Books I Have Read

Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Neil Postman)

Written in 1985, I found this book still relevant. I haven’t watched television for at least a decade, but I wonder about the effect of computers and the internet on the presentation and consumption of information. To me, it feels very similar to my consumption of books.

In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, icono-graphic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.

***

"The clock," Mumford has concluded, "is a piece of power machinery whose ’product’ is seconds and minutes." In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

***

What reading would have been done was done seriously, intensely, and with steadfast purpose. the modern idea of testing a reader’s "comprehension," as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending? As far as we know, there did not exist such a thing as a "reading problem," except, of course, for those who could not attend school. To attend school meant to learn to read, for without that capacity, one could not participate in the culture’s conversations. But most people could read and did participate. To these people, reading was both their connection to and their model of the world. the printed page revealed the world, line by line, page by page, to be a serious, coherent place, capable of management by reason, and of improvement by logical and relevant criticism.

***

The great literary critic Northrop Frye has remarked, "the written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination." All that Plato surmised about the consequences of writing is now well understood by anthropologists, especially those who have studied cultures in which speech is the only source of complex conversation. Anthropologists know that the written word, as Northrop Frye meant to suggest, is not merely an echo of a speaking voice. It is another kind of voice altogether, a conjurer’s trick of the first order. It must certainly have appeared that way to those who invented it, and that is why we should not be surprised that the Egyptian god Thoth, who is alleged to have brought writing to the King Thamus, was also the god of magic.

***

Our media-metaphors are not so explicit or so vivid as these, and they are far more complex. In understanding their metaphorical function, we must take into account the symbolic forms of their information, the source of their information, the quantity and speed of their information, the context in which their information is experienced. Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news as a commodity. And yet, such digging becomes easier if we start from the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.

***

The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the "truth" is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.

***

In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must "draw them pictures" so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.

***

In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, there appears a remarkable quotation attributed to Michael Welfare, one of the founders of a religious sect known as the Dunkers and a longtime acquaintance of Franklin. The statement had its origins in Welfare’s complaint to Franklin that zealots of other religious persuasions were spreading lies about the Dunkers, accusing them of abominable principles to which, in fact, they were utter strangers. Franklin suggested that such abuse might be diminished if the Dunkers published the articles of their belief and the rules of their discipline. Welfare replied that this course of action had been discussed among his co-religionists but had been rejected. He then explained their reasoning in the following words:

When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.

***

Where such a keen taste for books prevailed among the general population, we need not be surprised that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, sold more than 100,000 copies by March of the same year. In 1985, a book would have to sell eight million copies (in two months) to match the proportion of the population Paine’s book attracted. If we go beyond March, 1776, a more awesome set of figures is given by Howard Fast: "No one knows just how many copies were actually printed. The most conservative sources place the figure at something over 300,000 copies. Others place it just under half a million. Taking a figure of 400,000 in a population of 3,000,000, a book published today would have to sell 24,000,000 copies to do as well." The only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today’s America is the Superbowl.

***

When Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, his reception equaled the adulation we offer today to television stars, quarterbacks, and Michael Jackson. "I can give you no conception of my welcome," Dickens wrote to a friend. "There never was a King or Emperor upon earth so cheered and followed by the crowds, and entertained at splendid balls and dinners and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds… If I go out in a carriage, the crowd surrounds it and escorts me home; if I go to the theater, the whole house… rises as one man and the timbers ring again."

***

The resonances of the lineal, analytical structure of print, and in particular, of expository prose, could be felt everywhere. For example, in how people talked. Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy in America. "An American," he wrote, "cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say ’Gentlemen’ to the person with whom he is conversing." This odd practice is less a reflection of an American’s obstinacy than of his modeling his conversational style on the structure of the printed word. Since the printed word is impersonal and is addressed to an invisible audience, what Tocqueville is describing here is a kind of printed orality, which was observable in diverse forms of oral discourse. On the pulpit, for example, sermons were usually written speeches delivered in a stately, impersonal tone consisting "largely of an impassioned, coldly analytical cataloguing of the attributes of the Deity as revealed to man through Nature and Nature’s Laws." And even when the Great Awakening came--a revivalist movement that challenged the analytical, dispassionate spirit of Deism--its highly emotional preachers used an oratory that could be transformed easily to the printed page.

