The 4-Hour Workweek

Sometimes I think there is almost no point in writing about a book which is so huge and so much the subject of a publicity frenzy.
But The 4-Hour Workweek interests me because I see it in many ways as an artefact of a post-literate age. Apart from its physical form (and yes, I was reading the hardcover version) there is not much about the book that is standard. It owes a debt to the bizarre and genre-changing mind of Tom Peters in its random thoughts, insistent bold sections and bullet-pointed directions to real-time information which is destined to date and disappear. That said, reading this book was quite an exciting process, and I looked forward to returning to it. Its format also encouraged skipping, however, and leafing past whole pages that you could tell at a glance were irrelevant to your needs.

Since reading the book - somewhat belatedly, I'll admit - I have noticed just how completely Ferriss' ideas have sunk into the mainstream of management, marketing and workplace standards. He lead the way in the rejection of email for example, telling people to check it twice a day at most - a practice, incidentally, which has contributed a great deal to my own productivity. I have also heard more and more people talking about "geoarbitrage," a concept I think Ferriss has popularised.

Timothy Ferriss - image from thenextweb.com

Apart from his obvious formulaic connections with Peters' work, it is hard to place Ferriss on a spectrum of self-help history. I mean, naturally he inherits all of the great traditions of American self-help literary culture, but his obsessions are so focused, and so peculiar, that it is hard to place him culturally, politically and in almost every other lit-crit way. He is, of course, a hyper-individualist and I am certain that critics like Micki McGee would have a great deal to say about his work on this front, but that is not so much my area of expertise.
As always, I am actually much more interested in text than subtext. I am fascinated by the advice he gives, buy the ideal world he seeks to create through his peculiar examples and  injunctions. There is an element of isolationism in his counsel. Ferriss the person seems to despise telephone calls and emails and any kind of un-solicited contact. I think this is a growing modern malaise, one which I recognise because I share it in large part. Ferriss wants to be left alone, and he advises his readers to pursue that same dream. By strictly limiting and controlling how we engage with the outside world, we gain some kind of internal control and can better guarantee the success of our outcomes. It is about living according to the priorities you set, and not those set by others and dictated through the medium of email and telephone calls. Indeed, Ferris admits to not checking his email for up to four weeks at a time, and says that by then most of the emergencies and problems he found described had already fixed themselves.
The final chapter of the book is very representative of the scrapbook-y nature of this text, which itself resulted from a series of blog posts. This last chapter is made up of emails from people telling Ferriss how much applying his techniques has changed their lives. Interestingly, many of these changed lives revolve around the freedom to travel and to work for oneself. Ferriss' acolytes are a restless bunch, privileging the experience of travel and the ability to work remotely while still earning big bucks.
Ultimately, The 4-Hour Workweek proved a very useful read, and I gleaned several good ideas from it which I have applied to my everyday life. I am also glad that I read it because of its popularity and influence. It really is the source of so much contemporary management-speak, so reading it will give you the upper hand when it comes to your next corporate retreat.
Quite entertaining and useful.

What I'm Up To: Gordon Powell

I'm committed now to writing one chapter a month in order to have my thesis finished by February 2012, so there's no time for dilly-dallying.
This month's chapter is focused on the writing of Australian Presbyterian clergyman Gordon Powell. Largely forgotten now, Powell was one of the most prominent and progressive clergymen in Australia in teh 50s and 60s, and he modelled his ministry very closely on that of Norman Vincent Peale. Rising to fame as the minister in charge of the beautiful art-deco St. Stephen's church in Macquarie Street, Sydney, Powell finally moved on to Melbourne, where he spent most of the rest of his life at the Collins St Independent Church.
He was a forward-thinking man, and for many years his lunchtime services at St. Stephen's were broadcast on radio stations throughout Australia. This was, of course, the kind of thing that Peale had done before him in America. And also like Peale, he branched out into popular self-help writing, creating books that taught the Christian message in an accessible, non-nonsense manner focused on psychology, happiness and the art of living.
In this chapter I am comparing Powell's work with that of Peale's, and I am describing the way that mainstream religion absorbed the ideas of New Thought in an effort to modernise and popularise its image. Norman Vincent Peale was heavily influenced by the philosophy and life of New Thought legend Ernest Holmes, though as a conservative Christian he was very wary of admitting this influence.
The key ideas of this chapter are:

• The introduction of overt and orthod Christian ideas into self-help literature
• The repetition of Bibical verse and its use as affirmation
• The emphasis on the power of faith and communal worship
• The notion of positivity
• Christianising psychiatry

Plus a few others that I probably won't get around to.
Powell, like Peale before him, was a lively writer, and the books are actually a pleasure to read. It fascinates me that these books were ever released by a mainstream publisher in Australia, because to a twenty-first century reader they seem so laden with religious talk and imagery, so much talk of prayer and miracles. They would never be released today.

