Michael C. Perkins's Blog, page 5

a rare expression of humility and wisdom in the age of Trump

moving commencement speech by John Roberts. Learning wisdom and humility from pain and loss, aka as real life.

Reminds me of my doctor dad who echoed Henry James: "be kind, be kind, be kind" and always treat everyone with dignity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzu9S...

Why Saudi Women Are Literally Living ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

this is the NYT, not Fox News....

"Ms. Atwood has famously said all the horrors she included in her 1985 book have actually happened in one place and at one time or another."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/op...

The Archimedes Device

Featured in our novel. The NYT writer uses the Italian name: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana


Two really nice photos and this description....

"Though summer was still a month away, Florence’s centro storico was already dense with tourists. But the cloister of the Church of San Lorenzo, which houses the Laurenziana, though just a stone’s throw from the Duomo, was so deserted when I arrived at 11 a.m. that I wondered if I had come to the right place. I bought my ticket, followed the signs and pushed open the door, and for the next hour I had Michelangelo pretty much to myself.

“Austere” was the word that came to mind as I entered his crepuscular vestibule and ascended to the portal of the reading room on a flight of oval steps carved from a somber gray stone known as pietra serena. No adjective I know does justice to the reading room itself. Rows of walnut benches that ingeniously double as lecterns — “plutei,” they are called — flank the sides of a central corridor paved in intricately patterned rose and cream terra cotta. Along the two lateral walls, stained glass windows face each other in precise rectangular alignment, illuminating the benches. The heavily carved wooden ceiling seems to flatten and deepen the space to infinity, like the vanishing point in a Renaissance landscape painting.

Michelangelo’s library is so rational, so resolute, so majestically realized that not in my wildest dreams could I imagine working here. In fact, as in the other great libraries I visited, the Laurenziana’s reading room is now primarily a showpiece, with side rooms of a later and lesser vintage used for lectures and exhibits. Scholars from all over the world, drawn by the vast collection of manuscripts, labor in less imposing spaces tucked away in the cloister.

“There is a small club of libraries with truly deep holdings, and we are part of it,” said Giovanna Rao, the director of the library, when we met in her office, a former monastic cell off the cloister. “Our manuscript collection, which runs to 11,000 items, rivals that of the British Library or the National Library of France, though we are not a national library. And of course, no other library enjoys the good fortune of having Michelangelo as its architect.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/tr...

Most unreadable modern author:

c/o Jasper Fforde....

Of all the pseudointellectual rubbish that hits the literary world every year, few authors can hope to compete in terms of quasi-highbrow unreadability than the accepted master in the field, Otis ChufftY. With unread copies of his books gracing every bookshelf in the fashionable areas of London, ChufftY’s prodigious output in terms of pointless, long-winded claptrap has few equals and brings forth gasps of admiration from his competitors.

Even after several million in book sales and frequent appearances on late-night artsy-fartsy chat shows, ChufftY’s work remains as fashionably unreadable as ever. “It’s the bipolarity of human sufferance,” Mr. ChufftY explained when asked the secret of his success, “and the forbearance of wisdom in the light of the ultimate ignorance of nothing.”

How Trump got elected: it's worse than you thought

I have been registered independent for 25 years. I am skeptical of ideology and I am not big on conspiracy theories, but I am always interested in figuring out what's really happening. (For example, with my expose of the tech bubble). 60% of eligible voters on the eve of the election did not like either candidate. But even if one assumes the worse about Russian hacking, Comey, etc. it's not enough to explain what happened. Here are the main pieces.

The father of propaganda.

About a hundred years ago, the son of an immigrant to the U.S. brilliantly formulated what influences the masses and how to put it into practice. It was first used to sell soap, then tobacco, then Joseph Goebbels co-opted it to send Jews to the gas chambers. Why did the intellectuals and the Christians go along with it? Here's how it started....

https://phys.org/news/2015-07-america...

I am based in Silicon Valley and have followed and professionally covered the tech industry for years. "Old media" has been in denial about the digital revolution for decades now. And it turns out the masters of it, via social media, are Trump supporters. Far more people get their "news" from Facebook, Google, and Twitter than the NYT. Here is the frightening story (read carefully) of how Trump supporters figured out how to control it by mastering the algorithms that send out their message, en masse, to the gullible. It's not about facts, but emotional appeal.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/...

Did Witkiewicz's "Insatiability" anticipate "Brave New World"?

from "The Captive Mind" by Czesław Miłosz

A curious book appeared in Warsaw in 1932. It was a novel, in two volumes, entitled "Insatiability". Its author was Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, a painter, writer, and philosopher, who had constructed a phil¬osophical system akin to the monadology of Leibnitz. As in his earlier novel, Farewell to Autumn, his lan¬guage was difficult, full of neologisms. Brutal de¬scriptions of erotic scenes alternated with whole pages of discussions on Husserl, Carnap, and other contemporary philosophers. Besides, one could not always tell whether the author was serious or joking; and the subject matter seemed to be pure fantasy.

