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Since I’ve spent more than my fare share of time thinking about Shakespeare’s plays I clicked and was taken to one of the dullest, schmaltziest articles I’ve read recently (and that’s saying something).

The anonymous author culls five lines from Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes as the latter is returning to college in Paris after the funeral of the Danish king (in act one, scene three).  Here’s a sample. Read it slowly.

“Give thy thoughts no tongue”

Basic as it may be as far as business lessons go, keep in mind the idea of thinking before you speak; it looms large when you are just starting to feel your way through your career. You must pick your battles wisely and with caution.

Kinda clichéd– both the line from Shakespeare and the lesson the author, right?

There’s a reason: Polonius’ advice to Laertes was already clichéd in 1603 when the first edition of Hamlet hit the printing press. In fact, back when I was teaching Shakespeare at U.C. Berkeley one of my students, upon reading this passage, said to me, “Mr. Berens, I don’t see what’s so great about this play: it’s really just a patchwork of old sayings”—not realizing that Shakespeare is where such saying come from.

Anybody who has had even a half-conscious 11^th grade English teacher (or seen it onstage, or one of the many movies) will instantly see that trotting out Polonius as a business councilor is like getting personal decorum tips from Lindsay Lohan or nuance advice from Carrot Top. He is a foolish character who gives idiotically superficial, greeting card advice that the play’s original audience would have found laughable.

The author of this article was probably under deadline, came up with something in a hurry and pitched it to an editor who needed to fill some space. More importantly, this sort of deployment of Shakespeare as a cultural shield behind which lack-of-thought can hide is exactly why most people find the plays boring beyond all comprehension, and that is sad.

However, my point in this post is not to say, “Shakespeare is for trained professionals: kids, don’t try this at home.”

Quite to the contrary, if you want good business advice you should look carefully at William Shakespeare’s career. Yes, read the plays, but don’t just take greeting-card snippets from famous passages. Instead, look at their deep structure and how they’re embedded in the early modern London economy.

Shakespeare was the greatest playwright in the history of the language, but he was also an innovative businessman who vertically integrated the production of his product centuries before “vertical integration” even became a term: he was part owner of the playing company, part owner of the buildings in which the actors performed, the chief dramatist and one of the players.

More on this soon—let me know in comments if you want it sooner.

And here’s the full passage in question—a beautiful patchwork of entry level HR handbook precepts that just happens to be written by the best copywriter ever:

POLONIUS

Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!

The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,

And you are stayed for. There, my blessing with thee,

And these few precepts in thy memory

Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel,

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatched, unfledged courage. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,

Bear’t that th’opposèd may beware of thee.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not expressed in fancy–rich, not gaudy,

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are of a most select and generous, chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender, boy,

For love oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulleth edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow as the night the day

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!

Jerry spied my plea for help on Facebook and made it his personal mission to help me find it, and then David identified it immediately (I should have consulted David’s steel-trap memory first… next time I’ll know).

And the book? “The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald,” by Clifford B. Hicks, first of a series that you can learn more about at www.alvinfernald.com.

I’ll quote from David’s note:

Alvin is using the invention on the cover.  I quote from Chapter 7, “The One-Jerk Bed Maker”:

“Rummaging through the boxes on his inventing bench, he found a ball of strong cord and two small pulleys. He tied the pulleys to the head of the bed, one on each side of the pillow. He cut two long pieces of cord. One end of each cord he tied to one of the clothespins. The other ends he ran through the pulleys. He brought the cords down under the bed, leaving plenty of slack on the floor, then tied the two cords to the footboard. He squeezed open two clothespins and fastened one to the sheet and blanket on each side of the bed… He pulled slowly on the cords. The blanket and sheet slid neatly into place, as tough pulled by two invisible hands. Alvin Fernald, Great Inventor, had done it again.”

Of course, it’s possible you remember ANOTHER children’s book in which the protagonist invents an automatic bed maker. This is the one I recalled.

As I write, the local library is finding a copy and bringing it to the nearest branch.

Jerry, David– thanks!

Now that my eight year old girl has become a big reader, I find myself remembering the books that I read as a kid, and that’s the reason for today’s post: can you help me identify a book?

The book: I have a clear memory from the 1970s of reading a book about a boy inventor who — in an aside — created a simple machine to help him make his bed. It was a lever of some sort that attached to the top of the sheets and blankets, and when he got out of bed in the morning he would pull the lever and it would pull the bed into shape.

That’s all I remember, and it’s driving me crazy.

