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FT: The joy of excess (The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco)

The joy of excess

Review by Simon Schama

Published: December 23 2009 03:59 | Last updated: December 23 2009 03:59

The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to James Joyce
By Umberto Eco
Quercus £35, 408 pages
FT Bookshop price: £28

You know how you’re going to be feeling post-turkey, don’t you? Listless. So, in the spirit of going through satiety and out the other side, why not reach for Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists, the Thinking Person’s literary equivalent to the Christmas pud: chockful of goodies, dense, dark and (mostly) delicious, studded with obscure, spicy ingredients and likely to make you feel a touch groggy – soaked as it is in heady erudition.

The book is a delight. Let me count (some of) the ways: profuse, plethoric, prolix, plentiful, playful, populous, picaresque, picturesque; copious, cornucopian, congested, clotted; incontinent, infested, infectious; omnivorous, orgiastic, odd; abundant, redundant; multifarious, multitudinous; glutted, gargantuan, inclusive, elusive, and ... exhaustive. But, at times, it can also be exasperating, indulgent, erratic, incoherent, wayward, whimsical, (occasionally) inaccurate and even, at times, incurious. If its pleasures easily overwhelm its irritants, that’s because the book has the charm of extreme greed.

The Infinity of Lists began as one of a series of curatorial collaborations between the Louvre and various writers. This inspired series of shows has produced its share of genuinely memorable illuminations – Jacques Derrida’s exhibition on blindness, for example, and Peter Greenaway’s on dreams of flight. The appeal of the book lies as much in its beautiful array of pictures as in Eco’s choice of exemplary texts. One staggers drunkenly through its 400-odd pages, from Hesiod’s endless recitation of the progeny of the gods – “Doto, Proto, Pherusa and Dynamene ... Potontopore, Leagore, Euagore and Laomeda” (a boon for all you pregnant parents out there who don’t want to call your baby Jason or Tracy) – to Huysmans’ equally relentless description of the gems with which he encrusted the shell of his pet tortoise: “the chrysoberyls of asparagus green, the chrysolites of leek green, the olivines of olive green” (well they would be, wouldn’t they?).

Although gorgeously reproduced, the images don’t always hit it off in happy consonance with the texts. The painting by 16th-century Dutch artist Pieter Aertsen, included to exemplify “the visual list” and described as an “omnium gatherum of emblems of transience”, is, in fact, a Christ in the house of Martha and Mary – an altogether different proposition. The painting set beside the novel Ninety-Three, Victor Hugo’s fabulously deranged tour through the National Convention, isn’t in fact an image of that militantly republican body but Jacques-Louis David’s “Tennis Court Oath” from the Estates General of 1789 (dated, somewhat desperately, as “18th century”). The iconographic difference isn’t trivial. David’s is a myth of orchestrated social harmony; Hugo’s Convention a theatre of hatred.

Many of the images represent congestion rather than enumeration, in the manner of a visual catalogue, and are repetitious rather than encyclopaedic in their crowded detail. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Damien Hirst’s shelves of cigarette butts constitute a series rather than a catalogue, even though each of the items differ slightly from each other. It’s a rhythmic thing: maximalist richness against minimalist inflection, Stravinsky against Philip Glass.

Anyone familiar with Eco’s brimming novels knows all about his obsession with the cumulative power of enumeration. In the teasingly brief essays that interleave his chosen texts and images, he identifies the addiction to lists that even the most austerely organised have (and don’t count me among them) as a hunger for the infinite; hence the uncharacteristically ungainly English title of his book. (The original Italian title, La Vertigine della Lista – The Vertigo of Lists – has a more authentically Ecovian ring to it.)

He compares the urge to list, and revel in the detail within, to the sensation of locating oneself beneath the numberless stars, an experience simultaneously intoxicating and sobering. But does the hunger for the boundless – a multiplicity that extends indefinitely beyond the frame of vision, a page or a painting – provoke us to rush off and count birds, beasts and blessings?

It seems to me that the two impulses that lead us to make, and dwell within, lists are at odds with each other. One is the “reality effect” of massively agglomerated detail: the illusion of panoramic omniscience augmented by thick texture. For example, when historian Fernand Braudel guides us minutely through the shift of tides, the perils of each riparian bay and estuary in his study of the Mediterranean, we travel over the surface of the 16th-century sea in a way inaccessible from a more stringently analytical description.

But the other impulse, much exercised by Renaissance encyclopaedists in picture and in text, is mystical: a revelation from broad sampling. So a trip through the welter of detail (say an eclectically stocked botanical garden or a menagerie) might yield an epiphany of cosmic “Wow”: the harmonic connection ties the discrepancies of the world together with a single ribbon of meaning. OK, this may not happen when you peruse a bulb catalogue, or the Yellow Pages, or the Top Hundred vampire movies, but don’t say that I – or Plato – didn’t warn you if it does.

In the meantime, especially in these lean times, why not just lie back and wallow in Eco’s bath of superabundance, and enjoy what he calls the motiveless “poetics”, by which he means, he eventually confesses, the pure joy of aimless excess. After all, how can you not be thankful for a book that supplies both a complete list of the names of angels – including, naturally, Iachoroz, Onomataht and Xanoryz – and Rabelais’ comprehensive guide to the wherewithal for wiping one’s bum? But be warned, Yuletiders, geese are involved.

Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: How to raise your game in 2010

How to raise your game in 2010

By Stefan Stern

Published: December 21 2009 23:36 | Last updated: December 21 2009 23:36

Been a loooong year,” sang John Lennon, as the music faded away on the last track of his 1975 album Rock’n’Roll. This December we know what he meant.

It has been a year of high anxiety. Good news has usually been followed by bad, making it hard (and unwise) to believe that the worst was over. For those who had never experienced it, bumping along the bottom has become a meaningful concept.

But let’s not slump into excessive end-of-year doom. Looking ahead, here are three ideas to help business leaders have a happier time in 2010.

Management with analytics
The New York Police Department was “kind of a classic case of a big organisation not knowing what it knows,” says NYPD chief Ray Kelly in a recent video produced by IBM, NYPD’s technology partner.

Having realised there was a problem, Commissioner Kelly took action. Four years ago, NYPD established its Real Time Crime Center, a 24-hour, seven-day data warehouse that provides information and support to detectives who are investigating violent crime. Information is delivered to them at the crime scene. Clear-up rates and speed of operation have both improved significantly.

This is what managing with “analytics” can do for you. Successful companies – Google, Amazon, Tesco, Netflix – have got terrifically smart at extracting the right amount of relevant data from their businesses, and making it work for them: finding unexpected, unseen patterns in customer behaviour, and exploiting them.

In 2010, it will be time to get serious about managing proliferating data more intelligently. But don’t spend all your time poring over the stuff, because idea number two is going to require putting the spreadsheets down and getting out of the office ...

Management by walking around
OK, so MBWA is hardly new. Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard pioneered it decades ago. But in the “faster, faster” 21st century, when the pressure is on managers to take decisions more quickly, investing time in talking to colleagues can slip a long way down the list of priorities. Big mistake. (In the global era, Rosabeth Moss Kanter has observed, we should think in terms of “management by flying around”).

When I asked the chief executive of the global recruitment business Manpower, Jeffrey Joerres, about his management style recently, he spoke eloquently about the need to get out of the office and meet people face to face. Being a leader involves a lot more than just sending e-mails and “gazing at charts”, he said. “We are a company of do-ers, and if you have this big chasm between executives and [staff], you have no idea what the challenges are.”

Increasingly, the gurus tell us, strategy is execution. In other words, it’s how you do things that matters.

Management with a moral purpose
Business leaders have a lot of work to do to convince a sceptical public that their organisations can be a force for good. Maybe non-financial companies are suffering unfairly as a result of what some banks in particular have done. But that does not remove the need for moral renewal at the heart of business.

Jeff Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, gets it. In a speech at the US military academy West Point two weeks ago, he argued forcefully that business leaders have lost their way. “We are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership, and maybe leadership in general,” he said. “Tough- mindedness, a good trait, was replaced by meanness and greed, both terrible traits ... rewards became perverted,” he added.

Large sections of Mr Immelt’s speech could have been written by Ken and Will Hopper, authors of one the most important business books of the past decade, The Puritan Gift. Indeed, in it they salute the GE boss as their kind of leader.

The Hoppers’ book emphasises “the importance of a good managerial culture in determining the nature and direction of any society”, as Will Hopper puts it. Good managers master their craft, while also possessing what Mr Immelt calls “domain knowledge” – that is, they know what they are doing in their specific discipline. If only bankers had been better at banking, how much happier we would all be.

It has been a long year. With hard work, and after drawing on these ideas, next year could be better.

For more on management, visit www.ft.com/managementblog
stefan.stern@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Alarming Bright Futures

December 20, 2009

Children’s Books

Alarmingly Bright Futures

By RICH COHEN

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THE DAY-GLO BROTHERS

The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer’s Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors

By Chris Barton. Illustrated by Tony Persiani

Unpaged. Charlesbridge. $18.95. (Ages 7 to 10)

THE BOY WHO INVENTED TV

The Story of Philo Farnsworth

By Kathleen Krull. Illustrated by Greg Couch

Unpaged. Alfred A. Knopf. $16.99. (Ages 5 to 8)

ROBERT CROWTHER’S POP-UP HOUSE OF INVENTIONS

Written and illustrated by Robert Crowther

Unpaged. Candlewick Press. $17.99. (Ages 3 and up)

O.K., so you’re a baby. You show up. You know nothing. You can’t even hold up your own head, for God sakes! I mean, look at yourself. You’re a blob! Then, time goes by, you’re on solids now, and know a thing or two, yet there remains this one big fact you miss entirely: that the world, which you take for granted, as if it’s always been like this, because (for you) it always has been, has in fact been designed. Your baby world, which turns into your toddler world, is wholly invented, made by people. Everything you turn on and put batteries into and look at, with the possible exception of the earth and sky, is the outcome of a story, a struggle, a patent stolen, a fortune made or lost.

Now here come three books, each, in its way, determined to brief the new cast on the back story. Where does television come from? Why does the hot rod seem to glow in the sun? Who designed the first toilet? Here’s an answer for that one: “Domestic toilets on the Orkney Islands, off Scotland, had clay pipes to carry waste to streams, c. 8000 B.C.,” according to “Robert Crowther’s Pop-Up House of Inventions.”

Crowther’s “House of Inventions” — a revised edition of a book that first appeared in 2000 — is itself a kind of invention, an ingenious physical object in which each room of the house — kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom — is ­recreated, popped to life and filled with tags that date and explain dozens of household objects. “The first electric eggbeater was sold in 1910” (kitchen); “Six-sided dice were first used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans” (living room); “first brassiere, Greece, 2500 B.C.” (bathroom). This book demonstrates, in the most graphic way, how our lived-in spaces are the product of accretion, a history of fiddles and fixes. It may, in fact, be more appealing to cultural historians and students of design than to kids. All the tags, dates, numbers — it can be overwhelming. And is it all true? Remember that 10,000-year-old toilet? The earliest settlements in the Orkney Islands are said to date to around 3000 B.C., which makes you wonder about some of the other fun facts here.

If it’s narrative you want, you could turn to Chris Barton and Tony Persiani’s “Day-Glo Brothers: The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer’s Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors.” It’s a story in color and about color, in which two sons of a pharmacist, one carefree and into magic, the other studious and into medicine, experimented with fluorescent light in their basement in Berkeley, Calif., in the 1930s and mixed the first Day-Glo paint. It’s perfect that they did this in Berkeley, as their colors would play such an interesting role in the postwar West Coast hippie scene. (See Tom Wolfe’s first book, “The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” from the toddler era of fun nonfiction.)

The brothers, in other words, did the seemingly unimaginable: invented a band of colors new to the world. As with many great inventions, the discovery happened somewhat by accident, while they were making a billboard to grab attention on a nighttime Ohio highway. (They knew their paint was good, just not how good.) In Barton’s description of the breakthrough moment, which can stand for all such moments, you can almost hear the echo of Moses and the burning bush: “When the billboard came into view that afternoon, what the brothers saw astonished them. From more than a mile away, it looked like the billboard was on fire!”

The book, which explains the whys and hows of Day-Glo and is illustrated with tremendous Pop Art verve, began with Barton’s perusal of The New York Times’s obituary page, proving that the dead really do tell the best tales.

The invention of TV makes a kind of bookend with the discovery of Day-Glo. They’re band mates, Paul and John. Because if you have TV and Day-Glo, you have the key elements of the modern age in place. In “The Boy Who Invented TV: The Story of Philo Farnsworth,” by Kathleen Krull (illustrated by Greg Couch), you have another classic story: the ­science-loving country boy who solves the puzzle before the professionals, by himself, in the wilds.

“One bright, sunny day, 14-year-old Philo plowed the potato fields. It was the best chore for thinking — out in the open country by himself. Back and forth, back and forth, . . . the plow created rows of overturned earth. He looked behind him at the lines he was carving — perfectly parallel.”

