Year: 2012

BELGIAN WAFFLING

I rarely blog my reading of blogs, this seeming just too 21st century to bear, but today I do just have to record a blog I really enjoy, Emma Beddington’s BELGIAN WAFFLING. Describing herself as “an ex-Eurodrone, unfit mother, slattern,” she writes a most amusing blog on that most difficult of subjects, herself. With the added bonus of an ongoing series of pictures of mournful dogs.

Most really recently she has been writing about ZAFARA by Michael Allin, which is about the first giraffe in France. She reports:

Zarafa WALKED from Marseille to Paris in 1826, accompanied by 4 Egyptian handlers, 2 antelopes, some cows, and zoologist Etienne Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, who kept a sort of diary of the trip:

“Today the giraffe toured a part of the city, accompanied by her keepers, a numerous picket of police and a great crowd of the curious. The courteous animal did not fail to visit the Prefect, who accorded her the welcome due to a beautiful stranger. In order to protect her from the cold temperature she was dressed in a mantle of waxed taffeta”.

I also like this:

“One can say that the Giraffe has nothing elegant or graceful in the detail of her forms; her short body, her high and close-together legs, the excessive length of her neck, the declivity of her back, her badly-rounded rump and her long and bare tail, all these things contrast in a shocking manner; she seems badly built, unbalanced on her feet, and yet one is seized by astonishment at the sight of her, and one finds her beautiful without being able to say why”.

Isn’t that lovely?

A COLOSSAL FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE by Lawrence McDonald

The subtitle of this book is “The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers,” and so it proves to be, written by a former trader there, in a somewhat embarrassingly breathless I-read-bad-thrillers kind of style.

We begin with McDonald’s early years, in which we get a bit too much information about his various family issues and his obsession with working on Wall Street. Once he is hired at Lehman the book improves, and the author does an excellent job explaining clearly the complicated financial products that were Lehman’s undoing.

What I found particularly interesting was the fact that (at least according to McDonald) long before the crisis many people were aware how shaky the American mortgage market was, including many people at Lehman, and made repeated efforts to get the company out of the web of mortagage debt in which it was entrapped. I’m puzzled by how total the collapse was, and how unprepared the world’s governments seem to have been for it, given that so many people seem to have been aware for so long of which way the CDO winds were blowing.

You may recall I recently read Ehrenreich’s BRIGHT SIDED, about the role of so-called positive thinking in the financial crisis, and I was interested to see how ‘positive’ Dick Fuld, the head of Lehman, insisted on being, right through to the bitter, bankrupt end. Warned of the risks by Mike Gelband, the firm’s fixed income chief, he responded: “I don’t want you to tell me why we can’t. I want you to be creative, and tell me how we can. You’re much too cautious. What are you afraid of?”

Presumably he was afraid of world wide financial armageddon.

So, an interesting book, but also a sort of interesting view in a trader’s life. Leaving aside the horribly bad thriller style writing, what stays with me most is the idea that trading is somehow a higher profession, a profession that singles you out as special, and that making money is genuinely its own reward. I’m sure these ideas are widely held, but you don’t usually hear them quite so baldly put. His idea of describing someone is to describe what their fancy flat is like. His description of their work day makes it sound like they were nobly fighting in the trenches. Take this, about a bonus:

Not one day passes when I do not hink with profound gratitude of those moments when I stood up there with Rich and Larry and received my million-dollar reward. No day. No night.

I mean, seriously, get a hobby. Or become obsessed with some woman or something. It’s creepy to think about some bonus, every day. Every night.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by JD Salinger

This famous American novel of adolescent angst follows the story of a young man named Holden Caufield.

Holden is on the verge of being expelled from his expensive boarding school when, on impulse, after a fist fight, he decides to leave the school a couple of days early. The novel follows that couple of days, during which Holden wanders around New York and struggles with his many and various issues.

Holden is a seriously unhappy young man, but the book is often very funny. Here he is describing one of his old teachers:

He started going into this nodding routine. You never saw anybody nod as much in your life as old Spencer did. You never knew if he was nodding a lot because he was thinking and all, or just because he was a nice old guy that didn’t know his ass from his elbow.

Or here’s school boy talk:

He was always telling us about a lot of creepy guys that go around having affairs with sheep, and guys that go around with girl’s pant sewed into the lining of their hats and all. And flits and Lesibans.

Or here’s a movie review:

All I can say is, don’t see it if you don’t want to puke all over yourself.

A model of the sort of journalistic excellence to which this blog aspires.

What is so difficult about Holden’s situation, and perhaps what has made it so pertinent to generations of young people in particular, is that Holden can’t say why he is so unhappy. His is an amorphous, nebulous alienation.

The closest he can get to describing his feelings is to calling everyone and everything ‘phony.’ Thus, for example, on the movie:

The part that got me was, there was this lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You’d have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddamn wolf You take somebody that cries their goddamn eye out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart. I’m not kidding.