The action of the book took place in Europe, more precisely in Poland, at some time in the near future or even in the present, that is, in the thirties, forties, or fifties. The social group it portrayed was that of musicians, painters, philosophers, aristocrats, and higher-ranking military officers. The whole book was nothing but a study of decay: mad, dissonant music; erotic perversion; widespread use of narcotics; dispossessed thinking; false conversions to Catholicism; and complex psychopathic personalities. This decadence reigned at a time when Western civiliza¬tion was said to be threatened by an army from the East, a Sino-Mongolian army that dominated all the territory stretching from the Pacific to the Baltic.

Witkiewicz's heroes are unhappy in that they have no faith and no sense of meaning in their work. This atmosphere of decay and senselessness extends throughout the entire country. And at that moment, a great number of hawkers appear in the cities ped¬dling Murti-Bing pills.

Murti-Bing was a Mongolian philosopher who had succeeded in producing an organic means of transporting a "philosophy of life." This Murti-Bing "philosophy of life," which constituted the strength of the Sino-Mongolian army, was contained in pills in an extremely condensed form. A man who used these pills changed com¬pletely. He became serene and happy. The problems he had struggled with until then suddenly appeared to be superficial and unimportant. He smiled indul¬gently at those who continued to worry about them.

Most affected were all questions pertaining to unsolvable ontological difficulties. A man who swal¬lowed Murti-Bing pills became impervious to any metaphysical concerns. The excesses into which art falls when people vainly seek in form the where¬ withal to appease their spiritual hunger were but outmoded stupidities for him. He no longer con¬sidered the approach of the Sino-Mongolian army as a tragedy for his own civilization. He lived in the midst of his compatriots like a healthy individual surrounded by madmen. More and more people took the Murti-Bing cure, and their resultant calm con¬trasted sharply with the nervousness of their environment.

The epilogue, in a few words: the outbreak of the war led to a meeting of the armies of the West with those of the East. In the decisive moment, just before the great battle, the leader of the Western army surrendered to the enemy; and in exchange, though with the greatest honors, he was beheaded. The Eastern army occupied the country and the new life, that of Murti-Bingism, began.

The heroes of the novel, once tormented by philosophical "insatiety," now entered the service of the new society. Instead of writing the dissonant music of former days, they composed marches and odes. Instead of painting ab¬stractions as before, they turned out socially use¬ful pictures. But since they could not rid them¬selves completely of their former personalities, they became schizophrenics.

My Mark Twain childhood

“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see." (C.S. Lewis)
=========================================

“You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” (Opening lines to Huckleberry Finn)

I never white-washed a fence, like Tom Sawyer did, but I did know a Becky Thatcher, a cute blonde in 6th grade named Ann Rogers, who owned an Afghan Hound. Beyond that, my primary memory of Tom Sawyer was his desire to be a pirate. As Twain said: “Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, that God would permit us to be pirates.”

The Twain stories took place in a 19th century small town in Missouri on the Mississippi River. But the SF Bay Area’s mid-peninsula of the 1960’s also had a small town feel that enabled childhood adventures.

“Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young, the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. The hill, beyond the village and above, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.” (Tom Sawyer)

On such days, right after breakfast, we’d leave on our bikes in search of the Delectable Land. We rode everywhere into the hills of Portola Valley and Woodside in the Bay Area, and the county parks, and did not return home until about twilight for dinner. We had no cell phones and there was no concern about getting kidnapped.

Other times we treated Stanford University as our playground, attending sporting events. Once my brother posed as a ball boy to get us into a sold out game between Bill Walton’s UCLA Bruins basketball team and Stanford. And on New Year’s Day, 1970, my dad, my younger brother, and me were lucky enough to travel to Pasadena to watch Jim Plunkett and the Stanford football team defeat Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.

Back home, we also fantasized about rivers and lagoons.

In those days, Stanford had two water bodies. One was Searsville Lake, damned, with a sandy beach and paddleboards to take out on to the water. There was no sunscreen, so we fair-skinned blokes got blisters the size of 50-cent pieces, but somehow never regretted it.

The other water body was Lake Lagunita where we put together a makeshift raft and paddled from one side to the other, pretending we were Huck Finn and the slave Jim dodging steamboats and running away from the authorities.

Other times, as we steadily and monotonously drove the raft toward the middle of the lake, we pretended to bark orders to one another as if on a pirate ship.