The Stomach in The Science of Mind

The whole of Chapter 15 in The Science of Mind ("Physical Perfection, Concluded") is devoted to specific complaints and illnesses and how they might be cured through the power of thought. As in the rest of the book, these instructions are addressed to the Religious Science "Practitioner", though one imagines any general reader might also be able to put these instructions to work.
The basic treatement seems to be complete denial of the illness, which is exactly what Christian Science dictates. Any ailment is merely a false beliefe, and it is the duty of the practicioner to heal the patient of her false thoughts, thereby restoring her body to the absolute physical perfection that God intended, and that we are all worthy of.
On p. 256 Holmes tells us that the stomach in particular is inclined to be affected by mental causes, though many of these stomach upsets can be alleviated through the simple expedient of saying grace before meals (and I will have to try that out).
This chapter includes specific instructions and affirmations for any number of ailments, including headache and obesity. Interestingly, this kind of thing was revived (and with great success) by Louise Hay, herself a Religious Science practitioner, and more recently in Australia by people like Annette Noontil and Inna Segal. Which goes to show that you can't keep a good idea down.

Reviling The Secret

I find it interesting that, six years after its release, The Secret still has the power to excite the emotions of people, especially journalists and commentators. Just a couple of weeks ago the Sydney Morning Herald contained not one but two mentions of The Secret in its weekend edition, both, naturally, condemnatory.
This is fascinating because it proves the immense reach and impact that The Secret has had on our culture - one of the central premises of my thesis, as it happens. The hostility toward it as cultural artefact and popular-religious text also speaks to my other premise, which is that many writers, theorists and commentators have an extremely limited knowledge of the history of religion and of popular literature. If they did even the slightest amount of research in the area they would find much to intrigue them, and they also wouldn't slip so easily into foolish, uniniformed and paternalistic cliches when talking about the genre.
The Secret is, for the most part, a collection of much older texts and ideas re-packaged for a 21st Century audience - interestingly, it largely strips the overt references to theism and Christianity from the writings and and instead re-casts the central tenets of New Thought in a manner much more palatable to a secular readership.
As we know, New Thought, the philosophy that informs The Secret, is not new - it's about 150 years old now, and is loosely based in any case on much older mystical notions that can be found, without much trouble, in the literature of most of the older religions.
Because The Secret has been immensely popular, and because it is targeted so bluntly at a post-literate, short-attention-span kind of audience, it is easy to make fun of it. But to my mind it is a cheap kind of joke, and speaks more of the writer's underlying elitism and lack of knowledge than their rapier-like wit.
In her piece ostensibly slamming the soft-liberal, ecological subtext of the film Avatar, Miranda Devine makes a doozy of an error in equating this kind of philosophy with the ideas that inform The Secret. Even a cursory amount of research would have shown Ms. Devine that New Thought is more closely associated with the rhetoric of libertarianism, individualism and utilitarianism, and explicitly rejects the kind of millenarian ecological rhetoric that underlies Avatar. Most people of Mr. Cameron's political stance find the ideas of The Secret repugnant, re-inforcing as they do the primacy of personal choice and responsibility, independent of identity politics and other broader social movements. If anything, the philosophy of The Secret is almost entirely in line with the liberal neo-conservative values espoused by Ms. Devine herself.
Later on in the paper Tim Dick provides a ho-hum kind of opinion piece in which he offers us his not-very-interesting take on The Secret. In a particularly vitriolic (yet vapid) passage he says:

The only thing Byrne proves is how idiotic our mindless aspirations can make us, and that it is possible for human society to regress. The success of the ''book'' is surely one of the great bafflements of recorded time; that this ''positive'' mumbo-jumbo can top bestseller charts while great works of fiction struggle, even though most fiction is closer to reality despite being entirely made up.