He also finds it phony when people, to be polite, tell him the coffee’s almost ready. It’s also phony when ex-girfriends are polite to him. And ninety percent of what’s on television, also phony.

Undoubtedly, these things are phony. And Holden’s revolt against all that, I found admirable, and indeed logically coherent. But I think its a very young person’s revolt. When you get a little older, you maybe start to think that we all need to make concessions, and compromises, just to be able to keep on sliding by. Most people’s lives are sort of incoherent. ‘Marriage is compromise,’ an elderly Indian man at a wedding told me recently; and then he added, with awkward but total sincerity: ‘life is compromise.’

Poor Holden.

ROBINSON CRUSOE by Daniel Defoe

How much do you love the chapter titles of this book? A representative sample:

I GO TO SEA
I AM CAPTURED BY PIRATES
I ESCAPE FROM THE SALLEE ROVER
I BECOME A BRAZILIAN PLANTER
I GO ON BOARD IN AN EVIL HOUR
I FURNISH MYSELF WITH MANY THINGS
WE MARCH OUT AGAINST THE CANNIBALS
WE QUELL A MUTINY
I FIND MY WEALTH ALL ABOUT ME

I mean, this is not messing about. This is stuffing your book as full of plot as possible. Daniel Defoe would have done well in the twenty first century, working on BOURNE IDENTITY and REAL HOUSEWIVES OF WHEREVER THE HELL. Though I’m not sure he’s bothered, as he did pretty damn well in the seventeenth century too. This book is a big part of his life’s achievement, as ROBINSON CRUSOE has a place in history as being the first ever novel in English.

It’s a curiously modern piece of work, not least because Defoe pretended it was ‘based on real events’. He even put in a preface from ‘the editor’ assuring readerss of its veracity. This is not too surprising when we learn that Defoe was described by one contemporary as“ a shrewd, shifty, ingenious man, much mistrusted and frequently imprisoned.” According to the introduction:

He was imprisoned for debt as well as for his satirical writing, and his reverses including bankruptcy and the failure of get-rich-quick schemes, of which raising civet cats (their glands were used to produce perfume) for quick cash was just one. He was a journalist, publisher, poet, businessman and sometime secret agent

In another very modern turn of events, the book, which was huge bestseller, was immediately widely pirated.

You may not know that Robinson Crusoe was in fact Robinson Kretuznaer, a German immigrant to York, who anglicized his name; but you probably know much else about him. Essentially the story is he is shipwrecked on an island where he lives for over twenty years on his own, until he saves a local man from ethnic warfare (okay cannibalism), names him after a day of the week, and is eventually rescued.

Learning how Cruose teaches himself to survive – how he makes cheese, and tries to build casks, is very compelling. So to is his description of the loneliness, which must surely be a far greater challenge than diary or storage. Here he is at dinner:

. . .then to see how like a king I dined too, all alone, attended by my servants; Poll, as if he had been my favourite, was the only person admitted to talk to me. My dog, who was now grown very old and crazy, and had found no species to multiply his kind upon, sat always at my right hand; and two cats, one on one side the table and one on the other, expecting now and then a bit from my hand, as a a mark of special favour.

Poll is the parrot he spends hours teaching to talk so he can hear some kind of voice.

Of course when he finally does get to meet a human, and thus hear a voice, I think we can be pretty confident that the main thing he’d be doing is blubbing and shaking. However Defoe seems to feel that in fact he would be delighted to have extra domestic help, name him FRIDAY, and get the poor unfortunate to call him MASTER.

You can see why this book is often read as a metaphor for colonialism, and that’s certainly one way to understand it That said, it has many themes, and even the naughty-western-hegemony-naughty thing can be overstated. Crusoe is very upset by having to watch cannibalism on his island, and is tortured by feeling he ought to save the victims. There follows then a really interested and complicated debate about what constitutes ‘right’ in other cultures, which struck me – again – as curiously modern.

. . .who, however they were isolators and barbarians and had several bloody and barbarous rites in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rooting of them out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves, at this time, . . . as a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable to god or to man . .

So, curiously modern. So too is the ending:

All these things, with some very surprising incidents in some new adventures of my own, for ten years more, I may perhaps give a further account of hereafter.

Sequel anyone? He needs something to fall back on if the whole civet cat thing doesn’t work out.

THE BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood

I am insanely far behind in blogging my books for 2012, so without further ado lets turn to the appalling BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood.

This dire book won the Booker, which after this and the THE FINKLER QUESTION, I’m beginning to regard as a mark of shame.

It tells the story of two young women whose father is slowly going bankrupt. The oldest one agrees to marry a rich man to save the family. She lives a terribly constrained life, which she enlivens with an affair. Her sister comes to live with the family and eventually kills herself.