“Then,” Krull writes, “he almost fell off the plow seat.” Instead of seeing rows of dirt, he imagined breaking down images into parallel lines of light, then reassembling them for the viewer. If it could be done quickly enough, the eye could be tricked into seeing a complete picture.

This scene is illustrated in heroic, almost Social Realist style. The light-drenched fields, the fresh-plowed rows, the smiling boy with horse waiting dumbly: it’s a scene from an American gospel done in stained glass in the window of a church, or bank.

Beautiful and beautifully told, the book tracks like the sort of graphic novel that breaks your heart, with its implied passage of time and slipping away of early dreams. In fact, the invention of Day-Glo and Philo Farnsworth’s story read like fables of old America: the kid from the provinces, face illuminated in lab light, tubes and burners humming. Each follows the reliable three-act structure of Horatio Alger or “Rocky”: the early breakthrough, the reversal, the triumph. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about these books. You work, you succeed, you win — or at least you live to see your idea made manifest. “The Boy Who Invented TV” also has a glimpse of the world you, as an adult, will recognize. “With his brainstorm in the potato field, Philo ­Farnsworth may have won the race to invent TV. But he lost the war over getting credit for it during his lifetime,” Krull writes in an author’s note. “Partly this was due to several strokes of bad luck; partly it was because he was more brilliant at inventing than at business. Mostly it was due to the Radio Corporation of America, the most powerful electronics company in the world in the 1930s.”

But that’s another story, and can wait till junior high.

Rich Cohen is the author of “Sweet and Low,” “Israel Is Real” and other books.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: Patricia Highsmith, Hiding in Plain Sight

A witty biography of the manipulative, secretive and obsessive novelist Patricia Highsmith, creator of Tom Ripley, a character who was a version of herself.

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December 20, 2009

Patricia Highsmith, Hiding in Plain Sight

By JEANETTE WINTERSON

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THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH

The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith

By Joan Schenkar

Illustrated. 684 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $40.

Patricia Highsmith said of herself, “I am always in love. . . .” Yet at her memorial service in Tegna, Switzerland, in 1995, there were no lovers from the past, and there was no lover to mourn her in the present. The service was filmed, which Highsmith would have liked, because although reclusive, she was interested in posterity. Such display also allowed Highsmith to hide in plain sight (as her hero Edgar Allan Poe put it in “The Purloined Letter”) the fact that all her relationships had failed. Highsmith had died in a hospital alone, and the last person to see her was her accountant. Highsmith was obsessed with taxes.

There had been so many lovers, usually women, but men, too, including Arthur Koestler, who had the good sense to give up. Highsmith was attractive to men and to women, until her diet of alcohol and cigarettes (she hated food) raddled her beauty.

Men never fired her imagination, except in her fiction, where her males, especially Tom Ripley, are versions of herself. It was women she wanted, and she found them in bars, on boats, at parties and, best of all, in settled relationships with other people.

Highsmith loved a triangle, and she liked to destroy it, axing the part of the couple she didn’t want, but usually sleeping with her first. Hers was a life jammed with encounters, and it is not by chance that her novels obsessively use the unexpected life-changing/life-threatening encounter as the drive into the narrative — think “Strangers on a Train” or any of the Ripley series.

Highsmith’s one explicitly homosexual novel, “The Price of Salt,” uses the spring of a particular encounter that the writer never forgot. As a young woman in New York City, Highsmith was working in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s earning Christmas cash when a wealthy Venus in furs — older, handsome — came in to order a doll. Simultaneously falling in love and falling ill with a fever, Highsmith went home in a daze and plotted the whole scenario for her novel — and even dared to give it something like a happy ending. What she didn’t dare to do was publish it under her own name.

But this was the 1950s, and homosexuality was classified as a disease and a disorder. Highsmith’s Freudian therapy had been aimed exclusively at “curing” her, though, bizarrely, she was offered a support group with other women, mostly married, who had homosexual tendencies. Highsmith thought she might seduce a couple, and as her lover at the time observed, “better latent than never.”

Patricia Highsmith was as secretive as an oyster. She enjoyed the closeted hidden underground world of the gay scene in ’40s and ’50s New York and ’60s and ’70s Paris. She traveled in search of fresh encounters, and to rid herself of too much that could be known by others.

Highsmith left 8,000 pages of diaries and ­“cahiers,” but as Joan Schenkar notes in “The Talented Miss Highsmith,” she forged, fabricated and altered where necessary, just like her antihero Ripley. ­She lied all the time — to her lovers, to her friends, to the tax authorities, to publishers, agents, journalists, and to posterity. Lying about the facts was her way of telling the truth — as she understood it.

She was born in Fort Worth in 1921, in her grandmother’s boardinghouse. The family came from Alabama, where Highsmith’s great-grandfather had owned an antebellum plantation and 110 “body-slaves.” (Highsmith loved that ­image.)

Highsmith was never comfortable with blacks, and she was outspokenly anti-Semitic — so much so that when she was living in Switzerland in the 1980s, she invented nearly 40 aliases, identities she used in writing to various government bodies and newspapers, deploring the state of Israel and the “influence” of the Jews. Yet Highsmith had Jewish friends, and her first boss was a Jew who did nothing but support her work. She wrote him out of her history, as she did her stint at writing comic strips in New York in the 1940s.

Highsmith had a kind of archive-­attachment disorder; she adored lists. She chronicled, mapped, numbered and cross-referenced everything in her life, and even rated her lovers, but she wiped out what didn’t suit her and only vaguely acknowledged, when pressed by the more ferrety kind of interviewer, having conjured up a few story lines for Superman and Batman.

In fact her job was much less glamorous than plotting for those superheroes, but the comic strip formula of threat/pursuit/fantasy life/alter ego/secret identity was the formula she used in all her work. The four-color, six-panel comic strip shaped Patricia Highsmith the crime writer like nothing else — however much she cared to cite Dostoyevsky and Henry James.

Her emotional shaping came from her sexuality and from her turbulent relations with her mother and stepfather. “I learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred very early on. And learned to stifle also my more positive emotions.” She also believed that homosexuals, in concealing their preferences, conceal their “humanity and natural warmth of heart as well.”

Concealment was her game, and her way of life. Dating three women at a time was not difficult for her. She collected snails, liking their portable hiding place and the impossibility of telling which was male and which was female. She traveled with snails in her luggage and kept hundreds at home. If she was bored at dinner parties, she might get a few snails out of her purse and let them loose on the tablecloth. As she didn’t eat much, she was often bored at dinner parties.

How good a writer was she? “Strangers on a Train,” “The Price of Salt” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley” are hypnotic and amoral novels, pushing past any genre, unsettling the reader and using the limitations of her prose style — her karate-chop syntax — to create a powerful effect. My own feeling is that when Highsmith consciously tried to be literary it never worked, and when she went for money and fame (the more she earned the meaner she became), she found a formula and lost her form. The problem wasn’t the supposed confines of crime writing, but her increasing refusal — in love or in work — to let a relationship happen. And art is always about relationship — to the material, to the self, and to the world in all its chaos and intrusion, its terror and its glory.

And yet, with Ripley she created a new kind of criminal, not seen before in crime/murder/detective fiction — his nearest relative being something out of de Sade — whose criminal libertines challenge what we mean by good and evil, and also thrive unpunished.

Joan Schenkar has been able to use previously unpublished and undocumented Highsmith material and has been given full access to the Highsmith archive in Bern, Switzerland.The University of Texas at Austin had offered $25,000 for the papers, which Highsmith dismissed as the “price of a used car.” Hiding herself in a Swiss vault is very Highsmith. She did, though, at the last possible second, leave her considerable fortune to the artists’ colony Yaddo.

Schenkar has a wonderfully bold approach: not worrying about a linear chronology (although this is meticulously supplied in the appendices), but choosing instead to follow the emotional water­course of Highsmith’s life, allowing her subject to find her own level — to be tidal, sullen, to flow without check, so that events in one decade naturally make an imaginative tributary into turbulence ­before and after.

Schenkar’s writing is witty, sharp and light-handed, a considerable achievement given the immense detail of this ­biography. Highsmith was a detail junkie. Schenkar’s nonlinear organizing method was a brilliant idea to save herself — and the reader — from data overload.

This is a biography of clarity and style. A model of its kind.

Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel is “The Stone Gods.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

New Scientist: Alice's adventures in algebra - Wonderland solved

Excerpt:

Take the chapter "Advice from a caterpillar", for example. By this point, Alice has fallen down a rabbit hole and eaten a cake that has shrunk her to a height of just 3 inches. Enter the Caterpillar, smoking a hookah pipe, who shows Alice a mushroom that can restore her to her proper size. The snag, of course, is that one side of the mushroom stretches her neck, while another shrinks her torso. She must eat exactly the right balance to regain her proper size and proportions.

While some have argued that this scene, with its hookah and "magic mushroom", is about drugs, I believe it's actually about what Dodgson saw as the absurdity of symbolic algebra, which severed the link between algebra, arithmetic and his beloved geometry. Whereas the book's later chapters contain more specific mathematical analogies, this scene is subtle and playful, setting the tone for the madness that will follow.

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Alice's adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved

• 16 December 2009 by Melanie Bayley
• Magazine issue 2739. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• For similar stories, visit the Christmas Science Topic Guide

Critical of the new mathematics (Image: Andrew Hem)

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What would Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess's baby or the Mad Hatter's tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you'll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text.

As I embarked on my DPhil investigating Victorian literature, I wanted to know what inspired these later additions. The critical literature focused mainly on Freudian interpretations of the book as a wild descent into the dark world of the subconscious. There was no detailed analysis of the added scenes, but from the mass of literary papers, one stood out: in 1984 Helena Pycior of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had linked the trial of the Knave of Hearts with a Victorian book on algebra. Given the author's day job, it was somewhat surprising to find few other reviews of his work from a mathematical perspective. Carroll was a pseudonym: his real name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a mathematician at Christ Church College, Oxford.

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the missing scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Even Dodgson's keenest admirers would admit he was a cautious mathematician who produced little original work. He was, however, a conscientious tutor, and, above everything, he valued the ancient Greek textbook Euclid's Elements as the epitome of mathematical thinking. Broadly speaking, it covered the geometry of circles, quadrilaterals, parallel lines and some basic trigonometry. But what's really striking about Elements is its rigorous reasoning: it starts with a few incontrovertible truths, or axioms, and builds up complex arguments through simple, logical steps. Each proposition is stated, proved and finally signed off with QED.

For centuries, this approach had been seen as the pinnacle of mathematical and logical reasoning. Yet to Dodgson's dismay, contemporary mathematicians weren't always as rigorous as Euclid. He dismissed their writing as "semi-colloquial" and even "semi-logical". Worse still for Dodgson, this new mathematics departed from the physical reality that had grounded Euclid's works.

By now, scholars had started routinely using seemingly nonsensical concepts such as imaginary numbers - the square root of a negative number - which don't represent physical quantities in the same way that whole numbers or fractions do. No Victorian embraced these new concepts wholeheartedly, and all struggled to find a philosophical framework that would accommodate them. But they gave mathematicians a freedom to explore new ideas, and some were prepared to go along with these strange concepts as long as they were manipulated using a consistent framework of operations. To Dodgson, though, the new mathematics was absurd, and while he accepted it might be interesting to an advanced mathematician, he believed it would be impossible to teach to an undergraduate.

Outgunned in the specialist press, Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction. Using a technique familiar from Euclid's proofs, reductio ad absurdum, he picked apart the "semi-logic" of the new abstract mathematics, mocking its weakness by taking these premises to their logical conclusions, with mad results. The outcome is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Algebra and hookahs

Take the chapter "Advice from a caterpillar", for example. By this point, Alice has fallen down a rabbit hole and eaten a cake that has shrunk her to a height of just 3 inches. Enter the Caterpillar, smoking a hookah pipe, who shows Alice a mushroom that can restore her to her proper size. The snag, of course, is that one side of the mushroom stretches her neck, while another shrinks her torso. She must eat exactly the right balance to regain her proper size and proportions.

While some have argued that this scene, with its hookah and "magic mushroom", is about drugs, I believe it's actually about what Dodgson saw as the absurdity of symbolic algebra, which severed the link between algebra, arithmetic and his beloved geometry. Whereas the book's later chapters contain more specific mathematical analogies, this scene is subtle and playful, setting the tone for the madness that will follow.

The first clue may be in the pipe itself: the word "hookah" is, after all, of Arabic origin, like "algebra", and it is perhaps striking that Augustus De Morgan, the first British mathematician to lay out a consistent set of rules for symbolic algebra, uses the original Arabic translation in Trigonometry and Double Algebra, which was published in 1849. He calls it "al jebr e al mokabala" or "restoration and reduction" - which almost exactly describes Alice's experience. Restoration was what brought Alice to the mushroom: she was looking for something to eat or drink to "grow to my right size again", and reduction was what actually happened when she ate some: she shrank so rapidly that her chin hit her foot.

