Two articles in the New York Times express immense outrage today (“The Reckoning: On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real” and Paul Krugman’s “The Madoff Economy”). On some level, I can relate. I am also, in many ways, outraged. I worked in finance, but I wasn’t particularly aware of the extent of the MBS, CDO, etc. web of toxic assets/pseudo-insurance (although I was aware that the markets were death-defyingly levered). And I certainly had no idea something like the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme was even possible in even the lax regulatory environment of the past several years.
So yes, I am outraged, even as someone who worked in finance, by the scope of the mess. But I am also outraged by the press’s complacency during the boom. Why did the Tom Wolfes and Michael Lewises of this world write such fluffy little stories over the last several years about people in Greenwich who owned big yachts (publishing them in places like Portfolio, feeling dapper and clever and holier-than-thou) instead of actually writing good investigative journalism (digging deep into the numbers, asking themselves how all of this could possibly be the product of anything other than a bubble)? Wasn’t so much financial reporting over the past six years really just lifestyle journalism in disguise?
I was certainly wondering how all of this could be the product of anything other than a bubble—it completely blew my mind to work in finance in Midtown Manhattan from 2002-2008—but at least where I was working (which traded mainly quantitatively; in equities and fixed income, big traditionally liquid markets), it made some modicum of sense. I could see the money trail from point A to point B, I understood how the accounting worked, the auditing, how the trades were approved, how they happened. I had experience with high-stakes poker, and saw how quantitative finance resembled, in many respects, a very large poker game, which is something I could get my head around (whether or not one believes it is moral per se). My overwhelming impression of the very senior people where I worked was that they played by the rules (such as the rules may have been). Plus (and perhaps I sell myself short—to use to a financial metaphor) I do not fancy myself much of a financial expert and figured someone with more bona-fides—someone working at the New York Times, say, or the SEC, someone like Paul Krugman—would have noticed that the whole thing was a scam if that’s what it actually was.
So: where was the Seymour Hersh of finance when we needed him? I know finance people are secretive, but they aren’t any more secretive than people in the government. The two shows that This American Life has produced on the bubble (“The Giant Pool of Money” and “Another Frightening Show About the Economy”) are better than anything I ever read while the bubble was developing. Why did it take the bubble bursting for journalists to produce shows like these? And how can it be that Alex Blumberg, who I’ve met, and who seems like a really nice earnest guy, but who is in no way some big scary finance guy, can produce two hours of programming on the economy—and in the This American Life format, which isn’t particularly geared toward financial reporting—that are so much better than pretty much anything I read in the press or heard on the radio during the last six years?
Paul Krugman: where was your outrage at the height of the boom?
New York Times: where was your outrage at the height of the boom?
Even though I feel ambivalent about having worked in the financial industry (the word “ambivalent” isn’t as fun for people to think about and hear as the word “outrage”), I refuse to blame all of this only on Big Rich Mean Finance Men (“You know him, reader,—hypocrite,—my twin!”). I insist on blaming it in part on the SEC, in another part on the Bush Administration's crappy policies, in another part on the Clinton Administration’s economic policies, in another part on the ability of even reasonable people to live in denial, in another part on everyday greed, in another part on everyday ignorance, in another part on bad timing, in another part on the extreme functional specialization in our economy, in another part on the invention of Excel, in another part on the stone cold undeniable fact that history repeats itself, in another part on the decline of American literacy (for if more people read, more people would have read The Way We Live Now, Galbraith, and The Madness of Crowds), in another part on the fact human ingenuity is bigger than anything functionally human, in another part on people’s fear in this country (that they won’t have health insurance, that social security is going to disappear, that no one will take care of you if you are old and infirm)—it’s not just greed, it’s also fear, let us remember, and in another big part on crappy financial journalism.
I think looking for someone to blame—blaming, say, Big Rich Mean Finance Men at Merrill Lynch—for this will only serve to make us forget the lesson of this horrifically systemic (the scale is truly beyond human) bubble that much more quickly. Blaming only Big Rich Mean Finance Men is a form of scapegoating. And scapegoating is all about loading up a goat and sending that goat out into the desert to die; by sending the goat out into the desert to die, the people of the town are able to just forget all about the trauma, and if the people of our town forget, we’ll just be in another bubble in ten or twenty years.
Paul Krugman will be outraged again. The New York Times will be outraged again.
Paul Krugman today writes (reasonably enough—but only after a lot of scapegoating outrage):
“Think of the way almost everyone important missed the warning signs of an impending crisis. How was that possible? How, for example, could Alan Greenspan have declared, just a few years ago, that ‘the financial system as a whole has become more resilient’—thanks to derivatives, no less? The answer, I believe, is that there’s an innate tendency on the part of even the elite to idolize men who are making a lot of money, and assume that they know what they’re doing.”
John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, back in the 20th century:
“Nothing so gives the illusion of intelligence as personal association with large sums of money.”
“As to new financial instruments, however, experience establishes a firm rule, and on few economic matters is understanding more important and frequently, indeed, more slight. The rule is that financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation... All financial innovation involves, in one way or another, the creation of debt secured in greater or lesser adequacy by real assets.”
“Financial genius is before the fall.”
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
“The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
“It is, alas, an illusion. The mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, leveraged buy- outs, their presumed contribution to economic success and market values, and the burden of debt that they incur are the current form of that illusion. They will one day—again, no one can say when—be so recognized. A fall in earnings will render the debt burden insupportable. A minor literature will marvel at the earlier retreat from reality.”
“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the
majority than to be right alone.”
Paul Krugman: you have read Galbraith—why are you just now becoming outraged? You are a very brilliant and very important economics professor—could you not have bent Alan Greenspan’s ear? Sent him a copy of Galbraith?
New York Times: could you not have gotten Alan Greenspan’s ear? Asked Alan Greenspan to read J. K. Galbraith?
Do none of you know Andrea Mitchell? Were journalists afraid to question Alan Greenspan because he was married to Andrea Mitchell? This sounds petty of me to ask, but I just don't understand where all the quality journalism went to while the boom was at its zenith. Journalists aren't particularly paid off to look the other way—not like people in finance or government can be—so where was the story when it could have amounted to more than mere outrage?
Friday, December 19, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Brooklyn/American Poet
OK, decided to hide my blog from search engines. Had only wanted this to be a diary for friends, that sort of thing... so... a diary for friends. Search-engine-hiding hasn't seemed to work, though... maybe someone out there is more geekie than I and knows how to fix this? In the meantime, finished American Poet essay... haven't heard from editor yet, but feeling great relief. Cleaned house from top to bottom... House now very clean. Bad Kitty sleeping under my legs, which are under the covers. Bad Kitty is very warm. He is also VERY BAD. Here is final essay (for now!)... I found thing I said at the end about LANGUAGE poetry interesting and reasonable, but it will probably piss someone off. For the record, however, I don't mean to say the LANGUAGE poets are responsible for the current financial crisis, no. (Thank god they never got access to any actual automated trading systems, though, that would have been a disaster...)