The story is told primarily from the perspective of the older sister, as an old woman in the present. She lives a very dull life, and this is for some reason detailed for us in excruciating detail. If you have any familiarity with the tastes of the Booker committee, you won’t be surprised to hear that this is not the only narrative voice. The story is interwoven with a science fiction story (how innovative, I could just puke) and a pretentiously third person account of the affair.

Here’s a representative extract, a description of a man in an old photograph:

. . .he’s holding up his hand, as if to fend her off in play, or else to protect himself from the camera, from the person who must be there, taking the picture; or else to protect himself from those in the future who might be looking at him, who might be looking at him through this square, lighted window of glazed paper. As if to protect himself from her. As if to proect her.

I mean honestly. And to think I used to like this writer. Who was I?

THE MAPLES STORIES by John Updike

THE MAPLES STORIES is an unusual format, being a string of short stories following one long marriage, of Mrs Maple to Mr Maple.

Updike is an immensely accomplished author. Try this wonderful description of a cabbage:

. . . the pure sphericity, the shy cellar odor, the cannonball heft. He chose, not the largest cabbage, but the roundest, the most ideal, and carried it naked in his hand to the checkout counter . . .

Note how he describes the cabbage as naked. I have never thought of any vegetable as naked, but these are the kind of lines along which Updike’s mind runs. He is well obsessed with sex, as we observed last year on reading RUN RABBIT RUN.

It is Saturday; the formless erotic suspense of the afternoon – the tennis games, the cartoon matinees – has passed.

The erotic suspense of cartoon matinees?

Anyway, the Maples have a very depressing suburban midcentury American marriage. They are constantly going to suburban cocktail parties and having affairs with their suburban friends. It is all very repressed and alcoholic and dramatic. I had to say: get a divorce. Or at least take make every third drink a soft one. Beautifully written, deeply felt, I just found it all very difficult to relate to.

RICH DAD, POOR DAD by Robert Kiyosaki

Robert Kiyosaki is a self-made millionaire who in this book shares with us his ideas about making money. If you can look past some terrible writing, childish views about tax, and many awful golfing anecdotes, it is an interesting book.

His primary point is that one does not make any serious money as an employee. The idea of getting good grades and a good job is he feels painfully old-fashioned; all it means is that the profits do not come to you but to your employer. You ought, he argues, to be your own employer.

He thus recommends owning an array of business ventures, investments, real estate, and so forth. In order to do this, he believes you should ‘pay yourself first.’ This means that you pour your income into your own projects, even when money is tight. This may mean not paying your rent, your creditors, etc etc, in a timely fashion. This idea makes me very nervous, though perhaps that supports his point: he feels most people make decisions about money based on emotion, or family history, not on reason. I do see the value of paying yourself first – it means your own projects are never allowed to be optional or to remain in the realm of theory.

Clearly, investing your own money carries risk, but as he points out: “I have never met a rich person who has never lost money. But I have met a lot of poor people who have never lost a dime.”

One thing you do not expect from a low brow financial self-help book is Freudian dama. RICH DAD, POOR DAD is an exception. It literally drips with Oedipal anxiety. The poor dad is Kiyosaki’s real father, who is a teacher on a low income and does EVERYTHING WRONG. The rich dad is a friend’s father, who is WONDERFUL. Seriously, Mr Kiyosaki, sit down with your dad at the dining room table. You don’t need to write a book to get to the bottom of your issues.

O PIONEERS! by Willa Cather

Fourteen days, ten flights, four continents, seven countries. The beginning of January gave me lots of time to read, and also to regret poor scheduling choices.

Let’s have WHITE WHALE’S only annual airline awards!

BEST UNIFORM
Usually a cinch for KLM, I have to go with Indigo, a small Indian airline with these super cute retro outfits. The narrow belt is killing me.

MOST PAINFUL CHECK IN
Kenya Airways is a shoo-in here, with a two and half hour queue. Other airlines can only gape at this impressive level of incompetence. I certainly hope none can compete.

MOST LIPSTICK
Ethiopian Airlines usually has this one in the bag, hot pink being very big with their cabin crew. However, this time it also goes to Indigo! One hostess was wearing so much red lipstick I didn’t know if she wanted to eat me or nurse me. Revolting and yet titillating.

And now let us turn abruptly to Willa Cather’s masterpiece of nineteenth century American life, O PIONEERS! Some people will suggest this is Cather’s best work, but all this shows is what a real afflication crack smoking must be among readers of early American fiction. MY ANTONIA is much better.

This is not to say I did not enjoy O PIONEERS! I particularly like it’s musical theatre title. It is set in the early days of immigration to Nebraska, and follows one particularly bright young woman as she builds a healthy farm. She however is unlucky in love, with her brothers chasing her only suitor away.

Her suitor, poor man, leaves rural Nebraska for the big city of Chicago, hoping to hit the big time as an engraver. Sadly for him, photography is invented. Here’s his heartbreaking, and very modern, account of his time in the city:

Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to ay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.