I found this photo on dreamstime. The quote we'll get to. They aren't related. Necessarily. The following is from a review of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families: Building a Beautiful Family Culture in a Turbulent World. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing...

Stephen Covey's books must be read as a description of a capitalism that has no place to go. His ideal reader is not the person who creates wealth, it is the middle-level bureaucrat working in a large-scale organization trying to get through the day. Into this world of purposeless activity, Covey introduces structure. For people powerless to influence the destiny of the organizations for which they work, he offers the illusion of efficacy. In a world in which competition is sublimated into furious struggles over seating arrangements around tables, as if any change from yesterday to today must be divined for meaning, he tells his readers that win-lose is over. Mormonism's great contribution to the work of Stephen Covey has been to provide the unwritten and perhaps unconscious assumptions for a secular version of what life means in organizations in which most people spend most of the time spinning their wheels. And now, we are told, the family has become another one of those organizations.

Bourgeois ideology rarely treated success in capitalism as a precondition for success in other realms of life. Hard-nosed and realistic when it came to the world of business, the bourgeoisie turned romantic and sentimental when it came to the world of the family. Feminists of a certain sort have criticized this division into separate spheres, as if, for women to achieve equality, the rules of the professions and the practices of the family have to be the same; and they have just been joined by Stephen Covey, whose self-announced objective is to further not loving families, not self-respecting families, not nourishing families, not decent families, not autonomous families, but effective families. This amounts to a managerialist redefinition of the family. By treating the family as just another form of organization, no different in any significant way from the firm, Covey conveys, in his breezily chilling manner, the sense of an Iron Cage far more impregnable than anything that the more tragic and pessimistic Weber could have imagined.

from: Capitalism, Mormonism, and the doctrines of Stephen Covey: White Magic in America by Alan Wolfe
source: The New Republic, 23 February 1998
via: HighBeam™ Research

The reference to the "Iron Cage" derives from Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Page refs are to the Routledge 2nd edition (pictured and linked), 2001.

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (p. 123)

note: Richard Baxter (1615-1691)
was a Puritan divine who wrote on ethics

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals or, if neither, mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has obtained a level of civilization never before achieved.' (p. 124)

"Don't you ever ego surf," I ask Robin. "Don't you ever go looking to see where you are?" She says, no, she doesn't feel the need to do that. "I'm right here," she says.

Me, I'm not so sure. So every once in a while, I go have a look around. Lately, I've been messing with Google Print again. One thing I discovered that's sorta nice is that there are 140 books indexed there that mention Cluetrain.

There are also a couple that mention my other blog, which used to be --- and sometimes still is -- a webzine. But imagine my surprise to find it listed in Handbook of Research Design and Social Measurement by Delbert C. Miller. Click the link or the graphic, then search inside the book for "Entropy Gradient Reversals." Of course, this is meaningless information at this point -- and probably always was. But curious to look back and see the tracks we lay down, like the tunnels some insects carve under tree bark.

And then there was a mention in Web Word Wizardry: A Net-Savvy Writing Guide...

It would be a sad day if every ezine writer used the same style. Consider the benign, discursive style of Dr. Ralph F. Wilson's ezine, Web Marketing Today. Everything he writes has a strong personal stamp... and is selling, selling, selling all the way.

By way of extreme contrast, consider the style of Christopher Locke, aka RageBoy (see screenshot).

Good thing you can't really read that last line. Here's a bit of it in which I'm attempting to describe a chapter of Gonzo Marketing I was working on in late December, 2000 -- way behind deadline to get the book on the stands in time for September 11.

As Nietzsche bought the farm in 1900, you can see that this sort of general shakiness about the meaning of things has been floating around for quite some time. Hell, you could go back to the classical philosophers. Say you're walking in Memphis, home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks. Is what you think a thing to be what everyone else understands it as? Is the world as it appears to you, or does it look completely different to someone who didn't grow up in Darien, Connecticut and get an MBA from Wharton? Of course, Plato and Aristotle and that lot wouldn't have been able to tell an MBA from a bananafish. And anyway, who cares? Who cares, especially, because such questions verge on dangerous ground, on terra incognita. Business prides itself on hard-nosed practicality and pragmatism, even if it gets all dewey-eyed wondering where its pragmatism came from. Philosophy, anthropology, sociology, linguistics? Leave that stuff to the long hairs. We got a business plan to write!

