Category: Administrative

Seems there is a blogger meme going around about naming the books which influenced you the most.  This is a hard one to resist, so I’m not going to, though I know I’m certainly not going to “win” this, as my tastes are not high brow.  While I’ve read Plato and Nietzsche and so on, they were not major influences on my thinking.

Jane Jacobs, “The Economy of Cities”, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”. These three books, especially the first two, may have influenced my thoughts on economics more than any others.  Jacobs willingness to throw standard economics overboard and to look at particular details of how the world actually works on a basic building block level, and her mastery not of detail, but of the lessons which can be drawn from detail, made a big impression on me.  She certainly wasn’t right about everything, but she grabbed a few strings, pulled hard, and wasn’t scared by the fact that what came up didn’t match orthodoxy.

Bullfinch’s Mythology.  I spent the better part of grade 4 reading every book on mythology I could find, and this is just a stand in for all of them.  I don’t remember the names of most of them, but to this day I remember the stories: the Golden Fleece, Leda and the Swan, Ragnarok, and so on.  Other youngsters had favorite superheroes or sports stars, I had favorite Gods (Athena, Artemis and Odin).  My twitter icon is Odin with his two ravens, Hugin and Mugin (thought and memory).  I seriously considered naming this blog “the Cassandra Complex”.

Robert Parker’s Spencer Novels, in particular “Early Autumn”. Light easy reads, but Parker had a message about how to live life.  Be good at something (it doesn’t matter what), know what you will do and won’t do, figure out the traits the person you want to be has, and work until you have those traits.  When I was 21, and read all the novels published to that point in a couple weeks, that was a message I needed to hear.

Thomas Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” The cycle of how paradigms are accepted, filled out and then overthrown enthralled me.  Read this one alongside Randall Collins’ “The Sociology of Philosophies” to get an overview of how intellectual networks form, how they require change, and how intellectuals cluster into networks with “great” intellectuals tending to be major nodes.

Randall Collins, “An Introduction to non-obvious Sociology” and “Interaction Ritual Chains“. Collins meshes together a theory of how symbols are formed and how interaction empowers or disempowers people into a construct which explains important parts of phenomena as diverse as fandom, religion and marriage.  These books and his “Weber: A Skeleton Key” introduced me to conflict theory, to Weber and to and in combination with Kuhn, helped me understand not just how much “reality” is socially constructed (I knew that at a young age) but some of the mechanisms by which it is socially constructed.

“God Stalk”, by P C Hodgell.  Odds are you have neither heard of this book, nor read it, but in my teen years I probably read it over 30 times.  The way the protagonist, Jame, manipulated belief to create and destroy minor gods fascinated me, but so did the fact that there was a reality which could not be manipulated, a bedrock where belief did not matter—it was what it was.  Likewise her struggle to both be honorable and to live the life she wanted struck a cord.  Raised as I was with a belief in noblesse oblige and that to be a man was to have a code of honor, Jame’s dilemma, though written in the high relief of fantasy, seemed all too familiar.

Andrew Vachss “Burke” Novels In my early twenties I was down and out, bloody fingernails away from the street, working at awful, humiliating menial jobs and suffering from the beginnings of an illness which would wind up costing me my health for the remainder of my twenties.  My world was an ugly one: rooming houses, loading docks, screaming bosses, minimum wage and the possibility of a future which offered nothing better.  I would look in the mirror and see myself at 50, older, wrinkled, worn and without hope.  Vachss showed me a world even grittier than mine, which his protagonist and friends managed to live in with integrity: true to themselves.  Certainly I was no martial artist, or clever ex-con, or mechanical genius, but still, the sense of despair, of making the smallest of differences, of the only thing that mattered being having your own rules and sticking to them, spoke to me.  If Burke could do it, if he could use a moral code to wring dignity and meaning out of the world, so could I.

