Man walks into a column, no.6: Machiavelli

Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli (sub-titled How To Wield Power In The Modern World) offers fascinating insights into the mind of a once-powerful man, but that man is Powell himself, not Machiavelli.

Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff, says in the preface that the book ‘is an attempt to test whether Machiavelli’s maxims still hold in the world of modern politics’. But it turns out that this is just a handy excuse (or ‘washing line’, to use Peter Mandelson’s term for the over-arching theme of a speech) for the second and third objectives: drawing lessons on leadership based on Powell’s experience in Number 10, and recounting anecdotes to illustrate what life at the top was really like.

JP is being a bit disingenuous when he says this is ‘not another memoir of the Blair years’, because that’s exactly what it is. I’m no Machiavelli scholar, but the breadth of the Italian apparatchik’s theorising allows Powell to find enough quotes to bolster his argument, most of the time anyway – towards the end it feels like Powell just gives up, and the chapters on ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Europe’ in particular are almost all anecdote, no Prince.

Still, I guess most people will read The New Machiavelli for the behind-the-scenes stuff – I know I did – and there’s certainly fun to be had. We hear how during the 2005 election campaign Powell assumed that Tony’s faltering delivery of a speech on immigration was due to a bust teleprompter, when it was actually the PM not looking at the camera on purpose, thus ensuring that the media didn’t report on the most politically sensitive bits of the speech. Or, when Blair was in hospital for a heart operation, we learn that Prince Charles sent a get-well card and box of Duchy of Cornwall fudge, signed from ‘Dr Wales’, which the security service thought was a suspicious package and proceeded to blow up, fudge and all.

What lets this book down, however, is the bloody-mindedness of Powell’s determination to defend the record of the Blair governments. I’ll leave aside the rightness or wrongness of the arguments he puts forward for specific decisions; the fact of the matter is that after only a short time the one-sidedness of the account really grates.

A big part of this defence is a hagiographical approach to Blair himself. Powell is convinced that Tony was a Truly Great Leader, and that the only things holding him back were Gordon Brown, an inexperienced and inept bunch of ministers, and the lying media. Whatever you may think of Blair, the complete and utter lack of balance is really distracting.

The stuff about Gordon is frequently hilarious (unintentionally and not) for the depth of hatred – there’s no other word – that it reveals. So on page 37 we have this entirely typical example:

Gordon’s influence on those around him was at times extraordinary. After a few years working with him his aides became changed people. Ed Balls, who had been a pleasant young man as a Financial Times leader writer, was transformed by his connection with Gordon. He reminds me of Quintus Fabius in [Machiavelli’s] The Discourses, who came under the influence of the tyrant Appius: ‘though an excellent fellow, [he] was after a while blinded by a little ambition and, under the evil influence of Appius, changed his good habits for bad and became like him’.

Blair, on the other hand, can do no wrong: consistently strategic, conciliatory, reforming, self-deprecating, visionary. His only failing, it seems, was being too much of a nice guy and not sacking people soon enough. I was talking to a colleague about this, who said that a friend of theirs also worked in Number 10 for a time under Blair, and that they (the friend) felt exactly the same way and would not hear even a modestly critical word against the ex-PM. The power of charisma, I guess: Machiavelli would’ve been proud.

Man walks into a column, no.5: Libraries

This is a post by Phil

It’s tempting for a fledgling blogger to write something controversial for the sake of courting attention. That’s not what this is about, honestly. The fact is that I found the text of Philip Pullman’s recent speech in defence of public libraries to be at once impassioned, forceful, moving and… well… a little simplistic.

There’s tons of stuff to agree with, and particularly cogent arguments against the blasé assumption that volunteers are the answer to all the world’s problems. Do we really think that the job of the librarian is so simple that anyone could step in and do it, Pullman asks? How on earth will local people find the time to volunteer when they find it difficult enough to squeeze in work, family responsibilities and everything else? Won’t a strategy that revolves around communities bidding for the right to run libraries favour folk in more affluent areas who are better placed to put together winning bids?

Exceptionally sound points all. But what motivates Pullman at base is his fundamental, deeply-held love for libraries. He recounts his delight upon being enrolled at the first library he ever visited: ‘All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted!’. He goes on to say that:

Somewhere in Blackbird Leys, somewhere in Berinsfield, somewhere in Botley, somewhere in Benson or in Bampton, to name only the communities beginning with B whose libraries are going to be abolished, somewhere in each of them there is a child right now, there are children, just like me at that age in Battersea, children who only need to make that discovery to learn that they too are citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that gift.

