The Game by Neil Strauss

I’ll admit. I’m not much of book reader. I hardly get around to browsing beyond the magazine and car section, but for obvious reasons, this one got my attention. Aside from the interesting game in its website (easy2pull.com) that harshly reminds guys like me of high school, it included a few excerpts from the book. Needless to say, I wanted to learn more.

You’ll find this one under biographies, and just like the tag says, it’s nonfiction. Neil says it best: “naked, vulnerable and disturbingly real.” Neil’s written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and the biographies of Marylin Manson, and Jenna Jameson (yes, you all know who she is), but this, his most recent book, is about his own two years undercover learning all the tools in the trade.

The book starts with an old device. Neil, a.k.a. Style paints a bleak picture of Project Hollywood, the so-called Pick Up Artist (PUA) headquarters in Los Angeles. Mystery, the number 1 PUA is suffering a mental breakdown and no one else cares to help him except Style, all while Project Hollywood is falling apart around them.

It all starts to flashback to the time Neil’s heartbreak was just beginning, following the lead of Dustin, a natural in the game of courtship, and just not getting it. A couple more years into the future and he still doesn’t get it. Despite all the celebrities he’s met and his successful career in writing, Neil is still single. His initial research to tracking down the origins and contributors of The LayGuide lead him to discover Mystery on the internet. He consequently signs up for his first seminar, fronting the full $500 for it. His metro choice of clothes earns him the nickname Style and his quick learning soon pulls him deeper into the seduction community.

The whole book goes through Neil’s humble beginnings as the lowly Style, to his rise to the top of the PUA ladder. All the while, he takes us through each of his seminars and epiphanies, educating in the counter-intuitive art as he goes along. Being based on forums and message boards on the internet, the book is chockfull of PUA lingo (e.g. AMOG, AFC, LJBF, etc. You’ll find a glossary at the back), forum posts and profanity. Neil even spills a couple of his own routines as well. Techniques range from David DeAngelo’s cocky-funny, Ross Jeffrey’s hypnosis methods, the indirect Mystery Method, and Neil’s very own Stylemogging. Men are taught maintenance like the right answers to women’s ‘tests’ and many ways to diffuse resistance from boyfriends, girlfriends and family. Even a sensory technique to jumpstart threesomes is explained. The result is a formulaic and definitive approach to what most guys had initially thought was a game of chance. Style divulges, not only his own insights, but even those of known seduction experts and authors.

All the characters are called by their internet names which makes for interesting insights into their character if not for a good laugh (e.g. Extramask, Sickboy, Papa, Tyler Durden and Sweater). Neil’s eccentric celebrity friends are also thrown into the mix like the obsessive Tom Cruise, the loopy Courtney Love, easy Paris Hilton, Andy Dick the bi, and even Britney Spears.

Most people would easily label this as the definitive guide to the art of seduction. It’s not so much a guide as it is a digest of sorts of all the existing techniques out there. Neil acknowledges all the other sources and methods available, simply citing his own as the most ideal for his personality. He even recommends a couple of books and sources that might provide more detailed instruction. Regardless, his insights and instructions are more than enough to work with and any avid student need only improvise and do some research to improve.

What makes this different from most of these other ‘pick up’ books is that Neil tells, first hand, the inherent faults in devoting one’s entire life to mastering the art of pick up. Mutiny, fierce competition, partner swapping, antitrust and betrayal result. All this and actually achieving what he set out to do – to find the one – eventually come together to make what was once a lofty dream into a living hell. It reads more like a novel and is driven by plot more than instruction, making for quite a long and informative read.

Any guy reading this will find himself scratching his head in disbelief. Yes, everything you’ve learned is wrong. Fortunately, it can be reprogrammed. Women reading this will be disgusted by the sheer chauvinism and objectification, but will also nod in agreement.

Here’s a little routine right out of the book called the Neg:

“Walk up to a woman, stop, wordlessly remove lint (hidden in the pal of your hand) from her clothing, ask, “How long has that been there?,” then hand her the piece of lint.”

How is this supposed to work?

