13 Days of Looking at a Bureaucrat, 1. Entering the Maze of Power
behind-the scenes glimpses of the writing of my new book
To celebrate and to promote my newly published book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, I am going to offer insights to each of the thirteen ways over the next thirteen workweek days.
I will highlight different aspects of the book on each platform - Twitter, YouTube, theburningarchive.com blog, the podcast and of course, for my very special susbcribers, on SubStack.
Here on Substack I am going to provide a short 100 to 300 word post some of the literary models, personal mentors or introspective challenges related to each chapter of the book.
You can buy the book as an ebook or paperback at Amazon, and other retailers such as Booktopia, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.
On Day One of this little festival, I look at the first chapter, the first way of looking at a bureaucrat, which is entitled, Entering the Maze of Power.
In this chapter, I explained how I have searched for the best books on bureaucracy or on the form of conduct that I call governing. There are many books on politics, and many manuals for princes; but there are few good books on governing and no good books on the bureaucracy. So, I decided to write that good book on the bureaucracy. I did it in a way that would not conform to outsiders’ expectations, but rather reflected the unique blend of intellectual and literary influences that shaped my mind.
There are four major writers who helped me to write at least a fair-to-middling book on bureaucracy, and to guide me out of the maze of power in which I was lost. These writers were Machiavelli, Vaclav Havel, Franz Kafka and Wallace Stevens. If you read my first chapter, you will see how this odd company of cold skulls helped make Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat the book that it is.
There is also one other author who was a model for the genre of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat; that is W.G. ‘Max’ Sebald. I did not mention him directly in the book, but I have let you as a Substack subscriber into my little secret. I did write a little more on Sebald in my collection of essays on culture, history and literature, From the Burning Archive.