I was sad to see, in the recent New York Magazine treatment of Doug Liman, a note of agony.  Liman talks about his new film, Jumper, as something that "completes my sellout trilogy."  He calls Swingers, his first film, "the one film that was truly not a sellout."  Liman believes that Mr. and Mrs. Smith cost him his "indie credibility." 

There is something faintly old fashioned about this agony.  From an anthropological point, I can’t help feeling like I am looking at a little bit of New York history, an artifact of a time gone by.  What we are hearing in Liman is the modernist insistence that the world must be dichotomized into art and commerce, that those who make one can’t make the other, that art is necessarily worthy and commerce necessarily craven, that credibility goes to art, condemnation to commerce.  Those who engage in commerce instead of culture are "selling out."

From an anthropological view, this concept was installed with special virulence in popular culture sometime after World War II.  Any one who made culture for commercial purposes (art directors, copywriters, TV producers, Broadway producers) were filled with self reproach.  It was customary for ad executives to let you know that they were "working on a novel," lest you imagine that they took advertising seriously.  The wonder is that Manhattan turned out so much brilliant popular culture, when so many of its meaning makers were so conflicted, so self hating.

But there it is, the modernism was clear on this: culture that comes from commerce was compromised, bad, dirty and wrong.  From an anthropological (aka, a Martian point of view) it was an amazing vital and formative cultural construction.  And it exists still.  It torments still.  When Liman talks of "selling out" for making films that have entertained millions, it is virulent.

But here is the post modernist view.  (I wonder if we shouldn’t call this the "past modernist" view, because when we wish to say "not modern," we don’t necessarily mean what "post modernism" has come to mean.)  There are two ways to make the case.

First, culture that comes from commerce has got steadily better.  This says the "art vs. commerce" argument was wrong.  People insisted TV was a waste land from which nothing good could ever come.  And of course, now we watch The Wire, Six Feet Under and other HBO productions with the conviction that its pretty good indeed.  Even the major networks now turn out great work, as I think Raines, Life, 30 Rock demonstrate. This evidence is extraordinarily damaging to the "art vs. commerce" argument.  Good work should never have come to TV or Hollywood, if the dichotomy were real.  (See the work of John Carey, Tyler Cowen, John Docker, Steven Johnson, D.L. LeMahieu, and Robert Thompson, as below.)

Second, we are coming to see that art and commerce are not mutually exclusive, that it’s ok to do both.  This argument accepts the original argument: art is better than commerce.  But
it says that we no longer have to choose.  People who do one can do the other.  Specifically, people who do commerce can still do art. (Actually, it might be that the argument still works when transposed.  It may well be that those who do art can’t do commerce.  That would be agonizing…but it is a topic for another post.) 

When Elvis Mitchell asked Steven Soderbergh what he was thinking as he prepared to make his movie Out of Sight, Soderbergh replied:

If you blow this, you will be doing art-house movies for the rest of your life and that’s as bad as doing big budget things.  I wanted to do both.

This is I think the signature of our postmodernism, that conviction that we will not submit to the tyranny of dichotomous categories, that we will not submit to choosing between art and commerce, that we want both.  The post modern self is a voracious creature.  We want everything on offer.  Now.  Ours is a time of expansionary individualism.   

This is not to say that there are not moral issues here, that we are not obliged to think about the kinds of value that different kinds of film-making creates, that we are not obliged to choose with care.  It is merely to say that the art-commerce dichotomy is now an exhausted cultural artifact, a moral antique. 

References

Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939. London: Faber and Faber.

Cowen, Tyler. 1998. In Praise of Commercial Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Docker, John. 1994. Postmodernism and popular culture: a cultural history. Cambridge. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fishman, Steve.  2008.  The Liman Identity.  New York Magazine. January 21-28, 2008, pp. 36-41, 124. http://nymag.com/news/features/42823/

Johnson, Steven. 2005. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.  New York: Riverhead.

LeMahieu, D. L. 1988. A culture for democracy: mass communication and the cultivated mind in Britain between the wars. Oxford : Clarendon Press.

Acknowledgments

To Eunice Hong and The Brown Daily Herald  for the photo above.

Once it was enough for a corporation to make widgets.  Now it must also make ideas.  Especially if it wants to keep making widgets. 

