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Carl Mason Mason 42.101.253 13 May 2011 Finding Chaos, Order, and Serendipity in Libraries OUTLINE Thesis of Harriet Rubin article: “Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete.”

Question: What qualities make the executive bookshelf valuable? Is it Price?

• Rubin: “Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.”

• From Ken Lopez Booksellers: Clement Edmonds’ The Commentaries of C. Julius Caesar priced at $2,625. Lopez notes, “All books are first printings of first editions or first American editions unless otherwise noted.”

• Published in 1655, Clements writes: "Of his Warres in Gallia; and the Civil Warres betwixt him and Pompey. Translated into English: With Many excellent and judicious observations. Thereupon: As also The Art of our Modern Training, or Tactick Practice; Whereunto is adjoyned the Eighth Commentary of the Warres in Gallia; with some short Observations upon it.”

• 17th Brit lit may be too dense. Modern translation may be preferable. From Amazon.com, The Gallic War: Seven Commentaries on The Gallic War with an Eighth Commentary by Aulus Hirtius (Oxford) Carolyn Hammond(Tr) $9.95 ($5.45 used)

• John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Means? 1959, 7th printing. ($4 in’59) Purchased from Brattle Bookstore in Boston for $10. On Alibris.com: priced for $65.95 – $212.60.

• Shakespeare is 49 cents at Harvard Book Store, which means one can afford a “priceless” library for the price of a used papaerback.

What of Mentors’ Mentors?

• “If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: 'Don't follow your mentors, follow your mentors' mentors,’ suggests David Leach,” chief executive of the AMA's accreditation division. Leach stocks cabin in NC woods with collected works of Aristotle.” Mason 2

• Isn’t relying on the precedent of prior thought (i.e., following your mentors’ mentors) the underlying principal of all libraries?

• But is this always the case? Are entrepreneurs not inherently rebellious and/or willing to go in bold directions? CEO’s seek guidance and insight, but not necessarily rules.

• Consider Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse”: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. /They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” Larking follows tradition poetic structure, but is also playfully defiant.

• Consider Walt Whitman’s poem ““When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer”: “How soon,unaccountable, I became tired and sick; / Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, / In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is the original American poetic rebel, rejecting his mentors’ mentors to forge a new direction for poetry.

• Consider Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement about young scholars locked away in libraries: “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm." Books are only vibrant and dynamic when the function out in the world of ideas. Is this what CEO’s have in mind? Books as tools?

• Precedents have value, but it’s necessary to not only follow predecessors, but to engage them as well? This Emerson’s point. Does reading not encourage the skill of engagement with ideas? Not only challenging predecessors and their ideas, but our own ideas and preconceptions as well.

• Consider New York Times’ "Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins." How readers mark up margins as an act of defiance, adoration, and engagement with their mentors.

What is the intrinsic value of reading?

• Rubin: “Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete.”

•Libraries are kept private. Does this reflect the monetary value, or does it reflect personal and/or intimate nature of reading or relationship between CEO’s and their books? “Phil Knight, a room behind his formal office. To enter, one had to remove one's shoes and bow: the ceilings were low, the space intimate, the degree of reverence demanded for these volumes on Asian history, art and poetry greater than any the self-effacing Mr. Knight, who is no longer chief executive, demanded for himself.” Mason 3

• Knight’s library is private, but it is also dynamic. It is not treated solely as a prize possession for display, but as a functional tool. “The Knight collection remains in the Nike headquarters. ‘'Of course the library still exists,'’ Mr. Knight said in an interview. ''I'm always learning.’”

• Jorge Louis Borges stated: ''There must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest.''

• Is it the book that contains the system, or is it the structure of the library that holds the book in question? Rubin addresses both issues.

♦ “C.E.O. libraries typically lack a Dewey Decimal or even org-chart order. '’My books are organized by topic and interest but in a manner that would make a librarian weep,' Mr. Moritz said. Is there something ‘Da Vinci Code’-like about mixing books up in an otherwise ordered life?”

♦ “Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power. The empire-loving Elizabeth I surrounded herself with the Roman historians, many of whom she translated, and kept one book under lock and key in her bedroom, in a French translation she alone of her court could read: Machiavelli's treatise on how to overthrow republics, ''The Prince.'' Churchill retreated to his library to heal his wounds after being voted out of power in 1945 -- and after reading for six years came back to power.”

♦ “It took Dee Hock, father of the credit card and founder of Visa, a thousand books to find The One. Mr. Hock walked away from business life in 1984 and looked back only from his library's walls. He built a dream 2,000-square-foot wing for his books in a pink stucco mansion atop a hill in Pescadero, Calif. He sat among the great philosophers and the novelists of Western life like Steinbeck and Stegner and dreamed up a word for what Visa is: ''chaordic'' -- complex systems that blend order and chaos.

In his library, Mr. Hock found the book that contained the thoughts of all of them. Visitors can see opened on his library table for daily consulting, Omar Khayyam's ‘Rubáiyát,’ the Persian poem that warns of the dangers of greatness and the instability of fortune.”

