Reading notes: On leadership and Brecht and writing

From a commentary on the “leadership industry” in the 2/29/16 New Yorker, by Joshua Rothman:

“Crises of leadership are the order of the day at the beginning of the twenty-first century,” Elizabeth Samet writes, in the introduction to “Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers” (Norton). “If we live in a world of crisis,” she continues, “we also live in a world that romanticizes crisis—that finds in it fodder for an addiction to the twenty-four-hour news cycle, multiple information streams, and constant stimulation.” Samet believes that our growing addiction to the narrative of crisis has gone hand in hand with an increasing veneration of leadership—a veneration that leaves us vulnerable to “the false prophets, the smooth operators, the gangsters, and the demagogues” who say they can save us. She quotes John Adams, who suggested, in a letter to a friend, that there was something both undemocratic and unwise in the lionization of leadership. The country won’t improve, Adams wrote, until the people begin to “consider themselves as the fountain of power.” He went on, “They must be taught to reverence themselves, instead of adoring their servants, their generals, admirals, bishops, and statesmen.” It can be dangerous to decide that you need to be led.

Briefly noted: European terrorism and American economics onstage

Last week, the Economist website’s Prospero blog, which provides cultural commentary, brought news of a play that’s been bouncing around Belgium and France since December 2014. It’s called Djihad, and it’s about the quest of three young Belgian Muslims to travel to Syria and join the Islamic State. But it’s not what you might think: “Despite the serious subject, the hit Brussels play is a comedy, poking fun at the characters’ racism, anti-Semitism and ignorance.” The post is here.

A brief post about writer’s block, coincidentally proving that I don’t have writer’s block

Does writer’s block exist? In 1950, according to a recent New Yorker website post, a psychoanalyst who had studied the issue published a paper under that very title. He concluded that it does. But there’s a potential difficulty with disorders of the mind, which the Western world’s materialist science has more or less left behind in cases of somatic (that is, bodily) disorders: we can’t literally see what’s wrong, because we have no direct access to the area in question. Besides, some disorders seem to be culturally conditioned and/or psychologically conditioned. Among other things, this means that—odd as it sounds—the illnesses we can come down with may depend on where and when we’re living, or on beliefs we hold about ourselves.

Giddy delight: Trevor Nunn works wonders with Pericles at TFANA

Raphael Nash Thompson as the tale-teller Gower in TFANA’s Pericles (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Literally and figuratively, Shakespeare’s Pericles is all over the place. Like a very leisurely travel package, it visits six different Mediterranean locations—Antioch! Pentapolis! Mytilene!—and ranges across more than 16 years of time. It has a tour guide—I mean a narrator—and frequent outbreaks of song, dance, and mime. It features a princess protected by a riddle, an assassin, a shipwreck, fishermen on a beach, a jousting tournament, a storm at sea, pirates, a bordello, a dream sequence, and more than one unexpected reunion. It has reminders of other Shakespearean works going all the way back to The Comedy of Errors and looking ahead to pieces he hadn’t written yet, such as The Winter’s Tale. And parts of it may not have been written by Shakespeare at all.

Briefly noted: The Economist looks at “bits and ballots”

To paraphrase a line attributed to Trotsky, you may not be interested in tech, but tech is interested in you. The current issue of The Economist contains not only an editorial but also an entire multi-article special report on technology and politics (read my final note before clicking). The entire package is worth reading whether or not you already have a grasp of the promise and the threat of digital technologies. As the editorial concludes, “The original vision of the internet, as a self-governing cyber-Utopia, has long since been consigned to history.… But it remains a public good. The danger is that the centralisation of data may undo many of the democratic gains that social media and other technologies have brought.”

All singing! All dancing! All killing! American Psycho comes to Broadway

Tales of connivers, criminals, and killers have a long history in our culture, but Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho—about a Wall Street investment banker whose notion of making a killing is literal—struck some people the wrong way when it came out, in 1991. In fact, its original publisher backed out before publication, and the rights were sold to another house. Its violence against women was decried; its author received hate mail and death threats; The New York Times Book Review published a piece headlined “Snuff This Book!”

I haven’t read the novel, but c’mon—look at the title.

The world is full of actors: a photo of Mireille Enos

Francis Thompson felt that the world was full of angels: “Turn but a stone, and start a wing!,” he wrote. While it lacks a certain something, one might say the same about actors, for our entertainment-saturated world seems to abound in them; turn but a stone, and start a thespian. One I discovered a few years ago is Mireille Enos, who played a leading role in The Killing, an American TV drama based on a Danish show called Forbrydelsen. Many viewers took it as essentially a crime story and were disappointed when the end of its first season failed to resolve the case with which it had begun, but in truth it dramatized a view of the world as much as anything else, and a good deal of its view was embodied in Enos, whose character seemed always to be harried, doubting, or in pain.