De Morgan's work explained the departure from universal arithmetic - where algebraic symbols stand for specific numbers rooted in a physical quantity - to that of symbolic algebra, where any "absurd" operations involving negative and impossible solutions are allowed, provided they follow an internal logic. Symbolic algebra is essentially what we use today as a finely honed language for communicating the relations between mathematical objects, but Victorians viewed algebra very differently. Even the early attempts at symbolic algebra retained an indirect relation to physical quantities.

De Morgan wanted to lose even this loose association with measurement, and proposed instead that symbolic algebra should be considered as a system of grammar. "Reduce" algebra from a universal arithmetic to a series of logical but purely symbolic operations, he said, and you will eventually be able to "restore" a more profound meaning to the system - though at this point he was unable to say exactly how.

When Alice loses her temper

The madness of Wonderland, I believe, reflects Dodgson's views on the dangers of this new symbolic algebra. Alice has moved from a rational world to a land where even numbers behave erratically. In the hallway, she tried to remember her multiplication tables, but they had slipped out of the base-10 number system we are used to. In the caterpillar scene, Dodgson's qualms are reflected in the way Alice's height fluctuates between 9 feet and 3 inches. Alice, bound by conventional arithmetic where a quantity such as size should be constant, finds this troubling: "Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing," she complains. "It isn't," replies the Caterpillar, who lives in this absurd world.

Wonderland's madness reflects Carroll's views on the dangers of the new symbolic algebra

The Caterpillar's warning, at the end of this scene, is perhaps one of the most telling clues to Dodgson's conservative mathematics. "Keep your temper," he announces. Alice presumes he's telling her not to get angry, but although he has been abrupt he has not been particularly irritable at this point, so it's a somewhat puzzling thing to announce. To intellectuals at the time, though, the word "temper" also retained its original sense of "the proportion in which qualities are mingled", a meaning that lives on today in phrases such as "justice tempered with mercy". So the Caterpillar could well be telling Alice to keep her body in proportion - no matter what her size.

This may again reflect Dodgson's love of Euclidean geometry, where absolute magnitude doesn't matter: what's important is the ratio of one length to another when considering the properties of a triangle, for example. To survive in Wonderland, Alice must act like a Euclidean geometer, keeping her ratios constant, even if her size changes.

Of course, she doesn't. She swallows a piece of mushroom and her neck grows like a serpent with predictably chaotic results - until she balances her shape with a piece from the other side of the mushroom. It's an important precursor to the next chapter, "Pig and pepper", where Dodgson parodies another type of geometry.

By this point, Alice has returned to her proper size and shape, but she shrinks herself down to enter a small house. There she finds the Duchess in her kitchen nursing her baby, while her Cook adds too much pepper to the soup, making everyone sneeze except the Cheshire Cat. But when the Duchess gives the baby to Alice, it somehow turns into a pig.

The target of this scene is projective geometry, which examines the properties of figures that stay the same even when the figure is projected onto another surface - imagine shining an image onto a moving screen and then tilting the screen through different angles to give a family of shapes. The field involved various notions that Dodgson would have found ridiculous, not least of which is the "principle of continuity".

Jean-Victor Poncelet, the French mathematician who set out the principle, describes it as follows: "Let a figure be conceived to undergo a certain continuous variation, and let some general property concerning it be granted as true, so long as the variation is confined within certain limits; then the same property will belong to all the successive states of the figure."

The case of two intersecting circles is perhaps the simplest example to consider. Solve their equations, and you will find that they intersect at two distinct points. According to the principle of continuity, any continuous transformation to these circles - moving their centres away from one another, for example - will preserve the basic property that they intersect at two points. It's just that when their centres are far enough apart the solution will involve an imaginary number that can't be understood physically (see diagram).

Of course, when Poncelet talks of "figures", he means geometric figures, but Dodgson playfully subjects Poncelet's "semi-colloquial" argument to strict logical analysis and takes it to its most extreme conclusion. What works for a triangle should also work for a baby; if not, something is wrong with the principle, QED. So Dodgson turns a baby into a pig through the principle of continuity. Importantly, the baby retains most of its original features, as any object going through a continuous transformation must. His limbs are still held out like a starfish, and he has a queer shape, turned-up nose and small eyes. Alice only realises he has changed when his sneezes turn to grunts.

The baby's discomfort with the whole process, and the Duchess's unconcealed violence, signpost Dodgson's virulent mistrust of "modern" projective geometry. Everyone in the pig and pepper scene is bad at doing their job. The Duchess is a bad aristocrat and an appallingly bad mother; the Cook is a bad cook who lets the kitchen fill with smoke, over-seasons the soup and eventually throws out her fire irons, pots and plates.

Alice, angry now at the strange turn of events, leaves the Duchess's house and wanders into the Mad Hatter's tea party, which explores the work of the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton. Hamilton died in 1865, just after Alice was published, but by this time his discovery of quaternions in 1843 was being hailed as an important milestone in abstract algebra, since they allowed rotations to be calculated algebraically.

Just as complex numbers work with two terms, quaternions belong to a number system based on four terms (see "Imaginary mathematics"). Hamilton spent years working with three terms - one for each dimension of space - but could only make them rotate in a plane. When he added the fourth, he got the three-dimensional rotation he was looking for, but he had trouble conceptualising what this extra term meant. Like most Victorians, he assumed this term had to mean something, so in the preface to his Lectures on Quaternions of 1853 he added a footnote: "It seemed (and still seems) to me natural to connect this extra-spatial unit with the conception of time."

Where geometry allowed the exploration of space, Hamilton believed, algebra allowed the investigation of "pure time", a rather esoteric concept he had derived from Immanuel Kant that was meant to be a kind of Platonic ideal of time, distinct from the real time we humans experience. Other mathematicians were polite but cautious about this notion, believing pure time was a step too far.

The parallels between Hamilton's maths and the Hatter's tea party - or perhaps it should read "t-party" - are uncanny. Alice is now at a table with three strange characters: the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse. The character Time, who has fallen out with the Hatter, is absent, and out of pique he won't let the Hatter move the clocks past six.

Reading this scene with Hamilton's maths in mind, the members of the Hatter's tea party represent three terms of a quaternion, in which the all-important fourth term, time, is missing. Without Time, we are told, the characters are stuck at the tea table, constantly moving round to find clean cups and saucers.

Their movement around the table is reminiscent of Hamilton's early attempts to calculate motion, which was limited to rotatations in a plane before he added time to the mix. Even when Alice joins the party, she can't stop the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse shuffling round the table, because she's not an extra-spatial unit like Time.

The Hatter's nonsensical riddle in this scene - "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" - may more specifically target the theory of pure time. In the realm of pure time, Hamilton claimed, cause and effect are no longer linked, and the madness of the Hatter's unanswerable question may reflect this.

Alice's ensuing attempt to solve the riddle pokes fun at another aspect of quaternions: their multiplication is non-commutative, meaning that x × y is not the same as y × x. Alice's answers are equally non-commutative. When the Hare tells her to "say what she means", she replies that she does, "at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing". "Not the same thing a bit!" says the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"

It's an idea that must have grated on a conservative mathematician like Dodgson, since non-commutative algebras contradicted the basic laws of arithmetic and opened up a strange new world of mathematics, even more abstract than that of the symbolic algebraists.

When the scene ends, the Hatter and the Hare are trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot. This could be their route to freedom. If they could only lose him, they could exist independently, as a complex number with two terms. Still mad, according to Dodgson, but free from an endless rotation around the table.

And there Dodgson's satire of his contemporary mathematicians seems to end. What, then, would remain of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland without these analogies? Nothing but Dodgson's original nursery tale, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, charming but short on characteristic nonsense. Dodgson was most witty when he was poking fun at something, and only then when the subject matter got him truly riled. He wrote two uproariously funny pamphlets, fashioned in the style of mathematical proofs, which ridiculed changes at the University of Oxford. In comparison, other stories he wrote besides the Alice books were dull and moralistic.

I would venture that without Dodgson's fierce satire aimed at his colleagues, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would never have become famous, and Lewis Carroll would not be remembered as the unrivalled master of nonsense fiction.

Imaginary mathematics

The real numbers, which include fractions and irrational numbers like π that can nevertheless be represented as a point on a number line, are only one of many number systems.

Complex numbers, for example, consist of two terms - a real component and an "imaginary" component formed of some multiple of the square root of -1, now represented by the symbol i. They are written in the form a + bi.

The Victorian mathematician William Rowan Hamilton took this one step further, adding two more terms to make quaternions, which take the form a + bi + cj + dk and have their own strange rules of arithmetic.

Melanie Bayley is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. Her work was supported by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council

FT: Triump of the ordinary

Triumph of the ordinary

By Jackie Wullschlager

Published: December 5 2009 00:09 | Last updated: December 5 2009 11:00

Andy Warhol
By Arthur C Danto
Yale £18, 162 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14.40

Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol
By Tony Scherman and David Dalton
Harper $40, 510 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

Andy Warhol: The Last Decade
By Joseph D Ketner II
Prestel £45, 223 pages
FT Bookshop price: £36

Andy Warhol Giant Size
Introduction by Dave Hickey
Phaidon £24.99, 624 pages
FT Bookshop price: £19.99

New York, early 1969: Andy Warhol, recently shot by Valerie Solanas because “he had too much control of my life”, is recovering. At a party, he spies Willem de Kooning and hurries to pay homage. Instantly, de Kooning spins round so that the two great artists are face-to-face. “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, you’re even a killer of laughter. I can’t bear your work!” he shouts. The other guests are stunned but Warhol, turning away, merely shrugs, “Oh well, I always loved his work.”

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Art critic Arthur Danto relates de Kooning’s rant in his incisive, essential account, Andy Warhol, just published by Yale as part of its “Icons of America” series. Tony Scherman and David Dalton’s Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol is packed with similar anecdotes: for instance, a star-struck Andy, persistently ignored by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whines, “Why don’t Bob and Jap like me?” – only to be told by a mutual friend, “How could they? You’re too queer – and your work is so commercial. It probably makes them uneasy.”

It took a long time, Danto argues, “for Warhol to become intellectually respectable in America. Instead, he became an icon.”

Warhol is now the most famous American artist of all time, and among the most expensive. But many viewers still sympathise with the responses of de Kooning, or Rauschenberg and Johns, or even Solanas. All the more so because since the 1960s Warhol’s control over our visual experiences has indeed been indisputable. Collapsing the gap between high and low culture, his silkscreen methods brought printing techniques into painting, while his subjects – from Coca-Cola bottles to Elvis – took commercial art into fine art. Like Picasso, he revolutionised how art is made; like Duchamp he revolutionised what we consider art can be. But unlike Picasso and Duchamp, who were both European intellectuals from privileged backgrounds, Warhol came from a working-class immigrant family and his blue-collar sensibility created an aesthetic aimed, for the first time in history, at mass audiences.

As with all seminal artists there will probably be a Warhol for every epoch. In terms of biography, Victor Bockris’s account, published in 1989 two years after the artist’s death, stands unrivalled. These four books, however, testify that debate continues to rage around Warhol’s contribution – his early versus his late works – and his role as Pop artist versus philosopher versus celebrity.

No interpreter of Warhol can escape the influence of Danto’s uniquely perceptive understanding. Both artist and critic were born in the 1920s, grew up in America’s industrial heartland – Warhol in Pittsburgh, Danto in Detroit – to be shaped by the Depression before hitting New York in the 1940s.

Danto became professor of philosophy at Columbia, but his Damascus moment came on seeing Warhol’s “Brillo Box” in 1964. “It turned me into a philosopher of art,” he says. His book distils a lifetime’s thinking about Warhol and modern aesthetics, which “is more or less a response to Warhol’s challenges, so in an important sense he really was doing philosophy by doing the art that made him famous”.

When Warhol displayed facsimiles of Brillo cartons in an art gallery – piled high, in neat stacks, as in the stockroom of a supermarket – he was rephrasing an ancient question: “Given two objects that look exactly alike, how far is it possible for one of them to be a work of art and the other just an ordinary object?” With his urinal, “Fountain”, Duchamp had playfully asked this question half a century before; Danto argues that Warhol was a more political and also a religious artist. Was Jesus man or God? “Imagine that there was a man just his age in Jerusalem, who looked enough like Jesus that the two of them were often confused for one another ... The difference could not have been more momentous than that! Confusing a god with a mere human being is ... like confusing a work of art with a mere real thing – a thing defined through its meaning with a thing defined through its use.”

With priestly genius, this theological Warhol mesmerised his non-intellectual congregation by using images that transfigured the commonplace. His Campbell soup cans and Coke bottles speak a vernacular language anyone can understand; like Joseph Beuys’ fat and felt, they resonated too with widespread memories of cold and hunger for a postwar generation. Their repetition, and Warhol’s obsession with working in series, are not just formal devices – though they were a slap against the individualism of abstract expressionism – but emblems of political equality. As a child, face pressed to the windows of downtown stores packed with desirable, unaffordable products, Warhol had known real want: here were his dreams of assembly-line plenty and security.