Dangerous Magicians:
Speculations About Money and Poetry
Katy Lederer
DRAFT
“Money is a kind of poetry,” Wallace Stevens once wrote, which, as Dana Gioa remarks, is “not an allegory, but a metaphor.... Money is the one thing in society you can turn into almost anything else.” Or, as Kant says, money “represents all goods, since it is conceived as a universally accepted mere means of commerce [and has] no value in itself as opposed to things which are goods.” In other words, money—perhaps contrary to popular belief—is fundamentally neutral, a figure or lens, a means by which we magnify our motives and desires (in this it is a form of humanism). There is a kind of nonsense to it—money (“a poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have,” Stevens also wrote). It can be like religion (a conveyance of prayer) or language (a means of expression) or love (one can lose oneself in it). I do not fault money for my desires, though society may fault me for desiring to have money. It isn’t money that’s the root of all evil—no that’s a form of humanist self-loathing—it is the love of money that’s the root. There must be a passion, a surfeit, some kind of excess to make money qua money a sin; in this, it is really like anything else.
Or not—for it is this very quality, this representational facility, that makes money precisely unlike so much else. It is everything or nothing, what you want and what you cannot have. It is made and made-up—and sometimes painfully un-made. We agree to believe all those pieces of paper are actually worth what is written upon them until we no longer believe. The influential economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote:
There is very little in economics that invokes the supernatural, but by one phenomenon many have been tempted. In looking at a rectangular piece of paper, on frequent occasion of indifferent quality, featuring a national hero or monument or carrying a classical design with overtones of Peter Paul Reubens, Jacques Louis David… they have been assailed by the question: Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?... Surely some magic is involved; certainly some metaphysical or extraterrestrial explanation of its value is required. The priestly reputation and tendency of people who make a profession of knowing about money have been noted. Partly it is because such people are thought to know why valueless paper has no value. [1]
In its sheer malleability, its creative force, money is as human as language [2] and yet we have historically believed that it is evil, supernatural—a trick. Consider the following passages from Act 1 of the second half of Goethe’s Faust, which take place after Mephistopheles has persuaded a financially desperate Kaiser to start printing paper money (“the heaven-sent leaf”):
Chancellor:
Listen! and look upon the heaven-sent leaf,
That into joy hash changed a people’s grief.
“To all whom it concerneth,” and so forth:—
This note of hang, that purports to be worth
A thousand crowns, subjects to such demand
The boundless treasure buried in the land.
[….]
Kaiser:
Audacity unheard of!—foul deceit!
Who signed the Emperor’s name to such vile cheat?
[….]
Treasurer:
Forget you, Sir, the writing is your own?
This last night you were in the character
Of Pan: we saw the Chancellor prefer
The suit. He said, “A few strokes of your pen
Will bless the people over whom you reign.
Do make them happy on this festal night.”
And then you did take up the pen and write.
No time was lost. A thousand artists plied,
A thousandfold the scroll was multiplied;
And that the good to every one might fall,
We stamped at once the series, one and all.
[….]
The alphabet! What is it to this sign?—
To this “hoc signo vinces” note of thine?
[….]
Mephistopheles:
Once used to them, men will have nothing but
These leaves—so easy to receive and spend;
And the realm circulates, from this hour out,
Jewels, and gold, and paper to no end.
Riddled with not-so-subtle allusions to writing (we see notes, signs, a taking up of a pen and a multiplication of a scroll; there is a climactic mention of the alphabet and an equivalency made between “jewels and gold” and “paper to no end”), these passages draw a clear parallel between the making of money and the production of literature. They also illustrate nicely the distrust with which both the making of money and the making of literature have been met by the wider society; both processes appear to the common observer alchemical in nature, supernaturally creative. Like the makers of money to whom, as Galbraith observes, we have historically assigned a kind of priestly stature, the writers of verse have been regarded by the larger society with a mixture of envy and awe, loathing and reverence.
Historically, the dialogue—both aesthetic and political—between money and poetry has been a fascinating one. The great works of antiquity—the Bible and many of the major Greek and Latin epics—display not only a comfort but also an authorial facility with money, the marketplace, and international economics. The Bible, particularly the New Testament (the climactic passage of which is, of course, the exchange of coins for information on Jesus’s whereabouts), is littered with references to money and commerce, and epics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey would make no sense without a clearly drawn backdrop of world economic affairs.
The Renaissance was a golden age for poetry incorporating money as a theme (in part because metaphysical poetry, with its penchant for conceit, found money—the figure of the coin in particular—an attractively versatile, multivalent symbol). “When all Birds els do of their musick faile/ Money’s the still-sweet-singing Nightingale,” Robert Herrick wrote in a paean to the constancy of money, while John Donne (1572-1631) in his major poem “Love’s Usury,” employs the metaphors of banking to poeticize romantic yearning and inconstancy: “This bargain’s good; if when I’m old, I be/ Inflamed by thee,/If thine own honour, or my shame and pain,/ Thou covet most, at that age thou shalt gain.” Shakespeare is similarly facile with the tropes of economics and money, Sonnet IV being particularly jam-packed with economic terminology (likely the only occasion the word “audit” has been used in a major lyric poem):
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tomb’d with thee,
Which, used, lives th’ executor to be.
In contrast to the metaphysical Renaissance writers, who enthusiastically employed the figures, metaphors, and language of economics and commerce in their verse, the English Romantics generally eschewed such tropes, preferring to structure their poems around images and figures of country life. (Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” are two excellent examples.) Even Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us,” which famously invokes commerce, does so only as a contrastive device—a way to highlight the superiority of the country over the city, the natural over the artificial, the mythic over the banally commercial. He admonishes the reader.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Many of our most public contemporary poets—figures like Robert Pinsky, Frank Bidart, and Louis Gluck (as their Confessionalist predecessors Lowell, Bishop, and Plath also did)—continue to work in the Romantic tradition, employing the figures and tropes of domestic country life in order to elaborate upon inner intellectual and emotional states. Whether by choice or by tradition (probably by both), figures such as these have perpetuated a Romantic bias against the employment of tropes of money and commerce in poetry, and the general public has seemed to neither notice or care. I cannot think of a single Poet Laureate who has made issues of class, commerce, or economics one of the cornerstones of his or her laureateship, even though one might argue that issues of class and, by extension, access to quality education, are at the heart of poetry’s limited popularity in this country.
On the more experimental side of the aesthetic divide over the last two hundred years, there has been a greater openness to the employment of tropes of class and money in poetry. Modernists like Pound (in the Cantos in particular; he also authored a book, now out of print, called the ABCs of Economics), Eliot, Stein, and Stevens were, either biographically or aesthetically (again, often both), inclined to include the economic and commercial in their work. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is at once an anti-Humanist and anti-Romantic poem, employing tropes of both (an “unreal”) city and (a menacing) country in order to admonish and at the same time mourn the impoverished spirituality of contemporary man.
Formal experimentalists Auden and Larkin continue in the anti-Humanist, anti-Romantic Eliotic tradition, refining an aesthetics of great erudition combined with a post-Nietzschean spiritual nihilism; both employ the tropes of money and commerce to witheringly brilliant effect in their most famous poems. Auden’s “Fall of Rome” references “absconding tax-defaulters,” “temple prostitutes” and mutinying “muscle-bound Marines” using a diffident, notably anti-lyrical tone only to end with an obviously ironic—and patently anti-Romantic—bucolic scene: “Altogether elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ Miles and miles of golden moss,/ Silently and very fast.” Larkin, in his poem “Money” uses a similar strategy, musing rather banally in the body of the poem on his titular theme only to end with a sudden burst of Romantic high lyricism:
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’
So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don't keep it upstairs.
