Managerial Impotence

I put two books on hold from the library so I can re-read passages therefrom.

Goings-on in my day-to-day having to do with what Luann Van Houten called a “complete lack of business sense” with a generous helping of “managerial impotence” got me reflecting on a noteworthy passage from a book I read in 2019 called Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis.

I asked for the book to be delivered as a hold to my local library branch, took photos of the relevant pages to peruse later and then handed the book in at the desk with a request to cancel the hold. That’s how it’s done with library holds; in an out with feline agility. The passage runs a touch over five pages and is entitled “On Enemies.”

Christakis and his Human Nature Lab at Yale University did research and crunched numbers to buttress the commonsense but profound-in-its-implications assertion that “the capacity for making friends comes with a capacity for making enemies.” The part in which I’m most interested starts at the top of page 265 after Christakis has made the “simple observation” that “one must know someone in order to be either a friend or an enemy.” He goes on to point out “not only that the enemy-making process requires contact and familiarity, but also that enemies are more likely to be found within one’s own group than among people in other groups” (both emphases here are Christakis’s).

In the penultimate sentence of the “On Enemies” passage he adds, almost as an aside, the insight that in 2019 made me abruptly stop taking too seriously the apparently ineluctable conundrum of regularly finding one’s self rubbing elbows with people with whom one shares a genuine dislike and start figuring out how to maneuver more deftly and less unintelligently in such situations. Christakis and team “also found that the more friends a person had, the more enemies he or she was likely to have, with each ten extra friends being associated with one extra enemy” (emphasis is mine, all mine).

This won’t be as profound to a lot of readers as it was to me, but it helped me quite a lot to know that there is good scientific data behind the problem of just not being able to get along with some people, especially assholes you have to regularly see and cooperate with. When I’m stressed or inspired or exhausted or lonely or optimistic, all of which I have been in combination for weeks now, I must flee to cherished passages from favored books. Even if I’m not going to read or re-read the whole book I often like to simply touch them, peruse them and/or just have ‘em around like intellectual stuffed animals.

Along these lines I also had the library send The Actual by Saul Bellow. I checked that one out and brought it home; it is next to me on my combination windowsill/bedside table. I read this in 2017 and the same kind of bullshit that got my thoughts back to Christakis also got them around to one particular passage from The Actual, in fact one of only two parts I remember. The part stuck with me where the protagonist/narrator Trellman gets summoned to a peculiar meeting with an impossibly wealthy magnate acquaintance Adletsky, the purpose of which it takes Adletsky some pages to work his way round to.

“‘So you had a Roosevelt-style brain trust?’” asks Trellman. Replies Adletsky, “‘No. I had people it benefited me to consult, and I’d like to arrange occasional meetings with you, to be filled in on this or that.’” Later he says that “‘For business I don’t need you. Don’t even try to advise me. I’ll only now and then ask you. In my active years I did very little socializing. I have to do it now. And there must be a way to make it pleasanter.’” Trellman says in his narration to the reader that “I said, with my usual reserve, that I’d be very pleased to be a part of his brain trust.”

It occurred to me yesterday that everything I’d like to adjust about my life right now could for the sake of succinctness by encapsulated in a desire to be more frequently in circumstances that require me to wear a suit. I should probably figure out how to infiltrate suit spaces and work backwards from there. If I met the right robber baron at the right affair I could theoretically talk myself away from those workaday banes of Luann’s and the adversaries one accrues in such environments. I must have gotten the brain trust notion from Bellow and it has eructated back to the surface of my consciousness. It’s the main thing I carry forth from The Actual. Money, paperwork and management are too uninteresting to me to be worth the investment of time and effort it would take to get anywhere of my own with them, but I’d be an alright brain trustee for an Adletsky-like “trillionaire” or trillionairess along the lines sketched by Bellow via Trellman. I could still fill out my schedule at various joint-crunching gigs but could do less of them. Fewer enemies and more Adletskys. This is more of an observation than an ambition.

The only other thing I remember from The Actual is when this character Amy gets hot tea poured on her as part of a strange social ruse: ““I’m scalded,” said Amy loudly. She stood up.”

That’s a deeply Bellovian touch, the lack of exclamation point or emphasis in what would we would naturally think of as quite an emphatic exclamation. A master craftsman’s skill at capturing the odd ways in which people really do almost unbelievably sometimes talk, somehow almost too real for fiction. By 1997 when The Actual was published Saul Bellow seemed to be drawn more to the momentary and the precise than to the expansive and universal of his most well-regarded novels. To this end his books also mostly got shorter as he got older. But one can make a solid case that his early mastework The Adventures of Augie March stands as his finest accomplishment. If I live long and well enough to get around to it I unquestionably have a solid re-reading of that one in the cards.