All religion is based on suffering and its radical relief; Warhol’s art evolved on two levels, “the level of fears and agonies, and the level of beauties”: car accidents, plane crashes, suicides, executions – and Liz, Jackie, Elvis, Marilyn in gold, glimmering like the Byzantine icons at the Orthodox church where Warhol’s Ruthenian family had worshipped. Danto concludes with a powerful picture of the coherence of Warhol’s work: “a dark world with radiant beings, whose presence among us is redemptive, and into whose company Warhol sought to insinuate his own ungainly presence, and to make stars of us all”.

That ungainly presence is the centre of Scherman and Dalton’s gossipy, illuminating account of Warhol’s 1960s transformation from an “undesired, homely” commercial illustrator, “languishing at the bottom” of New York’s gay hierarchy, to the “ashen-faced mothlike ghoul fixed in the collective mind” as the world’s first celebrity artist. Scores of interviews bring alive his complexity in this most fertile period: Andy the party addict (“he would go to the opening of a drawer”) living chastely with his mother and 17 cats (“the place smelt – you wouldn’t believe how terribly”); the fey attention-seeker (“I was going to bring my butterfly on a string but I couldn’t find him”) who was also a weightlifter (“to build up his chest, mainly ... and to check out the boys”); and the career opportunist who spent Sundays helping in soup kitchens.

Crucially, Warhol was the voyeur (“Andy said ‘Ohh I want to draw it!’ and before I knew it ... I was sitting with my pants down, with a daffodil wound around my dick. That was my first meeting with Andy”) who could not bear to be touched – “he told me he’d had sex a few times, he had tried it and didn’t like it, too ‘messy and distasteful’ ”. Scherman and Dalton suggest that as emotional, aesthetic and social outsider, Warhol was able to see instinctively that “comic strips and ads were in fact contemporary folk art” and that the fan magazine idols adored in the “blue collar woman’s world” of his mother Julia Warhola could be transmuted – via his own repetitions, off-register printing and deliberate lack of nuance – and served up to sophisticated New York taste.

The photographic sources were a masterstroke. They allowed Warhol to bypass illusionist dilemmas, just as Johns did by painting already-flat subjects such as “Flag” and “Target”. In this context, the well-known aperçu “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it” becomes a metaphor for his grasp of a major formal issue confronting painters of his era.

Scherman and Dalton’s account stops at 1968, when they believe success destroyed Warhol’s originality. “It had been his poor-boy’s fascination with the offerings of 1930s Pittsburgh showrooms and movie theatres that gave Warhol’s Pop paintings their glow, his bitterness at the elite’s snubs that largely fuelled his early Pop images’ abrasive inelegance. But he was an insider now; his 1960s authority, rooted in marginality and transgression, was extinguished.” In Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, however, Joseph D Ketner takes the opposite view, arguing that in his final years Warhol brought his oeuvre full circle, sweeping his previous images into a “complex dance of painting and printing, abstraction and representation, surface and meaning”.

Certainly the 1970s and 1980s presented Warhol with a new challenge: each artist had to find his own way and the pluralistic art scene began to anticipate that of today. Warhol’s diverse range of references, as explored here, suggest some desperation: performance art, and an ironic jest at Pollockesque physicality in the “Piss Paintings”; Picasso’s cartoonish late canvases in the drag queen portraits; the collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat. “I wasn’t creative since I was shot” became a mantra.

The Whitney Museum’s 1979 exhibition of his portraits was critically mauled: the exchange of Brillo-box austerity for flattering likenesses in psychedelic colours suggested a sell-out. Robert Rosenblum hailed Warhol as “court painter to the 1970s international aristocracy”. Warhol replied that the canvases were the same size “so they’ll all fit together and make one big painting called Portraits of Society. Maybe the Metropolitan Museum would want it someday.”

The Met hasn’t so far but when the group was shown at Paris’s Grand Palais this spring, it looked stunning. And if Warhol’s late fright-wig self-portraits, based on Polaroid snaps with his hair swept up, Basquiat-Rasta style, are not comparable to Rembrandt and Picasso’s final self-depictions, to which Ketner compares them, they are nevertheless among his greatest works: at once stage performances and hollowed-out death-masks.

“Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you, just measure it in inches”, was a famous comment by this lifelong chaser of fame. Andy Warhol Giant Size is a condensed edition of a 420mm-high visual biography published in 2006. Now shrunk to more manageable but still impressive size, it is a celebrity album. It opens with little-known childhood photographs and closes with the order of service for Warhol’s memorial mass and images of his Pittsburgh gravestone (it does not, as he once demanded, say “figment”).

“I never fall apart because I never fall together,” Warhol remarked; the abundance of detail and scrapbook format here perfectly reflect an overcrowded life which was never distinct from his art. It is dotted with apparently throw-away remarks by himself and others – “I don’t really believe in love. I sort of believe in liking” in the context of 1950s male nude drawings; Ed Ruscha’s “Andy was like no artist I had ever met because he was for everything and nothing at the same time” alongside his “Race Riot” series. It conveys persuasively how Warhol was at once America’s 20th-century Everyman and an artist who depicted ordinariness with exceptional visionary intelligence.

That democratic agenda haunts all these volumes. Their authors are all American and each has a patriotic undertow; Danto’s is dedicated to the Obamas. Even if you don’t agree that Warhol was America’s most significant artist, they leave you in no doubt that he was, as Danto calls him, “the laureate of the American soul”.

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s chief art critic and author of ‘Chagall: The Dream of Life’ (Allen Lane)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Drucker's ideas stand the test of time

Drucker’s ideas stand the test of time

By Stefan Stern

Published: November 23 2009 22:06 | Last updated: November 23 2009 22:06

In 1974, the New York Times reported that sales of Peter Drucker’s latest book, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, had overtaken those of Alex Comfort’s illustrated primer The Joy of Sex. For one brief moment, management was the hottest topic of all.

Only Drucker could have achieved this. “No other person has had the impact on the practice of management that he did,” according to one of today’s leading authorities, CK Prahalad. This November marks the centenary of Drucker’s birth – he died in 2005 just short of his 96th birthday – and the anniversary has been celebrated in a series of events round the world.

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Last week in Vienna, the city where Drucker was born and spent the first 18 years of his life, an international conference debated his significance and continued relevance. But the idea was to look forwards and not back, as Richard Straub, the conference organiser, explained. “We are not opening a museum here,” he said. “We have plenty in this city already.”

Debate centred on the views and legacy of the father of modern management. What would he be advising us to do now? And what would be his response to the great financial and economic crisis?

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Drucker’s disciples chose to give business school orthodoxy (particularly the “Anglo-Saxon” kind) a clobbering. Armed with MBAs, personal profit maximisers had selfishly pursued their own interests, ignoring their moral responsibility to concentrate on the sustainable success of the organisation (and society) as a whole. As Ira Jackson, dean of Peter F Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management in California, put it: “If we were producing doctors, they would have some difficulty getting insurance cover against future malpractice.”

Drucker’s critique of greed and irresponsibility pre-dated today’s crisis. He admired what managers and organisations could achieve when they put their minds to it. But having witnessed managerial incompetence as well as political extremism at first hand in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, he understood what the worst consequences of bad practice could be.

Joseph Maciariello, a colleague of Drucker’s, told the conference that he believed organisations needed to be structured “to counteract, minimise or redirect the darker forces of human nature”. Harvard Business Review has this month reprinted Alan Kantrow’s 1979 article on Drucker, in which he argued that “[he] is so deeply concerned about the profession of management because he is profoundly afraid of what might happen if the major institutions of western society fail in their essential responsibilities”.

In this spirit, Professor Prahalad argued that the true Druckerian task for the 21st century would be “to reinvent the social compact of business”. While that sentiment seemed, to a few delegates, to be straying too far from Drucker’s Schumpeter-inspired emphasis on entrepreneurialism, innovation and even “creative destruction”, the majority felt the profession of management would benefit from rededicating itself to an explicitly moral approach.

If one word was mentioned more than any other at the conference, it was “purpose”

In fact, Drucker’s greatest virtues were his plain-spoken insights and practicality. If one word was mentioned more than any other at the conference, it was “purpose”. Drucker’s “five most important questions you will ever ask” should help any manager ensure that he or she leads a purpose-driven enterprise. Those questions are: What is our business (or mission)? Who is our customer? What does the customer value? What are our results? What is our plan?

Although hailed as a visionary by some – he first started talking about “knowledge workers” some 20 years before anyone else – Drucker rejected that label, and the “guru” one as well. “I never predict,” he once said. “I simply look out the window and see what is visible but not yet seen.”

Drucker might also have been a little impatient with the reverence with which he is now discussed. “I do not intend to be an icon,” he declared.

Too late. There are Drucker Societies all over the world, and he continues to be the one management writer almost everyone agrees is worth reading. Prof Prahalad summed him up in admirably Druckerian terms: “He tells us how to do stuff, not just how to think.” I expect he will still be remembered 100 years from now.

For more on management or to comment, visit www.ft.com/managementblog

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: A question all leaders should ask themselves

A question all leaders should ask themselves

By Stefan Stern

Published: December 1 2009 00:07 | Last updated: December 1 2009 00:07

Four hundred feet above the ground, rock-climbing in the Eldorado Canyon near Boulder, Colorado, the teenage Jim Collins was seconds away from death. The knot in his rope had come loose, he was slipping out of his harness and his hands were tiring.

“I was very lucky because there was an old piton [metal peg] in the crack right in front of me ... I could clip a sling in the piton, grab the rope and tie it ... Had I been 10ft above it or 10ft below it at the same moment it would have been a different story ... I would have died. And I remember that. It’s just so seared in my brain.”

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He’s not kidding. That much was clear sitting across the table from Collins – one of the most intense people I have ever met – in London a couple of weeks ago. Think of it: the co-author of Built to Last and author of Good to Great and How the Mighty Fall was very nearly lost to us before he had got started.

Collins is one of the world’s most important management thinkers. Those titles have become part of the management lexicon. He was in the UK last month for a combined work and holiday, so there was time for a long chat about management and leadership. It was a fascinating and challenging conversation.

‘To be in a position of power, you are signing up for sacrifice’

Collins’s passion for rock-climbing explains his lean, muscular frame. The only sign that he has reached middle-age (he is 51) is his grey-white hair. When he speaks, he fixes you with a penetrating stare.

“If you think being in a position of power and responsibility is something that you want to go to because it will be good for your life, you don’t understand the job,” he told me. “You are signing up for sacrifice.”

Collins is at least as hard on himself as he is on those business leaders who fail to recognise what their job entails. Consider the way he writes. A Collins production takes years. First, there is the lengthy analysis of data (he has a large team to help with that), and then there is the honing and polishing of the text. He sends his “bad first draft” to about 60 readers.

“I don’t want them to tell me they like it,” he explained. “That’s not of any use. What I want them to do is to really identify its weaknesses so that they can be addressed long before the world sees it.”

In Good to Great, Collins urged leaders to “confront the brutal facts” about their businesses. In his own work, he seeks out brutal criticism. “I really thrive on criticism because it’s always a chance to get better,” he said. “If you’re not suffering, you’re not making yourself better.” And then, to confirm the point, he offered a parallel from rock-climbing: “I’d much rather have a really severe coach and then go on the big climb than avoid the severe coach and go on the big climb unprepared.”

Collins’s work contains several key lessons. In Built to Last (with Jerry Porras) he argued that successful companies have core ideologies by which they operate. In the more recent How the Mighty Fall, Collins set out the “arc of tragedy” that apparently sound businesses follow to their eventual demise.

But perhaps most important, and most controversial, Collins argued in Good to Great that so-called “level-five leaders” – self-effacing, driven, relentless – are far more likely to prove effective than dazzling, celebrity leaders.

He reiterated that point when we met. One question can reveal what sort of leader somebody is: “What are you in it for?” (As he uttered this question, his eyes narrowed and his gaze seemed to grow even more intense than before.)

Most leaders are ambitious, but with a level-five leader, “that ambition is channelled into something bigger than you, or beyond you, or it’s ultimately not about you”. It is about making the organisation great, and sustainably so. “That’s the essence of level five ... What are you in it for, and do you have the capacity to suffer for it?” he said.

Charisma alone is not enough to turn somebody into a leader. In fact, it may do more harm than good. “If I’m enormously charismatic, I can convince you to do a lot of things because of the force of my personality,” Collins told me. “But force of personality is not an argument ... It’s not facts, it’s not evidence, it’s not data ... Charisma is irrelevant. It’s not good or bad, it’s irrelevant.”

So, time to take the Collins test. Put the paper down, find a mirror, look into it, and then ask yourself: what are you in it for?