***

That is the meaning of Douglas’ reproach to the audience. He claimed that his appeal was to understanding and not to passion, as if the audience were to be silent, reflective readers, and his language the text which they must ponder.

***

One must begin, I think, by pointing to the obvious fact that the written word, and an oratory based upon it, has a content: a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content. This may sound odd, but since I shall be arguing soon enough that much of our discourse today has only a marginal propositional content, I must stress the point here. Whenever language is the principal medium of communication--especially language controlled by the rigors of print--an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result. The idea may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the claim false, but there is no escape from meaning when language is the instrument guiding one’s thought. Though one may accomplish it from time to time, it is very hard to say nothing when employing a written English sentence. What else is exposition good for? Words have very little to recommend them except as carriers of meaning. The shapes of written words are not especially interesting to look at. Even the sounds of sentences of spoken words are rarely engaging except when composed by those with extraordinary poetic gifts. If a sentence refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell. As a consequence a language-centered discourse such as was characteristic of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century America tends to be both content-laden and serious, all the more so when it takes its form from print. It is serious because meaning demands to be understood. A written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said. And when an author and reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most serious challenge to the intellect.

***

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge’s famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into "one neighborhood," but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other. Since we live today in just such a neighborhood (now sometimes called a "global village"), you may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?

For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the "information-action ratio."

***

Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. The telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose form had startling characteristics: Its language was the language of headlines--sensational, fragmented, impersonal. News took the form of slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch. Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One message had no connection to that which preceded or followed it. Each "headline" stood alone as its own context. The receiver of the news had to provide a meaning if he could. The sender was under no obligation to do so. And because of all this, the world as depicted by the telegraph began to appear unmanageable, even undecipherable. The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.

***

It may be of some interest to note, in this connection, that the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use. the crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930’s and 1940’s and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful "Trivial Pursuit." In one form or another, each of these supplies an answer to the question, "What am I to do with all these disconnected facts?" And in one form or another, the answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game?

***

I bring forward these quixotic uses of television to ridicule the hope harbored by some that television can be used to support the literate tradition. Such a hope represents exactly what Marshall McLuhan used to call "rear-view mirror" thinking: the assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle.

***

I must begin by making a distinction between a technology and a medium. We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.

***

I do not mean that the trivialization of public information is all accomplished on television. I mean that television is the paradigm for our conception of public information. As the printing press did in an earlier time, television has achieved the power to define the form in which news must come, and it has also defined how we shall respond to it. In presenting news to us packaged as vaudeville, television induces other media to do the same, so that the total information environment begins to mirror television. For example, America’s newest and highly successful national newspaper, USA Today, is modeled precisely on the format of television. It is sold on the street in receptacles that look like television sets. Its stories are uncommonly short, its design leans heavily on pictures, charts and other graphics, some of them printed in various colors. Its weather maps are a visual delight; its sports section includes enough pointless statistics to distract a computer. As a consequence, USA Today, which began publication in September 1982, has become the third largest daily in the United States (as of July 1984, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations), moving quickly to overtake the Daily News and the Wall Street Journal.

***

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not. To take another example: We may find it convenient to send a condolence card to a bereaved friend, but we delude ourselves if we believe that our card conveys the same meaning as our broken and whispered words when we are present. The card not only changes the words but eliminates the context from which the words take their meaning. Similarly, we delude ourselves if we believe that most everything a teacher normally does can be replicated with greater efficiency by a microcomputer. Perhaps some things can, but there is always the question, What is lost in the translation? the answer may even be: Everything that is significant about education.

***

By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser’s claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald’s commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.

***

It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of the point being made. That is why most commercials use the literary device of the pseudo-parable as a means of doing their work. Such "parables" as the Ring Around the Collar, the Lost Traveler’s Checks and the Phone Call from the Son Far Away not only have irrefutable emotional power but, like Biblical parables, are unambiguously didactic. The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales, which is to say, it isn’t. Which is to say further, it is about how one ought to live one’s life.

***

An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. We are not likely, for example, to be indifferent to the voices of the Sakharovs and the Timmermans and the Walesas. We take arms against such a sea of troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton, Bacon, Voltaire, Goethe and Jefferson. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?