And that last point is where I found myself disagreeing. Because however brilliant many libraries are, as buildings and as spaces for people to come together, isn’t free access to books the basic human right, rather than free access to libraries? And are libraries really the only way of achieving that goal?

I think we’re in danger of confusing ends with means. As anyone who works behind the scenes at a council department responsible for library funding will know, it costs an astonishing amount for every book loaned. Much of this comes from the costs of maintaining a large number of ageing, often dilapidated buildings, but also from the inefficiencies caused by the system of distributing books amongst so many points of access.

In a time of severe financial constraints I think the ‘this is the way we’ve always done things’ complaint just isn’t good enough. We need to focus on the outcomes that are important, and find imaginative, genuinely workable ways of achieving them with fewer resources.

If to solve the libraries funding crisis we have to turn to a LoveFilm-esque subscription service, with books posted out from a central depository, and/or a smaller number of ‘hub’ libraries with good transport links and much larger, more efficiently managed collections, is that such a terrible thing as long as people get free or low-cost access to a wide range of books?

I know that libraries have other benefits too, but again we should ask: are the libraries as currently provided the best and most efficient way to achieve the goals of e.g. access to the internet or a place for isolated older people to come together? Maybe they are, but let’s start with the things we want to achieve and work back from there, rather than assuming that the current model of service provision is necessarily the right one for the future.

Man walks into a column, no.4: Type

This is a post by Phil

What kind of week have I had? I’m allowed to ask this rhetorical question because, as Dave Briggs points out in this excellent post, it would be ludicrous for me to pretend that I am not a real person talking to other real people. And ‘what kind of week have you had?’ is a perfectly normal way to begin a real conversation.

Social media and networking is above all about human beings and human relationships. [...] So don’t be afraid to post what might seem at first to be trivial, or of limited interest. Much of the power of social media lies in serendipity – which probably drives people who like measuring stuff mad – and so by describing your dog walking route in one tweet might forge a link with a fellow dog walker who ends up being a vital business connection.

So: what kind of week have you had, Phil? How very kind of you to ask (although I should say that I’m willing to talk to you whether or not you are likely to become a vital business connection). 

This week I’ve been luxuriating in the prose of John Banville. This is one of those instances, I’m sure, of discovering a secret that’s not really a secret at all because virtually everyone else is in the loop already. Banville won the Booker in 2005, but I smugly chose not to begin with the novel that won (The Sea), instead opting for one of his first books, Doctor Copernicus. It’s chock full of astonishingly direct, undadorned yet luminously evocative passages, and reminded me a little of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall in its striking depiction of an aloof, otherworldy genius immersed in the muck and the mire of a filthier time. I’ll do a proper review at some point.

January has been a month of mixed blessings, reading matter aside. Like many, I began 2011 by deciding a spell off the booze would be a good idea, but then quickly discovered that things were grim enough without losing out on the chance to have a glass of wine or a cold beer at the end of a long, dark day. Problem is that, as our Antipodean cousins are known to expound, every beer’s a sandwich (mate), and so it’s little surprise that my parallel quest to shed festive poundage is going nowhere. I have no choice, it seems, but to endure a dry spell; wish me luck.

On the plus side, this has been the month when I discovered that, contrary to past experience, I actually can work productively from home. Oddly, the key seems to be Twitter. With my work laptop to one side and my Mac to the other, I find I have sufficient distraction to keep me on the straight and narrow. Because, certainly from university on, I’ve always found it impossible to concentrate when I have only one thing to concentrate on, if you know what I mean. I don’t suppose I am alone in this?

It was whilst working from home on Friday, proofing a document, that I discovered the answer to a question that has long puzzled me: why do so many intelligent, otherwise fastidious people insist on placing two spaces after full stops, irrespective of the manifest evidence – from books, newspapers etc. – that this is madness? A brief exchange on Twitter, initiated out of idle frustration, came up trumps: it’s all the fault of the typewriter.

The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks ‘loose’ and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. [...] Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.

Next week: I may or may not be writing about the delights on offer in a new publication from the Royal Society, in which leading scientists give their thoughts on the key questions for policy and society arising from latest developments in neuroscience. Until then, find me on Twitter @philblogs.

Man walks into a column, no.2: Who?

This is a post by Phil

I am being followed by a Nobel Prize winning author.

I’m conscious that it might seem a bit indulgent to post twice about the same book within the space of a week, on two different blogs, but these are special circumstances. 