“The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir.  The second time I went to university, I became fascinated by feminism—by the anger, the hatred and the sense of injustice that many of the feminists I met seemed to ball up inside themselves, like eternally burning pitch—black and consuming.  I took a number of courses on feminism, but in none of them was I told to read The Second Sex.  Instead, a couple years later, I stumbled on it, and everything they had been trying to say clicked into place as I read Beauvoir.  The Second Sex summed it all up and said it better than any of the feminists who came after.  Beauvoir was angry, make no mistake, but her anger was kept on tight leash, it did not consume her, but instead served as fuel and illumination.  Since then I’ve rarely read any feminist and not thought “Beauvoir said it better, decades ago.”

“The Art of War”, Sun-Tzu and “The Japanese Art of War”, by Tomas Cleary. I read these two books around the same time, and they changed how I thought not just about strategy but about how to think and act.  The principles of formlessness and concentration, the Japanese concept of how one masters an art by mastering the details till one forgets them, and the Buddhist concept of acting without placing a censor before one’s actions all enthralled me.  This lead to a further fascination with Buddhism, Taoism and the different ideas and paths towards, not so much enlightenment, but seeing the world clearly by seeing it without preconceptions.  Later I was to conclude that if you aren’t, indeed, enlightened, the best you can do is to choose the paradigms or glosses you place over the world, knowing that you are doing so, and knowing the advantages and limitations of whatever model you are using.

Barbara Hambly, The Darwath Trilogy. Not great fiction, not even great fantasy, these three books nonetheless made a huge impression on me because Hambly’s theory of knowledge and power resonated with me.  I have come to accept as true her maxim that people, things and even ideas give themselves to you when you love them for themselves, and not for what they can do for you.  I have used this theory when leading teams, when making friends, and when learning new fields, and when I have been able to execute it, it has never failed me.

There are more books which have influenced me, of course.  For much of my life I read at least a book a day, and sometimes more, and even now I read a couple a week and wish I read more (the internet sucks away my time and I sometimes wish it had never been invented.)

Still, these books have all helped make me who I am today.  They have laid the bricks of my intellectual foundation and have taught me about what it means to create a life worth living in a universe which has the meaning we give to it, and nothing more.

What are some books which have influenced you, how have they influenced you, and why?

Dave Anderson, of the Newshoggers, has agreed to cross-post some of his posts here. I’ve long admired Dave’s writing, and more importantly, his smarts.  He writes articles regularly I wish I’d written, and his approach to and understanding of warfare is very close to my own.  He also cuts fine when it comes to domestic issues, especially local economic issues.

Of course, the Newshoggers are worth reading (as are all blogs on the blogroll), but if you don’t spend time over there, Dave will be spending some time here.

I’m heading out to Victoria to take care of the necessary.  I have queued a few posts for the time I’m traveling, one on the American police system, one critique of the libertarian theory of earnings (more interesting than it sounds like, unless you don’t like slapping around libertarian morons) and one on a reason why things don’t get fixed in America.

I do have a laptop, so you may see me around during my travels, but as a creature of long habit, when traveling I tend to read books instead of surfing.

I received news today that my father had died.  He’d had pneumonia, the “old man’s friend”, but somehow I didn’t expect him to die of it.  He’d been written off so many times and pulled through that even though I thought it was theoretically possible, I didn’t really believe this would be it.  And perhaps the idea that my father could die, that it was possible, wasn’t something I really believed, emotionally

But he could.  And he has.

A big man, both tall and broad with a red face, my father was one of those men for whom “larger than life” was coined.  His temper was legendary, and he often seemed to radiate fury.  I had seen him, in his prime, wade into large crowds, and a path would melt open in front of him without a word being spoken or him having to push at all.  I have seen men literally shake when he lowered his voice to a whisper.  His ready temper made him a bad father in many respects, and a worse husband, but it had its uses.  I still remember, when I was 23, and extremely ill, the way my father used his fury, a living thing which seemed barely leashed, to make sure I got the care I needed, and was treated the way he felt I should be.

He had me late, at age 39, so I never knew him as a young man. From the time I was 1 till I was 5, we lived in Malaysia, and we seemed to be quite wealthy. But a business deal went bad, due to politics, and my father lost it all.  He never really recovered.  There was a nasty edge to his temper afterwards which I don’t remember from before.  Always a bit of a boozer, he hit the alcohol harder, drinking every night when he came home.  We returned to Canada, but somehow he seemed out of place there.  He was a man meant for Asia, a man more at home in other countries than in his own.