Capitalism was once ruled by a rough and ready, mechanical, pragmatism.  No pointy headed people need apply.  Now ideas are the first order of business. And this gives advantage to the people with higher degrees from Stanford.  I give you the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. 

Let’s put this another way.  Capitalism used to belong to the guys who stole lunch money.  Now it’s much more likely to belong to the kids who surrendered it. 

We have lots of institutions that make ideas.  Universities, institutes, laboratories, for instance.  And we have institutions that see to the dissemination of these ideas: books, magazines, and conferences used to serve nicely. 

I can’t be the only one who has noted a change.  Call it the conference that isn’t a conference.  Take the Foo Camp invented by Sara Winge and Tim O’Reilly at O’Reilly Publishing.  This appears to illustrate that famous William Gibson line about the future being badly distributed. Foo Camp appears to bid (dare?) the future to "assemble here."

There is the Andrew Zolli’s PopTech, and TED founded by Richard Saul Wurman.  There is SxSW and Burning Man.  There is Dave Isenberg’s F2C, Jerry Michalski’s retreat, and Pip Coburn’s dinners in NYC and SF.  There is Russell Davies’ Interesting2007.  There is Piers Fawkes at PSFK.  I think Roger Martin is doing something like this in the context of a business school. 

None of these are conventional approaches to the convention.  I haven’t done my homework here, but I expect all of them exhibit have the structural properties: relatively egalitarian, more interested in expressive individualism than instrumental individualism, more concerned with intrinsic more than extrinsic rewards, suspicious of power and rank asymmetries, playful, dramatic, less interested in intellectual due process and more interested in the counterexpectational, the ad hoc and the improvisational. You have to be nimble witted to take advantage of these things.  And you come away more nimbly witted still.

But the thing that really strikes me is that these exercises are so person centric.  Almost always there is someone at the center of things, duly humble, not an all imperial, but there nevertheless, initiating, organizing, enabling, sustaining.  What’s odd about this is that not so very long ago, this task of bringing people together used to belong to institutions working out of the routinized logic of their role in the world.  These institutions are falling silent, even the very great ones seem to be somehow displaced in the larger, idea production, scheme of things.  It is as if knowledge and knowledge makers now gather at the behest of individuals not institutions. 

This makes me think of city-states for some reason.  I can’t say I know very much about city-states but here’s what I think I know: that they are exercise in "order-out."  The city-state exists in a larger domain that is relatively chaotic.  It creates order, most intensely within the walls of the city proper, but also in the concentric rings that run out into the ever more lawless countryside.  Nation-states, on the other hand, are "order-in."  There is an embracing idea, and an embracing bureaucratic order, and the domain of order they make possible. 

I think Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp is order-out.  At the center of a Foo camp, knowledge gathers.  (There’s a book to be written about these people, O’Reilly, Winge, Zolli, Wurman, Isenberg, Michalsky, Coburn, Davies. Who are these people?  And who is going to organize the meta-foo camp that brings them all of them together?)  And then it begins to filter out into the provinces, the places the future is reluctant to go.  It is carried by simple monks and not so simple courtiers, people who have had a chance to glimpse the glory of this order or that court, and laden with its intellectual riches, go out into the world. 

It’s a medieval model, no? (I know next to nothing about the period, so I proceed with caution.)  And the question is why this order-out model should now be flourishing when indeed we have magnificent post-monastic institutions in place, richly founded, magnificent in their gravitational powers, indubitable in their authority.  In the words of Max Weber, the great scholar of the modern world, "What gives?" 

The answer has got to that the knowledge produced by these events is newly nimble, spontaneous, improvisational, responsive, in a word, liquid.  Big institutions can’t produce this kind of knowledge because they are predicated on another model of knowledge, one that is, for all the many things it does well, inclined to grind fine and slow, and mostly slow. 

In the Foo Camp and its many counterparts, we are looking at an adaptive response to a world that is itself newly nimble, spontaneous, improvisational, responsive, in a word, liquid.  Large institutions are being in the words of Thomas Kuhn, "read out" of the field.  The knowledge required of a liquid world must almost necessarily come from liquid events, the only places, we now suspect, that liquid knowledge and news of the future now consent to gather. 

References

O’Reilly, Tim.  2007.  Foo Camp Takeways.  here. 