For a while I thought it was “Homer Price” by Robert McCloskey, but I then found that book in our local library, read it, and discovered I was wrong. Then I thought it was “Henry Reed, Inc.” by Keith Robertson (with illustrations by McCloskey), but I checked THAT one out of the library and so far, no dice.

The incredible book stumper archives at Loganberry Books didn’t help, and I submitted a query to the CBC’s “Lost Childhood Books” radio show (please, kind Canadians, help me!), but I thought that perhaps somebody reading this might recognize the book.

If you can help, please contact me via the form on this page or by commenting.

Does this post have a lot to do with media? Only in the sense that how we remember media — one of my strongest areas of intellectual interest — changes with time, and how we re-experience all culture as we get older can create an uncanny double sense of visiting our former selves along with the song, story, painting, book, TV show or movie in question. Today’s content-hungry internet and cable jumbles everything together into one big media haggis, and that can wreak havoc on our memories.

In her classic 1967 essay, “Movies on Television” (anthologized in “For Keeps,” 1994, among other places), Pauline Kael wrote about this:

People who see a movie for the first time on television don’t remember it the same way that people do who saw it in a theatre. Even without the specific visual loss that results from the transfer to another medium, it’s doubtful whether a movie could have as intense an impact as it had in its own time. Probably by definition, works that are not truly great cannot be as compelling out of their time. Sinclair Lewis’s and Hemingway’s novels were becoming archaic while their authors lived. Can On the Waterfront have the impact now that it had in 1954? Not quite. And revivals in move theatres don’t have the same kind of charge, either. There’s something a little stale in the air, there’s a different kind of audience. At a revival, we must allow for the period, or care because of the period. Television viewers seeing old movies for the first time can have very little sense of how and why new stars moved us when they appeared, of the excitement of new themes, of what these movies meant to us.

What would Kael have made of media today, I wonder.

My eyebrows lifted at this, as to me re-reading is a special pleasure and it had never occured to me that this was unusual or a family trait– H is also a big re-reader, as is Kathi, my wife).

I read a LOT and I re-read a lot: when I travel on busienss I often find myself visiting with old textual friends (“It’s homey,” as H says) like Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice,” the Vorkosigan adventures by Lois McMaster Bujold or — and this one I finished for perhaps the 40th time over my morning cup of coffee a few minutes ago — Heinlein’s majestic “Time Enough For Love.” Last week, I downloaded “Huckleberry Finn” onto the new Kindle Dx (a seven-league-boots leap forward for Amazon, by the way) for my next trip.

Speaking of Mark Twain, one of the best passages on re-reading I’ve encountered comes from the first chapter of Annie Dillard’s autobiography, “An American Childhood” where she talks about her father’s disasterous boating trip down the Mississippi River and what provoked it:

In 1955, when I was ten, my father’s reading went to his head.
My father’s reading during that time, and for many years before and after, consisted for the most part of Life on the Mississippi. He was a young executive in the old family firm, American Standard; sometimes he traveled alone on business. Traveling, he checked into a hotel, found a bookstore, and chose for the night’s reading, after what I fancy to have been long deliberation, yet another copy of Life on the Mississippe. He brought all these books home. There were dozens of copies of Life on the Mississippi on the living-room shelves. From time to time, I read one.

Re-reading lets me focus on the HOW of a piece of writing, not just the WHAT of its sense. If I’m just reading for plot (like, say, the J. D. Robb “In Death” mysteries that are a guilty pleasure like a pint container of Chunky Monkey in my lap while I sit on the couch watching The Mentalist) then there’s not a lot of point to re-reading, but the best books, even the best mysteries (Ellis Peters’ Cadfael books, for example) exceed the pleasures of plot and merit thinking about the how.  This is true of novels, essays, and particularly denser language like verse. The Russian Formalist critic Yuri Lotman famously once said that we don’t read poetry, we only re-read poetry.

There’s also a kinaesthetic old-jeans comfort about the physicality of a favorite book: my fingers know just where to hold the pages and the measuring pressure between the ball of my right thumb and the side of my right index finger hints at how far I’ve come in a reading session and how far I have to go.  The progress bar on the Kindle Dx doesn’t compare.

That cozy knowledge can also inhibit critical awareness, so it’s sometimes handy to read a new edition of an old friend — I did this regularly when I was a Shakespearean, flipping from edition to edition — or mildly tragic when a beloved copy of a book gets lost and the replacement just isn’t the same. I’m curious how reading Huck Finn on the Kindle will be different than reading the ancient, friendly, black-covered hardback edition I found in my grandmother’s front-hall cupboard when I was nine, or the green scholarly edition I read in grad school.