"What sail's she carrying?" "Courses, tops'ls, and flying-jib, sir." "Send the r'yals up! Lay out aloft, there, half a dozen of ye—foretopmaststuns'l! Lively, now!" "Aye-aye, sir!" "Shake out that maintogalans'l! Sheets and braces! NOW my hearties!" "Aye-aye, sir!" "Hellum-a-lee—hard a port! Stand by to meet her when she comes! Port, port! NOW, men! With a will! Stead-y-y-y!" "Steady it is, sir!”
(Tom Sawyer)

There was also a creek, San Francisquito, thick with trees and bushes, which coursed its way through several mid-peninsula towns and helped define the border between San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. The stretch we liked to explore was where it ran between my hometown, Menlo Park, CA, and the Stanford Shopping Center parking lot. We’d go down into it chasing frogs.

“There was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation [...] Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and just as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to us. All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.” (Tom Sawyer)

The only rude intrusion into this calm was that my younger brother always seemed to get poison oak, whereas I never did. I was often tempted to tell him that it was God’s punishment for him provoking me, but I resisted.

We also belonged to the Boy Scouts, primarily for the camping. We learned to tie knots, communicate in Morse Code, track animals, chop wood, build campfires, roast marshmallows, and sing Kumbaya. The scoutmaster of my second troop was not a nice person and some of the scouts got their revenge by throwing poison oak into the fire, which he promptly inhaled. I was not around to see the result.

But I also learned that I did not like sleeping on the ground. I found it hard and uncomfortable and a bit scary. One night I awoke to a bear nibbling my potato chips. Another time, a diamondback rattler slithered away as I returned to my tent from a hike.

It was thus determined that in future trips to National Parks, with my kids, we’d always stay in the lodges, although they have since developed an interest in backpacking.

A favorite past-time was collecting baseball cards. We were real sharks when it came to trading them. However, I wish I saved by Superman, Batman, and Captain America comic books, instead of the baseball cards, as the comics are worth so much more. In those days, I was not a reader of books except for book reports. I always chose biographies of Daniel Boone, Davy Crocket, Jim Bowie, Jim Thorpe, and the like. It was only later in life that I would learn the truth of Twain’s dictum: “the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

The only organized sport we played was Little League. Otherwise most of our sports were unsupervised. This included pick up basketball on the asphalt or in a college gym we used to sneak into. And a baseball game called over-the-line that only required two kids on each team. With no referees present, we had to learn to negotiate rulings regarding fouls or whether a ball was out of bounds. This led to some spirited arguments. We rode our bikes to practices and games. Our parents were not busing us around and generally did not show up for our games.

Interestingly, Mark Twain was a big fan of baseball, taking an interest in the team near his house in Hartford, CT, the Hartford Duck Blues. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, he even portrays knights playing the game in their armor. He writes of “The very best man in my subordinate nine! What a handy right-fielder he was!” and “My peerless short-stop! I’ve seen him catch a daisy-cutter in his teeth!” An armor-plated runner sliding into a base, Twain wrote, “was like an iron-clad coming into port.”

As in the Twain novels, most of the supervising adults in my life---teachers, scoutmasters, Little League coaches---were an annoyance. They were these controlling personalities who didn’t seem to like kids. They lacked imagination and were inclined to discourage ambition rather than foster it.

“But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” (Huck Finn)

And so it is….

“Don’t part with your dreams. When they are gone you may still exist, but you will have ceased to live.” (Mark Twain).

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MIchael C. Perkins is coauthor of the bestselling "The Internet Bubble" (HarperCollins) and a new novel, "The Archimedes Device."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

The unstoppable march of fake news

Sales of Orwell may be up, but we better read some Huxley, as well. Google and Facebook march on, as traditional media continues to falter. Here are the shocking numbers.

https://www.axios.com/searching-for-i...

Why we know so much about Ancient Rome

"The single most extraordinary fact about the Roman world is that so much of what the Romans wrote has survived, over two millennia. We not only have their poetry, letters, essays, speeches and histories, but also novels, geographies, satires and reams and reams of technical writing on everything from water engineering to medicine and disease. The survival is largely due to the diligence of medieval monks who transcribed by hand, again and again, what they believed were the most important, or useful, works of classical literature, with a significant but often forgotten contribution from medieval Islamic scholars who translated into Arabic some of thephilosophy and scientific material.

And thanks to archaeologists who have excavated papyri from the sands and the rubbish dumps of Egypt, wooden writing tablets from Roman military bases in the north of England and eloquent tombstones from all over the empire, we have glimpses of the life and letters of some rather more ordinary inhabitants of the Roman world. We have notes sent home, shopping lists, account books and last messages inscribed on graves. Even if this is a small proportion of what once existed, we have access to more Roman literature – and more Roman writing in general – than any one person could now thoroughly master in the course of a lifetime."

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard

Graham Greene was right

time for me to get back to writing....

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”