Feldman's Faves: January 13, 2025

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

Like many of you I took time over the holidays to reflect on the remarkable year we had in 2024 and to set goals for 2025.  Many of my annual goals are repeats of previous years with some modifications.  For example, last year my goal was to sleep more (than my usual four hours) and I did it and I felt better than I have in years – so I am sticking with that going forward. With this success behind me (and a more well rested body and soul) I decided that 2025 was the year I was going to eliminate social media from my life. In particular, I have been very active on LinkedIn over the years but I have found that it became too much of a time suck and even worse, a place where I would compare myself to others and feel bad about myself. So I am attempting to cut this habit cold turkey.  Stay tuned for the results.  I hope you are also finding ways to do things that will make your lives better in 2025.

One habit I will never quit is watching as much football as I can.  And what a weekend we had both at the college and NFL levels. I am so excited to see Lamar and Josh go at it next week – that should be quite a match up.

Just a reminder to make sure to involve Gurratan and Joeley in your files as we are now well into rotation #3. They are here and ready to work and to learn from you.

Finally, we are having our first section breakfast of 2025 this morning  (thank you Alex).  Hope to see you all there.

This week’s theme is very interesting stuff.

KNIFE By Salman Rushdie –I have always been a fan of Salman Rushdie and all of his books. While he has a reputation for being a bit of a d-bag (which comes out in his writing at times) I do admire his skill as a writer and his courage as a person (given that he has been hunted and in hiding for most of his adult life).  The famous knife attack on Rushdie (where, among other things, he lost an eye) is the basis for Knife that he describes in painstaking detail in only the way he can. We learn about the attack, its impact on his body, the painful process of rehabilitation and about the people in his life.  As soon as the attack happened one of my first thoughts was how is Rushdie going to write about this – and now we know.  As one reviewer notes, “Twelve weeks after the knife attack that almost killed him on 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie returned to his home in New York. One miracle duly following another, he was fairly soon out and about again: eating (tentatively) and drinking, and generally amazing everyone with his corporeal presence. At a dinner party in Brooklyn, for instance, he saw his old friend Martin Amis, who was then dying of cancer. After this meeting, which would be their last, Amis apparently sent Rushdie an email “so laudatory that I can’t reproduce it all”. What he will tell us, however, is that having expected his fellow writer to be altered, even diminished, by his trauma, Amis was struck by his intactness. Rushdie was, he wrote, entire: “And I thought with amazement, He’s EQUAL to it.”

In his extraordinary new book about the attempt on his life, Rushdie acknowledges that this statement may not have been true – and he’s right, of course. We are no match for horror and violence, just as we’re no match for cancer or any other illness. Such things may only be endured; a body responds (or not) to whatever treatment is available. But in another way, Amis wasn’t wrong. For all that Knife is unsparing of grisly details – when Rushdie describes the initial state of the eye that he lost to his would-be assassin’s blade, lolling on his cheek like “a large soft-boiled egg”, I had to close my eyes for a few moments – what has stayed with me since I finished it has relatively little to do with its author’s flesh and bones. On the page, this could not be anyone but Rushdie. In spirit, he really is, yes, unchanged. The writing is as good as it has ever been, and also (sometimes) as bad. If he appears before us as a courageous person, a true hero of free speech, he is still a bit of a snob and a show-off. The amour propre that was often on display in Joseph Anton, his 2012 memoir of the years when he was in hiding, has not gone away, though perhaps I’m more willing to forgive it now.  When Rushdie’s agent and staunch friend, Andrew Wylie, visited him in hospital after the attack – it happened on stage at the Chautauqua Institution, as Rushdie was about to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm – he told him with huge certainty he would one day write about what had happened. At the time, Rushdie was unconvinced. But Wylie was also right. At a certain point, he realized there was nothing else to be done but this; that such a book would be his way of taking control. He would meet hatred head-on “with art”. And so Knife was born: at once a fever dream and something cooler and more collected. Those moments of violent “intimacy” with his attacker, who has yet to stand trial and whom he prefers not to name (he calls him “the A”), are vividly recalled, as are the days and weeks in hospital afterwards. There is blood. The “armadillo tail” of a ventilator pipe is pushed down a throat. A lung is drained. An eyelid is stitched closed. A bowel cranks to life and a bladder refuses to do so. Nightmares and hallucinations crowd in. Elsewhere, however, Rushdie is by turns puckish (listen to the sound of his “penis begging for mercy”), sentimental (love will conquer all, he thinks, looking at the faces of those at his bedside) and ruminative (revisiting The Satanic Verses, the cause of the fatwa to which his attacker belatedly responded, he notes once again that a person who is afraid of the consequences of what they say cannot be said to be free). There is some light (and wholly justified) score settling: no, those writers who disagreed with him over the honouring of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 by the writers’ organisation PEN International have still not been in touch, even now. More strangely, Rushdie imagines a series of extended encounters with his attacker, in which he quotes Jodi Picoult at him and accuses him of being an “incel”.