For more on management or to comment, visit www.ft.com/managementblog

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Book extract - Viral Loop

Book extract: Viral Loop

By Adam L Penenberg

Published: November 6 2009 14:24 | Last updated: November 6 2009 14:24

Businesses are keen to harness the digital world to extend their brands and increase sales

It was the autumn of 2005 when Fritz Grobe, a professional juggler, and Stephen Voltz, a trial lawyer, first heard from a friend the amusing revelation that if you dropped Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, it would explode. Performers at heart – the two were members of a regional theatre company in Buckfield, Maine – Grobe and Voltz went out to the backyard to try it. After the pyrotechnics, their first thought was: how far could they take it?

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They weren’t the first. For decades, high school students had mixed vinegar and baking soda to make volcanoes erupt at science fairs and, since the early 1990s, the people at Mentos had been aware of the geyser phenomenon, which would come and go in popularity. Then, in September 2005, science educator Steve Spangler demonstrated the Mentos-Diet Coke effect on a news programme in Denver, Colorado, with the anchor Kim Christiansen getting soaked in the process. The online video became a minor hit.

In Buckfield, Grobe and Voltz spent a morning playing around with the idea. After corralling as many bottles of Diet Coke and Mentos as they could, they constructed a 10-bottle fountain with the aid of some cement blocks and put on a show at the nearby Oddfellows Theatre for other members of their troupe. The response urged them to greater heights and they spent about five months experimenting – cutting slits in bottles, drilling holes, adding screens.

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After settling on the idea of recreating the Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas, the two drafted blueprints and carefully choreographed their effects to match those of their glitzy muse. On April 29 2006, they laid out 200 bottles of Diet Coke in an intricate design and prepped more than 500 Mentos mints (total cost: $300), then spent eight hours doing walk-throughs. “It felt like blowing up a building,” Grobe says. “We had one chance. We had never done more than 20 bottles at a time before that.”

While a friend with a digital video camera recorded the action, the two, dressed in white lab coats, crossed their fingers and let it fly. Amazingly, it all went off without a hitch. It was an unseasonably warm day, so the effects were even more spectacular, especially at the end when the grand crown shot out in different directions and spun. They got soaked, puddles of Diet Coke gathering in their goggles.

On the first Saturday in June they posted the experiment to their website. Voltz told one person about it: his brother. Within hours, thousands of visitors were viewing “Experiment #137”. By the end of the first day, they counted 14,000 downloads. Two days later, The Late Show with David Letterman called. Grobe told producers they had only done the fountain once and would need a chance to rehearse. Over the next few weeks, Grobe and Voltz grew confident they could perform the Mentos geyser live. Meanwhile, the video became a runaway hit. Over nine days, more than 2m people logged on to their site.

The concept of collective curation has been around for thousands of years; it just didn’t have as sophisticated a propulsion system as it does today. At first it was verbal, with gossip and information spreading from person to person. Chain letters mailed through the nation’s postal system urged recipients to make copies and send to 10 other people, or suffer the consequences. Then there was the telephone, the first efficient person-to-person mode of communication, which, before the rise of the internet, offered an unprecedented level of virality.

Once Mosaic and Netscape seeded the viral plain, though, jokes, memes and information that touched someone’s heart or funny bone – or both – could be dispatched to dozens, if not hundreds of people in an instant. It was only a matter of time before businesses began to recognise the benefits of viral campaigns to extend their brands and, in the process, increase sales. They just had to figure out how.

The answer came from Burger King in the form of a guy dressed up as a chicken willing to do whatever you wanted. The brainchild of ad agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky in 2004, the “subservient chicken” was one of the first mega-successful corporate viral campaigns. There were some wacky television spots, but it was the ensuing interactive web campaign that turned it from idle curiosity into a phenomenon.

Crispin launched a website with the chicken in a living room, encouraging visitors to type commands and watch him perform them, as long as they corresponded to one of more than 300 pre-recorded moves – from a cartwheel to a Michael Jackson moonwalk. But the chicken would draw the line at anything obscene (such as a sex act), approaching the camera to wag his finger in disapproval.

Within a week, the chicken hosted more than 20m visits, with the average user spending an astonishing 5 minutes and 44 seconds on the site. More to the point, sales of Burger King chicken sandwiches increased 9 per cent a week in the month following the site’s launch.

. . . .

Pete Healy, vice-president of marketing at Mentos, heard about the geyser phenomenon on radio. He told a reporter that Mentos was “tickled” by the video. He called Grobe and asked if there was anything the company could do to help.

“Send Mentos,” Grobe replied.

Healy did more than that. What followed was a marketing coup that has become a textbook example of how a company can harness the power of viral video, where the 30-second TV ad, which is waning in influence, is replaced by the audience. Because collective curation means the audience alone decides what’s good and what should be watched while the traditional gatekeepers – TV networks, movie studios, news media – are pushed to the sidelines.

Although Healy knew there would be risks to involving Mentos in this type of new-media campaign, in the end Mentos was candy, not a cure for cancer. How much effort would people put into ridiculing it? “As long as we maintained a light touch and were authentic, we figured we would probably be OK,” he says.

When Grobe and Voltz appeared on Letterman’s show, Healy dispatched the Mentos-mobile, a Pontiac Solstice wrapped in Mentos graphics, which was parked outside the theatre, while street marketers toting six-foot rolls of Mentos gave out sweets to passers-by.

Unlike Healy, the people at the Coca-Cola Company didn’t know what to think. A Coke spokeswoman said: “We would hope people want to drink [Diet Coke] more than try experiments with it.” She added that the “craziness with Mentos” didn’t “fit” Diet Coke’s “brand personality”.

Michael Donnelly, the company’s interactive director, admitted that Coke wasn’t prepared for this. But in July 2006 the soft- drink maker relaunched Coke.com with a new focus: consumer-generated media that celebrates creativity and self-expression. Within days of starting his job at Coke, Donnelly contacted Voltz and Grobe. This led to a meeting between Coke, Mentos, Grobe, Voltz and Google, which also wanted in on the action.

Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz told one person about ‘Experiment #137’; after nine days, 2m had downloaded it

The companies agreed to work together to support the performers in a second Mentos-Coke sprinkler video, which Grobe and Voltz dubbed “The Domino Effect”. At the end, there was an advertisement that linked to Coke.com or cocacola.com, announcing a contest. For three months, people could submit videos of ordinary objects doing extraordinary things, with Grobe and Voltz judging. Coke supported the campaign by buying up hundreds of search keywords on Google, MSN and Yahoo, anything relating to Coke, Mentos and explosions, and counted 1.5bn ad impressions.

This democratisation of content is made possible by cheap video cameras, camcorders and mobile phones that capture user-generated infotainment, aided by powerful software like Final Cut Pro and iMovie to shape it, and distributed via a massive digital infrastructure with ample bandwidth. The technological zeitgeist is, however, equal parts human, as online communities blog about what interests them or disseminate links to everyone in their e-mail address books. Meanwhile, user communities have sprouted up on people portals such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and Digg. There, people share everything from blog posts to news articles, pictures, audio podcasts and videos in a quest for their own 15 megabytes of fame.

“It’s all about the combination of next-generation content creation and distribution coupled to instant access to your social network community,” says Adam Lavelle, vice-president of strategy for iCrossing, a digital marketing agency. “Because distribution is so huge and fluid and easy, your community connects to other communities, which fosters this distribution. If I know you, then I know everyone you know.”

As for companies caught up in a viral loop, they have little choice but to let go of their brand. As AG Lafley, chief executive of Procter & Gamble, once told the US Association of National Advertisers, “The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.”

A company willing to let go of its brand can find untapped riches, as Mentos did. The Bellagio Fountain video was downloaded 20m times and more than 10,000 copycat videos were posted online, which created a multiplier effect: Mentos tallied a staggering 215m mentions of its product in TV, print or radio stories over nine months, and estimates the free publicity was worth $10m to the company, half its annual marketing budget. Sales climbed 20 per cent during the first viral wave and, even after the commotion died down, they remained 15 per cent higher than they had been. Mentos made a mint.

Before the video, Diet Coke’s sales had been flat, while the company as a whole was losing market share. But Donnelly reports that after it went viral there was a “significant spike” in sales of two-litre bottles of Diet Coke, the ones used on camera. He wouldn’t give exact numbers but confirmed it was between 5 and 10 per cent.

On YouTube some videos have been downloaded tens of millions of times. There is a cat playing the piano , a music video set on treadmills at a gym, a cackling baby. At first there may not seem any rhyme or reason behind their appeal. Yet there are shared characteristics to some viral videos, and companies seeking to advertise their products are keen to decipher these.

A series created for the Sony Bravia HDTV featured explosions of paint covering whole buildings, thousands of bouncing balls and giant clay rabbits, all in vivid colour; a Dove Evolution ad showed a normal-looking woman instantly transformed into a supermodel before our very eyes. The tagline read: “No wonder our image of beauty is distorted.”

These are the antithesis of the hard sell. In exchange for entertaining us, the companies are afforded the privilege of mentioning their product. The narrative of each video is woven tightly into the brand’s message. Sony’s ad played up the Bravia’s colour and image clarity. Dove’s idea expanded the idea of beauty to encompass more than twiggy supermodels. On YouTube alone, several parodies were viewed a total of 5m times. (“Slob Evolution”, in which a male model eats, drinks and smokes himself into someone who resembles Christopher Hitchens, is a personal favourite.)

Plenty of others have played the system, with decidedly mixed results. Samsung released a series of videos on YouTube featuring a Saint Bernard named Sam on an aeroplane. The few who actually watched characterised these ads as “lame”, “a stinker” and “zzzzzz”. And though Dove scored big with Evolution, another promo for Dove Cream Oil Body Wash received more than 10,000 comments on YouTube, almost universally negative.

What’s the secret of a campaign like this? “You have to have a light touch and be careful not to act like a guy in his mid-40s trying to be a hipster,” says Pete Healy, the fifty-something Mentos marketer. “It doesn’t smell right.”

This is an edited extract from ‘Viral Loop’ by Adam L Penenberg, (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99). © 2009 Adam Penenberg.

.....................................................................................................

Adam L Penenberg on what’s next for the virtual economy

One need not be fluent in the lingua franca of social media to realise that Facebook is viral through and through. From the start it grew because each new user begat others, for what’s the sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are? Today there are more than 300m Facebookers and it is en route to half a billion.

Facebook not only constantly expands, stacked atop it is a teeming ecosystem of thousands of social networking applications: games, horoscopes and quizzes, apps for business and charity, all of them also viral in nature. With 25m users, one notable Facebook app is the gruesome game Mafia Wars. Users start their own mafia family with their friends, operate crime syndicates and shoot to be the next Godfather.

While the script isn’t all that interesting, the gamemaker Zynga’s revenue scheme is, because it turns bits and bytes into cold hard cash by trading in virtual goods, which yield about half the company’s revenue (advertising is responsible for the other half). Zynga combines free-market capitalism with high-tech killing hardware. Need an assault rifle for your arsenal? Pay Zynga real money and it’s yours. How about a “meat grinder” machine gun, an Easter egg bomb or napalm? Yours, for your next ambush, at a price.

Even more popular is Farmville, enabling its 60m users to buy digital representations of seeds, chickens, eggs, tools and plots of land. (While neither game runs exclusively on Facebook – they are also available on MySpace, Yahoo and over the iPhone – Facebookers form the biggest base of users.)

Don’t laugh. The market for virtual goods is estimated to be about $1bn in the US. It is spawning entire virtual economies, even being funnelled into charitable causes. Zynga released a special “sweet seed” it sold for the equivalent of $5 each, promising to donate half the proceeds to two non-profits in Haiti. Farmville players generated $640,000, with $320,000 going to charity.

These games, like the social networks they sit on, are viral, with each user attracting others to play. They will not only continue to spread, they will become more realistic and it’s not far-fetched to think that one day an alternate economy could arise.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Forbes: Thoughts - Books

I am an avid reader and always have a weakness for books... here's a selection of some of my favourite quotes that was in Forbes October 5, 2009 issue.

Despite the rage about eBook, I still like mine which I can hold and feel...

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• If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. ~ John Ruskin

• I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Book thinks for me. ~ Charles Lamb

• A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever. ~ Martin Tupper

• The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul - BOOK. ~ Emily Dickinson

• In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you. ~ Mortimer Jerome Adler

• A good book shoule be leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. ~ William Styron

• It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. ~ William Ellery Channing

• Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. ~ Francis Bacon

• A good book is the purest essence of a human soul. ~ Thomas Carlyle

• I do not read a book. I had a conversation with the author. ~ Elber Hubbard

• A book is a present you can open again and again. ~ Anonymous

• The investigation into the meaning of words is the beginning of education. ~ Antisthenes

• The proper study for mankind is books. ~ Aldous Huxley

• Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! ~ JOB19:23

BusinessWeek: Why Design Thinking Matters

Book Review October 26, 2009, 1:32PM EST text size: TT

Why Design Thinking Matters

"Design thinking" proponent and business school dean Roger Martin argues that the discipline provides executives with competitive advantage critical for success

By Helen Walters

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage
By Roger Martin
Harvard Business Press; 208pp; $26.95

One of the most compelling examples in Roger Martin's new book is a personal tale from his own days as a consultant. Asked by a Canadian bank to come up with a new strategy to cater to high-net-worth clients, Martin and his team came up with a bold plan they thought might revolutionize the bank's entire business. The bank's chief executive met the excited presentation with one question: Had any competitor already gone this route? "No!" Martin replied brightly. "You would be the very first!" And with that the meeting was over, the idea was killed.