In my life, he seemed most comfortable as a boss, especially in third world countries.  When he managed a large project in Bangladesh during my teens, he seemed in his element  The temper which in Canada caused him problems was shrugged off, and his loyalty and fairness shone through and were respected by those who worked for him.  I remember his second in command, a local man, telling me that he didn’t care about my father’s rages, what he cared about was that if my father was wrong, or did wrong, he would admit and apologize.  What mattered is that when man’s wife was sick, and needed medicine, he’d get it for him.  What mattered is that if a man needed help in court, my father would be there for him.  In Bangladesh the temper was not an issue, and his virtues were respected.

Infamously focused on “getting the job done”, he didn’t manage UN FAO (Food and Agriculture) headquarters well, cutting past their procedures and concerns time and time again.  I remember hearing the blow-by-blow of his battles with “Rome”, year after year.  He was protected by the fact that the locals whom he was there to help, including the Chief Forester and the Minister, loved him.

Eventually, of course, Rome finished him off.  They told his supporters in country that it was bad for his career to stay so long in one place, removed him from Bangladesh and his support, then they never gave him work ever again.  A beautiful piece of bureaucratic infighting, from which he never fully recovered, being a man who needed a job to do which mattered.   Playing nice and by the rules had won out over getting the job done, and my father was a dinosaur, a man who grew up in the Great Depression, a man with little finesse and no respect for rules which didn’t make sense to him.  The bull had been gelded.

My own relationship with my Dad was rocky.  I didn’t like how he treated me, and more importantly, I didn’t like how he treated my mother.  For a couple years in my twenties I cut off all contact with him, and unfortunately with my mother (it being one of those households where it was impossible to get to the wife without going through the husband.)  His drinking and his temper revolted me.

As with many men, much of what I am today is in direct reaction to my father—in direct reaction against him.  And yet, the truth is I have many of his characteristics, including his distaste for game playing, his belief that doing the job right is what matters and his unwillingness to tolerate bullshit and hypocrisy.

But as he aged, he mellowed.  We arranged that there would be no drinking during my visits.  And, perhaps most importantly, when I was deathly ill in my early 20s, he charged out from Victoria BC, to Toronto and helped in every way he could.  It’s something I’ve never forgotten.  The one time it really mattered, he came through.

So I’ll miss the old bastard. I wish I’d taken his illness more seriously this time, and gone out to see him, but I’ll try and honor his memory by remembering the best of him, the man who got the job done in the third world, saving many lives and to hell with Rome; the man who charged out to Toronto and helped me when I was sick; the man who helped many of those who needed it, who was loyal to his friends and those who worked for him.

If there is an afterlife, may he find in it a battle worthy of his rage, and the wisdom to know when and who to unleash it on.  In many ways he wasn’t a good man, but he was a man, and if he wasn’t a good family man, it is still true that the world is a better place for him having lived than if he had not.

May we all be able to say the same when our own time comes.

I’m travelling to Victoria, with a brief digression in Vancouver on the way back.  A couple of posts are queued for the time I’m gone, but as my laptop is on the fritz, I probably won’t be checking in much.  To all a good week, and I’ll see you all on the other end.  I doubt much will have changed economically.

Clio, By Giovanni Baglione

This is the home blog of Ian Welsh.  It seemed like time to make one since as a peripatetic author and editor for hire my writings are scattered all over the web and in many cases have disappeared as the blogs they were on went out of business.

If you want to read what I’ve written in the past, you can find partial archives at Firedoglake, The Agonist and the Huffington Post.

Going forward, everything I write will be published here, though it may be published at another site as well.  There will also be content here that is not found elsewhere, so do check back, or sign up for newsfeed or email updates.  I will also be showcasing previously-published articles that withstand the test of time, as many of the older ones were read by very few people when they were originally written, and sadly remain pertinent today.

I hope you will contribute your comments and I look forward to your feedback and suggestions.

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