The first was a short note of my entirely subjective, personal response to a novel called The Black Book, by the laureate-follower in question: Orhan Pamuk. As you can see for yourself if you read the post – there’s no particular reason you should – I thought The Black Book was a beautifully written exploration of big ideas, if not exactly what you’d call a rip-roaring read.

The biggest of the big ideas is that, by knowing the work of a writer inside out – the stories told, the ideas held, the principles promulgated – your identity can dissolve into theirs. I won’t go into detail about the extent of the dissolution in The Black Book for fear of spoiling the read for those who may choose to take it on, but suffice to say that if nothing else the novel succeeds in calling into question the fundamental idea of authorship. 

It was thus with some delight that I discovered my newest Twitter follower was, apparently, Orhan Pamuk himself. Either this really was he, in which case: bollocks, I wish I’d taken more time over the review, or it was someone pretending to be Orhan Pamuk, which opens up the possibility that whoever is actually tweeting has been so heavily influenced by The Black Book that she or he is attempting to become Turkey’s best-selling novelist. Either that or they’re just having a bit of fun; if so, it’s a great joke. (As an aside: this is a brilliant example of fans – West Wing fans in this case – being willing to adopt alternative Twitter identities for fun.)

If you’re on Twitter yourself chances are you’ll be familiar with the minimal room for establishing ‘true identity’ that the medium affords. Is there even any point in a personal profile of 140 characters? Isn’t it a strange experience when you meet someone in the flesh who you’ve previously known, sometimes for what seems like a long time, only as a 1cm squared avatar and truncated textual meanderings? So how on earth am I going to establish whether ‘my’ Orhan Pamuk is the real deal when almost all of his tweets are in Turkish? And even then? (Judge for yourself: @BenOrhanPamuk)

Which brings me, in closing, to the topic of mindfulness, which as you may’ve seen was covered in last weekend’s papers after the National Institute for Clinical Excellence’s decision to recommend mindfulness meditation as a legit treatment for chronic depression. I posted about mindfulness quite some time ago, and freely admit to having become quite a convert.

A particularly mind-boggling (ho ho) foundation of mindfulness is the notion, supported by a burgeoning scientific evidence base, that the brain is plastic, with parts of it changing shape and size in response to our patterns of thought. How weird is that, seriously? (If you’re interested in reading more about the concept of neuroplasticity then there’s an in-depth interview with a psychologist who’s a leading expert on the subject available here.) Suddenly the idea of actually becoming a different person – switching identities – doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

As Mr Pamuk might say: until next week, dear readers. You’ll find me, or someone pretending to be me, on Twitter @philblogs. 

Man walks into a column, no.2: Who?

I am being followed by a Nobel Prize winning author.

I’m conscious that it might seem a bit indulgent to post twice about the same book within the space of a week, on two different blogs, but these are special circumstances. 

The first was a short note of my entirely subjective, personal response to a novel called The Black Book, by the laureate-follower in question: Orhan Pamuk. As you can see for yourself if you read the post – there’s no particular reason you should – I thought The Black Book was a beautifully written exploration of big ideas, if not exactly what you’d call a rip-roaring read.

The biggest of the big ideas is that, by knowing the work of a writer inside out – the stories told, the ideas held, the principles promulgated – your identity can dissolve into theirs. I won’t go into detail about the extent of the dissolution in The Black Book for fear of spoiling the read for those who may choose to take it on, but suffice to say that if nothing else the novel succeeds in calling into question the fundamental idea of authorship. 

It was thus with some delight that I discovered my newest Twitter follower was, apparently, Orhan Pamuk himself. Either this really was he, in which case: bollocks, I wish I’d taken more time over the review, or it was someone pretending to be Orhan Pamuk, which opens up the possibility that whoever is actually tweeting has been so heavily influenced by The Black Book that she or he is attempting to become Turkey’s best-selling novelist. Either that or they’re just having a bit of fun; if so, it’s a great joke. (As an aside: this is a brilliant example of fans – West Wing fans in this case – being willing to adopt alternative Twitter identities for fun.)

If you’re on Twitter yourself chances are you’ll be familiar with the minimal room for establishing ‘true identity’ that the medium affords. Is there even any point in a personal profile of 140 characters? Isn’t it a strange experience when you meet someone in the flesh who you’ve previously known, sometimes for what seems like a long time, only as a 1cm squared avatar and truncated textual meanderings? So how on earth am I going to establish whether ‘my’ Orhan Pamuk is the real deal when almost all of his tweets are in Turkish? And even then? (Judge for yourself: @BenOrhanPamuk)

Which brings me, in closing, to the topic of mindfulness, which as you may’ve seen was covered in last weekend’s papers after the National Institute for Clinical Excellence’s decision to recommend mindfulness meditation as a legit treatment for chronic depression. I posted about mindfulness quite some time ago, and freely admit to having become quite a convert.  