Wikipedia entry on Foo Camp here.   

Acknowledgments

To The Airfields for the image above.  See their website here. 

The episode of The Wire last night returned the series to its customary form.  The opening treatments were a little disappointing, and it looked for awhile as if the choice to make this season turn on the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun might have been a bad idea. 

But last night we could see The Wire do what it does best, bring together four structural elements that have the effect of creating a vivid anticipation and the arresting question, "what the hell happens now." 

The Wire brings together the following elements:

1) There are many parts.  the police, journalists, politicians, drug dealers, unions, neighborhoods.  Each part has its own parts. 

2) These parts are in the words of Weinberger "loosely joined."  What happens in one community will have deliberate and accidental effects in all the others. 

3) These communities are filled with life-like people whose behavior cannot be predicted.  (Bunk and Jimmy last season were the fastest of friends.  They are now estranged.)

4) Sometimes, one or two of these people will engage in acts of provocation that must have big structural effects.   Spoiler alert! Last night for instance Jimmy decided to fake a serial killer.  A journalist faked a quote.  (So we get some weird and unlikely reciprocity: what Jimmy, a police, did will have consequences for the world of journalism.  What the journalist did will have consequences for a particular police.)  A gang leader awakened a gang killer once retired and moved away, and now destined to return. 

We are returned to the edge of our seats!  We know something big will come of all of this, but because there are so many moving pieces, brought into so many unpredictable relationships, filled with people who will continue to act unpredictably and provocatively, it is impossible to imagine the end of the season.    

It is thrilling that TV should play host to this much indeterminacy and complexity.  It is thrilling to see that David Simon has invented a non-genre: the police anti-procedural.

References

Weinberger, David.  2002.  Small Pieces Loosely Joined.  New York: Basic Books.   

I was in Toronto yesterday doing ethnographic interviews on the topic of Canada and Canadianness.  One of my respondents was Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Part way through the interview, Martin identified a paradox.  He noted that Canadians who are creative and free thinking as individuals can become dramatically less creative in groups.  Let’s call this the Martin paradox.

You might say that this is paradox describes all cultures.  Doesn’t group-think crush creativity everywhere?  Don’t ideas suffer "death by committee" in all countries and economies.  Well, no.  I have seen Americans be sensationally creative in groups.  I have seen The Coca-Cola Company and IBM roll out ideas effortlessly.  That Canadians are not creative in groups, this may be a special national characteristic. 

Or, we might be wrong on the first proposition, that Canadians are especially creative as individuals.  But the anecdotal evidence here is strong.  I give you James Cameron, Martin Short, Malcolm Gladwell, Isadore Sharp, Jim Carrey, Lorne Michaels, Don Tapscott, Tim Bray, James Gosling (inventor of Java), Eugene Levy, Douglas Coupland, Matthew Perry, John Kenneth Galbraith, Hayden Christensen, Nelly Furtado, William Gibson, Rachel McAdams, David McTaggart (co-founder of Greenpeace) Michael Ondaatje, and of course Jason Priestley. It’s as if Canada generates a net surplus of creativity, enough indeed to help fund big chunks of American culture.  (Or maybe of course Canadians go south to escape the group effect.) 

We may take Martin as a good example of a creative Canadian.  He attended Harvard College and the Harvard Business School.  He remained in Cambridge to help build Monitor from a small company to a large one.  While running the Rotman school of Management, he finds time to produce a stream of articles and books.  He was coming north to Rotman just as I was going down to HBS, and I worried that this creative individual might be set upon by Canadians in groups.  But it turns out this guy is bullet proof and now threatens to reinvent b-schools, capitalism and Canada all at once. 

Martin gave me a copy of his new book, The Opposable Mind, which I read on the flight home from Toronto.  It’s good.  Friends of this blog will have noticed that I am usually unkind to books in the business literature category.  I have drubbed Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne, Lovemark by Roberts, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, and the ideas of Zaltman, Rapaille and Sir John Hegarty.  I have even dared challenge Freakonomics.  I am, by this reckoning, a tough audience, but The Opposable Mind impressed me. 

