Uh Oh.

 Something unexpected, embarrassing, inconvenient, and delightful…

This guy.

I’m on record saying there are no historians anymore. I was wrong. It’s no secret I’m not in the humility business, but I’m glad to be proven wrong when something outstanding swims into my ken. Probably because I’m in a cycle of deep pessimism, I’ve been scanning the horizon for hopeful helpful resources. Been reconsidering youthful assumptions I made about Bartok, for example. (Glenn Gould was a catalyst I’ve mentioned here already.) I think he may be a ticket for me to understand what’s happened to classical music, just as my belated discovery of Picasso at the Guggenheim some years ago overturned my dim view of cubism and Gertrude Stein. Now, by accident, I tuned in to Bannon’s War Room and learned for the first time about Arthur Herman. I’ll jump to the first concrete result of watching that interview. Just took delivery on a $6 used copy of this one-time bestseller:

Not the book he was promoting on the show, which also sounds like a must-read I can’t afford at the moment, but the book above was mentioned as a necessary classic by Bannon, and I was reminded of a funny moment I had when I was writing The Boomer Bible. I had several hundred pages of printout I wanted an objective opinion about. A former mentor of mine in the computer industry was John Murphy, a leading independent consultant in the microprocessor revolution. He was a Boston-Irish ‘Southie’ who went to MIT and had a rare talent for seeing through complexities to the nub of things. How he could write understandably about hardware and software issues others missed. We sat in my office in Dayton with manuscript in binders on a round table, just the two of us with my wannabe masterpiece. He read, and read, and read without much in the way of comment. Then he put down the binder and observed, “Laird, you are such a Scot.” I don’t remember what else he said, honestly, although he encouraged me to go ahead and finish what I’d started. He seemed to approve.

The Scot thing was funny though. My Dad’s extensive time in England, working for DuPont, had made him a devoted Anglophile, and he never seemed to identify much with our Scottish roots, beyond telling us the family legends of flight following the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie in in the 1740s. I don’t think he liked Scots much, the ones he had met anyway. Me, I imprinted on “Kidnapped” as a small boy, reread it multiple times, and thought Alan Breck was the best character I’d ever read about. (Wrong about that too.) 

At any rate, I realized this guy Herman was an important resource for me from surprising echoes of my own career in his. Like a true Scot I agonized about the $6 Amazon purchase but 

read enough of the sample text to be convinced. Feels good to be reading again from ink on paper…

Here’s the new title I’m sure I’ll have to bite the bullet and buy next.

And this one too…

I don’t have time for this. But I can’t afford to ignore the hints I get through my process of random sampling of all kinds of inputs hoping to get lucky. I mean, getting lucky is the point, isn’t it?

What’s notably different about Herman is that he started as an academic in an academic family and made the impetuous decision after getting his PhD. to get a real job in the real world. He went to Wall Street and worked there for many years. In addition to the fact that I too have divided my work experience between two worlds, two anecdotes he told Bannon convinced me he was a kindred spirit. Asked about the difference between the ivory towers of academe and the skyscrapers of Wall Street, he said, “That was the first time in my life I encountered people who were smarter than me and weren’t intellectuals.” Yes, some jolts are very necessary. Later, he recounted advice he had been given by one of the financial kingpins who was mentoring him. He prefaced this by exposing matter-of-factly just how much all these market geniuses hated Donald Trump…. The examples of true Wall Street greatness Herman was given as a shrewd career tip were Michael Milken and Ivan Boeski, both of whom wound up in prison for insider trading.

Herman’s subsequent decision to leave the land of megabucks and return to his first love of writing strike a familiar chord with me. I left the business world except as a sometime freelancer on technology topics and returned to my avocation as a writer, a decision I do not regret despite the relative poverty it has reduced me to. Also like him, I met the smartest people I’d come across in the business world. Three brilliant standouts gave me post-academic education that has been a major contributor to my subsequent creative work. John Murphy (Electrical Engineering, MIT), Frank Bogage (Urban Planning, Rutgers), Mark Long (Business Mgmt, MIT), and Edward Yourdon (Applied Mathematics, MIT) filled in a lot of gaps in my coursework at Harvard and Cornell. Of these, the tue genius of the lot was Frank Bogage, who worked so closely with me in my dramatic time at NCR that our colleagues began referring to us as the Blues Brothers, two incorrigibles who took on the whole system and simetimes even won. These four were all members of a brotherhood I call the Corporate Ronin. We spent huge percentages of our time on planes, in hotel rooms in the states and abroad, and we were always outsiders in the clannish corporate environments who required our services. It’s a life that puts you in touch with an enormous variety of other travelers,@;$ you hear what even their families about their lives and disappointments. It one of these who informed on a flight 10 years into my frequent flyer life that, “You’re cooked. Maybe you don’t know it yet, though you probably do, you can’t do this much longer. There is a life after this though.” He was right about all of it.

Of course, my sense of Arthur Herman is that he has become a different kind of icon, a contemporary Renaissance Man, the most notable in a long string of excellent teachers I had in my formal education was Richard Miller (Williams College, U.S. Navy Commander, Ret., holder of six RADAR patents, and French Department Chair-Mercersburg Academy). He was the man closest to knowing everything I’ve ever met. I still recall the day when in response to an innocent question, he gave us a breathtaking explication at the blackboard on the genre of modern art called ‘completing the square’ (a fad involving math as much as composition), an esthetic he disliked as fully as the works of Albert Camus, whose book “Étranger” he slammed on his desk in our AP year because it would be on the AP exam and he refused to teach it. But as with modern art, he knew all about it anyway.

Now that I have belatedly learned about Herman and his writings, I have to catch up somehow. 

I trust, as usual, that the universe will provide. Even though, of late, I seem to keep hearing this song at the back of my head…