And so on for another 7,000 words. It doesn't get any better. And I don't mean: "it doesn't get any better or "it just doesn't get any /better." I mean: it doesn't get any better.

Possibly related...

To speak of a rock'n'roll cinema isn't to imply that such a thing exists or, apart from a few brief glimpses, ever has. Rather it is to suggest a zone of unrealized potential, mistaken identities, and blown chances -- a Loch Ness populated with a horde of missing links and deformed monstrosities. From Elvis to Ken (Tommy-rot) Russell. Scorpio Rising's "He's a Rebel" (Jesus as Leader of the Pack) to Performance's "Memo from Turner" (Mick Jagger as Ike and Tina by way of William Burroughs), the relationship between rock and movies constitutes a history of what might have been. At the same time, the marriage of Hollywood's pandering impulses to rock's lust for assimilation has given us MTV: the revenge of each upon the other. With music and the moving image locked in a dance of mutually assured destruction, the form amounts to a pox a deux on both their houses.

from: Scorpio descending: in search of rock cinema
by Howard Hampton
source: Film Comment, 1 March 1997
via: HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 1997 Film Society of Lincoln Center

The title slug is from a weirdly beautiful song Buffalo Springfield did on Last Time Around called "In the Hour of Not Quite Rain." While the album title probably derives from some fundamental misconstruance of the Buddhist Wheel of Life (and mostly Death) combined with the fact that the band was breaking up -- hard to do, Buddhist or not; anybody around my base is it -- the song owes its provenance more to certain herbal essences . That was my take, at any rate, as I was deep into some pretty fine mescaline when I first heard it. Modern or not, the mirror was definitely giving back more than it got. Angle of incidence, angle of reflection: equal in most phases of the moon, but not all.

I woke at dawn this morning. Unusual, to say the least. I finally bailed last night after realizing I was so off in the weeds there was no way back. Not that that's unusual. Hardly. But to give you an idea... I was developing graphic proof (too ugly to replicate here) that the CDC used the Microsoft Comic Sans font for one of its pages on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), which you may know better as Mad Cow disease. Now that's funny. Sort of.

And because it once somehow got lodged in my stash of odd and disconnected facts that BSE/Mad Cow is a prion disease -- prions being neither bacteria nor viruses but rather, rogue proteins -- I rabitted off in search of CDC prion pages. The weird thing about prion diseases is that they seem to be caused by cannibalism.

Kuru. e.g., is a human prion disease. I have an interest in these things. When I was a kid, about ten or twelve, I had a bacteriology lab in my basement. I don't often admit this, especially these days, when the government doesn't want anybody to know what a piece of cake it is to culture anthrax and smallpox and stuff. Actually, smallpox isn't quite that easy, as it was eradicated a few decades ago. But if you believe The Demon in the Freezer (and why not?), the Russkies have got twenty tons of weaponized smallpox floating around the black market, no one knows quite where. Nice, huh?

Then, without warning (there usually isn't any): bam! I ran across this genuinely strange page about Unicorns. Now, I feel I should explain -- if only for those who have perhaps dropped by this blog for the first time -- that I am not your basic Unicorn kinda guy. I am more your basic Elvis on black velvet with the eyes that follow you around the room kinda guy. So this is a bit hard to explain. I guess the only way to do this is to show you the picture and hope you get the... well, picture.

And here, thanks to the miracle of Firefox's "View Selection Source" feature, is the the verbatim caption text.

South Netherlandish, The Unicorn Is Found
from Hunt of the Unicorn (1495-1505)
Wool warp, wool, silk, silver and gilt wefts, 368 cm x 379 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr., 1937 (37.80.2)
Cover topic: Prion Disease

Unicorn Tapestries, Horned Animals, and Prion Disease

Polyxeni Potter*
*Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Click on the cover, above (or here), to read the whole thing. Amazing. Really. Prions. Unicorns. Who would have guessed at such a connection? Something about your philosophy, Horatio. But again, as I was saying, off in those weeds so deep there was no way out. I mean, what hope was there, really, of explaining where I'd gotten myself to? So I went to bed.