A skeptic might say I am going easy on Martin because I have met him, because he is a Canadian (and there is Canadian mafia), and/or because he gave me a copy of his book.  May I reassure you that there is no Canadian mafia.  Furthermore, I have met, worked with, and deeply admire Zaltman, so personal acquaintance has no sway. And if you think my good opinion can be purchased with a free book, well, I wonder if we should step into the corridor and discuss this further.  (This is the Canadian version of Honi Soit qui Mal Y Pense. Or, as we might call it in honor of the national sport, Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense on ice.) 

The argument is, as I understand, it is that exemplary business leaders

have the predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads, [and that they are] able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.  (6)

Martin calls this process, "integrative thinking."  He argues that great managers are

born with an opposable mind we can use to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive tension, [which tension can be used] to think our way through to a new and superior idea. (7, italics in the original)

There are two things I particularly like about the book.  The first is that it gives us a license to embrace complexity.  We all know that the business world is rippling with new and powerful intellectual challenges.  I am just finishing a project for a large corporation and I have listened to middle and senior managers talk about a world almost liquid with change. The C-Suite seems to have a revolving door, competitors are inscrutable, new technologies unpredictable, cultural trends relentless, consumer taste and preference dynamic.  Blind side hits just keep on coming.  As one respondent put it, things change so fast, the contract "is dead on day 2."  Another said her world was all "turbulence and blur."

What we need in such a world are ideas that are both more powerful and less monolithic.  We need a new order of subtlety and nimbleness.   The nice thing about the Opposable Mind concept is that it allows us to come to terms with complexity, to endure tension, to harvest contradiction.  The usual business book is trying to make complexity go away.  This book says there is no one idea that will return to the world to order.  But there is a process with which we can learn to live with what Martin calls the "staggeringly complexity" of the new business environment. Martin says beware the easy answer, the single model, the cheap dichotomy, the false opposition.  Expect the world the resist comprehension, and learn to work with its complexity.

The second thing I like about this book is that I think it sets an important precedent for the world of the business book.  We know what b-books look like.  Characteristically, they are one-idea exercises, which idea is trumpeted from the title, adequately captured by the cover flap, and ground out with no real depth or subtlety in 200 pages of example and repetition. Which is another way of saying that the business book suffers the same problem as business.  It is wedded to a model of intellectual production that seeks out big, bold monolithic ideas and sticks with them.  B-books are so undeveloped intellectually that one suspects that what the author is really doing is building a consulting platform, and he or she is afraid that real detail will preempt all those lucrative contracts. 

There is something insulting about this withholding.  It is true that business books are read by business men and women who are driven by a 60-70 hour week and a horrific set of conflicting demands on their time.  But I am not sure this means we need to patronize them with a kind of "big print" approach to theory and discussion.  After all, these men and women live in a very testing intellectual environment and some of them are rising to the occasion by developing new intellectual capacities.  (Those who came to business and marketing because it’s "not exactly rocket science," well, I think they know their day is up.)  An evolutionary imperative is making managers smarter and it might be time for the publishing world to catch up.

Certainly, we know from the work of Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson that popular culture is ceased dumbing down and has started smarting up.  Network and cable TV now assume a viewer who is capable of richer, more nuanced stories.  The couch potato is now assumed to have a head and a heart.  Let us take for granted the business reader has a brain.

That The Opposable Mind is produced by the Harvard Business School Press, and specifically Jeff Kehoe, is a good thing.   After all, HBSP has the bully pulpit and to be honest it has in its time produced one or two books in the Keep It Simple model.  If HBSP is rising to the intellectual occasion, we may be looking at a rising tide that will elevate the entire industry. 

Ok, back to the Martin paradox.  Wouldn’t it be elegant if the Martin paradox can be illuminated by the Martin model?  Can we use the Opposable Mind to understand the Canadian inclination to be creative as individuals and uncreative in groups. 

It is a workable argument, I think.  One concept of Canadians is that they are products of contraction and complexity.  They come from a world of two founding cultures (the famous "two solitudes") for which integration is always sought.  Two cultures and languages have given way to many cultures and languages as the multicultural experiment continues.  Canada has licenses new comers with the right to keep and cultivate their differences.  This means that for every cultural characteristic that might serve as a national identifier, there is another that contradicts it.  Take as one case in point, Toronto as a city animated by the "tension" between Methodist Scots who made it Canada’s second city (after Montreal), and the Italians who arrived after World War II to save them from culinary, fashion, social and emotional inadequacies. 

