Clark’s Commandos And Wayfinders

Each month the editor offers up a handful of books. With the passage of time even business books are getting more “woke” and my black heart sinks lower. Fortunately the titles are a dead give away. I plead not  to review books titled something like “The Chief Executive of Feelings: Leadership without Privileging Facts”, “Problematic! The Endless Oppression of Business Plans”,   or “9-5: One Giant Microaggression”

“That sounds good”, I said.

It was called “Paws”

I used to want to be an army tracker. With my robust, hard as teak, leather school shoes you would get, in addition to a compass in the heel of the shoe, a little booklet that told you, well, it told you how to be a six-year old explorer. You had hand signals for silently communicating “gather round”, “go that way”  and “stop”. Basic stuff but I loved it.

There were illustrations of the secret signs you could make – arrows made of pebbles. A cross made of sticks that would tell your imaginary team of die hards not to go down this route because it led to a volcano or dinosaurs.

And you learned how to do tracking. You could tell, theoretically, from the indentations of a footprint whether someone was walking forward or backwards, running or tiptoeing.

And then, best of all, there were paw prints. This one was a wolf, this was a tiger, this an otter, and that one a red squirrel. I checked the flowerbeds. I circumnavigated the woods, scoured the local park and, free from wolves, sat on the roundabout and monitored the ground as I slowly spun. Nothing. It was fruitless. The odd Quality Street wrapper and a few fag ends and that was about it. Either there were no hedgehogs, goats or hippos or they were, by some cunning animal magic, not leaving footprints.

But I was in the flow and time evaporated. Or maybe it stopped. In any event its passing was invisible. As for the tracking, the embers never died. So I looked forward to this book.

Alack and alas, etc. As you can see, I had the phonetics right but the spelling wrong.

This is a book about not doing anything and frankly there isn’t much you can teach any writer about that. It’s 90% of your job. Nevertheless I was intrigued because here was a writer who had been given the task of writing about 35,000 words on how to do nothing. Take away the words and that would be a dream job. How would he tackle it? How could he even get out of bed with such monstrous levels of invention to perform?

Well it’s like this. Step 1. Define the concept of Pause as widely as possible and in that way encompass the entire world of inaction – from hesitating before angrily responding on twitter, to counting to three before entering a room, to having a sabbatical to listening to John Cage’s 4’33” or taking a Bill Gates’ style “Think Week” each year,

Step 2. Having argued that half the world of things you could possibly write about are relevant to the idea of “the Pause”, you then  create a plausible structure that encompasses it all and write about all the different forms.

That’s the formula.

And it works very well.

The author holds a reading retreat in a remote mountain village in the middle of Spain every year. It sounds fabulous. People have to be forced to go because they’re convinced they’re too busy. However once they eventually find time to go they get as committed as Born Again Reformed Smoker. After that they make it a linchpin part of their life. That’s all it takes, having forced themselves just once to take a pause from the hurly burly of freneticism they discover they can indeed put a value on mere nothing and it is so valuable it must be repeated. It just a few days to realise the value of “pausing” is incalculable. Here I should warn readers that inaction, while it is of incalculable value, does not pay very well if you make it the maypole of your career.

Here’s the rub, though. If you don’t buy into the possibility that there is something valuable in taking time-outs, sabbaticals or days off then this book will drive you bananas. If on the other hand you “get it” but need pushing over the edge; some advice on how to fit a pause into your life or even how to justify it to yourself or someone else, then this book is your first injection of pause-heroin.

So beware because it is addictive; I’m still hunting for heffalumps.

I read: Do Pause: You Are Not A To-do List

By: Robert Poynton

The World Champion of Sleep Has a Fear

Gorging myself on books as a teenager there was one title I could never commit to: The Bible. What if it made me pious just as life was becoming fun in so many impious ways? It just wasn’t worth the risk.

The same fear gripped me when this book landed on my Proustian bed-desk-sofa. What if becoming aware of the problems other people have with sleeping turned me insomniac?