A particularly mind-boggling (ho ho) foundation of mindfulness is the notion, supported by a burgeoning scientific evidence base, that the brain is plastic, with parts of it changing shape and size in response to our patterns of thought. How weird is that, seriously? (If you’re interested in reading more about the concept of neuroplasticity then there’s an in-depth interview with a psychologist who’s a leading expert on the subject available here.) Suddenly the idea of actually becoming a different person – switching identities – doesn’t seem that far-fetched. 

As Mr Pamuk might say: until next week, dear readers. You’ll find me, or someone pretending to be me, on Twitter @philblogs. 

What’s the point of reading novels?

Why are men, on the whole, much less likely to read fiction than non-fiction? This is something I’ve been pondering recently, after a quick non-scientific poll of friends and colleagues confirmed what a bit of web-grazing also shows: men account for only around a fifth or a quarter (depending on who you believe) of fiction readers (see for example here, here or here).

Actually, that’s a bit disingenuous: what I’ve really been wondering is why I read a hell of a lot more fiction than non-fiction. Am I fundamentally effete; is my masculinity open to question; have I grown a beard simply to hide the fact that deep down I’m a great big girly-man? The only other chap I know with as high a fiction:non-fiction ratio as me has the attention span of a gnat and only reads gnarly, bleak, ultra-macho books by American authors who write solely about wanting to sleep with women half their age, so there’s not much comfort to be gained there.

I can’t pretend to have solved this conundrum – a pressing one, I’m sure you’ll agree – but I’d love to hear from you if you too are a man with an addiction to fiction (or, conversely, a woman who never touches the stuff). In the meantime I leave you with this, from Iris Murdoch, which makes me feel all warm and smug about my love for the novel:

[The novelist] has always implicitly understood, what the philosopher has grasped less clearly, that human reason is not a single unitary gadget the nature of which could be discovered once for all. The novelist has his eye fixed on what we do, and not on what we ought to do or must be presumed to do. He has as a natural gift that blessed freedom from rationalism which the academic thinker achieves, if at all, by a precarious discipline. He has always been, what the very latest philosophers claim to be, a describer rather than an explainer; and in consequence he has often anticipated the philosopher’s discoveries.

Help me emerge from my splendid isolation on Twitter @philblogs.

Franzen on Franzen

I was at Kings Place (why no apostrophe?) recently to see Jonathan Franzen talk about his novel The Corrections – the one published in 2001, which made his name, and which caused his new novel Freedom to be so eagerly anticipated. In spite of what his reputation for monk-like devotion to intellectual purity of craft might suggest (see here), Franzen was warm, witty and just as articulate and clever as his writing.

If you haven’t been, Kings Place is a shiny, metropolitan Americany new concert and lecture venue next door to the equally new Guardian/Observer offices, on York Way, a couple hundred yards up from King’s Cross. The Q&A session was part of the Guardian’s book club series, and was held in the rather grand wooden-panelled main concert hall, attended by a mix of Eng Lit students, Dalston tight-trousered types and middle-aged couples (as my Q&A companion said after observing the dress sense of the assembled throng: ‘Am I the only person who’s actually come from work?’).

The book club is hosted by John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, who, at least in this case, made a right pig’s ear of the opening twenty minutes (before handing over to a relieved audience) by insisting on giving us the benefit of his own lengthy musings on The Corrections before, each time, stumbling to a halt without asking a proper question, expecting Franzen to pick up the scent.

Amongst the things we learnt once things warmed up: The Corrections is, in effect, a series of five separate short stories (one for each member of the family) just as much as a single work; the father of the central family, Alfred, is at least partly modelled on Franzen’s own father and his (Franzen Snr.’s) battle with dementia; and, most impressively, the whole novel was modelled after the human brain itself, with recurring metaphors, phrases, characters and so on placed strategically so as to ‘talk to each other’ in the same way that synapses in the brain link up.

Franzen was also very honest about the fact that he wrote The Corrections at a time when he felt the urge to ‘show off’ as a writer (spurred on by reading and being bowled over by a manuscript of his friend David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest). I found myself wondering whether that explained why, personally, I found The Corrections extremely admirable more than actively enjoyable: it feels highly crafted and tightly wound. On the other hand it makes me look forward very much to reading Freedom, which Franzen assured us is looser in form and feel.