By now they've a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life
–In fact, they've a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can't put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won't in the end buy you more than a shave.
I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long French windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
“Money” was published in 1971, a point at which the dialogue between money and poetry gets at once more convoluted and more interesting. Whereas pre-’70s poetry was—whether “raw” or “cooked” to use Lowell’s terminology—generally relatively easy for a typical college-educated reader to digest, post-’70s poetry fragmented into several often vehemently opposing aesthetic camps. Previous to 1970, the post-Romantic Confessionals were writing and publishing alongside the similarly content-based and accessible Beat, Black Mountain, and San Francisco Renaissance poets (Ashbery’s The Double Dream of Spring was published in 1970; Robert Grenier’s famous speech-act “I HATE SPEECH” appeared in This magazine in 1971), but post-1970, a poetics developed that, though legible to the readership of die-hard poetry aficionados and lovers of the writings of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, was generally opaque to the common reader.
The aesthetics of LANGUAGE poetry and the more sophisticated strains of the New York School were consciously derivative (which I would here define as the reliance on the previous generation’s work and an extra-poetic contemporary discourse to provide a working aesthetic vocabulary for a reader; the individual works do not tell you how to read them) of their Modernist precursors. Speculation and generative chance operations replaced “inspiration” or other traditional instigators of poetic composition, and a consciously discursive poetics was developed to at once generate and explicate the poems. Finally, the mimeo- and small-press revolutions allowed the poets unprecedented access to the resources required to publish one another, which produced to some a symphony and to others a welter of small-run periodicals and books.
While experimental poetry was developing in all of these interesting, and historically unprecedented, directions, strikingly similar changes were happening in the world of trading and money. Just as what amounted to a high-post-modernist aesthetic was being developed, so too were new technologies being invented in the field of high finance. Algorithmic trading—the sophisticated use of computer programs to generate and execute trades—was introduced to the markets in the early 1970s when the “designated order turnaround system” or “DOT” was brought into the New York Stock Exchange. This was the beginning of modern high finance, and the parallels are fascinating. In both fields—poetry and finance—the 1970s and ’80s saw the proverbial “death of the author.” Whereas LANGUAGE POETRY did away with the idea of an inspired composer of brief subjective lyrics in favor of a highly algorithmic, operational producer of texts, finance did away with the figure of the brilliant but impossibly temperamental trader in favor of the cool-headed, operational quant. Both fields saw the rise of particular technologies (email, cheap off-set printing; high-capacity computers and trading systems) revolutionize the content and form of their productions; and both also saw the availability of these technologies expand the scope of their fields such that any one contributor could be dwarfed by the volume and scale of the projects they might reasonably undertake. In both cases poesis—literally “making”—became at once more esoteric and more powerful. In so many ways, after 1970, both the makers of money and the makers of literature became even more dangerous magicians.
The poet Robert Graves famously remarked that, just as “there’s no money in poetry, [...] there’s no poetry in money [either].” In the contemporary milieu, in which both money and poetry can be generated at the touch of a finger, and in which, even in the world of lyric poetry, persona trumps autobiographical subjectivity (just as derivative instruments trump underlying assets), such a witty pronouncement sounds a bit like a marketing slogan—unsubtle, unsophisticated, closed. And yet it harks back to time in which both money and poetry operated on a smaller scale, after the birth of humanism, but before the death of the author. It harks back to a Renaissance subjectivity—a subjectivity that not coincidentally developed alongside the rise of the great banking family of the Medici—and in this it is certainly quaint.
In the spirit of the age, I now perform an algorithmic operation. I am looking for a quotation with which to end my roughly 2,500-word essay on the subject of poetry and money: “money poetry magician” I Google, and here is what I get: “Money,” by David Keig, from the website poemhunter.com. Poem in its entirety: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/money-31/
* * *
Notes:
[1] Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston. 1975, p. 62. “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled,” he also wrote.
[2] I like this quote from Gertrude Stein. You can’t tell if she is kidding: “The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing that no animal can do is count, and the thing that no animal can know is money.” The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1936.
Phew. Exorcised.
Dangerous Magicians:
Speculations About Money and Poetry
Katy Lederer
DRAFT
“Money is a kind of poetry,” Wallace Stevens once wrote, which, as Dana Gioa remarks, is “not an allegory, but a metaphor.... Money is the one thing in society you can turn into almost anything else.” Or, as Kant says, money “represents all goods, since it is conceived as a universally accepted mere means of commerce [and has] no value in itself as opposed to things which are goods.” In other words, money—perhaps contrary to popular belief—is fundamentally neutral, a figure or lens, a means by which we magnify our motives and desires (in this it is a form of humanism). There is a kind of nonsense to it—money (“a poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have,” Stevens also wrote). It can be like religion (a conveyance of prayer) or language (a means of expression) or love (one can lose oneself in it). I do not fault money for my desires, though society may fault me for desiring to have money. It isn’t money that’s the root of all evil—no that’s a form of humanist self-loathing—it is the love of money that’s the root. There must be a passion, a surfeit, some kind of excess to make money qua money a sin; in this, it is really like anything else.
Or not—for it is this very quality, this representational facility, that makes money precisely unlike so much else. It is everything or nothing, what you want and what you cannot have. It is made and made-up—and sometimes painfully un-made. We agree to believe all those pieces of paper are actually worth what is written upon them until we no longer believe. The influential economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote:
There is very little in economics that invokes the supernatural, but by one phenomenon many have been tempted. In looking at a rectangular piece of paper, on frequent occasion of indifferent quality, featuring a national hero or monument or carrying a classical design with overtones of Peter Paul Reubens, Jacques Louis David… they have been assailed by the question: Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?... Surely some magic is involved; certainly some metaphysical or extraterrestrial explanation of its value is required. The priestly reputation and tendency of people who make a profession of knowing about money have been noted. Partly it is because such people are thought to know why valueless paper has no value. [1]
In its sheer malleability, its creative force, money is as human as language [2] and yet we have historically believed that it is evil, supernatural—a trick. Consider the following passages from Act 1 of the second half of Goethe’s Faust, which take place after Mephistopheles has persuaded a financially desperate Kaiser to start printing paper money (“the heaven-sent leaf”):
Chancellor:
Listen! and look upon the heaven-sent leaf,
That into joy hash changed a people’s grief.
“To all whom it concerneth,” and so forth:—
This note of hang, that purports to be worth
A thousand crowns, subjects to such demand
The boundless treasure buried in the land.
[….]
Kaiser:
Audacity unheard of!—foul deceit!
Who signed the Emperor’s name to such vile cheat?
[….]
Treasurer:
Forget you, Sir, the writing is your own?
This last night you were in the character
Of Pan: we saw the Chancellor prefer
The suit. He said, “A few strokes of your pen
Will bless the people over whom you reign.
Do make them happy on this festal night.”
And then you did take up the pen and write.
No time was lost. A thousand artists plied,
A thousandfold the scroll was multiplied;
And that the good to every one might fall,
We stamped at once the series, one and all.
[….]
The alphabet! What is it to this sign?—
To this “hoc signo vinces” note of thine?
[….]
Mephistopheles:
Once used to them, men will have nothing but
These leaves—so easy to receive and spend;
And the realm circulates, from this hour out,
Jewels, and gold, and paper to no end.