I have no trouble sleeping whatsoever unless my mean-spirited physical trainer has made me do squats and jumping about in the gym. On such occasions, in the middle of the night, my legs become possessed by the spirit of the roadrunner and I churn the sheets and pillows all about the room like a Nutribullet. Even so, I am not really woken by the festival of activity. When at noon, I hit the 43rd snooze button of the day and finally open my eyes I am upside down, lamps have been smashed to the floor, and my digital watch tells me I have completely my steps for the day …and yet I feel fully rested.

Being such an accomplished sleeper I had a lot to risk. Yet, I have always been intrigued by sleep. My young sister used to cackle in her sleep; Cast iron admission of guilt for all her brazen criminality. “Darling, it doesn’t prove she broke your Lego castle”, my mum would say in her naivety.

My even younger brother once sleep-walked into my bedroom, opened a draw and relieved himself in it. When he walked out he was sleep-smirking.

Let me cut to the chase. I have read the book and so far I am still enjoying the sleep of a fairytale princess. The book has helped, in fact. For while it is short it is dense and casts a sceptical academic-philosophical eye over everything you have ever heard about REM, mattresses, dreams, narcolepsy, Freud, sleep and depression, biphasic sleep patterns, sleep debt and guilt-driven insomnia. And the more you learn the more you realise that we know everything and nothing about sleep. This is fascinating and depressing. But it appears to be the case.

Consider Rapid Eye Movement. It was once thought to mirror the gaze of the subject in the dream. Thus if a sleeper dreamed of watching a table tennis match their closed eyes dart left and right as if they were watching the game in real life.

But that theory was abandoned. Something else is going on.

REM and Non-REM sleep appear in pairs. For an adult REM sleep follows NREM and in very simplistic terms the cycle repeats four times. REM was long considered to be the period of sleep during which memories were stored, cells repaired and ideas formed. Unlike adults babies begin sleep in a state of REM.   So do people suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. So REM could be a way of creating systems for dealing with difficult or confusing memories. Babies need to create storage and language systems and PTSD sufferers need to create a new system from scratch.

REM was commonly thought to be the period during which the sleeper dreamed while NREM was dreamless. But later analysis found that the deepest sleep, the fourth wave of NREM was as abundant with dreams as any REM phase.  NREM4 for example is the period during which children have night terrors. Further experiment suggests that REM is the phase during which the mind encrypts scary ideas and memories into less disturbing idiosyncratic subconscious symbolism. In that case dreams during REM, because they are disguised by symbolism are less scary than dreams during the NREM deep sleep. The deeper you sleep, the less encrypted and symbolic the dreams become. Consequently REM sleep may be less fraught and thus mentally quieter sleep than deep sleep. This seemingly endless fractal breakdown of each element of sleep is characteristic of the book. There are no answers.

Except these:

My brother was awake and my sister broke the Lego.

And for giving me license to claim this is absolutely so because I now know more about sleep than 90% of everyone else this book gets the thumbs up.

I read: Why Can’t We Sleep?

by: Darian Leader

The Secret of Burning Celluloid and Getting Rich

In the 1970s I had an idea, or an insight as marketeers like to say, that would later become Snapchat.

The Utter Misery and Horribleness of Hurt Feelings

“Look at that beast!”,  guffawed  a personal trainer across the gym floor as he strode past the rowing machines and bikes while pointing at me.  I plodded over, heavily, my New Year’s eve hangover still  echoing around my head two days after the the year had begun.

I read: No Hard Feelings

by: Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy

Lowly Worm, Huckle Cat, My Therapist & The Global Economy

My therapist lives on a remote, nameless island with surprisingly good connectivity near Chile or Peru or somewhere. That’s all I’ve gleaned. We only talk via Skype audio so the truth is maybe he’s still living nearby in the Barbican. He says he needs space.