You can find me twittering away @philblogs.

The lengths writers go to avoid distraction

For some reason I enjoy reading about how writers write – their desks, their superstitions, their routines – even more than I enjoy shopping for books, which in turn I enjoy even more than actually reading.

Without really thinking about it, I paraded my ‘niche interest’ for all to see (all seven readers of this blog, that is – my Mum’s recently swelled the ranks, or at least says she has) when I made my very first post on this humble web-log back in February: I wrote an hilarious and entirely shameless repackaging of a Grauniad ‘top tips for writing’ feature.

One of the contributors of his own ‘top tips’ list was Jonathan Franzen, most famously the author of The Corrections, a novel routinely described as ‘one of the most important books of the last decade’. I’ve read it and enjoyed it very much, although for long, long sections the effect of nestling so closely in the bosom of a monstrously fucked-up family full of unpleasant people behaving unpleasantly is faintly nauseating. All the Tolstoy comparisons have at least this going for them: you feel better about The Corrections once you’ve finished it.

At number eight in Franzen’s ‘ten top tips’ list (which you can read for yourself here) was:

It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Which, like a child, I turned into a joke about writers being tempted to look at porn; as I said: hilarious! Anyway, I was interested to read about the extreme lengths that Franzen is willing to go in order to stick to this rule of thumb, in the latest edition of TIME magazine (he’s the first author to be the TIME cover star since 2000; the full interview isn’t online but is covered by The Guardian here):

Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the Internet, he not only removed the Dell’s wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. “What you have to do,” he explains, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.”

All of which makes me wonder whether Rich might be using his two week break from blogging and tweeting to pen his own magnum opus? I think we should be told…

The Vyas Sisters’ reading meme

Following my answers to the reading meme, here are the answers from 2 of the 3 Vyas sisters.

Dhara V:

Or put it in another room or back of the wardrobe if it scares or upsets me.

Jigna V:

I do start mumbling and grumbling aloud and if it gets really annoying I have to put the book down and walk away, or pick up another book.

Reading meme

Via normblog and More Than Mind Games I’ve picked up this meme. If you’d like to fill it out, please do and leave a link to your blog in the comments.

Do you snack while reading? > I can’t say I do.

What is your favourite drink while reading? > A good cup of tea will always do the trick, particularly if I’m reading in the evening. In the day – and particularly if I’m out and about and on a break – then a coffee is my preferred drink.

Do you tend to mark your books while you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you? > The idea of writing in books per se doesn’t horrify me. I tend to underline passages, though, or fold down corners so that – when I look back over a book when I’ve finished it – I can find the passages / lines that made most impact. For a while I used to use those little post-it note markers to do the same job with less permanent damage, but kept forgetting to put them in my bag so eventually gave up on them.

How do you keep your place? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book open flat? > Any variety of unofficial bookmark normally does the trick, typically train tickets, postcards or shreds of paper.

Fiction, non-fiction or both? > When I was younger it was overwhelmingly fiction. But now the vast majority of my reading material is non-fiction, mainly politics or some form of history.

Do you tend to read to the end of a chapter or can you stop anywhere? > I used to read until the end of a chapter, but since having a little baby boy, I’ll read until I get to where I get to!

Are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you? > No – I’m not that demonstrative. I may tut or put the book down on my lap.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away? > Without wishing to sound too poncey, I don’t come across too many unfamiliar words. If I do, the context generally means I can work them out. Otherwise, I may look them up later.

What are you currently reading? > I’m still trying to finish Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I’ve just finished On Roads by Joe Moran and so am going to start A View from the Foothills by Chris Mullin and The Revolt of the Pendulum by Clive James.

What is the last book you bought? > My birthday has just passed so I’ve bought loads recently. The two purchases I’m looking forward to the most are Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career Of British Democracy and The Presidents

Do you have a favourite time/place to read? > Late at night, lying on the sofa.

Do you prefer series books or stand-alones? > If this relates to fiction (see answer above) then I don’t really know. Stand-alones, I guess.

Is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over? > I find recommending books/authors a hazardous business, so I can’t say I do.

How do you organize your books (by genre, title, author’s last name, etc.)? > I used to think there was only one answer to this: alphabetically. But as my book collection has grown, the first main organisation involved a split by fiction / non-fiction. Fiction is now arranged alphabetically, with some size-based adjustments for aesthetic reasons. My non-fiction books are arranged by subject area, then by sub-topic area, then occasionally alphabetically (with some size-based adjustments as well).