Does one genre of literature capture this idea?

• Rubin’s article makes much of the uses of poetry. Dee Hock, Sidney Harman, and Steve Jobs refer to intrinsic value of poetry. Mason 4

• Hock speaks of his library as “chaordic” and believes he has discovered in a single poem “Rubáiyát.” Chaordic describes libraries, but also describes the workings of poetry.

• Harman: ''Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.''

•Poetry provides a system of providing order out of chaos, but it also provides an avenue of serendipity, which is the act of discovering something of great value along the path that we did not expect to find.

• Does this not describe both poetry and libraries?

Working Thesis: The curiosity and discipline essential to navigating the apparent chaos and intrinsic central to both poetry and libraries assures the possibility of serendipity, which may lead one further down the path toward success. . . . Question: If they are indeed essential, then how do we cultivate the qualities of curiosity and discipline? Does the world we live in make this task more or less difficult?

How do we locate this contemplative path in a contemporary world of technology and multitasking? Four issues must be considered:

• Our understanding of technology.

• Our understanding of multitasking.

• Our understanding of boredom.

• Our misconceptions of what poems and libraries are.

What is Multitasking?

• Words seems inextricably linked to technology itself

• Definition from OED. - Word introduced in 1986; linked to computers exclusively. - In 1995, enters lexicon as human activity

• Research supports deleterious effects.

• Wired: “Multitasking Muddles Brains, Even When the Computer Is Off” Brandon Keim Mason 5

- Study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, of 262 students, those “who routinely juggle many flows of information, bouncing from e-mail to web text to video to chat to phone calls, fared significantly worse than their low- multitasking peers.” - “In every test, students who spent less time simultaneously reading e-mail, surfing the web, talking on the phone and watching TV performed best.” - “These are all very standard tasks in psychology. In the first, there’s lots of evidence that if people do poorly, they have trouble ignoring irrelevant information. For the second task, there are many demonstrations that this is a good reflection of people’s ability to organize things in their working memory. The third task shows how fast and readily people switch from doing one thing to another.” -- Clifford Nass, a Stanford University cognitive scientist. - Questions remain: “As for what caused the differences — whether people with a predisposition to multitask happen to be mentally disorganized, or if multitasking feeds the condition ‘that’s the million dollar question, and we don’t have a million dollar answer,’”—Nash. - “The causality question is enormous here. There’s a lot of social pressure to multitask. You’re getting tweets, e-mails, IMs from multiple people at once, and the web offers unbelievable opportunities for text and video. It may be thrust upon you.”

• The New Atlantis: “The Myth of Multitasking” Christine Rosen - Lord Chesterfield (1740s):

• “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.”

• “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.” - 2005 BBC reports study by Hewlett-Packard & Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London: “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” T - Edward Hallowell, MA psychiatrist/ADHD specialist: • Multitasking is a “mythical activity”

• 2005 article MT as “Attention Deficit Trait” is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live.” • “(h)allmark symptoms mimic those in ADHD.” Mason 6

- U Cal Irvine “monitored interruptions among office workers […] found […] workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task - Jonathan B. Spira, analyst at business research firm Basex, believes “extreme multitasking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.” - Research: “(M)ultitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.” - Russell Poldrack, psych prof UCLA:

• “(M)ultitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.”

• “We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.” - Kaiser Family Foundation report (2006)

• “in 1999, only 16 percent of the time people spent using any of those media was spent on multiple media at once; by 2005, 26 percent of media time was spent multitasking. (i.e., television, Internet, video games, text messages, telephones, and e-mail) • “sensation-seeking” personality types are more likely to multitask,

• those living in “a highly TV-oriented household.”

• Subject: “I get bored if it’s not all going at once, because everything has gaps— waiting for a website to come up, commercials on TV, etc.” Mason 7

• New York Times: “8 Hours a Day Spent on Screens, Study Finds” Brian Stelter - Advertisers spent $3.7 on study - Adults spend 8.5 hours a day in front of various screens. This would equate to watching screens exclusively from Jan 1 through May 9 (8:45 a.m.?) - Media intake identical for all age groups - People over 55 less likely to multitask - 18-24 age group watch less live TV, “Even though people have the opportunity to watch video on their computers and cellphones, TV accounts for 99 percent of all video consumed in 2008. Even among the 18-to-24-year-olds, it was 98 percent.” - 18-24 spends 29 minutes a day texting (7.5 days out of the year) - TV and video games demand most attention - Music occurs while people do other things

• NPR: “Whatever Happened To The Audiophile?” Linton Weeks - People no longer listen to music exclusively, or spend money exclusively on high end sound equipment. - High end equipment = fewer sales. Low end equipment = more sales. - People hear more and more music, but music swallowed up by multitasking. It’s something we do while doing other tasks. - Outlier: “Laurie Monblatt, a Northern Virginia painter and sculptor and unapologetic audiophile.’ Reminds me of CEO’s in Rubin’s “Executive Bookshelf” - Possesses a “sanctum of sound.” -- “dedicated two-channel listening room. My passion is for vacuum tubes and this set up consists of a KT88 based tube amp, tube preamp, tubed CD player, tubed digital-to-analog converter that is partnered with an iMac for digital files and wonderful pair of very efficient speakers. Power to the room is on dedicated lines." - "many components have come and gone — both solid state and tubed, but as my obsession grew it became obvious to my ears that tubes give me more of the 'real thing' regarding texture, bloom, soundstage and tone. I could go on and on ..."