What he didn’t know until last month was that thanks to the wonders of the global economy (of the dark web variety) I’d persuaded the Fancy Bears to build me a program that allows me to *force* call him in times of emergency.

If he’s on another call, or even if the computer is turned off and sealed in a drawer under his desk I can force a Skype call to happen.

Eventually he answered.

“Doc, it’s Richard Scarry all over again”, I explained.

I had loved Richard Scarry books. But eventually, I’d had to face the incontestable truths: I’d never seen a pilot of an aeroplane who was a dog; Never seen a worm driving an apple-shaped car; Never seen a hippo on roller skates. It had taken me years to come to terms with the dull conformity of humans doing everything. I even tried to embrace identity politics to muster some interest in the variety of humans doing things. But I wasn’t THAT immature.

In any event it had dawned on me, during my recovery, that in our strident, divisive, ideological and identitarian times the world needs a new type of picture book; Not like treacherous Scarry but an honest one. If I permit myself to dream I would want one that contains no false promises (cf police cats); just facts and figures and nuanced explanations of the way things are. In fact in a perfect world I would want something written by a calm, measured, unflappable German economist.

And then, as if by magic, I’d heard a thud and found a review copy of a giant picture book for grown ups called The Global Economy As You’ve Never Seen It by Herr Thomas Ramge.

I’ve told a lie. It wasn’t a thud. It was a ping. I had received an html link to a giant PDF of the book.

The downside of a picture book as a PDF is that the words are so small on my little iPad that to read the dense wording you have to zoom right in but to see the shape of the many complex flow diagrams you have to zoom right out. All the zooming, scanning, shrinking was quite a workout. Like playing Rachmaninov.

The good side is that you can draw fat, red electronic lines across chunks of the book with my exhausted, cramping fingers.

Alas, the first thing I drew a red line through was the entire first page which introduced the giant, complex, nuanced global economy by describing employment patterns by gender and race with sub-sections on ‘inequality’ and ‘the gender pay gap’. These are emotive and disputed data points being presented with no context …on page 1. This is the scene setter.

Now, you’re a smart business magazine reader so you know that the gender pay gap arises from measurement of aggregate earnings over a lifetime rather than different pay for the same job (which is illegal). What accounts for that is worth diving into and is at least as complex as, say, the gender gap in mortality at work or homelessness and you wouldn’t kick off the book with either of those. It’s a great subject for starting a debate but it’s not the neutral delivery of clearly understood and undisputed data which I had been hoping for in my post-Scarry traumatised state. I was on guard for the rest of the book.

I generally didn’t need to be. The combination of detailed graphics and explanatory text dealt comfortably with wide ranging subjects; From a flow chart showing how a Volkswagen car is made to a section comparing economic theorists via charts showing the globalisation of the jeans business …and ending with the promise of fully automated luxury communism.

I can attest that it is, as the publicists claim, unlike anything else I have seen before or at least since I started my therapy.

And yet as a recommendable book, why was I feeling that sense of dread and panic? Why had I had force-called my therapist at 5am in Ushuaia ?

The answer was in the electronic red highlighted lines I’d drawn. They were everywhere.

Doc, I sobbed. This is worse than Busy Town’s false promises. The Global Economy book explains where and how everyone works. It shows a world where globalisation and free trade and AI will solve everything. But my red highlighter struck wherever jobs would be automated out of existence and there isn’t much left after that. Not even humans driving apple-shaped cars.

I can’t wait, he said and hung up.

Leadership Beyond The Flatulence Question

The silver haired Senator for Rhode Island raised his head from the document in front of him and stared hard, Columbo style, at the subject of his merciless interrogation. His questioning had been forensic, the attention to detail relentless. His eyes narrowed. The sniper line of his gaze bisected the small gap between the top of his reading glasses and the flop of his fallen quiff.  At the receiving end,  the subject of his blistering inquiry shifted in the cross hairs. The committee room was hushed, electric. Unable to evade the question any longer, the accused leaned toward the microphone and spoke.