Riddled with not-so-subtle allusions to writing (we see notes, signs, a taking up of a pen and a multiplication of a scroll; there is a climactic mention of the alphabet and an equivalency made between “jewels and gold” and “paper to no end”), these passages draw a clear parallel between the making of money and the production of literature. They also illustrate nicely the distrust with which both the making of money and the making of literature have been met by the wider society; both processes appear to the common observer alchemical in nature, supernaturally creative. Like the makers of money to whom, as Galbraith observes, we have historically assigned a kind of priestly stature, the writers of verse have been regarded by the larger society with a mixture of envy and awe, loathing and reverence.
Historically, the dialogue—both aesthetic and political—between money and poetry has been a fascinating one. The great works of antiquity—the Bible and many of the major Greek and Latin epics—display not only a comfort but also an authorial facility with money, the marketplace, and international economics. The Bible, particularly the New Testament (the climactic passage of which is, of course, the exchange of coins for information on Jesus’s whereabouts), is littered with references to money and commerce, and epics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey would make no sense without a clearly drawn backdrop of world economic affairs.
The Renaissance was a golden age for poetry incorporating money as a theme (in part because metaphysical poetry, with its penchant for conceit, found money—the figure of the coin in particular—an attractively versatile, multivalent symbol). “When all Birds els do of their musick faile/ Money’s the still-sweet-singing Nightingale,” Robert Herrick wrote in a paean to the constancy of money, while John Donne (1572-1631) in his major poem “Love’s Usury,” employs the metaphors of banking to poeticize romantic yearning and inconstancy: “This bargain’s good; if when I’m old, I be/ Inflamed by thee,/If thine own honour, or my shame and pain,/ Thou covet most, at that age thou shalt gain.” Shakespeare is similarly facile with the tropes of economics and money, Sonnet IV being particularly jam-packed with economic terminology (likely the only occasion the word “audit” has been used in a major lyric poem):
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tomb’d with thee,
Which, used, lives th’ executor to be.
In contrast to the metaphysical Renaissance writers, who enthusiastically employed the figures, metaphors, and language of economics and commerce in their verse, the English Romantics generally eschewed such tropes, preferring to structure their poems around images and figures of country life. (Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” are two excellent examples.) Even Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us,” which famously invokes commerce, does so only as a contrastive device—a way to highlight the superiority of the country over the city, the natural over the artificial, the mythic over the banally commercial. He admonishes the reader.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Many of our most public contemporary poets—figures like Robert Pinsky, Frank Bidart, and Louis Gluck (as their Confessionalist predecessors Lowell, Bishop, and Plath also did)—continue to work in the Romantic tradition, employing the figures and tropes of domestic country life in order to elaborate upon inner intellectual and emotional states. Whether by choice or by tradition (probably by both), figures such as these have perpetuated a Romantic bias against the employment of tropes of money and commerce in poetry, and the general public has seemed to neither notice or care. I cannot think of a single Poet Laureate who has made issues of class, commerce, or economics one of the cornerstones of his or her laureateship, even though one might argue that issues of class and, by extension, access to quality education, are at the heart of poetry’s limited popularity in this country.
On the more experimental side of the aesthetic divide over the last two hundred years, there has been a greater openness to the employment of tropes of class and money in poetry. Modernists like Pound (in the Cantos in particular; he also authored a book, now out of print, called the ABCs of Economics), Eliot, Stein, and Stevens were, either biographically or aesthetically (again, often both), inclined to include the economic and commercial in their work. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is at once an anti-Humanist and anti-Romantic poem, employing tropes of both (an “unreal”) city and (a menacing) country in order to admonish and at the same time mourn the impoverished spirituality of contemporary man.
Formal experimentalists Auden and Larkin continue in the anti-Humanist, anti-Romantic Eliotic tradition, refining an aesthetics of great erudition combined with a post-Nietzschean spiritual nihilism; both employ the tropes of money and commerce to witheringly brilliant effect in their most famous poems. Auden’s “Fall of Rome” references “absconding tax-defaulters,” “temple prostitutes” and mutinying “muscle-bound Marines” using a diffident, notably anti-lyrical tone only to end with an obviously ironic—and patently anti-Romantic—bucolic scene: “Altogether elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ Miles and miles of golden moss,/ Silently and very fast.” Larkin, in his poem “Money” uses a similar strategy, musing rather banally in the body of the poem on his titular theme only to end with a sudden burst of Romantic high lyricism:
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’
So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don't keep it upstairs.
By now they've a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life
–In fact, they've a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can't put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won't in the end buy you more than a shave.
I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long French windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
“Money” was published in 1971, a point at which the dialogue between money and poetry gets at once more convoluted and more interesting. Whereas pre-’70s poetry was—whether “raw” or “cooked” to use Lowell’s terminology—generally relatively easy for a typical college-educated reader to digest, post-’70s poetry fragmented into several often vehemently opposing aesthetic camps. Previous to 1970, the post-Romantic Confessionals were writing and publishing alongside the similarly content-based and accessible Beat, Black Mountain, and San Francisco Renaissance poets (Ashbery’s The Double Dream of Spring was published in 1970; Robert Grenier’s famous speech-act “I HATE SPEECH” appeared in This magazine in 1971), but post-1970, a poetics developed that, though legible to the readership of die-hard poetry aficionados and lovers of the writings of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, was generally opaque to the common reader.
The aesthetics of LANGUAGE poetry and the more sophisticated strains of the New York School were consciously derivative (which I would here define as the reliance on the previous generation’s work and an extra-poetic contemporary discourse to provide a working aesthetic vocabulary for a reader; the individual works do not tell you how to read them) of their Modernist precursors. Speculation and generative chance operations replaced “inspiration” or other traditional instigators of poetic composition, and a consciously discursive poetics was developed to at once generate and explicate the poems. Finally, the mimeo- and small-press revolutions allowed the poets unprecedented access to the resources required to publish one another, which produced to some a symphony and to others a welter of small-run periodicals and books.
While experimental poetry was developing in all of these interesting, and historically unprecedented, directions, strikingly similar changes were happening in the world of trading and money. Just as what amounted to a high-post-modernist aesthetic was being developed, so too were new technologies being invented in the field of high finance. Algorithmic trading—the sophisticated use of computer programs to generate and execute trades—was introduced to the markets in the early 1970s when the “designated order turnaround system” or “DOT” was brought into the New York Stock Exchange. This was the beginning of modern high finance, and the parallels are fascinating. In both fields—poetry and finance—the 1970s and ’80s saw the proverbial “death of the author.” Whereas LANGUAGE POETRY did away with the idea of an inspired composer of brief subjective lyrics in favor of a highly algorithmic, operational producer of texts, finance did away with the figure of the brilliant but impossibly temperamental trader in favor of the cool-headed, operational quant. Both fields saw the rise of particular technologies (email, cheap off-set printing; high-capacity computers and trading systems) revolutionize the content and form of their productions; and both also saw the availability of these technologies expand the scope of their fields such that any one contributor could be dwarfed by the volume and scale of the projects they might reasonably undertake. In both cases poesis—literally “making”—became at once more esoteric and more powerful. In so many ways, after 1970, both the makers of money and the makers of literature became even more dangerous magicians.