Which brings me to blogging and reading blogs.

The physical properties of books helps great writing stake out space in my head that vaguely corresponds to the space on my book shelves.  I can stumble across a book while looking for something else, pick it up, and in moments step into another place.  It’s particularly true of fiction but also works with the best nonfiction.

With digital media — whether a PDF or on a website or on the Kindle — the kinaesthetics drop out.  I rarely go back to re-read a great blog post because they’re hard to find without SEARCHING for them, and searching is different than stumbling.  And for all its merits the Kindle doesn’t let me organize my many digital books in any personalized way– just by author, title or date acquired.

To be fair, there’s not a lot of re-writing in blogs; by design blogs are the unedited firstlings of the writer’s heart (to paraphrase Macbeth), and for an information-acquisition mode nothing beats them.

But its hard to SAVOR a post, and this is why no matter how much I love the Kindle and digital media in general, I don’t think that books, physical books, will vanish any time soon.  We need at least some of our things to exceed the spatial constraints of a screen.

When I worked at EarthLink, for example, the explicit purpose of our magazine bLink was so that our customers’ experience of the company would extend beyond the PC and beyond sitting at the kitchen table with a checkbook once a month paying the bill.  In other words, we wanted our customers to think about EarthLink while sitting on the toilet because we thought that extra-computer engagement would bind them more closely to the brand.

These days, I travel with the Kindle, a magazine or two (for takeoff and landing) and at least one non-digital book.  Not everything can be constrained by a screen.

I saw my old friend Debbie Ginsberg get tagged with this and read her list with fascination. Coincidentally, I’d been thinking along these lines just last night when I found myself picking up book #1 on my list and starting in again. So, I’m self-tagging myself and going on to tag others.

Here are the rules: On Facebook, write a note about the 15 books that will always stick with you, post it in your profile and then tag folks. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. They don’t have to be the greatest books you’ve ever read, just the ones that stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy these instructions and tag 15 (or more) friends, including me – because I’m interested in seeing what books are in your head.

In an emergent rather than pre-thought order:

1. Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein: I’ve read it dozens of times. An old friend Fascinating and just gets smarter the more I read it. One I Always Have With Me (OIAHWM).

2. Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold: something like the 10th book in her Vorkosigan series and a truly amazing book: it’s so compelling that I still get surprised by the twist even though I’ve read the book before. (OIAHWM)

3. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare: Yeah, I know I’m a big Shakespeare dork, but this was the first play that truly grabbed me in a deep way, and then years later I found myself aging out of the play as I started to sympathize with Capulet — Juliet’s father — as I started aging into fatherhood left sympathizing with Romeo (he’s SUCH a drip). (OIAHWM)

4. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare: more of the same, but the relationship between this play and Romeo and Juliet was the great discovery of my academic life and still informs how I think. (OIAHWM)

5. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: Why THIS play is the Ur-text of my marriage, the play that Kathi and I quote back and forth to each other on at least a weekly basis, baffles but consistently amuses me.

6. The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau: difficult, painfully difficult, but rewarding and changed the way I think about much of life’s experience. Similarly… (OIAHWM)

7. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson: Bakhtin’s own writings are illuminating (his notion of “eventness” powered my doctoral thesis and led to much of the useful thinking I’ve done since), but Morson and Emerson’s intellectual biography is so friendly, so usable, so damn helpful that it’s inspirational. I’m pleased to now call Saul Morson a friend… and speaking of whom… (OIAHWM)

8. Narrative and Freedom: The Invention of Time by Gary Saul Morson: introduces the notion of sideshadowing (to complement foreshadowing) and should be a must-read for every serious student of literature. A masterpiece that is sadly neglected. (OIAHWM)

9. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn: “Paradigm shift” has become a cliche the way that James Gleick’s notion of chaos has, but the original is worth reading closely and understanding, along with…

10. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Irving Goffman: we aren’t just one person, we’re a collection of many selves smushed into one bag of flesh, bone and goo. It’s important to remember that. This book is just one of Goffman’s works, most of which I’ve read around in rather than bathed in cover to cover.

11. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1760 by Michael Bristol: One of the smartest pieces of literary/cultural criticism that I ever encountered… along with Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind by Sherwood Cummings, but that one wasn’t pressing enough on my own intellectual pursuits to merit more than one read, although I still have it somewhere.

12. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 by Andrew Gurr: Andy is another intellectual hero whom I came to know personally, but the fact that he’s an incredibly kind and sweet guy doesn’t make him any less towering as a scholar. This 280 page paperback boils an entire library of information down into one useful — intoxicatingly useful — volume. OIAHWM.

13. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Just writing it down makes me realize that I haven’t read it in a few years. I’ll change that by the end of the month. I wonder if a decent edition is readily downloadable for the Kindle? “You don’t know me exceptin’ you’ve read a book call ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” by Mr. Mark Twain, which is the truth, mainly, although it has some stretchers in it.” That’s not quite accurate, but it’s about 75% of the to the first line.

14. The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp: A fantasy series that introduced me to the notion of multiverses, real people jumping into famous literary stories, as well as Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Sadly, this one hasn’t aged well with me. I’ve tried reading it again later in life and have trouble doing so (also true of the Barsoomian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs), but Enchanter was one of the first fantasy books I read and kicked me into the genre. I treasure the beaten up old paperback copy that I later loaned to Papa Marty, my late and beloved paternal grandfather, who kept it in his back pocket and flattened it. OIAHWM.

15. The Human Comedy by William Saroyan: Like Enchanter, one that I have trouble reading these days (I picked it up recently and read around in it, visiting it, relishing it, but I can’t quite do it start to finish), but it sticks in my heart. “Ithaca, California: East, West, Home is Best– Welcome Stranger.”

There are MANY other books and nonbooks worth pondering: this game doesn’t tag ESSAYS (Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” or “The Contingency of Language” in Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity or Stephen Booth’s 2nd appendix “Speculations on Doubling in Shakespeare’s Plays” in King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition & Tragedy, for a few examples) or comic books (Starman by James Robinson, Batman: the Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller)…

… but it’s a good place to start.

P.S. Yes, of COURSE there was a Kindle Huck Finn… several in fact.

“It’s been a few months since Leta’s had a play date, and we sort of forgot how that one extra little body can increase the blast radius of destruction by about a thousand percent. Afterwards there were toys sitting in the middle of the room that we forgot we’d ever bought, toys we hadn’t seen in years, and then we spent the next two days trying to figure out where we had stored them in the first place. At one point I was like, wait a minute, how did you guys manage to get this box of games down from the top of your closet, Leta? She didn’t say a word and instead slowly tilted her head to the side while slyly turning up the corners of her mouth. And I knew instantly that I should just carry on with my life without being burdened by the answer to that question. I imagine that the exact same exchange happens almost every hour with women who have given birth to boys.”

via dooce®.

I took a big screenshot that you can find here, and here’s a sneak preview:

Kemp Obit with FB banner

This content-ad juxtaposition struck me from a surreal angle. Kemp himself probably had a BlackBerry later in his career — or an assistant who had one — and probably had heard of FaceBook, but what would his response have been to seeing such a twenty-first century ad placed next to a story about such a twentieth centure figure?

Note also the AT&T U-Verse ad at the top of the page.

Note#2: Kemp was 73, which USED to seem old.

For the inveterate readers out there, the gauntlet has been thrown down! John Durham, Don E. Schultz, Sean Cheyney, Doug Weaver, Jim Meskauskas: I’m talking to YOU… and to anybody else hearing this. What explicit business strategy books have you read lately (or ever) that were worthwhile and why were they worthwhile?

Thinking over my own reading, the books that most influence me tend to not to be strategy books either. When I used to teach writing at U.C. Berkeley, for example, I never found that books about writing were useful to my students or to me as a teacher. Instead, I preferred to use things like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as writing manuals.

There’s a reason for this: off-topic books (Tzu, McCloud) open the mind to think creatively about how to apply the lessons of one subject to a related but different topic. This is also how metaphors work: if you say “my love is a red rose” that statement doesn’t contain or transmit meaning: instead, it provokes your mind to think creatively about how your love and red foliage are similar (the philosopher Donald Davidson explained this usefully in his terrific essay, “What Metaphors Mean”).

So, the books that have most influenced how I think about the interactive media business over the last three years have been books like:

• Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, which explains how and why less can be more

• Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, which explains how the real metric for engagement requires people rather than server logs

• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which explains the forces behind things like Wikipedia

In all three cases, the books have stimulated new thought, whereas when I tried to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done it felt like a set of prescriptions that hobbled my thinking rather than expand it.

So, here’s my question: what do you think?

I’ve created this Twitter hashtag to help us all track the conversation, if it happens: #bizstratbooks