“Neither a compliment nor insult, a neg is something in between – an accidental insult or backhanded compliment. The purpose of a neg is to lower a woman’s self esteem while actively displaying a lack of interest in her… The point is to come in under the radar. Don’t approach a woman with a sexual come-on. Learn about her first and let her earn the right to be hit on.”

This is used in combination with several other techniques in a strict sequential order designed to break any defense.

Indeed it comes across as demeaning and preys upon women’s weaknesses and insecurities. Neil, however, makes clear his own traumas, and that of men in general, as justification, all the while battling with his own morals on the newfound art. Like any Average Frustrated Chump (AFC) and closet romantic, Neil’s just looking to find the one. Towards the end of the book, the hardest decision he has to make is between just that and the community.

The Game is one of those rare books that gives unique insights into what we all thought was a mystery, combined with human frailty and pop culture elements thrown in. It tells the good and bad, without the force feeding, hard sell or contrived metaphors of the many other books on the subject. It’s still a story, first and foremost, self-help book second.

As for the lessons it teaches… By God, it was so simple all along…

The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby: A review that’s admittedly too first-person

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don't know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception — Blonde on Blonde might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn't give much for Pale Fire's chances against Citizen Kane. And every now and then you'd get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I'm still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty.

"I know you don't really like Nick Hornby too much," my boyfriend said when he handed me The Polysyllabic Spree. "But I hope you like this one."

"I don't like Nick Hornby?"

"Yeah, you said he was 'too first person.'"

"Oh, that's right."

Significant others have a funny way of reminding you of things you've totally forgotten. The Polysyllabic Spree was everything I was trying to avoid: it wasn't a novel per se, but a collection of columns written by an author I hadn't really learned to like after two novels (High Fidelity and 31 Songs). On top of it all, it was a book that tackled the pleasures of reading (or, as the blurb on the cover described it, "A hilarious and true account of one man's struggle with the monthly tide of the books he's bought and the books he's been meaning to read."). These were all things I've never really encountered before, simply because I didn't think I'd like them.

Surprisingly, reading a book about a famous author reading books was an enjoyable experience. Nick Hornby manages to avoid making you feel alienated, even as he talks about his very subjective reactions and reading experiences. For example, he explains how a single wrong sentence can singlehandedly make a book seem less genuine, or how other things can so easily get in the way of reading (like football, or an addition to the family).

In the past, I would've been quick to label these as "too-first-person" grievances. Plus, the vast majority of these books he mentioned were ones I hadn't even heard of before, and he drops cultural references on almost every page, only a handful of which I recognized. (He's so British.) But the magic of The Polysyllabic Spree lies in Hornby's ability to draw you in and find out what you (the reader) and the author have in common. Anybody who's ever loved reading, for one, will smile at Hornby's mention that the true book lover compulsively buys books even as he has dozens waiting to be read, or when he quips that all Amazon.com reviewers are idiots.

Basically, reading The Polysyllabic Spree felt like having a chat with Nick Hornby himself. I have no idea what the man looks like, but I had no trouble picturing him lighting a cigarette and relating how he offered Kurt Vonnegut a light once, or how he thinks Dickens is one of the greatest novelists to have ever existed. Perhaps the light and jovial tone of the book is also its downfall: like many conversations with truly engaging people, it just leaves one wanting for more.

Bringing Down the House

About a week ago, I was playing poker with a bunch of friends from high school. Now, we're smart people for the most part, having attended the country's top public high school, with most of us going on to take tough science and engineering courses in the best universities. Poker night, however, does not lend itself to erudition, and so the evening was filled with really stupid quips, such as "Poker is 50% betting and 100% luck" as well as dumb terms like a "suited pair". It probably had a lot to do with the Red Horse and the gin-and-juice we were having that night.

The characters in Ben Mezrich's book Bringing Down the House, who were all MIT students, are much, much smarter than we are. (Although, I must say, that the person who finished second in our class actually did go to MIT, and he finished with honors there as well.) They were all much better at cards than we are too, as the book tells the story about how they used their talents to win millions of dollars off of Vegas casinos.

