First Meeting: (October 2nd)

Machiavelli's The Prince and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People

C.N. towards a metalanguage of evil quote (written 1992):
"There is a meta-game available for use in the United States. The rules of the game, or even that there is a game at all, are hidden to some. The uninitiated are called naive, provincial, liars or suckers...
"Tabloids already make use of many of the game's tactics by foreshortening and cropping celebrities, blowing them up, and, in the case of National Enquirer television commercials, reducing them to photo-objects and then animating these objects. These papers regularly publish little bits of the rules gleaned from popular psychology books about how to manipulate people. These books have their genesis in the old warhorse, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, whose own primogenitor is The Prince by Machiavelli..."

Thus we're given a good starting point for reading both of these... whether you have in mind while reading how to "help" yourself win friends and influence people or are reading with analytic twinges of irony or a more historical perspective... If anyone wishes to focus on Cady Noland's text in particular then please do and I'm thinking I may create a comments-blog once I've started reading... throughout (in broad terms) I will be thinking about what kind of audience each text is directed towards, the specific historical context of this audience, how this audience/ the way in which the books are read or used has changed, and (of course) what kind of guidance I glean from them... I may also research people who site them as particularly influential books in their personal progressions..

A tip from Carnegie to be applied to both....:
"If you want to get a real, lasting benefit out of this book, don't imagine that skimming through it once will suffice. After reading it thoroughly, you ought to spend a few hours reviewing it every month. Keep it on your desk in front of you every day. Glance through it often. Keep constantly impressing yourself with the rich possibilities for improvement that still lie in the offing. Remember that the use of these principles can be made habitual only by a constant and vigorous campaign of review and application. There is no other way."

Possible and random book ideas: (not yet knowing what the trajectory of the group will be.... as some of these seem much more texts from the western canon and the others the more or less serious materializations of 20th and 21st century life; it's a good juxtaposition though)

Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus w/ Samuel Becket's Endgame
Shakespeare's Hamlet w/ Greg Behrendt's He's Just Not That Into You
The Andy Warhol Diaries w/ Joseph Murphy's Think Yourself Rich
Free to be You and Me w/ Sex for One
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations
What color is your parachute
Vonegut's mother night
General strange how-to-become-books (how to become an alien, how to become a good dancer) rife with diagrams
the self-help books that make you feel embarrassed in bookstores