Putting aside the fact that the comparison he makes is pointless, this passage points to his complete dis-connect, not just from the history of religion, but from the history of literature itself. It is no "bafflement" that a book espousing most of the central ideas of modern Western culture should strike a chord with readers, particularly since the dawn of printing such books of popular advice, exhortation and hope have always sold extraordinarily well, and outstripped fiction in both sales and cultural influence.
I am heartened by the fact that self-help attracts critics from all sides of the political spectrum, often for wildly contradictory reasons.
But let's ease up on making cheap observations based on a book you probably haven't read, and a historical cultural movement you've made no effort to research or understand. It's just not funny.

Richard Bach

When I was just a toddler I was taken to see the film version of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Perhaps it was the Neil Diamond soundtrack that attracted my parents (my father was always a huge fan), or perhaps they imagined a Disney-esque animated feature filled with singing, cavorting seagulls. They stoically sat through the film, and later on it became a part of family legend - how insufferably bad and terminally dull was Jonathan Livingston Seagull. All throughout my childhood it was held up to me as the pinnacle of boredom. Should I complain of having nothing to do, my mother would roll her eyes and say, "Oh you're bored? Well you obviously don't remember sitting through the entire length of Jonathan Livingston Seagull..."
Richard Bach's novel, on which the film was based (what an idea!) was absolutely ubiquitous in the 70s. Every home had a copy, and as a child I would be drawn to it. With trepidation I would pull a copy down from my aunt's bookshelf and, just before I could crack it open, my father would shout, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull!? Ho ho, you're in for a treat there. Most boring book ever written. But it back, right now. Did I ever tell you about the time I took you to see the movie...?"
Years later I worked for a long period at Australia's then-largest New Age bookshop. I was surprised at how popular Richard Bach's novels continued to be. We always kept them in stock, and they would always sell a dozen or so copies a year, which is quite respectable for a backlist book. Even the dreaded Jonathan Livingston Seagull would be asked for on occasion.
Now, because of this childhood stigma I have never read a single word of any of Mr. Bach's books, so I'm not about to offer a critique. I'm sure they are lovely, and they are certainly an essential part of the history of New Age/Self-Help publishing, which means I'll have to be reading them sooner, rather than later.
Last weekend I went to the big book sale at the Great Hall at Sydney Uni, and it was heaven. I scored a box and a half of self-help classics, including a copy of Richard Bach's The Bridge Across Forever. I'll start reading it as soon as I've finished the wonderful Dennis Cooper short stories I'm currently reading. I don't like to have two fiction projects going at the same time.

Eckhart Tolle

One of the more interesting phenomena in the recent history of self-help publishing has been the rise and rise of Eckhart Tolle.
It is really quite difficult to fathom the appeal of Tolle, but he has written one of the bestselling books of all time, so obviously I am a little out of synch with the rest of the world. But even his most diehard fans will admit that he is not a charismatic speaker, and someone from among my acquaintance who adores the man confessed that whenever she can't sleep she just picks up her well-thumbed copy of A New Earth and after just a few paragraphs she drifts off.....
As an author he is actually quite difficult to categorise. In a pefect world I wouldn't even list him as a self-help author, because I really think the books are more religious in content, spelling out a pretty basic Advaita Vedanta message and observing none of the standard forms of the self-help genre. But booksellers seem determined to shelve him in the self-help section, and it is marketed and promoted as a self-improvement book, so I will bow to the pressure of public opinion.
I do, however, think its disingenuous of people like Oprah (and Tolle himself) to state that the books make no religious claims and are compatible with all spiritual worldviews. Even the most basic reading of A New Earth will show that it delineates quite a specific theological viewpoint which is completely at odds with mainstream Christianity. This doesn't bother me, but fundamentalist Christians are quite right to attack it as a piece of quite specific religious literature.
Al these criticisms aside, A New Earth and The Power of Now are both such monumentally successful works that their influence will be felt for decades to come. I remember when The Power of Now first came out I was asked to review it, and my judgement was that it was dull and derivative and no-one would ever read it......rather humbling to look back on one's old pronouncements.
A year or so agao, when I was working in a bookshop, a man came in and asked wher he might find Eckhart. I automatically lead him to the enormous piles of Mr. Tolle's work, but the man looked at me rather nonplussed and said "Actually, I meant Meister Eckhardt...."
Don't get me wrong, I think the content of Mr. Tolle's books is perfectly acceptable. Indeed, for the most part I find myself in total agreement with him. It's just that it's all been said before - much more conscisely and much more interestingly at that. A New Earth is such a deathly dull book. I really don't know why people rave about it so.