***

What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

***

Aftershock: The Blast That Shook Psycho Platoon (T. Christian Miller and Daniel Zwerdling)

A short Kindle Single about traumatic brain injuries resulting from explosion shockwaves without other impact (like being thrown against a wall), told in relation to a group of soldiers who suffered such injuries in an IED blast.

“"When you work a lot with acute concussion, you actually kind of recognize even the look of a person who has been acutely concussed, which is kind of a dazed expression, a little bit unfocused, a little bit slow to respond," Russell said. "Several of them had significant gaps in their memory. And it wasn´t clear how long they were unconscious. The last thing they remember is they were playing video games. The next thing they remember, they are outside the trailer in a shelter. Some minutes had actually passed where they weren´t recording memories. That´s post-traumatic amnesia. And that´s your classic symptoms of a concussion."”

***

“Given the number of troops deployed, tens of thousands of soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen may be suffering from this pernicious combination of PTSD and lasting problems from mild traumatic brain injury. They become, quite literally, different men and women than they used to be, a generation of warriors whose fight has shifted from external combat zones to invisible internal battlefields.”

***

“Soldiers sustain their injuries in settings dramatically different from those encountered by athletes or car accident victims. Civilian concussions are typically caused by a physical blow to the head. But nobody is sure exactly how the brain is damaged in a blast concussion. Do blast waves rupture miniature blood vessels inside the brain? Does the force sever connections between neurons? Does it damage individual brain cells? Or does it simply slam the helmet into the head hard enough to injure the brain?”

***

“Some researchers believe that soldiers´ concussions may pose an even more complex medical challenge. Soldiers sustain their injuries in settings dramatically different from those encountered by athletes or car accident victims. Civilian concussions are typically caused by a physical blow to the head. But nobody is sure exactly how the brain is damaged in a blast concussion. Do blast waves rupture miniature blood vessels inside the brain? Does the force sever connections between neurons? Does it damage individual brain cells? Or does it simply slam the helmet into the head hard enough to injure the brain? After the blast, soldiers face a different environment than typical concussion victims. No fans applaud as they rise from the field. Medics often can´t rush them to the safety of a hospital right away. Instead, they remain on a hostile battlefield, fighting for their lives, the violence and rush of combat filling their brain with abnormal levels of chemicals such as adrenaline. Those left dazed, but not unconscious, experience a fear so fierce that it may simultaneously trigger post-traumatic stress. Paradoxically, patients who suffer severe traumatic brain injuries are less likely to develop PTSD-perhaps because, knocked unconscious, they do not actually experience the horror unfolding around them.”

***

“Though the men of Psycho platoon returned to duty shortly after the explosion, several continued to experience aftereffects. Hollingshead remembered stumbling across the base, unable to keep his balance on the white gravel that lined the ground between buildings. His ears rang constantly. He had difficulty keeping track of what his sergeants were telling him to do. "I just could not remember it. I´d ask three different times. It’s a very unusual feeling, not being able to remember all of a sudden." Hopkins had similar trouble. "I just didn’t feel right. I could barely walk a straight line," he said. "I was forgetting things, my attention span was shot, someone would be directly talking to me and I would not even really be paying attention. I couldn’t recall or say back what they said to me. It was like I was paying attention but I wasn’t gathering the information." Junge had splitting headaches, so he popped ibuprofen and Tylenol PM to help get to sleep.”

***

“In Homer´s Iliad, some have speculated that Achilles´ blind rage after the death of a beloved companion is an early description of post-traumatic stress. During the Civil War, men who struggled to return to normalcy after the war were described as suffering from "soldier´s heart." In World War I, it was called shellshock. World War II brought the name "combat fatigue." All generally described soldiers numbed and haunted, unable to return to battle-or normal life.”

***

“He tried to continue psychological treatments, but Minot is 271 miles from the nearest Veterans Affairs hospital. He started to make the drive several times but would get spooked when going under overpasses, often the site of insurgent attacks in Iraq.”

***

“Savelkoul seemed more at peace, more rested, more confident of the life ahead of him. He had taken the first steps, he said, toward understanding the war in his mind. He said that the VA and the military were helping. "They teach us how to get over there," he said. "Now they need to teach us how to get back."”

***

Dealing with the Media (Chris Rau)

Informs common folk on how to approach and interact with the media fruitfully.

“No-one argues about whether a big story is newsworthy or not. We instinctively know it is. Death, destruction, crime on a grand scale: all need no debate among news editors and attract instant prominence. The closer to home – the bigger the coverage. Sub-editors on newspapers used to have a ratio for this, and the numbers differed for every outlet. A rough estimate, after talking to a few colleagues, might be one person dead in Australia equates to fifty in Britain and 500 in a developing country. This is an understandable community response. We are less involved with stories which don’t affect our families or neighbours.”

***

“Chequebook journalism is a form of corruption: it distorts the story. If you want accuracy in a story, don’t trust the money paid to an interviewee, but always follow the money trail.”

***

“Once defined as ‘clerks of facts’, journalists who learn to humanise events and issues will always communicate more successfully than their colleagues who prefer to pile up the statistics and the details. This is not entirely a good thing – but it’s a simple truth about the profession. Thus it accounts for the principal change in newspapers over recent decades as they’ve evolved into ‘viewspapers’ with a growing emphasis on punditry.”

***

“If you are trying to approach the media with an unsolicited idea, you have only two options: one is to put your story in the most lively way you can; the other is to try a different outlet if someone on the news desk just doesn’t get it.”

***

“There’s also a style to writing news which most media students learn in their first year of study. It’s worth repeating because some may not know about it or have forgotten it. It’s the inverted news pyramid shown below. Crafting your story around the news pyramid is a bit like making an inverted iceberg: put everything relevant at the top and let the floating mass below carry any extra information. If you’re supplying the main premise for a story, focus on your own information and any other material you can give the journalist to help with verification and research. The main thing is to encapsulate the essence of your premise in the intro, or lead, when structuring your argument.”

***

“Selective quotes and emphasis mean there are many ways to interpret a story. The above hypothetical is also a caution about how some people might use similar material with less concern for the story and more for preaching to their audiences. The first is more balanced and skewed toward environmental issues; the second is more negative and focuses on criticism.”

***

“Every working journalist interviewed for this book implored contributors to use lively, clear and succinct language. The advice of ‘never use ten words when you can say it in three’ holds true. The occasional elegantly-placed, multisyllabic word only strengthens your point if it’s placed next to shorter, clearer text. Don’t be afraid to use contractions like ‘don’t’. Use the active voice rather than the passive.”

***

“The Socratic checklist has lasted thousands of years because it works. Make sure your text covers: What is the story? Why is it important? Who does it involve? When did it happen? How did it happen? Where did it happen? Be sure to answer all these questions, but be very focused. The most important question is why. Why does your story matter for the audience? Why should they care? Answer that, and only include the information essential to support it.”

***

“People relate to physical things. Real objects form images in the mind, which helps to understand and remember a story. If you fill your text with abstract nouns, you will end up sounding vague and boring. So think creatively. What concrete objects are involved in your story? Write out a list of them. Then work them into the text to ground it in reality.”

***

“Morning newspapers have a wide-ranging news conference at about 11 am from Mondays to Thursdays, when they tentatively plan the next day’s paper. The next news conference comes in the mid-afternoon, when news editors solidify their ideas about what’s going to get a run. It’s best to get in by about 2.30 pm, especially if it’s on a Friday, to make the afternoon conference’s agenda. If you can get an item onto the news agenda by about 10.00 am, at least it’ll be considered as a possible story for the day. The journalists then have a few hours to chase up the story and explore it from different angles. The timing is constantly in flux now and not as ironclad as it used to be. There’s usually someone on the news desk to take your calls during conference times, but they might be less experienced than the news editor who can instantly evaluate your story idea. Stick to the 10 am rule for all the media if you’ve got breaking news for that day.”

***

A Technique for Producing Ideas (James Young)

Very brief book that breaks the process of having an idea into a set of five strictly linear and unskippable steps.

“[...] an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.”

***

“The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.”

***

“This technique of the mind follows five steps. I am sure that you will all recognize them individually. But the important thing is to recognize their relationship and to grasp the fact that the mind follows these five steps in definite order-that by no possibility can one of them be taken before the preceding one is completed, if an idea is to be produced.”

***

“The first of these steps is for the mind to gather its raw material.”

***

“Every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever know has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested-from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.”