The story, and others in Martin's new book, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage, illuminates more than just the risk-aversion of so many members of the C-suite. Instead, Martin is calling for a new way of thinking to permeate business that embraces the tricky reality of executing innovation and in doing so transforms it into action. He calls the technique "design thinking" and argues that it provides the necessary balance between the poles of analytical and intuitive thinking that are commonly taught and nurtured in today's professionals.

Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto since 1998, Martin has been a key figure in driving understanding of the concept of design thinking for some time now. Here he again outlines his theory that this perspective provides a new—to his mind, critically important—method of running a business in today's fiendishly complex world.

With examples from companies such as Procter & Gamble (PG) and Research in Motion (RIMM), Martin shows the power of design thinking in action. He also makes the case that it can—and should—be adopted by any department within an organization.

Indeed, the most interesting insights within the chapter on P&G are not the well-trodden stories of A.G. Lafley and Claudia Kotchka shaking things up by holding mandatory hands-on innovation workshops. Instead, it's the work of Filippo Passerini, head of P&G's global business services, that emphasizes the potential impact of the technique. By applying design thinking within the traditionally uncreative corporate engine room of the organization, Passerini brought about radical transformation that could both support and spearhead the turnaround of the company at large. Without this in place, the flashier, more talked-about product introductions would not have had the strong foundation needed to flourish in the marketplace.

dealing with the backlash

Design thinking has received more than its share of attention in recent years, not least from magazines such as BusinessWeek. Somewhat inevitably, a backlash has bubbled up, with designers grumbling that the concept detracts from the purity of the design discipline itself, and some executives skeptical of its worth outside of design agencies or creative consultancies.

Smartly, Martin acknowledges the tension and he remains steadfastly nuanced in his own argument that balance remains the key. Sometimes Martin's language reflects his long tenure as a university professor, but bushwhacking through the academic terminology is a worthwhile exercise. An accountant can learn to embrace the concept of validity, or leap-of-faith ideas, through the help and guidance of a more creative thinker. Likewise, structure and data can help the free-wheeling, blue-sky dreamer make a difference. Neither can exist without the other for long, and Martin's is a clarion call for all parties to lay down their defensive weapons in order to move toward a culture of openness and acceptance that nurtures a culture of sustainable innovation.

And while Martin emphasizes that design thinking is of the utmost importance within the C-suite itself, he doesn't let readers off the hook. Instead, everyone can learn to become a design thinker, and should try to understand the position of their colleagues.

As he explains, his own mistake as an excited consultant pitching a new strategy to that Canadian bank CEO was to speak in the language of validity when what the CEO really needed to hear was the language of reliability. Had Martin reassured the chief executive that while there were no direct comparisons, some well-performing European banks had employed a similar approach with some success, the CEO might have been persuaded to take the leap. The purpose of this useful book is to equip the reader with the tools needed to make sure that happens.

Helen Walters is the editor of Innovation and Design at BusinessWeek .

Copyright 2000-2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.

FT: Superfreakonomics

Superfreakonomics

Review by Tim Harford

Published: October 17 2009 00:37 | Last updated: October 17 2009 00:37

Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Allen Lane £20, 288 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

For fans of the multimillion-selling pop-economics book, Freakonomics, all that needs to be said is that the sequel’s title is an accurate description. This book is a lot like Freakonomics, but better.

The original, a runaway hit, had its genesis in Stephen Dubner’s masterful New York Times Magazine profile of “rogue economist” Steven Levitt. “Rogue” may be stretching it a bit, because Levitt is, in fact, a garlanded and hugely influential professor at the University of Chicago.

He has applied his statistical techniques, now much emulated, to unconventional topics such as the link between abortion laws and crime, or whether sumo wrestlers cheat (they do, he concludes). The 2005 book that resulted was wide-ranging, fascinating and above all, likeable – however, it showed signs of haste, and it was never clear whether it was supposed to be a book by Steven Levitt or about him.

SuperFreakonomics offers much the same range and amiability, but is more polished. The book’s chapters cover prostitution; data analysis in healthcare and counter-terrorism; altruism; innovation; and geo-engineering. The reader may not guess the central topic from the chapter titles or the opening pages, however, which betray a fondness for springing surprises and putting twists in the storytelling.

Detours are all part of the style; an afternoon reading SuperFreakonomics is like one of those thrilling and occasionally frustrating conversations where ideas tumble out so quickly that they keep interrupting each other. In short, the book’s organisation is deliberately on the freaky side, but if you simply resolve to read it from cover to cover you are guaranteed a good time.

My favourite chapter describes the research of John List, a colleague of Levitt’s, as he zaps some of the most famous results in behavioural economics. In the “dictator” game, well-known in economic circles, player A is given $10 by the experimenter and told they can keep it all. Alternatively they can give some to anonymous player B. Many players do, indeed, hand over money, a finding that troubles conventional economic theory.

List thinks many researchers have embraced this finding too easily, however. “What is puzzling”, he comments, “is that neither I nor any of my family of friends (or their families and friends) have ever received an anonymous envelope stuffed with cash”. The lab experiments, in which large numbers of students display a preference for sending cash to anonymous strangers, need to be questioned more closely. Yet List showed that with small modifications to the dictator game, experimental subjects could be persuaded not only to curb their generosity, but to confiscate cash from others.

There is much more here, and all is told with verve and care. Levitt and Dubner have a gift for explaining precisely how a researcher discovers something. Their epilogue, on Keith Chen’s attempts to introduce currency to a monkey society, is a model of how to tell a gripping story of scientific research without compromising on accuracy.

The most eye-catching chapters in the book are the first, on prostitution, and the last, on global warming. The chapter on prostitution flits from academic research into street prostitution, carried out by Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, to an engaging profile of a high-end escort and various digressions into the economics of gender and other topics.

One of these asides provides the book’s best moment: when the authors demonstrate that a prostitute gets more money through the use of a pimp than a homeowner gets through the use of a realtor, or estate agent. The financial impact of a pimp is greater than that of a realtor, “Or, for those who prefer their conclusions rendered mathematically, PIMPACT > RIMPACT.”

Those with a prurient curiosity (I am guilty), will find some of the descriptions of what prostitutes do all day rather coy. Those with an interest in the economic angle (guilty, again), will find some questions unanswered.

“The real puzzle isn’t why someone like Allie becomes a prostitute, but rather why more women don’t choose this career,” Levitt and Dubner write. Do tell, thinks the reader, but they don’t, even though literature on the puzzle does exist. The leading research on the question is written by two women, not two men, a fact that some people will find relevant.

The analysis of street prostitution is based on careful academic work. The account of high-end prostitution is merely a journalistic profile of a single successful and intelligent woman. But Levitt and Dubner seem to have decided that while data-driven discoveries are generally wonderful, you can have too much of a good thing.

The authors claim to prefer data to “individual anecdote”, but part of the secret of their success is that they like a good story more than anyone.

As for the final chapter on global warming, it is a striking discussion of geo-engineering, surveying various schemes for cooling down the planet rather than trying to prevent climate change by cutting carbon emissions. This is a strong story, but it is also one-sided, portraying the geo-engineers as brilliant iconoclasts, dismissing the objections to geo-engineering as the knee-jerk reaction of the unreflective, and failing to convey the views of a single credible geo-engineering sceptic. A well-deserved swipe at Al Gore does not really count.

According to this chapter, the only reason everyone is making so much fuss about carbon dioxide is that they’ve never heard of geo-engineering, or are the kind of stubborn Luddites who think technology never solved anything. I have some sympathy with that view but the section nevertheless needed more balance.

In the end, a book such as SuperFreakonomics stands or falls on its entertainment value. And on that count, there’s no doubt: it’s a page-turner.

More revealing, though, was that I’d folded over at least a dozen pages, resolving to go back, follow up the references, and find out more. This is a book with plenty of style; underneath the dazzle, there is substance too.

Tim Harford is the FT’s ‘Undercover Economist’

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

TIME: Why Women Have Sex

Tuesday, Oct. 06, 2009

Why Women Have Sex

By Alyssa Fetini

While figuring out what women want has stumped men for centuries, understanding how they think about sex may have just gotten easier. Cindy Meston and David Buss, psychologists at the University of Texas, interviewed over 1,000 women around the world for their book Why Women Have Sex and managed to come up with 237 reasons, ranging from the predictable — commitment — to the puzzling — curing a headache. Spoiler alert: love may be further down on the list than one might think. TIME spoke to Buss about the myriad mind games, turn-ons and turn-offs involved in female sexuality, and what a guy can do to stand a chance.

You co-authored a famous 2007 study "Why Humans Have Sex." Why focus on women this time around?
We discovered that women's sexual psychology turned out to be far more complex than we envisioned. [It] deserved an entire book-length treatment. (See photos: "The Best of the Bond Girls")

What differences between men and women did you notice?
There are important gender differences in sexuality, but these must be interpreted within the context of a high level of similarity. Both women and men have sex because they are physically attracted to the person, for pure pleasure, because they are in love, or simply because they are horny. But within the overall similarity, I'd say women's sexuality tends to be more linked with love and emotional bonding. Women, more than men, like sex when there's some kind of emotional connection. Men were more likely to have sex simply because the opportunity presented itself. Women tend to be pickier, especially for short-term sexual encounters. And men are more motivated to have sex to boost their status among their peers, although some women in our study also had sex for precisely this reason. (Read more about the chemistry of desire.)

What are the main reasons why women have sex?
The most frequent reasons include: sexual attraction to the person, the desire for physical pleasure, to express affection, to express their love for a person or because they were sexually aroused and wanted release.

Other important reasons are to boost their self-esteem or sexual esteem, to get revenge, to secure "mate insurance" in case a partner dumps them, to relieve pain, to achieve health benefits such as getting rid of a headache — yes, it works — to decrease stress, to lose weight and as a sleep aid. We devote one chapter to "sexual economics," which focuses on all the ways in which women have sex as an exchange for other benefits, such as getting her partner to take out the garbage, securing free dinners or getting expensive gifts. We also devote one chapter to what we call "the dark side" of women's sexuality — when women have sex because they were deceived, coerced or forced into it. (See photos: "Same-Sex Overtures Across Species")

Any particularly surprising findings?
I was surprised by the importance of revenge. A few had sex in order to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease. More commonly, women's revenge sex involved getting back at a cheating partner, or having sex with the partner of a friend who had poached her partner. Actually, the frequency of mate-poaching also surprised me — the frequency with which women try to lure men who are already "taken," either for a short-term sexual liaison or a longer-term relationship. Most women have experienced mate-poaching in one form or another, either as the mate poacher or as the victim.

How does evolution explain some of these complexities?
Sexual attraction often boils down to what Darwin called "female choice." Modern women are the descendants of a long and unbroken line of ancestral mothers who made wise sexual choices. As descendants of these successful women, modern women carry with them the sexual psychology — the ancestral wisdom — that led to the success of their female forebears. So women find cues to health, status and protection to be sexually attractive. These are all qualities that led to better survival and reproductive outcomes.(Read about teen girls and sex.)

On the competition side, evolution by selection is an inherently competitive process. It's a cliché that "the good men are all taken, permanent bachelors or gay." And there's some truth to this. The number of truly desirable and available men is limited. So women are in sexual competition with other women for access to the most desirable men. Modern women are the descendants of ancestral mothers who succeeded in besting other women in these sexual competitions.

What physical features do women tend to find most attractive in men?
Body is important to women. Women are sexually attracted to men with a V-shaped torso, or a high shoulder-to-hip ratio, and men who are taller than average. Interestingly, women do not like muscle-bound men, and men misperceive how muscular women want them to be. The face is also critical. A symmetrical face is a health cue, as are a good head of hair and masculine features such a strong jaw and a deep voice. Women generally don't find feminine-looking or feminine-sounding men to be sexually attractive.

What advice could you give to the men out there not blessed with Michael Phelps' torso and George Clooney's face? What can they do to stay in the game?

Have good hygiene. Sense of smell is critical. A man who smells bad, or who has bad breath — that can be a sexual kill switch for women. Interestingly, women have a keener sense of smell than men, so men are sometimes oblivious to how bad they smell to women. A man's scent conveys critical information to women about a man's health status.

The other thing to note about what women find sexually attractive centers on cues that convey personality, sense of humor, self-confidence and social status. These things can transform an average-looking man into a sexually attractive man in the minds of many women.

Read more about Americans and sex.

