blog, as you may have noticed. The monastery and the printing press, as it were. (With this Californian Cabernet instead of the beer.) I’m hoping that between these two poles–a bound book and an unbound blog about it–some energy will flow. A good book blog can, over time, become something that a physical book can never be: a community, in which the author maintains a conversation with readers and everybody learns from everybody (ideally). My hope is–especially given the book’s topic of life, success, failure, reversal–that all of you will share your stories (by email, comment, whatever). In turn, the physical book, when it comes out, can provide something that a blog is not good for: an immersive and gripping story.

My thoughts about this blog-book alchemy owe a lot to people such as Chris Anderson, a former colleague of mine at The Economist, currently editor of Wired Magazine, and author of The Long Tail–both the book and the blog. He has long been saying that “blogging a book” and even giving much of it away free is enlightened. In part, that’s because, as Tim O’Reilly, a publisher, likes to say, “obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” And also because, well, why wouldn’t an author seek input from as many people as possible?

But back to the basic conundrum, and to my search for possible solutions. So far we can summarize:

Fewer readers + more books in fewer genres = friggin’ big challenge

What about those genres, though? It’s not about fiction versus non-fiction. But non-fiction books do tend to contain a fifty-page idea that the author must stretch out to 300 pages just to please the publisher, leaving lots of books with 250 unread pages on most people’s shelves, as Seth Godin, an author and blogger, told me in my article on the subject. Good fiction does not face that problem, because it tells stories, and human beings love good stories. So the challenge is really a timeless and old one: to write great stories, whether fiction or non-fiction. Or:

Fewer (but engaged and appreciative) readers + great story with satisfying idea = happy readers + happy author

As Seth Godin said to me in that same interview, right at the end of the article: We are increasingly discovering that books are not artefacts, nor necessarily good vehicles for ideas, but rather “souvenirs of the way we felt” when we read something. A good author has to make you feel something, and then you’ll want the book to remind you of it. I’m giving it a shot.


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