Leadership?

I saw this interesting quote from Joel Ewanick who was head of marketing for GM up till Sunday when he was given the heave- ho. In what I presume was an earlier interview cited in an article in the WSJ, he confessed to being polarizing and adds:

"One of my jobs is to make sure people don't relax, to keep the tension high....I don't mean to hurt people, but everything matters now and we have to be great."

So, I like the notion of people not relaxing or getting slack. I agree that if you are doing anything well, everything matters and you need to convey that to all stakeholders. And, you should always try to be great. Does this invariably lead to tension and hurting feelings? I know it's easy to simply say no, it doens't have to lead to those things but I wonder. And, maybe it doesn't have to lead to those things, but there is a big cost to pursuing greatness without inducing tension and hurting feelings.

Of course, Mr. Ewanick was basically let go from GM, only two years after being hired by the firm. They pulled, or better, stole him from Nissan where he'd been working all of six weeks when GM called. That's not nice, or loyal.

George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

This weekend, I finished George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. I've read a lot and am not genuinely surprised by many endings but this one caught me off guard. Not only Maggie's death in the flood, which feels like a death-sentence delivered, but the abrupt and sudden way Eliot delivers the final scenes. Certainly it is forecast, but...I only saw the forecasting in retrospect.

And, Eliot finishing off Maggie at the end seems to me akin to the way horror films often harm, mutilate and kill the promiscous girl. Not that Maggie is promiscous, but clearly she is a person whose passionate nature drives her to impulsive actions destabilizing to the norms of her time? Certainly, Eliot doesn't kill her off to punish her. Instead, it almost seems to be an attempt to punish the reading public of her time. By taking the narrative turn she does at the end, Eliot is asking her public where is a woman like Maggie to go and make a life for herself after what she's done? She's conceding that her powers can't imagine a life forward for a woman like Maggie in the world of which she's part/apart. Maggie's death at Eliot's hands also seems a mercy killing.

Eliot is an outsider. She clearly looks at her fellow men and women and suspects they have been lessened in some manner from their true natures. Their souls have been starved in some fashion and the lives they lead are dreary shadows of the lives of which they are capable. She's never explicit on the forces which have accomplished this de-naturing nor is it ever clear what the world would look like if men and women stayed in closer touch with their imaginative, passionate and feeling natures, as Maggie has.

Feeling and passion are portrayed as natural but potentially dangerous forces, like the river which figures so prominently in the novel. Given this formulation, the question that informs the novel is how does one stay in touch with one's feelings and passion without being destroyed by them. The question is crucial because, for Eliot, to be human is to be passionate and to have strong feelings which enlarge and empower.

Eliot uses the mill of the book's title to serve as a metaphor to elaborate the question of a human being's proper relation to his or her feeling, for achieving a proper relation to the strong natural force of our feelings. By virtue of it's proximity to the river, a strong natural force, the mill is able to harness the power of the river to achieve an essential function. But, being close to the river, in touch with the river is dangerous on those occasions when the river runs "too high." Then, one is liable to be destroyed by the river.

The metaphor is an interesting one. No matter what you do, eventually a season will come when a river runs to high and the mill will suffer by virtue of being a mill and near the river. It isn't really a question of if but when? And, if the mill serves as an emblem of the proper and authentic relation between a human and his or her feeling, it is easy to wonder whether all deep feelers like Maggie, all people who stay near their feelings and harness their power, are eventually going to be doomed eventually when their feelings, like a river, one day achieve an inevitable flood stage.

Relationships built on verbs

It's funny how sometimes you come across an idea that seems kind of unique, intriguing and well expressed and then....you come across the same idea equally well-expressed in another forum. Four days ago, I read an interesting piece by Chris Suellentrop in the NYT about the way owning a dog delivers the same kind of satisfactions yielded by a well-loved video game, Joystick or Leash, It's All About Love.

In defining the satisfactions of dog ownership (and those satisfactions basically are similar to the satisfactions that come with cats), Mr. Suellentrop writes:

"Sometimes Wookiee and I look at each other, heads cocked, unable to express our feelings for the other except through simple actions performed routinely, year upon year upon year: retracing the same blocks of our neighborhood each morning, playing fetch (shhhhh, illegally) in the park in the early evening, falling asleep with our sides touching, to warm ourselves in the air-conditioned night. The characters are unremarkable. The setting is ordinary. The action is dull. But like all games, owning a dog is about the quiet magic of doing. The love comes from the doing."

Relationships defined, established and sustained by the sharing of actions. The character, personality, or inner being of the other party to the relationship is not nearly as important. Shared actions come first and cement the bond? Interesting, I thought.

At lunch Saturday, I read an excerpt in the New Yorker of Zadie Smith's new novel, NW which I eagerly await. It details the friendship of two childhood friends, Leah Hanwell and Keisha Blake. Getting at the same idea as Suellentrop, Smith writes:

"It had never occrured to Keisha Blake that her friend Leah Hanwell was in possession of a particular type of personality. As with most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns. Leah Hanwell was a person willing and available to do a variety of things that Keisha Blake was willing and available to do. Together they ran, jumped, danced, sang, bathed, colored-in, rode bikes, pushed a Valentine under Nathan Bogle's door, read magazines, shared chips, sneaked a cigarette, read Cheryl's diary, wrote the wowrd "FUCK" on the first page of a Bible, tried to get "The Exorcist" out of the video shop, watched a prostitute or a loose woman or a girl just crazy in love suck someone off in a phone box, found Cheryl's weed, found Cheyl's vodka, shaved ....."

Colm Toibin on Fiction

From Colm Toibin's op-ed piece in the New York Times July 15, 2012:


"The world that fiction comes from is fragile. It melts into insignificance against the universe of what is clear and visible and known. It persists because it is based on the power of cadence and rhythm in language and these are mysterious and hard to defeat and keep in their place. The difference between fact and fiction is like the difference between land and water.

What occurs as I walk in the town now is nothing much. It is all strange and distant, as well as oddly familiar. What happens, however, when I remember my mother, wearing a red coat, leaving our house in the town on a morning in the winter of 1968, going to work, walking along John Street, Court Street, down Friary Hill, along Friary Place and then across the bottom of Castle Hill toward Slaney Place and across the bridge into Templeshannon, is powerful and compelling. It brings with it a sort of music and a strange need. A need to write down what is happening in her mind and to give that writing a rhythm and asound that will come from the nervous system rather than the mind, and will, ideally resonate with the nervous system of anyone who reads it."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/what-is-real-is-imagined/