Canadians must also endure the fact that they are practice a communitarian capitalism, that they insist on a tall poppy individualism, that they are both aggressively egalitarian and aggressively hierarchical.  There are really lots of contradictions swimming about here, and I think the people who rise in a world like this are people who are good at surviving and managing complexity.  The fact that Canadians generally are uncomfortable with the "imperial self" that is sometimes popular south of their border gives them a certain perspectival flexibility, let’s call it.  The ones who flourish are precisely the ones who use these complexities as a staircase with which to climb to acts of integration and creativity.  (The relationship between integration and creativity needs more careful examining than I can give it here.)

So it works.  The Martin model helps illuminate the Martin paradox. What about the other way round?   Does the Martin model help us understand why Canadians cease to be creative when in groups?  I’m not sure.  I haven’t finished the book.  My guess is that what is happening here is that Canadians suffer here from the devotion to consensus. Much more than Americans, Canadians think they have to agree.  Much more than Americans, Canadians think they have to approve.  One of the things I love about Americans is their pragmatism.  You will be hammering away at a problem in a boardroom and it becomes clear that we are not looking for a consensus, we are looking for something that is "good enough for television.  Let’s get on it." 

As I recall from my museum days in Toronto, it was customary to watch people withdraw their compliance and it was customary for people to sniff their disapproval.  Again, in the American case, people pursue the thing much less personally, and are inclined to go with things that are responsive to the opportunity…even if they are not especially consistent with one’s own preferences.  Finally, Canadians believe their is a null space to which a committee, an institution (and their nation?) can retreat, a place of no decision and no momentum.  For most Americans, this is intolerable.  In American committee meetings there is a unspoken but deeply shared understanding.  We are going to decide on something, and we are going to act on it, it’s just a matter of what. 

In Canadian groups, contradictions live and they have the power to derail things.  Which is to say the Martin model cannot take effect.   These Canadians cannot escape their contradictions.  They cannot integrate.  They can ascend to higher plane of generality, a richer synthetic moment of creativity.  Canadians in groups become the victim of their differences while as individuals they are the beneficiaries of these differences.  Or, to put this another way, the integration that Canadians do so well as individuals is denied them in collectivities. 

Anyhow, check out The Opposable Mind.  It’s really interesting.

References

Martin, Roger.  2007. The Opposable Mind.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press. here at Amazon.com.

That brilliant Scottish idea, the one that accomplished something like an intellectual miracle, and stripped away all things the rest of the world, and the whole of the world, took for granted. 

It said all of the sociality that is present to the creation of any social moment, the existence of prior understandings and connections and an assignment of status according to who owns what to whom as established by kinship, clan or hierarchy, or some other social overlay–all of this we can set aside. 

For this thing called a market, we need only posit two parties, as unattached atoms, engaged only by their interest, and only for the duration of this exchange of value.  That’s all.  They will have social connections, they will be something to someone for some purposes, and they will be this over time and space, but in this thing called a market, they are atoms with interest transacting.  C’est, as the French say, tout.  (Sorry. I was in Montreal all day.)

It was a simplifying idea, and a liberational one.  It released the world from cultural constructs and social elites, and it made the world responsive to what people wanted in spite of social assigned standing, status and desire.  It enabled a world that was responsive, not to what people were supposed to want, but what, for better or worse, and often worse, they did want.  (I will tell you in confidence that I am the only anthropologist on the face of the earth prepared to make this argument.  Where I see liberation and transparency,  they see alienation and anomie.  To which I say, freedom is grueling difficult and only people with tenure think otherwise.) 

And as bad as this ever was (this uncontrolled wanting), there was now at least a certain transparency.  This world was not a reflection of the interest of elites or the imaginings of culture.  It reflected, in an unsentimental, unmediated way, what people were actually willing to pay for.  In a marketplace society, the truth will out.  Elites and received wisdom, these get the Sicilian salute.  (A mental picture of which, please insert here.)