Find this article at:

• http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1928189,00.html

Copyright © 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Search Insider: The Meeting of Mind and Marketing - 11 Books To Read

The Meeting Of Mind And Marketing: 11 Books To Read  by Gord Hotchkiss , Thursday, October 15, 2009 It's official! With this column, I break David Berkowitz's Search Insider column count record, with 225 of my own. And to commemorate the occasion, I wanted to follow up on a request that came in response to my column two weeks ago. I had warned any would-be students of human nature that this wasn't a quest to be taken lightly. A few readers responded by asking for a recommended reading list. So this week, I went through my bookshelf at home and jotted down a list of titles that I found particularly insightful or interesting in understanding the human condition. Today, I offer them as suggestions for some fall or winter reading. I came up with 22 titles, so I've broken them into two groups. This week, all the titles are specifically for those who want to explore the intersection between marketing and the way our minds work. "How Customers Think" -- Gerald Zaltman. Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman has carved out a nice little career by exploring the psychology of consumerism. The foundation of Zaltman's approach is his metaphor elicitation technique. Metaphors are linguistic keys to some of the darker workings of our mind, and Zaltman shows how these can be used as a Rosetta stone to unlock consumers' true feelings towards brands and products. A fascinating approach suffers a little from Zaltman's dry and overly academic writing style, but it's a very worthy candidate for the list. "The Culture Code" -- Clotaire Rapaille. If Zaltman is a little stodgy and academic, Rapaille is an unabashed French nouveau-riche pop psychologist who has used his decidedly qualitative approach to dig down to the cultural common denominators behind our brand relationships. This book looks for those labels cultures apply to some of the best-known brands in the world. Being French, Rapaille brings an occasionally charming European cultural arrogance to his subject (i.e. in France, the culture code for cheese is "alive", but in the U.S. it's "dead"). This is  an easy and interesting read; while you might have some quibbles with Rapaille's findings, he has plenty of willing customers among the Fortune 500. "Buy-ology" -- Martin Lindstrom. Lindstrom's ego is almost matched by the insight he brings in his latest book. Lindstrom is the self-styled guru of brand perception and has written before on how our senses interpret brands. In "Buy-ology," he goes one step further and launches an extensive brain scanning research project to see exactly what happens in our brains when we think about brands. For example, do the warning labels on a pack of cigarettes have any impact on our desire for a smoke? Does product placement really work? (The answer, in both cases, is no, according to Lindstrom) Don't worry about getting caught in academic jargon here. Lindstrom keeps it light and readable. "Why Choose This Book?" -- Read Montague. Baylor University neurologist Montague was behind the original Pepsi Challenge fMRI test -- and in this book, he takes on no less a challenge than explaining how we make decisions. The writing style's a little uneven, as Montague tries to balance his academic background with a style overly determined to appeal to a wider audience. That said, Montague knows his stuff and the insights here are solid, supported by both his own and others' research. "Predictably Irrational" -- Dan Ariely.  Ariely follows in the footsteps of behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky by looking at some of the common irrational biases of humans. For example, why does a 50-cent aspirin eliminate a headache better than a 5-cent generic brand, even though the pills are identical? And why would offering your mother-in-law $300 for a fabulous meal be an unforgivable social transgression, yet be expected in a restaurant? The territory has been covered before, but Ariely deals with a highly interesting topic with a nice, light touch. "The Mind of the Market" -- Michael Shermer. Last but not least, Michael Shermer delivers what I consider to be a tour-de-force on this topic. Shermer's approach is well-grounded in evolutionary psychology (he labels it evolutionary economics), so he and I share a common approach to understanding consumer behavior. He strikes the right balance in his writing, delivering solid information without worrying too much about how it might play for a wider audience. This is probably my favorite on this list. If these six titles whet your appetite, here are some other titles you might consider: "Driven" by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria "Why We Buy" by Paco Underhill "The Paradox of Choice" by Barry Schwartz "The Advertised Mind" by Erik Du Plessis "Brain Rules' by John Medina Next week I'll share another 11 books, as well as some reader suggestions. Feel free to keep the suggestions coming!

FT: William Golding - The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies

"Lord of the Flies" was one of the mandatory text for literature during my O Levels.

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William Golding

Review by Henry Hitchings

Published: October 5 2009 05:06 | Last updated: October 5 2009 05:06

William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies
By John Carey
Faber £25, 573 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

William Golding is known mainly for one book, Lord of the Flies, which has become a staple of exam syllabuses and a massive cultural influence – from the work of Stephen King to television drama Lost. Despite this, it is neither Golding’s best novel nor the one for which he would have wanted to be remembered. In later life he disowned it and even complained that the wealth it brought was “Monopoly money”. When Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature, King Gustaf of Sweden told him that he had been obliged to study the book at school – the kind of backhanded compliment that Golding often had to swallow.

As John Carey emphasises in this tactful and detailed biography, the first since Golding’s death in 1993, Lord of the Flies might easily have slipped into oblivion. When the manuscript arrived at Faber and Faber, it had already done the rounds and looked correspondingly tatty. The publisher’s professional reader reported that it was an “absurd & uninteresting fantasy”, “rubbish & dull”. But the donnish editor Charles Monteith recognised Golding’s original gifts and picked the book up for a tiny advance of £60. So began a lustrous literary career.

Carey, an Oxford professor, is closely interested in the mechanics of the writer’s life. As a result, there is a good deal here about the genesis of Golding’s fiction, his dealings with publishers and how his books were received. It is necessary information, judiciously handled, but still at times rather dense and flavourless.

Altogether more peppery is the exposition of Golding’s character. On the surface, his was an ordinary life – much of it spent as a schoolteacher – but a fierce oddness nestled within him. He was energetic and intellectually curious, passionate about chess, orchids, sailing, science and underwater photography. Carey shows that he was also preternaturally sensitive, tight-fisted and morbid – and an attention-seeker, who used his acting skills to conceal his real self. And while he bristled with leftish principles, he was desperately eager to receive a knighthood and found that paying a tax bill left him grief-stricken, as though mourning a death.

Behind these peculiarities lurked something occult and ominous. It burgeoned in his dreams, about which he kept detailed notes. In his private journal he provokingly declared himself “a monster in deed, word and thought”.

The most monstrous episode presented by Carey is Golding’s clumsy attempt, while a student at Oxford, to rape a 15-year-old girl. The incident caused Golding deep shame. Yet it is apparent that a vein of sadism throbbed within him, seemingly dilated by his naval experiences during the second world war. He claimed to understand the Nazis because he was himself “of that sort”, and delighted in explaining to schoolboy actors the proper way to stab a man with a dagger. Heavy drinking exacerbated his wild behaviour; on one occasion he destroyed an acquaintance’s puppet of Bob Dylan, having mistaken it for Satan.

Carey excels at divining the qualities of Golding’s fiction – its imaginative concentration and allegorical richness – and deftly picks a way through the thicket of his weirder attitudes. Yet the darkness of the man needs more probing. For instance, Carey presents him as having been for the most part a good husband and father, but what are we to make of his wife’s challenging him at a public lecture, asking why there were not more female characters in his books? There are other traces of domestic sourness, as well as of personal recklessness and fanaticism. Carey’s account is nimbly intelligent but there is an abiding sense that the gnarled complexities of Golding’s psyche have yet to be fully explored.

Henry Hitchings is author of ‘The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English’ (John Murray)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Catching Fire

Catching Fire

Review by Harry Eyres

Published: October 5 2009 05:06 | Last updated: October 5 2009 05:06

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human
By Richard Wrangham
Profile £15, 309 pages
FT Bookshop price: £12

This lucidly written and accessible popular science book argues that cooking was crucial in the evolution of the human race. Its thesis is not just that some experimentally minded members of homo erectus got the idea of cooking food, but that the epochal evolution of the homines from habilines (big-brained apes) can only be explained by the move from eating raw to cooked food. Cooking, according to Richard Wrangham, accounts for our small guts, our big brains, and the sexual division of labour prevalent in nearly all societies; in effect, the beginnings of human economy as well as our particular pair-bonding and culture itself.

That may sound like the wishful thinking of a gourmet or a French cultural theorist, but Wrangham is a level-headed Englishman who is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard. What makes his thesis so gripping to read is that it is elegantly argued, step by step, using evidence from palaeontology, primatology, the anthropological study of hunter-gatherer societies and the science of food digestion.

The first step is to establish that raw food, including raw meat, often touted as the crucial factor in turning apes into men, is unsatisfactory as a human diet. This may well have been already obvious to most people other than raw food fanatics, especially salad-hating males, but Wrangham cites the Giessen Raw Food study conducted on 513 volunteers in which half of the women fed on raw food stopped menstruating. Counter-intuitively, he says, cooked food produces far more energy and nutrition than raw food because it is easier to chew and digest. This permits the development of the big human brain, almost four times the size of a chimpanzee’s.

But cooking brings difficulties too. The basic problem is simple: who will do the cooking – guarding the vulnerable food that (before the days of ready-meals) requires hours of preparation? No prizes for guessing that the answer in more than 97.8 per cent of the 185 cultures studied by the anthropologists Murdock and Provost is women.

Having a woman to keep the home fires burning enables the male hunter, in hunter-gatherer societies, to spend all day hunting in the knowledge that a sustaining meal awaits him. In these societies, cooking seems to be a stronger bond than sex.

Wrangham agrees with those, from John Stuart Mill to contemporary feminists, who regard this as a raw deal for women. So though cooking may make us human, the sexual division of labour it has produced also “trapped women into a subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture”.

He ends, leaping rather abruptly from the neolithic to the digital age, with a chapter on the health problems caused in affluent societies by eating too rich a diet. What he doesn’t examine is the question of whether, if cooking has made us human, giving up cooking in favour of eating pre-prepared food might be making us less human once more.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

BusinessWeek: Change By Design

Book Excerpt September 24, 2009, 5:00PM EST text size: TT

Change By Design

In his new book, the CEO of design shop IDEO shows how even hospitals can transform the way they work by tapping frontline staff to engineer change

As the center of economic activity in the developed world shifts inexorably from industrial manufacturing to knowledge creation and service delivery, innovation has become nothing less than a survival strategy. It is, moreover, no longer limited to new physical products but includes new sorts of processes, services, interactions, entertainment forms, and ways of communicating and collaborating.

These are exactly the kinds of human-centered tasks that designers work on every day, and over time they have evolved a body of skills to help them do it. It is time for this type of thinking—design thinking—to migrate outward and upward into the highest levels of leadership. Business leaders, hospital administrators, university professors, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) need to integrate the methods of the designer, just as designers need to broaden their reach from the crafting of objects to the shaping of services, experiences, and organizations. Design, in short, has become too important to be left to designers.

When I speak to CEOs, the question they most often ask is: "How can I make my company more innovative?" They recognize that in today's fluid business environment, innovation is key to competitiveness, but they are aware of the difficulties in focusing their organizations around this goal. "How can we incorporate the designer's creative problem-solving skills into our larger strategic initiatives?" "How can we engage a greater percentage of our workforce in design thinking itself?"

Steelcase (SCS)'s Jim Hackett and A.G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble (PG) are among a growing number of enlightened business leaders who understand that a steady flow of innovative products rests upon an underlying culture of innovation. While they are excited by the challenge of designing new products, they are even more excited by the challenge of designing the organization itself.

Since Hackett became CEO, Steelcase has come to look like a very different company from the one that offered the world the first fireproof wastebasket back in 1914. Once technology and manufacturing capability drove most of its new-product development. Now the innovation process at Steelcase works outward from the perspective of human-centered design thinking. This new approach is evidenced by Workplace Futures, a unit that operates as a kind of internal think tank and includes anthropologists, industrial designers, and business strategists who conduct observations in the field to gain insights into the problems of Steelcase's actual and potential clients.

Tricks from the designer's toolkit—user observations, brainstorming, prototyping, storytelling, and scenario building—are invaluable in building an innovation capability, but taken by themselves they are rarely sufficient. Over time, and after countless experiences with organizations throughout the world, we have learned that innovation has to be coded into the DNA of a company if there is to be large-scale, long-term impact. All the workshops and brainstorming sessions in the world would not have transformed Procter & Gamble if then-CEO Lafley had not designated a chief innovation officer, increased the number of design managers by more than 500%, and established what he calls his innovation "gym," a place to train managers in the new design thinking.

Companies such as P&G and Steelcase that make products and manage brands have a head start when it comes to transforming their internal cultures because they already have designers, and even some design thinkers, on their payrolls. In service organizations, that base of talent may not exist, and the challenge is greater.

Health-care provider Kaiser Permanente is a case in point. In 2003, Kaiser set out to improve the overall quality of the health-care experience from the point of view of both patients and medical practitioners. My design consultancy, IDEO, proposed that rather than hire a slew of internal designers, the existing staff should learn the principles of design thinking and apply them themselves. Over the course of several months we conducted a series of workshops with nurses, doctors, and administrators that led to a portfolio of innovations. One of them—a project to reengineer nursing staff shift changes—involved a strategist with a nursing background, a specialist in organizational development, a technology expert, a process designer, and a union representative.