The poet Robert Graves famously remarked that, just as “there’s no money in poetry, [...] there’s no poetry in money [either].” In the contemporary milieu, in which both money and poetry can be generated at the touch of a finger, and in which, even in the world of lyric poetry, persona trumps autobiographical subjectivity (just as derivative instruments trump underlying assets), such a witty pronouncement sounds a bit like a marketing slogan—unsubtle, unsophisticated, closed. And yet it harks back to time in which both money and poetry operated on a smaller scale, after the birth of humanism, but before the death of the author. It harks back to a Renaissance subjectivity—a subjectivity that not coincidentally developed alongside the rise of the great banking family of the Medici—and in this it is certainly quaint.
In the spirit of the age, I now perform an algorithmic operation. I am looking for a quotation with which to end my roughly 2,500-word essay on the subject of poetry and money: “money poetry magician” I Google, and here is what I get: “Money,” by David Keig, from the website poemhunter.com. Poem in its entirety: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/money-31/
* * *
Notes:
[1] Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston. 1975, p. 62. “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled,” he also wrote.
[2] I like this quote from Gertrude Stein. You can’t tell if she is kidding: “The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing that no animal can do is count, and the thing that no animal can know is money.” The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1936.
Phew. Exorcised.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Brooklyn/American Poet
Procrastinating on American Poet essay, which has ruined my life. Today: was supposed to go to tree-trimming in the afternoon, birthday drinks for friend in Manhattan in the evening, rock festival to see my friend John play the drums late-night. Suspect: none of these will happen. Essay due on Monday. Need another 400 words. Here is essay so far... If you are out there on a Saturday night and looking to help a poor, hapless essay writer get over her block, please feel free:
“The Heaven-Sent Leaf”:
On Poetry and Money
Katy Lederer
“Money is a kind of poetry,” Wallace Stevens once wrote, which, as Dana Gioa remarks, is “not an allegory, but a metaphor.... Money is the one thing in society you can turn into almost anything else.” [1] Or, as Kant says, money “represents all goods, since it is conceived as a universally accepted mere means of commerce [and has] no value in itself as opposed to things which are goods.” [2] In other words, money—perhaps contrary to the popular belief—is fundamentally neutral, a figure or lens, a means by which we magnify our motives and desires (in this it is a form of humanism). There is a kind of nonsense to it—money (“a poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have,” Stevens also wrote). It can be like religion (a conveyance of prayer) or language (a means of expression) or love (one can lose oneself in it). I do not fault money for my desires, though society may fault me for desiring to have money. It isn’t money that’s the root of all evil—no that’s a misprision, a form of humanist (a paradigm not coincidentally concurrent with rise of the great banking family of the Medici) self-loathing—it is the love of money that’s the root. There must be a passion, a surfeit, some kind of excess to make money qua money a sin; in this, it is really like anything else.
Or not—for it is this very quality, this representational facility, that makes money precisely unlike so much else. It is everything or nothing, what you want and what you cannot have. It is made and made up. We agree to believe all those pieces of paper are actually worth what is written upon them. “There is very little in economics that invokes the supernatural,” the influential economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote:
But by one phenomenon many have been tempted. In looking at a rectangular piece of paper, on frequent occasion of indifferent quality, featuring a national hero or monument or carrying a classical design with overtones of Peter Paul Reubens, Jacques Louis David or a particularly well-stocked vegetable market, and printed in brown or green ink, they have been assailed by the question: Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?... Surely some magic is involved; certainly some metaphysical or extraterrestrial explanation of its value is required. [3]
In its sheer malleability, its creativity, money is as human as language [4] and yet we have, historically, believed that it is evil, supernatural—a trick. Consider the following passages from Act 1 of the second half of Goethe’s Faust, which take place after Mephistopheles has persuaded a financially desperate Kaiser to start printing paper money (“the heaven-sent leaf”):
Chancellor:
Who could ever have dreamed such happiness
Would come this day of my old age to bless.
Listen! and look upon the heaven-sent leaf,
That into joy hash changed a people’s grief.
“To all whom it concerneth, and so forth:—
This note of hang, that purports to be worth
A thousand crowns, subjects to such demand
The boundless treasure buried in the land
And furthermore, said treasure underground,
To pay said sum is, whensoever found,
And wheresoever, firmly pledged and bound.”
Kaiser:
Audacity unheard of!—foul deceit!
Who signed the Emperor’s name to such vile cheat?
What punishment can for such crime atone?
Treasurer:
Forget you, Sir, the writing is your own?
This last night you were in the character
Of Pan: we saw the Chancellor prefer
The suit. He said, “A few strokes of your pen
Will bless the people over whom you reign.
Do make them happy on this festal night.”
And then you did take up the pen and write.
No time was lost. A thousand artists plied,
A thousandfold the scroll was multiplied;
And that the good to every one might fall,
We stamped at once the series, one and all.
Tens—thirties—fifties—hundred off we strike!
Never was anything that men so like:
Your city, moldering and in despair,
Has caught new life, and joy is everywhere.
Long as your name was by the world held dear,
Never did it so brightly shine as here—
The alphabet! What is it to this sign?—
To this “hoc signo vinces” note of thine?
[….]
Mephistopheles:
Once used to them, men will have nothing but
These leaves—so easy to receive and spend;
And the realm circulates, from this hour out,
Jewels, and gold, and paper to no end.
Riddled with not-so-subtle allusions to writing (we see notes, signs, a taking up of a pen and a multiplication of a scroll; there is a climactic mention of the alphabet and a rather clear equivalency made between “jewels and gold” and “paper to no end”), these passages clearly draw a parallel between the making of money and the production of literature. [5]
Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 also cites Goethe’s Faust (along with Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens) in order to illustrate a very different point—that money is in fact “the alienated ability of mankind.” He begins his argument elaborating upon the ways in which money is a powerfully creative force (a kind of poesis): “If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot,” he writes:
Money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of the imagination, translates them for their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence—from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power.
Marx continues his argument at money’s expense (pun intended, I suppose), however, positing:
That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not—turns it, that is, in its contrary. [….] Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy. [….] Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things—the world upside-down.
Of course there is a glaring flaw in Marx’s argument, which is that it assumes that all power (for in the passages I cite above, money is more than roughly equivalent to power) is corrupting. Might we wonder, for instance, if a virtuous man might not become even more virtuous (“virtue into more virtue” to use Marx’s phraseology) by use of money? And if so, is this magnification still a corruption, an alienation—a lie? On the one hand, we have AIG, Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley first “making money” and then “making money up” by leveraging their assets 40 to 1; on the other, we have, as the poet Frederick Turner puts it in his book Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (Oxford UP, 1999): “even holy and unworldly persons, like Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama [raising] money to pursue their goals of mercy and charity” (p. 5). Unless we dispense of money altogether, are we doomed to live in an exaggerated, unjust world? And, by a similar logic, unless we dispense of the making of literature altogether—another kind of “making,” “making up”—are we doomed to live in Plato’s imperfect Republic?:
Yes, Socrates, that, I think, is quite true.
Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colors and figures.
[….]
Certainly.
And what is the faculty in man to which imitation is addressed?
What do you mean?
I will explain: The body which is large when seen near, appears small when seen at a distance?
True.
And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to the illusion about colors to which the sight is liable. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.
That is, again to quote Marx (on money, but, for my purposes here, he could just as well be speaking about writing):
Money as the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man as man or from human society as society) for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and therefore imperfections and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras—essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual—into real essential powers and faculties.
Of course the parallel isn’t all neat and clean. While Marx’s corrupted spender can transform wishes and desires into actual objects that exist in the world, for instance, Plato’s artist can only imitate said objects (thereby distorting and ultimately diminishing them); while Marx’s spender uses money as an extension and enlargement of his intellectual, emotional, and corporeal selves, Plato’s artist uses representation mainly to make of the objects he writes of or paints that much smaller, less real—less ideal. Both the spender and the artist, however, are cast as deceivers in these texts; both are morally suspect, unworthy—magicians. And yet both are also fundamentally—and irresistibly—creative. Just as we can’t help but root for Mephistopheles in Faust, so too, I would argue, we are infinitely charmed by both the spender and the artist. They are mythic in their trickery. We venerate their power.
We are living now in an unprecedented era—both for money and for poetry. […]
* * *
Notes:
[1] On the one hand, it strikes me as odd that, after making such an assertion (that money is this malleable, this creative), Gioia would have written a poem (called, literally enough, “Money”) composed entirely of clichés ; then again the clichés are themselves (as clichés will be) either metaphors or similes and are therefore, I suppose, a (perhaps brilliantly, perhaps not) literal enactment of his assertion. Best bit: “Money. You don’t know where it’s been,/ but you put it where your mouth is./ And it talks.”
[2] See also Hume for a similar sentiment: “Money is not, properly speaking, one of the subjects of commerce, but only the instrument which men have agreed upon to facilitate the exchange of one commodity for another. It is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy.”
[3] Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston. 1975, p. 62. “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled,” he also wrote.
[4] I like this quote from Gertrude Stein. One can never tell if she is kidding: “The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing that no animal can do is count, and the thing that no animal can know is money.” The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1936.
[5] In furtherance of my reading, see also this wonderful foreshadowing passage from Knabe Lenker, the Boy Charioteer (AKA “poetry”), which comes just a few pages before:
I am PROFUSION—I am POESY.
I am the POET who feels his true power,
And is himself, indeed, but in the hour
When he on the regardless world hath thrown,
With lavish hand, the wealth, peculiarly his own.
And I am rich—am rich immeasurably:
Plutus alone in riches equals me.
Through me his banquets charm, his dances live:
That which they could not else have had, I give.
* * *
In other news (and I guess I'm paying for it now), had interesting last couple of days. Yesterday, had lunch with an agent friend who turned to me before we started eating and remarked—rather coolly considering the context: "last week was the Armageddon of the book industry."
The woman's forehead says "shit is coming":
Two nights ago, went to the D. E. Shaw Christmas party (in the whale room at the Natural History Museum). During especially depressing conversation about the economy with a fiancee of one of the traders, was reminded of the Cavafy poem "Waiting for the Barbarians":
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)
Here is a picture of Andrew Hultkrans and Zelimir Galjanic, both of whom were at the party (I used to manage Zelimir, strangely enough). Zelimir is a refugee of the publishing industry (used to work at Grove and Penguin—got out several years back, however); Andrew used to be the editor of Book Forum. It is interesting to me how closely linked the worlds of publishing and finance really are...
Aren't they handsome?:
“The Heaven-Sent Leaf”:
On Poetry and Money
Katy Lederer
“Money is a kind of poetry,” Wallace Stevens once wrote, which, as Dana Gioa remarks, is “not an allegory, but a metaphor.... Money is the one thing in society you can turn into almost anything else.” [1] Or, as Kant says, money “represents all goods, since it is conceived as a universally accepted mere means of commerce [and has] no value in itself as opposed to things which are goods.” [2] In other words, money—perhaps contrary to the popular belief—is fundamentally neutral, a figure or lens, a means by which we magnify our motives and desires (in this it is a form of humanism). There is a kind of nonsense to it—money (“a poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have,” Stevens also wrote). It can be like religion (a conveyance of prayer) or language (a means of expression) or love (one can lose oneself in it). I do not fault money for my desires, though society may fault me for desiring to have money. It isn’t money that’s the root of all evil—no that’s a misprision, a form of humanist (a paradigm not coincidentally concurrent with rise of the great banking family of the Medici) self-loathing—it is the love of money that’s the root. There must be a passion, a surfeit, some kind of excess to make money qua money a sin; in this, it is really like anything else.
Or not—for it is this very quality, this representational facility, that makes money precisely unlike so much else. It is everything or nothing, what you want and what you cannot have. It is made and made up. We agree to believe all those pieces of paper are actually worth what is written upon them. “There is very little in economics that invokes the supernatural,” the influential economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote:
But by one phenomenon many have been tempted. In looking at a rectangular piece of paper, on frequent occasion of indifferent quality, featuring a national hero or monument or carrying a classical design with overtones of Peter Paul Reubens, Jacques Louis David or a particularly well-stocked vegetable market, and printed in brown or green ink, they have been assailed by the question: Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?... Surely some magic is involved; certainly some metaphysical or extraterrestrial explanation of its value is required. [3]
In its sheer malleability, its creativity, money is as human as language [4] and yet we have, historically, believed that it is evil, supernatural—a trick. Consider the following passages from Act 1 of the second half of Goethe’s Faust, which take place after Mephistopheles has persuaded a financially desperate Kaiser to start printing paper money (“the heaven-sent leaf”):
Chancellor:
Who could ever have dreamed such happiness
Would come this day of my old age to bless.
Listen! and look upon the heaven-sent leaf,
That into joy hash changed a people’s grief.
“To all whom it concerneth, and so forth:—
This note of hang, that purports to be worth
A thousand crowns, subjects to such demand
The boundless treasure buried in the land
And furthermore, said treasure underground,
To pay said sum is, whensoever found,
And wheresoever, firmly pledged and bound.”
Kaiser:
Audacity unheard of!—foul deceit!
Who signed the Emperor’s name to such vile cheat?
What punishment can for such crime atone?
Treasurer:
Forget you, Sir, the writing is your own?
This last night you were in the character
Of Pan: we saw the Chancellor prefer
The suit. He said, “A few strokes of your pen
Will bless the people over whom you reign.
Do make them happy on this festal night.”
And then you did take up the pen and write.
No time was lost. A thousand artists plied,
A thousandfold the scroll was multiplied;
And that the good to every one might fall,
We stamped at once the series, one and all.
Tens—thirties—fifties—hundred off we strike!
Never was anything that men so like:
Your city, moldering and in despair,
Has caught new life, and joy is everywhere.
Long as your name was by the world held dear,
Never did it so brightly shine as here—
The alphabet! What is it to this sign?—
To this “hoc signo vinces” note of thine?
[….]
Mephistopheles:
Once used to them, men will have nothing but
These leaves—so easy to receive and spend;
And the realm circulates, from this hour out,
Jewels, and gold, and paper to no end.
Riddled with not-so-subtle allusions to writing (we see notes, signs, a taking up of a pen and a multiplication of a scroll; there is a climactic mention of the alphabet and a rather clear equivalency made between “jewels and gold” and “paper to no end”), these passages clearly draw a parallel between the making of money and the production of literature. [5]
Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 also cites Goethe’s Faust (along with Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens) in order to illustrate a very different point—that money is in fact “the alienated ability of mankind.” He begins his argument elaborating upon the ways in which money is a powerfully creative force (a kind of poesis): “If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot,” he writes:
Money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of the imagination, translates them for their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence—from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power.
Marx continues his argument at money’s expense (pun intended, I suppose), however, positing:
That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not—turns it, that is, in its contrary. [….] Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy. [….] Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things—the world upside-down.
Of course there is a glaring flaw in Marx’s argument, which is that it assumes that all power (for in the passages I cite above, money is more than roughly equivalent to power) is corrupting. Might we wonder, for instance, if a virtuous man might not become even more virtuous (“virtue into more virtue” to use Marx’s phraseology) by use of money? And if so, is this magnification still a corruption, an alienation—a lie? On the one hand, we have AIG, Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley first “making money” and then “making money up” by leveraging their assets 40 to 1; on the other, we have, as the poet Frederick Turner puts it in his book Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (Oxford UP, 1999): “even holy and unworldly persons, like Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama [raising] money to pursue their goals of mercy and charity” (p. 5). Unless we dispense of money altogether, are we doomed to live in an exaggerated, unjust world? And, by a similar logic, unless we dispense of the making of literature altogether—another kind of “making,” “making up”—are we doomed to live in Plato’s imperfect Republic?:
Yes, Socrates, that, I think, is quite true.
Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colors and figures.
[….]
Certainly.
And what is the faculty in man to which imitation is addressed?
What do you mean?
I will explain: The body which is large when seen near, appears small when seen at a distance?
True.
And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to the illusion about colors to which the sight is liable. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.
That is, again to quote Marx (on money, but, for my purposes here, he could just as well be speaking about writing):
Money as the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man as man or from human society as society) for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and therefore imperfections and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras—essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual—into real essential powers and faculties.
Of course the parallel isn’t all neat and clean. While Marx’s corrupted spender can transform wishes and desires into actual objects that exist in the world, for instance, Plato’s artist can only imitate said objects (thereby distorting and ultimately diminishing them); while Marx’s spender uses money as an extension and enlargement of his intellectual, emotional, and corporeal selves, Plato’s artist uses representation mainly to make of the objects he writes of or paints that much smaller, less real—less ideal. Both the spender and the artist, however, are cast as deceivers in these texts; both are morally suspect, unworthy—magicians. And yet both are also fundamentally—and irresistibly—creative. Just as we can’t help but root for Mephistopheles in Faust, so too, I would argue, we are infinitely charmed by both the spender and the artist. They are mythic in their trickery. We venerate their power.
We are living now in an unprecedented era—both for money and for poetry. […]
* * *
Notes:
[1] On the one hand, it strikes me as odd that, after making such an assertion (that money is this malleable, this creative), Gioia would have written a poem (called, literally enough, “Money”) composed entirely of clichés ; then again the clichés are themselves (as clichés will be) either metaphors or similes and are therefore, I suppose, a (perhaps brilliantly, perhaps not) literal enactment of his assertion. Best bit: “Money. You don’t know where it’s been,/ but you put it where your mouth is./ And it talks.”
[2] See also Hume for a similar sentiment: “Money is not, properly speaking, one of the subjects of commerce, but only the instrument which men have agreed upon to facilitate the exchange of one commodity for another. It is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy.”
[3] Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston. 1975, p. 62. “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled,” he also wrote.
[4] I like this quote from Gertrude Stein. One can never tell if she is kidding: “The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing that no animal can do is count, and the thing that no animal can know is money.” The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1936.
[5] In furtherance of my reading, see also this wonderful foreshadowing passage from Knabe Lenker, the Boy Charioteer (AKA “poetry”), which comes just a few pages before:
I am PROFUSION—I am POESY.
I am the POET who feels his true power,
And is himself, indeed, but in the hour
When he on the regardless world hath thrown,
With lavish hand, the wealth, peculiarly his own.
And I am rich—am rich immeasurably:
Plutus alone in riches equals me.
Through me his banquets charm, his dances live:
That which they could not else have had, I give.
* * *
In other news (and I guess I'm paying for it now), had interesting last couple of days. Yesterday, had lunch with an agent friend who turned to me before we started eating and remarked—rather coolly considering the context: "last week was the Armageddon of the book industry."
The woman's forehead says "shit is coming":
Two nights ago, went to the D. E. Shaw Christmas party (in the whale room at the Natural History Museum). During especially depressing conversation about the economy with a fiancee of one of the traders, was reminded of the Cavafy poem "Waiting for the Barbarians":
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)
Here is a picture of Andrew Hultkrans and Zelimir Galjanic, both of whom were at the party (I used to manage Zelimir, strangely enough). Zelimir is a refugee of the publishing industry (used to work at Grove and Penguin—got out several years back, however); Andrew used to be the editor of Book Forum. It is interesting to me how closely linked the worlds of publishing and finance really are...
Aren't they handsome?:
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
"That sucking sound"
Investors Buy U.S. Debt at Zero Yield
By VIKAS BAJAJ and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published in the New York Times: December 9, 2008
When was the last time you invested in something that you knew wouldn’t make money?
In the market equivalent of shoveling cash under the mattress, hordes of buyers were so eager on Tuesday to park money in the world’s safest investment, United States government debt, that they agreed to accept a zero percent rate of return.
The news sent a sobering signal: in these troubled economic times, when people have lost vast amounts on stocks, bonds and real estate, making an investment that offers security but no gain is tantamount to coming out ahead. This extremely cautious approach reflects concerns that a global recession could deepen next year, and continue to jeopardize all types of investments.
While this will lower the cost of borrowing for the United States government, economists worry that a widespread hunkering-down could have broader implications that could slow an economic recovery. If investors remain reluctant to put money into stocks and corporate bonds, that could choke off funds that businesses need to keep financing their day-to-day operations.
Investors accepted the zero percent rate in the government’s auction Tuesday of $30 billion worth of short-term securities that mature in four weeks. Demand was so great even for no return that the government could have sold four times as much.
In addition, for a brief moment, investors were willing to take a small loss for holding another ultra-safe security, the already-issued three-month Treasury bill.
In these times, it seems, the abnormal has now become acceptable. As America’s debt and deficit spiral from a parade of billion dollar bailouts and stimulus packages, fund managers, foreign governments and big retail investors reckon they will get more peace of mind by stashing their cash, rather than putting it toward any of the higher-yielding risk that is entailed in stocks, corporate bonds and consumer debt.
The rapid decline in Treasury yields — which since summer have headed toward lows not seen since the end of the World War II — also renders the Federal Reserve less effective, as investors and banks stuff the money that the central bank is pumping into the financial system into Treasuries, rather than fanning it out across the broader economy.
“The last time this happened was the Great Depression, when people are willing to accept no return on their money, or possibly even a negative return,” said Edward Yardeni, an independent analyst. “If people are so busy during the day just protecting the cash they have, it’s not a good sign.”
Stocks fell sharply as investors digested the implications. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 242.85 points, or 2.72 percent, to 8,691.33, and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index declined 2.31 percent, to 888.67. The Nasdaq composite index lost 1.55 percent, to 1,547.34.
If there is a silver lining to the Treasury market’s gyrations, it is that the United States can borrow money more cheaply from investors, whether they be the governments of China or Japan, or big fund managers. That could help Washington finance various programs intended to revive the ailing economy.
Borrowing by the Treasury has already ballooned since Congress approved the $700 billion financial rescue plan, and policy makers expect the federal budget deficit to swell further next year as the Big Three automakers and other industries look for support.
“That sucking sound is all the world’s capital going into the U.S. Treasury market,” Mr. Yardeni said, “which means the Treasury and the Fed can tap into that liquidity pool to finance TARP and offer mortgages at 4.5 percent.”
