I’ve gotten into a habit of posting book notes on my lay blog, and I thought I might try doing so here for a conjuring book I’ve recently re-read.
The Secret Art of Magic by Eric Evans & Nowlin Craver is really two separate books under the same cover, with a few cross-references. The first half of the book is by Evans and is approximately 280 pages about the strategies and philosophy of busking, interspersed with frequent quotes from Sun Tzu. For me, the analogies were sometimes a stretch, and the book would have worked just as well without them. But overall, I believe that if you do this type of work, this section of the book will speak to your soul. Although I regularly perform street theatre, I’m not a busker, so much of this section was merely of curious interest.
The second half of the book, written by Craver, is what I found to be more interesting as it is a melding of performance with strategies from an ancient Chinese book, The Art of War.
Although the premise is based on a manual for warfare, the metaphors aren’t applied in a way that is overly adversarial. Which is a good thing, as my friend Fred recently pointed out, some performers regard their audience as a form of enemy. Here’s a quote from Fitzkee that he sent me:
The intended dupe of the magician’s wiles is, of course, the spectator. He is the objective. All of the performer’s endeavor is aimed at deceiving him. He is the obstacle the magician encounters. In him are combined the formidable barriers the deceiver must breach and the very weaknesses that make him vulnerable.
Craver’s half of the book is about 150 pages long. It probably could have been a bit shorter, but he relates all 36 of Sun Tzu’s strategies to conjuring. A less rigid approach, even as it would have broken Tzu’s model, would work too. Thankfully, there’s a handy appendix that provides a summary of each strategy. Here’s one example:
Remove the Firewood From Under the Pot: This strategy in magic involves dispersing concentration by directly disproving the method before suspicion can form in the spectators’ minds. Preemptive Cheng and Ch’i created to disprove Ch’i.
It had been decades since I read The Art of War, so getting reacquainted with it was fun, but also, seeing it cast in terms of the performer/audience dynamic made it more relevant. In the 1500 or so years since Tzu wrote it, there have been numerous applications of the book’s tactics, and bravo to these two magicians for using the work to examine conjuring.
For me, the best thing about this section of the book is how it leads you to consider the subtle distinctions between different techniques for audience management and, especially, misdirection. The concept of “misdirection” has leaked into popular culture and too often, even among magicians, it’s treated as if “look somewhere else” is all that it encompasses. But it can (and should) be so much more and Craver gives us the vocabulary and framework to go deeper with applying the techniques.
Overall, the book is quite unusual in the world of conjuring, and in many ways, a breath of fresh air. It’s thoughtful, and lovingly presented, and I’m sad that it hasn’t seemed to really catch on or inspire follow-ups. Perhaps this is because it is rather hard to find. (I’m guessing it had a limited print run.)
I bought my copy when it first came out (2003) at Misdirections in San Francisco. But, in a surprise release, it has recently been made available as a pricey ebook (in PDF, I presume, but oddly unspecified). You can get it, and read the laudatory reviews by the magic press, at Penguin.