For the reader (or this reader, at least) the effect of these different modes is discombobulating, to put it mildly. I was dizzied by the variety of my responses, pity shading into indignation, and straight back again, and while it’s surely part of Rushdie’s point that he wants Knife to be challenging as well as consolatory – his anger, he tells us, has faded; life is all “gravy” now – I cannot think he intended to go this far. How to explain the moment when he makes a point of telling us how much more his family like his new wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, than “one or two of the women who preceded her”? (This is his fifth marriage.) How to account for the fact that he seems to think it is charming and funny that Griffiths had T-shirts made for him with the word FINALLY emblazoned on them? (Because his son, Milan, and others said “Finally” when they met her.) In the midst of the grace and dignity he displays elsewhere, this seems tin-eared at best. The reader may be struck, too, by the inadequacy of words in a case like this: a failing Rushdie at one point notes himself (the notion that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is both a cliche and an untruth, he writes). The book is at its best when it is at its most visceral, its author grappling with the earthly, the horribly tangible. When it moves to a higher, more philosophical plane – “Art is not luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist”; “I have always believed that love is a force, that in its most potent form it can move mountains” – it’s in danger of banality. There is an uncomfortable disproportionality between the time Rushdie gives to those writers (Ovid, Lorca) he briefly presses into the service of his thoughts on art and freedom, and the main event of his struggle to breathe, to sit up, to walk; his scars, his disfigurement. People should certainly read this book, and I hope that they will, especially those who currently want for cultural courage; who’ve chosen, in recent times, to stay quiet about so many things. But I must warn you that it isn’t so easy to admire as some are saying. Rushdie’s light is undimmed, and while I celebrate this wholeheartedly in life, in Knife it brings with it a certain dissonance.” I had thought that this book might be a little self indulgent and boring but Rushdie does a great job describing “the incident”, the aftermath and a lot of other interesting ‘filler” to tell a great story about life, (almost) death and how a traumatic event can give you a brand new perspective on life. Here’s a good review from the NYT - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/books/review/salman-rushdie-knife.html

Acquired - Hermès – This PODCAST is another super long one so it will be an investment of your time to listen – but well worth it. When it comes to luxury brands there are many pretenders but there really only is one contender for the top spot, which of course belongs to Hermes. Hermes has been around since the days of both Napolean and the horse and carriage era (the reason in fact it was created – to make high end saddles and then saddle bags).  But boy have things evolved in so many ways over the centuries with this company and this brand. From the saddle stitch, to Grace Kelly to the Birken Bag and to the dominance this brand has in Asia there is really nothing in the world like this French juggernaut that generated over $14 BILLION in revenue in 2023, which is even more remarkable when you think about how their products are hand crafted, scarce and always in demand. And they spend basically NOTHING marketing, do no celebrity endorsements and will never keep up with demand. The boys from Acquired do an incredible job in explaining the history of this company and its founding family as well as laying how and why Hermes is such a unicorn.  And good luck getting a Birken if you want / can even afford one (and NEVER buy a WIRKEN)….Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “In luxury, there’s Hermès… and there’s everyone else. Stewarded by one French family over six generations, Hermès sells the absolute pinnacle of the French luxury dream. Loyal clients will wait years simply for the opportunity to buy one of the company’s flagship Birkin or Kelly bags. Unlike every other luxury brand, Hermès: Doesn’t increase supply to meet demand (hence the waitlists)Doesn’t loudly brand their products (IYKYK) Doesn’t do celebrity endorsements (stars buy their bags just like everyone else)Doesn’t even have a marketing department! (they barely advertise at all)And yet everyone knows who they are and what they represent. But, despite all their iconoclasm, this is not a company that’s stood still for six generations. Unbeknownst to most, Hermès has completely reinvented itself at least three times in its 187-year history. Including most recently (and most dramatically) by the family’s current leaders, who responded to LVMH and Bernard Arnault’s 2010 takeover attempt by pursuing a radical strategy — scaling hand craftsmanship. And in the process they turned the company from a sleepy, ~$10B family enterprise into a $200B market cap European giant. Tune in for one incredible story!” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/acquired/id1050462261?i=1000645939195

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon