Hello my two (two!) subscribers. This is the first in what I hope will be a monthly dispatch that’s equally neat, readable, and useful. I’m going to list some things I’ve consumed that you might also be interested in. By sending this to you, I don’t expect you to read it. But I do expect you to badger me if I stop sending these!
Let’s start.
1/ The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet (novel)
Genet was the antithesis of the MFA-softie. Often homeless and imprisoned, excitedly amoral, and both philosophically pompous and earnestly pornographic:
The tube of vaseline, which was intended to grease my prick and those of my lovers, summoned up the face of her who, during a reverie that moved through the dark alleys of the city, was the most cherished of mothers. It had served me in the preparation of so many secret joys, in places worthy of its discrete banality, that it had become the condition of my happiness, as my sperm-spotted handkerchief testified.
The book is an ode to a lifestyle and the attendant world view that can only be the result of a degradation so total you come to call it salvation. It’s less a novel than it is an exploration of solitude, as expressed in a common language in a rather uncommon way. Needless to say, it’s another classic 20th century classic you couldn’t publish today.
Marc is Silicon Valley’s best ambassador, and the relative innocence of Huberman forces Marc to speak plainly about everything from AI to government-as-institutional-cartels, to why small companies out-maneuver much larger ones. (The innovator’s dilemma, yes, but also: inside large companies, each individual’s No. 1 competitor is someone else at the company, whether that’s another team seeking resources, another individual seeking promotion, etc. Start-ups might have more internal churn, but having external enemies forces better internal alignment.)
3/ Milan Kundera: The Curtain, An Essay in Seven Parts (book)
Maybe the best introduction to the novel as an art form you can read. The elegance and conciseness is to be admired, as are the throwaway observations and opinions, like:
“Nobody would know Kafka today — nobody — if he had been a Czech.”
“Something essential in man’s existence changed then [in the 19th century], and forever: History became everybody’s experience; man began to understand that he was not going to die in the same world he had been born into.” [Note: It’s amazing the rate as to which this has accelerated. Not in all dimensions, of course. But each of us knows the culture we’re enmeshed in at the start of each year will be different than the one at the end.]
“Description: compassion for the ephemeral; salvaging the perishable.”
Kundera also argues for reading international books in translation, claiming that a lack of local context (and linguistic insider-ness) better allows readers to appreciate the aesthetic innovations of a given major work. Hard agree!
4/ Tyrant Books T-Shirt (merch)
The guy who runs this publishing house is dead (Since 2021). I guess ‘Leaving a legacy’ in 2023 means forgetting to turn the auto-renewal on your Shopify account off. Needless to say, I bought one.
SEE YOU IN DECEMBER.