December 4: Reading with Donna Stonecipher at Emory University, Harris Hall Parlor. 8PM.
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Rushing a bit here as I haven’t blogged for a while and have several readings I’d like to catch up on. I think I stopped blogging for so long in part because I had a terrible NPR experience—truly hideous—in between the two readings I did down in Georgia, and haven’t quite known what to make of it. This weekend, two other NPR interviews are airing—one on Studio 360 and one on To The Best of Our Knowledge—so maybe I am feeling more comfortable, or at least like my journey to the land of NPR isn’t as disastrous as I initially thought.
I went down to Georgia on December 2 to read as part of the Vox series in Athens. I had had a bit too much “fun” the night before, and ended up semi-catatonic at the wonderful pre-reading dinner, where I saw the Andrew Zawacki I read with at Buffalo State (he is a professor at the University of Georgia). I also met Donna Stonecipher, who was my hostess for the evening and would be reading with me at Emory on the 4th.
Here is Athens—beautiful lights on Main Street:
And dinner:
Here is Donna introducing:
Here is the (blurry) audience—I guess I was nervous:
This is Andy, who had just moved to Athens. It was a bit unnerving to see him there as he had sublet the apartment I eventually lost due to 9/11—that was how I first met him. He reminded me of how difficult things were back then (I had no money and ended up having to leave New York; he had no money and also ended up having to leave New York. Whereas I signed up to work at a hedge fund, however, he went to library school), but it was nice to see him now that both of us are doing better:
The next day I got a call from the horrible NPR show (which I’m not going to name for fear you ever find it on the web and listen to my dismal performance). It was horrible because I was told it was going to be “a wonderful hour of conversation about literature and finance,” but it ended up being a referendum on all of High Finance with yours truly as the representative of Pure Evil. A senior editor from the Atlantic was on (I had been told he would be more of a interlocutor) and ended up attacking me (and talking far more than I did during the hour—what a platform!). He started things off by reading a long passage from the following by Marx (“The Power of Money”)—I knew I was in trouble:
“By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as omnipotent…. Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person…. That which is for me through the medium of money—that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy)—that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my—the possessor’s—properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has a power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?.... If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?”
His, to my mind, hackneyed, overly simplistic, and antiquated views on money—on capitalism, really—were not ones I shared, and so I was unable to do what I could tell was the expected thing, which was to pile on, disparaging everyone in finance as a greedy bastard and romanticizing all other “working folk.” I found myself frozen, having to field calls from angry listeners who had lost their pensions. Being relegated to the role of resident “insider” or “expert” to the Atlantic editor’s “outsider” status was a joke—terrible journalism in the sense I was a middle-manager in back-office role at a quantitative hedge fund, certainly no Fuld or Thain, etc. But no need to linger. Here is the cafe where I spent hours preparing for the wonderful show about literature and finance that was described to me but never materialized:
Here is the Georgia NPR station (maybe the host and guest would have been nicer had I been sitting face-to-face with them):
Later, I read some of the listener comments, some of which were pretty mean. Thank goodness I was hosted by my old friend Bruce Covey. Here is Bruce:
Bruce is good at listening, so I talked angrily for a while, ran out of steam, and then got onto the business of reading with Donna. Here is Donna again (but this time in Atlanta). Her book, The Cosmopolitan, from which she read, is absolutely fantastic:
Left-over audience:
Left-over melon-balls:
Audience with melon-colored shirt on:
I'll end with the end of Marx's "The Power of Money," an interesting—and interestingly poignant—meditation on heart-break, basically:
"Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent—a misfortune."
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