Working with frontline caregivers at each of four Kaiser hospitals, the core team identified the problems that occur when shifts change. Departing nurses routinely spent 45 minutes briefing the arriving shift about the status of their patients. The procedures were unsystematic and differed from hospital to hospital, and methods used for compiling information varied from Post-it notes to numbers scrawled on hospital scrubs. Knowledge was often lost, and many patients felt the shift change created a hole in their care. What followed from these observations were the now-familiar elements of a robust design process—videotaping, brainstorming, role playing, prototyping—carried out not by professional designers from IDEO but by Kaiser's own staff.

The result was a complete change in approach. The first prototype, built in only a week, included new procedures and simple software that enabled nurses to call up previous shift-change notes and add new ones throughout their shifts. More important, patients were now part of the process and could bring up additional details important to them. Kaiser measured the impact of this change and found that the mean time between a nurse's arriving on shift and first interacting with a patient was more than halved. The innovation also had an impact on how nurses felt about their job. In a survey, one commented: "I'm an hour ahead, and I've only been here 45 minutes." Another admitted: "This was the first time I've ever made it out of here at the end of my shift."

The new procedure had an impact on patients and nurses but on its own was a long way from achieving the desired goal of a systematic improvement in the overall quality of health care at Kaiser. To achieve that, the core team of nurses, development experts, and technologists went from carrying out their own projects to acting as consultants to the rest of the organization. Through the Kaiser Permanente Innovation Consultancy, the team now pursues the mission of enhancing the patient experience, envisioning Kaiser's "hospital of the future," and introducing innovation and design thinking across the Kaiser system.

The design thinkers I have described here are not minimalist, esoteric members of an elite priesthood, and they do not wear black turtlenecks. They are creative innovators who can bridge the chasm between thinking and doing because they are passionately committed to the goal of a better life and a better world around them. In the process they are helping to make our societies healthier, our businesses more profitable, and our own lives richer and more meaningful.

From the book Change by Design by Tim Brown copyright 2009 Tim Brown (published by Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers)

Copyright 2000-2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.

Boing Boing: Church converted into magnificent bookstore

Church converted into magnificent bookstore

Posted by David Pescovitz, September 23, 2009 8:42 AM | permalink

This breathtaking place is a former Dominican church that was converted into a new retail location for bookseller Selexyz Dominicanen. The architecture firm was Merkx+Girod. From Design Top News:

The store demanded 1,200 sq m of commercial area where only 750 were available.

The initial idea of the client to install a second floor within the church was rejected by the designers, because this would completely destroy the spatial qualities of the church. The solution was found in the creation of a monumental walk-in bookcase spanning several floors and situated a-symmetrically in the church. In doing so the left side of the church remained empty while on the other side customers are lead upstairs in the three- storey ‘Bookflat.’

The ground floor gives room to several different book displays, information desks, magazine-stands and cash registers, all made of standard sheet materials in different colours and surfaces.

Merkx+Girod Architects: Bookstore Selexyz Dominicanen in Netherlands (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Previously:

• Neat organization at new NYC bookstore - Boing Boing
• Awesome kids' bookstore in China - Boing Boing

FT: What Van Gogh's letters reveal of his life

What Van Gogh’s letters reveal of his life

Review by Jackie Wullschlager

Published: September 19 2009 00:18 | Last updated: September 19 2009 00:18

Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Sower’ (1888)

The Letters: The Complete Illustrated Edition
By Vincent van Gogh
Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker
Thames & Hudson £325, six volumes, 2,240 pages

Even if van Gogh had destroyed every canvas he painted, his letters would still fix his place in history. The most complete, vivid, authentic and agonisingly frank account of the creative life ever written, the letters, like his drawings, form a day-to-day record of what passed before his mind and eye. Compulsively set down, dashed off and posted as soon as the ink was dry, they were composed – without a thought to publication – by an artist who lived and died unknown and isolated, too grim and cantankerous to manage social relations in person, but determined to communicate in his own way. “I can’t count on living a great many years”, he writes to his brother Theo in 1883, “but I have a certain obligation and duty – because I’ve walked the earth for 30 years – to leave a certain souvenir in the form of drawings and paintings in gratitude.”

After van Gogh’s death in 1890, his correspondence was discovered almost as soon as his paintings, and became famous with them. A selection appeared in 1893; almost all 900 extant letters were published in the Netherlands in 1914 and translated into English in 1958. They have always been an essential academic resource and, like all the artist’s work, entrance everyday readers for their immediacy and dizzying emotional accessibility. Intimate, compelling and comprehensive, the letters make a serious formal biography both redundant and impossible.

Nonetheless, a century after first publication, cultural and biographical references are obscure and, in the case of foreign editions, translations have dated. This new sumptuous, scholarly international edition in six volumes is, therefore, enormously welcome. The product of 15 years’ work by experts at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and at the Huygens Institute, it is the most important art publication of 2009, if not of the decade. Its innovative approach and ambitious scope significantly deepen our understanding of the great founder of modern art.

Reproduction of each known work among the 2,000 paintings by various artists that van Gogh mentions gives for the first time a full picture of his musée imaginaire. All his own paintings and drawings are excellently reproduced, too, whenever he refers to them, enhancing his commentaries on his work. A fresh, lively translation – modern without being gimmicky – reasserts his unadorned, evocative idiom.

In addition, annotations that are pertinent but not overwhelming provide a backcloth of bright quotidian detail: the popularity of a dish of milk and eels on the Hague’s Rijswijkseweg; the family of the Marseilles railway postman, Joseph Roulin, who modelled for “Sir and dear friend Vincent” in Provence; notes of prices for the paints, tobacco, chocolates sent by the selfless Theo – financial supporter, moral bedrock and metaphorical “travelling companion” through his brother’s life.

Best of all, the 242 letters which van Gogh illustrated with sketches are reproduced in their entirety, at actual size. Sent mainly to prove his progress to Theo, they offer sharp insights into his development and are also an emotional barometer. His handwriting changes, sometimes from line to line, from fastidiously neat to wildly chaotic; one envelope is entirely covered with drawings, others are returned because van Gogh, hopelessly impractical, has wrongly addressed them.

“I’m sending these three scratches that are still awkward but you’ll nonetheless see that there’s gradual improvement,” he writes in 1881. Van Gogh, like Matisse, was not a natural draughtsman, which is why the hard-won resolve and daring of his mature works is so triumphant. From tentative beginnings, his own bold, simplified style emerges, first in drawing, then on canvas as he applied paint with the same dynamic, graphic strokes. By the time of the great Provence work in 1888-1890, Theo was receiving reed-pen drawings of finished works alongside prose descriptions that cannot be bettered, and that demonstrate incontrovertibly that when van Gogh painted he was not mad but extremely lucid. From the asylum in St Rémy he writes, for example, of the 1889 “Cypresses”: “The trees in it are very tall and massive. The foreground very low, brambles and undergrowth behind, violet hills, a green and pink sky with a crescent moon ... thickly impasted, tufts of bramble with yellow, violet, green highlights.”

The intense looking by a voracious eye never wavers. “Do keep me constantly informed about whatever you see, that always gives me pleasure,” 19-year-old Vincent tells 15-year-old Theo in January 1873, when the brothers were juniors in different branches of Goupil print publishers, a company with family connections. Soon after, Vincent was transferred to London. “Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful,” he advises Theo. Tissot, Millais, Israëls, Boudin, Meissonier and other academic pompiers, as well as Constable, “a landscape painter who lived around 30 years ago, whose work is splendid”, are all praised in one London letter.

The plurality of his taste surprises. So do references to Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot, both still alive during van Gogh’s London sojourn, as “men and women who may be considered to stand at the forefront of modern civilisation”. The 20th century, obsessed with creative individuality, revered van Gogh as lone pioneer; this has clouded how crucially he was shaped by 19th-century social upheaval and idealism. The new volumes explode that myth and return him to a cultural context whose masters included Millet, mentioned 200 times, and gritty social realist Zola, the most cited writer here.

Vincent van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo (1881)

The last thing van Gogh wanted was to stand as solitary genius. “I still hope not to work for myself alone. I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour, of drawing and – of the artistic life. And if we work in that faith, it seems to me that there’s a chance our hopes won’t be in vain,” he tells Theo in 1888. That insistent “we”, and the religious allusions, are fundamental. Son of a Calvinist pastor, van Gogh disastrously tried jobs as teacher and minister: “I would see less of a problem in the future if I were less awkward in dealing with people”. He then turned to drawing, with the initial aim of becoming an illustrator in order to depict the lives of the suffering masses.

He practised what he preached, too: among his most painful misjudgments was to set up home with Sien Hoornik, a lazy, avaricious, manipulative, syphilitic prostitute and model. She was already pregnant and a single mother when they met. Van Gogh romantically tried to empathise with and improve “this ugly wasted woman. To me she’s beautiful ... Life has given her a drubbing and sorrow and adversity have left their mark on her – now I can make use of it.”

One volume here chokes with Biblical quotations, appended to letters during his most fanatically religious phase. Slowly, however, van Gogh came to reject Christian doctrine – only to replace it with as fervent a belief in the sacred power of nature. The task of modern art was to set down this truth with a new expressiveness, based on a fresh response. “What is drawing?” he asks. “How does one get there? It’s working one’s way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How does one get through that wall? – since hammering on it doesn’t help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently ... The great isn’t something accidental; it must be willed”.

He began, as art students had done for centuries, with figure drawing, but from the start, landscape claimed him. Sense of place is a recurring joy. “You must imagine me sitting at my attic window,” he tells Theo from The Hague at four o’clock one summer morning in 1882. “Over the red tiled roofs comes a flock of white pigeons flying between the black smoking chimneys. But behind this is an infinity of delicate gentle greens, miles and miles of flat meadow, and a grey sky as still, as peaceful as Corot.”

Pollard willows suggest to him a procession of beggars, trodden grass looks tired and dusty as slum-dwellers. Eventually he left potato-coloured Holland for Arles in search of southern light and, with it, spiritual illumination. He painted, at shrill emotional pitch, exactly what he saw: “The stretches of water make patches of a beautiful emerald and a rich blue ... pale orange sunsets making the fields look blue – glorious yellow suns.”

Nothing could have been further from van Gogh’s mind, when he painted such incandescent works as “Sower with Setting Sun”, “The Painter on the Road to Tarascon”, “Starry Night”, than the landscapes of pleasure, fully liberated from the restraint of realistic colour, which secular modernism evolved from them. “Man is not placed on this earth merely to be happy; nor is he placed here merely to be honest. He is here to accomplish great things through society ... to outgrow the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on,” van Gogh warned. Nevertheless, “the uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant colour, well arranged, resplendent”.

These pages thrill with that hope, tremble with van Gogh’s lack of reserve and thin skin and thud with his anguish. With our hindsight, we fear for him when he writes, during a defiant infatuation that “it’s just as impossible for someone who loves to take back that feeling as it is to take one’s own life ... [and] I really don’t think I’m a man with such inclinations”.

We share Theo’s anxiety, as febrile masterpieces speed from Arles to Paris, about “how hard your mind must have worked and how you endangered yourself ... Even if my heart isn’t as sensitive as yours, I can sometimes imagine the distress that you feel.”

But despite van Gogh’s volatility, suicide does not look inevitable. Right to the end he plans, makes arrangements, follows the fortunes of family, neighbours, other artists, almost jokes – “I prefer to make fun of myself than to feel lonely” – while always yearning for transcendence: “Just as we take the train to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.”

Above all, through the paradoxes of his character, these marvellous volumes, with their interlacing of words and images, convey as never before the unity of his artistic project – social, aesthetic, emotional, spiritual – and his search for his destiny: a quest that reads here with the personal urgency, validity and vitality of a great novel.

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s art critic

‘Van Gogh’s Letters: The Artist Speaks’, October 9 2009-January 3 2010, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; www.vangoghmuseum.nl

‘The Real van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, January 23-April 18 2010; www.royalacademy.org.uk

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Boing Boing: Classic Penguin books' designs

Classic Penguin books designs

Posted by Cory Doctorow, September 3, 2009 10:28 PM | permalink

Spencer sez, "This guy is a former Penguin Books designer who's posted a couple of collections of images that are downright mouthwatering if, like most designers, you're a fan of Penguin Books' design."

Penguin Books (Thanks, Spencer!)

Previously:

• Penguin books is releasing 200 - Boing Boing
• Classic Penguin covers gallery - Boing Boing
• Penguin books's podcast - Boing Boing
• Penguin Great Ideas -- gorgeous editions of classic philosophy ...

Source: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/03/classic-penguin-book.html

Spencer sez, "This guy is a former Penguin Books designer who's posted a couple of collections of images that are downright mouthwatering if, like most designers, you're a fan of Penguin Books' design."

Penguin Books (Thanks, Spencer!)

Previously:

• Penguin books is releasing 200 - Boing Boing
• Classic Penguin covers gallery - Boing Boing
• Penguin books's podcast - Boing Boing
• Penguin Great Ideas -- gorgeous editions of classic philosophy ...

Source: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/03/classic-penguin-book.html