My point and I do have one.  I just finished a round of ethnographic interviews in a large and influential corporation.  The question was how to bring the corporation into a better alignment with the world out there.  (Sorry, I can’t be more specific and honor my oath of confidentiality.)  (It went well, I think.  I was impressed with how well I did.  It turns out I  make a very good ferret.  If your organization needs to take another look at some aspect of the how the corporation works relative to the world out there, call me.)  The thing that impresses me as a result of this research is the possibility that the Scottish idea might be for some corporate purposes ill advised. 

Take for instance the churn in the c-suite.  [C-suite means the offices occupied by the CEO (chief operating officer), the CIO (chief information officer), the CMO (chief marketing officer), the CSO (chief strategic officer), and so on.]  People are now in place on average about 20 months.  And this is the reason that more and more CMOs , for instance, come with "their people" attached.  They do not meekly accept the agency with which the corporation is dealing.  No, they have a standing relationship with an agency of their own, and they bring this with them.  After all, they only have 20 months to make a difference.  The clock is ticking.  Getting to know the incumbent agency will cost them 6 months of their precious allottment.

Ok, so what if we take c-suite churn seriously.  I wonder if it says that the real center of gravity has moved from the corporation to the C-suiters as they move from gig to gig.  If indeed the corporation responds to change by streaming c-suiters through upper management, what is the unit of analysis, where is the real seat of decision making, what is the real locus of continuity?  It isn’t, or might not be, the corporation. This is now streaming with change.  It’s a box of bees.  It is no longer the Romain outpost of order. 

The real locus of governance and continuity is the c-suiter, that itinerant man or woman, traveling from corporation to corporation.  And this means that agencies and consultants and all of the rest of the traveling retinue on which the corporation depends, should establish its first loyalty to the CMO and only then to the corporation.  I don’t know.  It’s a thought only.  But my notion and I do have one, is that as the corporation responds to dynamism it is going to change shape and form, and the locus of some things is going to shift. 

Just to return to the Scottish idea.  It says that corporation will transact episodically and fitfully, as and when it discover the best clients and partners.  (This is a fiction of course, but a deeply useful fiction.  For most purposes, the corporation is economic corporation to corporation and for some purposes, supra-economic within the corporation.)  And these connections between corporate agents will become more and more instantaneous and less and less enduring. Certain continuities will be impossible to sustain.  If they are to exist, and its a fair question whether they must exist, they will have to exist outside the corporation.  Continuity will have to live in networked relationships between players who are in a sense in constant transit, migratory and in motion, and more actual for some purposes, between engagements than within them.

It may be that the corporation is obliged to decide that to be fully responsive to dynamism, it can’t afford certain continuities and is then obliged to farm these out and make them resident in professional communities that exist in orbit outside itself.  Ok, you can see I’m struggling.  When people start repeated themselves, they are looking for the thread, and clearly I haven’t found mine.  But something is shifting, and the corporation, for so long the great "city states" of capitalism, enduring and magnificent, perhaps they will in respond to the market place by seconding some of their essentials to the world out there.

This would be another way of saying that networks so dominant in personal matters may be poised to transform even the institutional world. 

A last point

Just a note on a national difference.  I am on the train from Montreal to Toronto as I file this post.  (There is something completely thrilling about being able to get a wireless connection on a train.  I can’t say why.  There just is.)  And at 4 hours the trip is roughly like the one from New York City to Boston.  But here’s the difference. On the American trip, the wait staff feed you alcohol as if it were a  medical responsibility and a matter of some urgency.  Triage!  (In point of fact, they are softening you up for their tip.  So it is not so much as social gesture, as an economic thing.  And this is fair…and of course the reason the Acela is perpetually in the read.) 

On this trip to Toronto, however, they are much more abstemious, as if there is a good chance that any given passenger might be called upon in an emergency to operate the train and, well, it’s probably better if each of us has a clear head.  And this refusal to lead the wine flow with Dionisian (sp?) generosity is a bad thing because I believe there are few things so charming as being intoxicated on a train that is traveling at speed.  I can’t say why.  This is an enduring truth.  It’s there in Aristotle somewhere.  You can look it up.   So I am as I write this suffer a small degree of alcohol deprivation and I am sure it shows in my prose.  But hey, it could change.  The stewart might bring more wine.  And just as I wrote this last sentence, I swear to God, the steward came by and told me that he would be back with more wine.  I am, I guess, jonesing pretty bad and, ok, most visibly.