***

“So it is with the production of ideas for advertising-or anything else. The construction of an advertisement is the construction of a new pattern in this kaleidoscopic world in which we live. The more of the elements of that world which are stored away in that pattern-making machine, the mind, the more the chances are increased for the production of new and striking combinations, or ideas. Advertising students who get restless about the "practical" value of general college subjects might consider this.”

***

“Now, assuming that you have done a workmanlike job of gathering material-that you have really worked at the first step-what is the next part of the process that the mind must go through? It is the process of masticating these materials, as you would food that you are preparing for digestion. This part of the process is harder to describe in concrete terms because it goes on entirely inside your head.

What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.”

***

“In this third stage you make absolutely no effort of a direct nature. You drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can.

It is important to realize that this is just as definite and just as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones. What you have to do at this time, apparently, is to turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep.

There is one thing you can do in this stage which will help both to put the problem out of consciousness and to stimulate the unconscious, creative processes. You remember how Sherlock Holmes used to stop right in the middle of a case and drag Watson off to a concert? That was a very irritating procedure to the practical and literal-minded Watson. But Conan Doyle was a creator and knew the creative processes.

So when you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or movies, read poetry or a detective story.”

***

“One more stage you have to pass through to complete the idea-producing process: the stage which might be called the cold, gray dawn of the morning after.

In this stage you have to take your little newborn idea out into the world of reality. And when you do you usually find that it is not quite the marvelous child it seemed when you first gave birth to it. It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work. And here is where many good ideas are lost. The idea man, like the inventor, is often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put ideas to work in a work-a-day world. Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.

When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.”

***

“There are some advertisements you just cannot write until you have lived long enough-until, say, you have lived through certain experiences as a spouse, a parent, a businessman, or what not. The cycle of the years does something to fill your reservoir, unless you refuse to live spatially and emotionally.”

***

Face Of Battle (John Keegan)

An examination of the act of warfighting and its effect on people, and how the act and those effects have changed (or not changed) over time.

“[...] it is possible to argue that while the mechanization of armies has produced a revolution in warfare, the real consequence, its effective potential for change, is not material but psychological; that tanks, in short, should be thought of not so much as weapons but as theatrical devices, dei ex machina, by the manoeuvring of which a general is enabled so to manipulate the emotions, so to stimulate the responses of his army that its resistance to movement is overcome, its tendency to self-protection transcended and its normal rhythm of campaigning shattered by the imposition of a higher object than that of holding one’s ground, driving the enemy off one’s front or even registering an incontestable victory. That higher object is the rescue of comrades in danger.”

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“The armoured thrust, on the other hand, offers a general the chance both to titillate his soldiers’ sense of solidarity with comrades at risk and to control the degree of risk to which they are exposed.”

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“]...] it is possible to say that the tank, though it has transformed the pace and appearance of modern campaigning, has not changed the nature of battle. The focus of fighting may be shifted twenty miles in a single day by an armoured thrust but wherever it comes to rest there must take place exactly the same sort of struggle between man and man which battle-fields have seen since armies came into being.”

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“What battles have in common is human: the behaviour of men struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honour and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them.”

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“The longbows of the Agincourt archers, the muskets of the Waterloo infantrymen were very effective agents for the temporary transformation of an airspace of modest dimensions into an atmosphere of high lethality. But ‘modest’ and ‘temporary’ are the important qualifications. By the beginning of the First World War, soldiers possessed the means to maintain a lethal environment over wide areas for sutained periods. Hence the titles of some of the war’s most deeply felt novels, Le Feu (Under Fire) by Henri Barbusse, A Man Could Stand Up by Ford Madox Ford and In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel) by Ernst Jünger, through which each of these soldier-authors sought to convey in a phrase to their readers what it was about the new warfare which made it different from all other warfare men had hitherto experienced: that it marooned them, as it were, on an undiscovered continent, where one layer of the air on which they depended for life was charged with lethal metallic particles, where man in consequence was forced to adopt a subterranean dwelling and an abject posture, where the use of day and night were reversed and where, by a bizarre modification of Erewhonian logic, good health was regarded as a burden, but wounds as a benefaction to be sought and enjoyed. It was as if the arms-manufacturers had succeeded in introducing a new element into the atmosphere, compounded of fire and steel, whose presence rendered battlefields uninhabitable (giving them that eerily empty look which, to an experienced twentieth-century soldier, is a prime indicator that danger lies all about).”

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