- “she sits on a comfortable sofa, in exactly the one spot where all the sound comes together, and she listens to Paul McCartney singing Blackbird, she can hear it so perfectly that she can discern McCartney slapping his thigh — Mason 8 against blue jeans. It's a really distinctive slap sound, she says, and quite different than if Sir Paul wore wool pants.” - “There is no video equipment in the listening room at all.” “she doesn't read or text or talk.” Laurie Monblatt may listen to music much as CEO’s read books. Consider this in detail.

• Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: “The Birth of Spread Spectrum” Anna Couey. - Actress Hedy Lamarr and avant guard composer George Antheil pioneered “Spread Spectrum’ technology during WWII - “Spread spectrum has proven highly useful in cellular telephones, because its inherent encryption guarantees better privacy for cellular phone users. The technology has also proven to be an extremely efficient method for using radio waves. Rather than requiring each transmission to use its own frequency, spread spectrum enables people to simultaneously communicate over the same bands of spectrum without appreciable interference. Thus, as more people buy cellular phones, the increasing demand for spectrum can be accommodated by sharing the same frequencies.” - Message moves rapidly across radio waves. Attempts to intercept result in fractured blips. - Problem of synchronization solved Antheil. “As a result of his musical experiments, Antheil had a good deal of experience with sound synchronization.” - “paper rolls perforated with a pseudo-random pattern would delineate the frequency path. Two rolls with the same pattern would be installed in the transmitter and receiver. If the two rolls were started at the same time, and one stayed at the launch point while the other was launched with the torpedo, and "if you had good rotary stability in the motor driving the paper rolls, you'd maintain the synchronization right on down to where the torpedo hit the ship," explains Dr. Robert Price of Consulting in Electronics Systems. Just like the player piano rolls in "Ballet Mecanique;" in fact, the two inventors designed their system to use eighty-eight frequencies--exactly the number of keys on a piano. -“(T)wo inventors worked with an MIT electrical engineer to iron out some technical kinks, and submitted their patent proposal in 1941 - “On August 11, 1942, Lamarr and Antheil awarded US Patent Number 2,292,387 for the Secret Communications System” as method for guiding torpedoes underwater - Antheil “convinced” “Navy's reticence” “due to an anti-cultural bias”: "In our patent Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that certain parts of it worked like the fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubtedly, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-headed gentlemen in Washington who Mason 9

examined our invention read no further than the words 'player piano.' 'My God,' I can see them saying, 'we shall put a player piano in a torpedo.'" - “Not only was the invention rebuffed, but so were Lamarr's efforts to contribute her considerable technical abilities to the task of defeating Hitler. When she offered to come to Washington, D.C. and work at the National Inventors Council, she was told she'd be of greater service to the war effort by remaining in Hollywood and using her star status to raise war bonds. She did indeed raise $7 million for the war effort, but her intellectual talents remained untapped.”

• New York Times: “From the Lab to the Red Carpet” Natalie Angier - Oscar winner Natalie Portman participated in “Science Talent Search” in high school. - Awards in “69-year-old contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grants.” - “For those who know how grueling it can be to put together a prize-worthy project and devote hundreds of hours of ''free'' time at night, on weekends, during spring break and summer vacation, doing real, original scientific research while one's friends are busy adolescing, the achievement is testimony enough to Ms. Portman's self-discipline and drive.”

- “Hedy Lamarr complained bitterly that people would look at her face and assume there was nothing behind it. Perhaps it was a case of projection. 'When you see a very beautiful face, it's stunning, and you yourself become stupefied,’ said Lisa Heiserman Perkins, who has completed a documentary about Lamarr. ‘So you project your own stupidity onto the person you're looking at.’ Question: What is the possible link between Laurie Montblatt and the CEO? Question: What does it mean to be stupefied? (Is it something like being bored in its results?) Question: Why is there a reluctance to look beyond appearances and/or the apparent surface of matters? Question(s): Multitasking begins as a mindless task for computers and evolves (devolves?) into an activity for people. This is echoed in the birth of Spread Spectrum technology as well; a mindless task for computers and changes into an activity for people. What is the link? Who benefits? If not people, who? Providers of technology components? Providers of technology service (cable, telecommunications, etc.)? Providers of technology support (IT)? What of planned obsolescence of technology? Does this affect people eventually?