Spring books 2024

It’s past spring, but it’s worth scribbling thoughts down.

Confusion de Confusiones Josef de la Vega. Fun 40-odd pages of options trading advice from a Sephardic guy who did business in Amsterdam in the late 1600s. Pretty fun how things stay the same. Amusingly de la Vega was probably an ancestor of my late pal Marty Halpern.

The Organization Man William H Whyte (1956).  This is a deep one, and it ties in with the “Lonely Crowd” stuff by Riesman mentioned two years ago. This is a funny book in that the time he describes is long since past: in the 50s, one could reasonably expect to join a firm out of college and have a job for life. He thought it was insane that privileged people with good educations wouldn’t be interested in entrepreneurial ventures, government service or other ways of contributing to the world. Of course we have the opposite of this now;  few people can expect to have a job with one firm now. But the phenomenon of the organization man is still very much with us. These are the NPCs that Riesman spoke of: the outer directed company man. The castrato office worker; the safety seeker who wants to work at a megacorp because it’s cozy. Whyte saw the dangers for society which would come of a large class of such people: American risk taking would go to zero, basic competence and freedom would fall with it.

People think this is dated because they think somehow that Whyte was talking about people wearing grey flannel suits, and we’re all so enlightened now we can have pink hair and go to work wearing their pajamas. This is an absurd misreading; he very explicitly talks about the kind of company man that infests current year tech companies. The therapeutic/managerial bozoid; aka the  kind of outer directed nincompoop spoken of in Riesman. Whyte rather explicitly says this: in his mind the proper American type is the inner directed “protestant work ethic” type -the risk taking entrepreneurial yankee, not the coddled collitch dope who looks to others for direction and wants to be buddies with his management chain. Some funny GE “managerial” training program versus Ford stuff (Ford has always been the most based US car company); also a great anecdote about his more Yankee/work ethic training with the Vicks company in the 1930s before these dorks became pervasive. The hilarious thing about reading this, written around 1956 is knowing these guys all turned into proto-hippies 10 years later, later more or less flushing the country down the toilet. There’s a great TV examplar of this in Bill Loud of “An American Family” going from drinky organization man to floppy collar quasi-playboy.

Lives of the Milanese Tyrants  Pier Candido Decembrio, I Tatti collection. Lives of  Dukes Filippo Maria Visconti and Francesco Sforza. The I Tatti collection is a recent Harvard published series of books in facing latin translation of Renaissance sources. I bought a half dozen of them once I noticed they existed; I’ll eventually learn enough latin to read the original texts. Unlike the Loeb translations (which are well out of copyright and cost too much), they’re recent and worth supporting. This one is quite amusing in that both Dukes were extreme characters, Sforza being the son-in-law of Visconti, and his main enemy for most of their overlapping lives. Filippo Maria  Visconti was an interesting guy with many well described quirks and idiosyncrasies, as well as many interesting tricks he used to keep his sprawling operation of Milan functioning properly. Sforza was a Mary-Sue. I assume because Sforza was still alive and in power when his section was written and Visconti was not. I really enjoyed the Visconti part; the rest of it was a bit dull.

The Italian Renaissance of Machines Paolo Galluzzi. I Tatti collection. It’s almost a coffee table picture book of renaissance sketches of various kinds of engine, military scheme and various oddball machineries. Good accompanying text, putting them in artistic context. Leonardo sketches figure in here, but also the earlier figures such as Il Taccola and Francesco di Giorgio. I guess the author has access to all of the original texts and takes a very scholar-like approach to all this. He’s more art historian than engineer, which is good in that we mostly appreciate these things as artistic achievements, which is what they are. The actual engineers who built things (like Brunelleschi, a friend of Il Taccola) didn’t leave notebooks; these aspirational notes were a mix of real things, potentially real things and hare-brained schemes.

The Presocratics Philip Wheelwright. I think I had a look through this at some point in college; summaries and choice excerpts from various of the Presocratics. Nothing new here, though somehow the dates made the biggest impression on me: I hadn’t realized how close in time most of the Presocratics were to Socrates. Nice little presentation, including people we don’t usually think of as Philosophers.

Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche. Somehow I had never read this one; it was mentioned on a recent Bapcast. It consists of three somewhat linked essays. The first, on good versus evil in Aristocratic versus Slave moralities. Classic Nietzsche stuff; true in some spiritual sense, even if it isn’t actually true in an anthropological sense (it’s probably  true for Westerners anthropologically). Second essay is a bit of a muddle, relating communal life, memory, promises and guilt. Some interesting ideas I guess, but it reminds me of the gibberish Rene Girard (who of course probably got the idea from this essay) goes on about. Most people object to Nietzsche because he uses triggering words, or has ideas that offend them: in this case I object because Nietzsche is an autist who very obviously hadn’t significantly interacted with any humans in years to have written such an essay: people aren’t that complicated, and they come equipped with certain tendencies in all cultures. Such remove of course is the philosopher’s superpower which enables him to think. Which brings us to the third essay, on asceticism. In my opinion this is the real money chapter: it verges on prophecy. Lots of interesting speculation on what asceticism means to different kinds of people, how cultures become exhausted from poor breeding, migration, disease and diet. Future potentiality of science, nihilist and bugmen to act as future cultural ordering principles. Fun read; Nietzsche would have had an amazing substack.

 

Distant Force A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation George A Roberts. Someone suggested this in the comments as an interesting memoir about a technology conglomerate. It is interesting in that Roberts (who was CEO of a steel company Vascomax: we used some of their export controlled Maraging steel superalloys for my thesis project) meticulously documents all the company acquisitions and why they did this, what the synergies were and how much money they made. I have no idea by what accounting chicanery they managed it after having read it all; wakipedia says it was “low interest rates.” It’s possible you could buy companies in those days by levering up on unsold stock as he kind of hinted, but as he never goes into the mechanics of it, I doubt it: more likely some dweeb state bullshit. I mean, he never even talks about the margins for companies he’s buying; of course it’s some kind of dweeb state bullshit rather than a rational buying of mom and  pop tech companies involving metallurgy and travelling wave tubes. Mind you this was an era that routinely put price controls on stuff like steel; the idea that this giant manufacturer of 1001 different US aerospace technologies didn’t get a little push from someone in the government seems considerably more unlikely than the idea spooks put them up to it. The fact that they pretty much all looked like this (aka Ling Temco Vought, Gulf Western); some weird unholy stew of propaganda, military technology, consumer goods (Teledyne made water pics and a brand of television), oil exploration and so on seems …. odd. Very cool company; I’d have love to have been involved with something like peak Teledyne. It’s also interesting how many of these acquisitions were very small mom and pop businesses making super high technology products: I guess they were buying up the tail end of a great era of physical tech startups. I’ve always said I assume these sorts of weird conglomerates were some kind of deep state encouraged project to preserve industrial capacity; there’s no direct evidence for this in this account, but the author George Roberts went to Naval academy with Teledyne founder Henry Singleton who was former OSS. More or less what you’d expect from a military industrial complex/spook nexus. No hate; other than killing Kennedy, they mostly seemed pretty reasonable back then: they were extremely WASP and remind me of a Boards of Canada song. Dude also wrote some books on tool steels it might be fun to own. There’s also a biography of him which has some ads on youtube, but I have been unable to find the full thing. FWIIW current year Teledyne is much like old Teledyne in that it’s a little bit of everything but seems to specialize in defense gizmos, including stuff like night vision oculars.