Their success stems from the fact that they played blackjack. Blackjack is unique among casino games in that it has a memory; that is, the cards the are dealt directly affect the odds of the next card. Because of this, counting cards is possible, as you might be familiar with if you've seen the film "Rain Man".

The book detaals the story of a team of MIT student who take counting cards to the next level. It starts off by revealing their advanced methods, which rely mostly on their mental prowess. The book then chronicles the rest of their adventures in the seedy gambling world, with the highs: winning millions of dollars, sleeping with hot women, hobnobbing with celebrities, and living the life in Vegas; and the lows: the crackdown on them by the casinos, the threats on their lives, and the inevitable disintegration of their team.

If you enjoyed Rounders (which I did, immensely), or if you're into gambling (ditto), or if you just appreciate genius (this too), or if you're just a geek who likes mathematics (guilty), then pick up this book and brace yourself for a helluva ride.

Baseball season

The Major League Baseball season is set to open this week amidst steroid controversies, and quite serendipitously I read a couple of books about the baseball over the last month.

I am somewhat familiar with the game, especially back in college. I remember during my senior year, I would spend most of my mornings watching an MLB match on TV while I had a breakfast of leftovers and ice cream (those were the days). Then one semester, I even played baseball for PE (mostly because the class fit my schedule). My instructor was this weird Korean dude who spoke pretty fluent Tagalog, and my classmates were pretty good. I was terrible at it, but I got a good grade after writing a term paper about Ichiro (he was a rookie then) and other East Asians making it big in the Majors.

The first baseball book I read last month was Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer-prize winning work The Natural. Like most other people, I was more familiar with the Robert Redford movie about Roy Hobbs, the New York Knights' rookie sensation who dominates the majors at age 35.

In the book just like in the movie, Hobbs was a mythic baseball player, shattering records left and right (although, I must point out that Barry Bonds, the player in the middle of the steroids controversy, might have had seasons that were statistically as impressive).

However, the difference between the movie and the book becomes apparent early in the novel. While Redford's Hobbs was a superhero right out of the comic books, Malamud's was as flawed as he was powerful; he was a Herculean hero, following unbelievably great deeds with ones as unbelievably stupid.

That Malamud was able to transfer his hero's locale from the heights of Olympus to the diamonds of America is the book's true genius. His narrative of the season was nothing short of brilliant. For example, his descriptions of the rag-tag personalities in the clubhouse and the team's winning streaks were the literary equivalents of those funny montages in baseball films like Major League. It shows not only how good Malamud is, but also how little the game has changed. The book was originally published in 1952.

Hobbs's fate in the book is much more cruel than that in the film, and I wouldn't fault anyone for preferring the nice Hollywood ending. But anyone who is a fan of baseball and literature should at least give The Natural a read.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis was just as fascinating a read for me. Published in 2003, the book chronicles the success of the Oakland Athletics led by GM Billy Beane, who have found success in the American League despite much lower budgets than their competitors.

Beane achieved success by eschewing traditional baseball methods for evaluating talent, instead relying on statistical tools. Early in the book, he was discussing a prospect with his scouts, who weren't very high on the player because of his body type. Beane replied, succinctly, "We're not selling jeans here."

The book goes on to profile Beane, who was, as a young player, a prospect with whom scouts fell in love for his body type and athleticism, but who never quite panned out in the big leagues. Aside from Beane, the book also devotes some time to Oakland players, gems in the rough who were uncovered with the A's system.

The book also details the history of sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball using objective statistics, as well as the opposition to these methods that still exists among traditionalists in baseball today.

While I myself have my reservations about the analytical tool, I love the fact that some sort of tool is being employed by baseball, with its wealth of statistics to draw from. The revolution has started, and spread to other sports such as basketball as well. In fact, I am a fan of the basketball statistical analysis site 82games.com.

However, at the heart of the book is the biggest problem in baseball: the economic disparity between MLB teams. Oakland has a payroll around $40 million, while the Yankees have a budget of a little less than $200 million. While the A's have been successful this past decade, it is only a matter of time before the big boys beat up on the little kids again.