On waking, before dawn (did I already say that? it's evening now, and a thunderstorm is rolling in off the plains) I returned like Sisyphus to my endless surfing -- and found this on my Amazon recommendations page: Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. I guess I paid closer attention than usual, three-quarters asleep as I was, because well, does that guy on the right have a really long arm? Or what is that exactly? I've always prided myself as being an intellectual, and sometimes it shows more than others. Other times, I mean. Yeah, whatever. So look, I haven't read this book, not sure I ever will, but something about it got me writing this at first light today, and you learn to go with these things. Never look a gift muse in the mouth, even if all you get out of it is typing practice.

So, having no idea, really, what this book is about, I'll have to really on Kirkus Reviews, which says:

Another cardinal shift effected by Rousseau and passed along to latter-day writers was fragmentation of the "I" and skepsis about the adequacy of language for life-writing. A prominent inheritor of the autobiographical tradition, Beckett declared the whole enterprise impossible, based on a postmodern doubt of reason, cohesive narrative, and the unified voice. In Krapp's Last Tape, The Unnamable, and other works, Beckett wrote specifically on the life-writer's failure to account for the past in any objective way. Mixing the first and third person, Beckett's narrators reminisce about their prior acts of memory, incapable either of pinning down the original event or completing their narrative. Detached from reality and trapped in incessant self-referentiality, the memory of postmodern writers signs a death sentence to the genre of autobiography.

Personally, I would say signs the death warrant. The death sentence is what is then carried out -- a bit too abstract to "sign," if you ask me. This is merely a quibble, of course, but at least it's not self-referential -- unless you count the bit about asking me. Good thing this isn't my autobiography I'm writing here. God alone knows what it is. And I'm not holding my breath on that one anymore than Beckett was waiting for Godot. I almost named my daughter Selene Godot, thinking it sounded cool. But the in-laws said what? God-dot? What are you thinking? So then I thought of Selene Mirage, but someone said Mirage sounded like a stripper's name, plus, much worse, Mitsubishi had just brought out a model by that name, and I figured if it got big, Selene would sound like a sports car. However, this is getting a bit attached to reality and trapped in cessant referentiality, so I'd better, you know, move on...

Saving my narrative's virtual bacon at this thorny juncture, the nothing less than amazing Highbeam Research database comes through once again! I swear, I didn't look this up there first. I searched on "Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing" and found this footnote in the second hit.

from: Genome and Genre: DNA and Life Writing
by G. Thomas Couser
source: Biography, 1 January 2001
via: HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 2001 University of Hawaii Press

In his recent book Memory and Narrative, James Olney has argued that "memory and narrative, together and alike, are the two major epiphenomena of consciousness, the dual defining conditions of our being human and not something else" (417). This works well as a descriptor of the species as a whole, not so well as a test of membership in the species; that is, I would not want to conclude that an individual deprived of the capacity for memory or narrative thereby ceases to be human.

So I guess that means that memory and narrative are, like, real real important, but not necessarily indispensable. Whew, that's a relief! Because now I can't remember why I started writing this. Or what it's even about. If anything. So I suppose I'm more in the Samuel Becket camp. It's a fact, after all, that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 and I did not. I feel that connects us more deeply than had we been brothers. To finish this off then -- once and for all, perhaps -- here's a little clip from his book, Watt, via and thanks to...

Here he stood. Here he sat. Here he knelt. Here he lay. Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the bed; from the door to the fire, from the fire to the door; from the fire to the door, from the door to the fire; from the window to the bed, from the bed to the window; from the bed to the window, from the window to the bed; from the fire to the window, from the window to the fire; from the window to the fire, from the fire to the window; from the bed to the door, from the door to the bed; from the door to the bed, from the bed to the door; from the door to the window, from the window to the fire; from the fire to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the bed; from the bed to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the window; from the window to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the door; from the door to the fire, from the fire to the bed; from the door to the window, from the window to the bed; from the bed to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the fire; from the fire to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the door; from the door to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the window; from the window to the fire, from the fire to the bed; from the door to the fire, from the fire to the window; from the window to the fire, from the fire to the door; from the window to the bed, from the bed to the door; from the door to the bed, from the bed to the window; from the fire to the window, from the window to the bed; from the bed to the window, from the window to the fire; from the bed to the door, from the door to the fire; from the fire to the door, from the door to the bed.

The room was furnished solidly and with taste.

Funny guy, that Beckett. Heh.