By VIKAS BAJAJ and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published in the New York Times: December 9, 2008
When was the last time you invested in something that you knew wouldn’t make money?
In the market equivalent of shoveling cash under the mattress, hordes of buyers were so eager on Tuesday to park money in the world’s safest investment, United States government debt, that they agreed to accept a zero percent rate of return.
The news sent a sobering signal: in these troubled economic times, when people have lost vast amounts on stocks, bonds and real estate, making an investment that offers security but no gain is tantamount to coming out ahead. This extremely cautious approach reflects concerns that a global recession could deepen next year, and continue to jeopardize all types of investments.
While this will lower the cost of borrowing for the United States government, economists worry that a widespread hunkering-down could have broader implications that could slow an economic recovery. If investors remain reluctant to put money into stocks and corporate bonds, that could choke off funds that businesses need to keep financing their day-to-day operations.
Investors accepted the zero percent rate in the government’s auction Tuesday of $30 billion worth of short-term securities that mature in four weeks. Demand was so great even for no return that the government could have sold four times as much.
In addition, for a brief moment, investors were willing to take a small loss for holding another ultra-safe security, the already-issued three-month Treasury bill.
In these times, it seems, the abnormal has now become acceptable. As America’s debt and deficit spiral from a parade of billion dollar bailouts and stimulus packages, fund managers, foreign governments and big retail investors reckon they will get more peace of mind by stashing their cash, rather than putting it toward any of the higher-yielding risk that is entailed in stocks, corporate bonds and consumer debt.
The rapid decline in Treasury yields — which since summer have headed toward lows not seen since the end of the World War II — also renders the Federal Reserve less effective, as investors and banks stuff the money that the central bank is pumping into the financial system into Treasuries, rather than fanning it out across the broader economy.
“The last time this happened was the Great Depression, when people are willing to accept no return on their money, or possibly even a negative return,” said Edward Yardeni, an independent analyst. “If people are so busy during the day just protecting the cash they have, it’s not a good sign.”
Stocks fell sharply as investors digested the implications. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 242.85 points, or 2.72 percent, to 8,691.33, and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index declined 2.31 percent, to 888.67. The Nasdaq composite index lost 1.55 percent, to 1,547.34.
If there is a silver lining to the Treasury market’s gyrations, it is that the United States can borrow money more cheaply from investors, whether they be the governments of China or Japan, or big fund managers. That could help Washington finance various programs intended to revive the ailing economy.
Borrowing by the Treasury has already ballooned since Congress approved the $700 billion financial rescue plan, and policy makers expect the federal budget deficit to swell further next year as the Big Three automakers and other industries look for support.
“That sucking sound is all the world’s capital going into the U.S. Treasury market,” Mr. Yardeni said, “which means the Treasury and the Fed can tap into that liquidity pool to finance TARP and offer mortgages at 4.5 percent.”
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Providence/Hudson/Buffalo/Rochester
November 22: Reading with Forrest Gander and Jeffrey Yang at Ada Books, 741 Westminster Street, #2, Providence, RI. 6PM.
November 23: Reading with Rebecca Wolff at the Spotty Dog Bookshop, 440 Warren Street, Hudson, NY. 7PM.
November 24: Reading with Andrew Zawacki at Buffalo State University, room 210, Butler Library, Buffalo, NY. 4PM.
*
So I think the first section (500-800 words) should be about money qua money—as distinct from commerce or trading or the current financial crisis, for that matter. The second section, which I want to call “The Heaven-Sent Leaf,” should include some examples of poems about money—for and against—probably one renaissance poem (perhaps John Donne’s “Love’s Usury”); one Romantic poem (Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us” is a likely choice…); a Modernist poem (this one is harder—much of Pound’s Cantos deals with class, but it’s oblique… of course, the Modernist period was the great age of upper-middle class poets with professional jobs—eg Eliot, Stevens, Williams); probably the (eerily anticipatory—Spicer, Berrigan, etc. eat your hearts out) poem “Twenty-Four Years,” by Dylan Thomas (published in 1938); and then the poem “Money,” by Philip Larkin, published in the 70s. I think this is a good list—a good way to illustrate the ways in which money has figured (representatively or no) in poetry over the years.
Bused it back from Turners Falls this afternoon… a disaster as the Greyhounds weren’t running on time… Watched TV about hideous Rod Blagojevich… more and more this life seems like a drama by Shakespeare (comedy and tragedy both)… corrupt governor trying to sell off the senate seat of the recently anointed prince; there is a parallelism to it—a symmetry, even, in classic Shakespearean style… Or the attacks in Mumbai; just as the new regime displaces the old, so too does a new style of terrorism—terrorism 2.0—usurp the style that came before.
Everything menacing. People in the station at Springfield were menacing—across their weathered faces was a slavering, for money? Restaurants set up so you stand while you eat—you wouldn’t want them to sit down, those hungry people with no money. Money is a kind of poetry; is poverty a kind of prose?
*
The day after the Stain reading, I trained it up to Providence for what would turn out to be one of my favorite readings of the trip (speaking of poems, of prose). I read at Ada Books. A nice woman named Kate Schapira hosted me along with Jeffrey Yang. Forrest Gander—who is an old teacher of mine—was billed as a sort of special “guest star.” At this reading, more than any other on the trip, I felt “received.” There was a drawing room feel to things—a kindly formality. It felt like a good part of the community was present. There were also some old faces—my good old friend from high school Annie White was there (I stayed at her house with her adorable husband and toddler), Gillian Kiley, who was a peer of mine at Iowa. Many of us went out to dinner afterwards. I was busy catching up with Annie, but managed to chat with Jeffrey and his wife, Forrest, Kate Colby (Kate Schapira and Kate Colby and I read a few months back in St. Louis as part of a reading called “Eight Kates”; the reading also included Katie Ford, Katie Peterson, Kate Greenstreet, Cate Marvin, and Kate Pringle… what a show), etc. It was lovely (though so awfully cold!). My iPhone broke that afternoon, so I don’t have any pictures.
The next day, I drove over to Hudson to read at the Spotty Dog with Rebecca Wolff. This was another favorite reading in that I was reading with and for old friends, the place was pretty packed, and I was feeling back at home, having come from Annie in Providence, and knowing I’d be staying that evening with Caroline Crumpacker, a co-editor at Fence and wonderful hostess. We all went to a great Italian restaurant after and devoured some spelt pizza.
Here is the audience in Hudson (photos courtesy of Monica Youn):
Here is Rebecca reading:
Me:
Here is Mark Wunderlich, who lives in that enchanted area:
The day after that, I drove up to Buffalo (I sped the whole way up to Buffalo the way I'm speeding through these readings) to read at Buffalo State with Andrew Zawacki. Here is Lisa Forrest, my wonderful hostess up there:
Andrew (more on him later):
And then… phew…. That very night, I drove to Rochester, about an hour, to crash at a hotel. There was a very large accident along the way. It was pouring down snow:
The next morning I guest taught a class of about 50 9-12 graders at the local arts high school. This was a real treat (no pictures, unfortunately). I read a bit and had them do two exercises. The first was to write a persona poem (these turned out great); the second was to write a “speech act” poem—basically a poem composed around a wish (these didn’t turn out as well). The kids were a little antsy as it was the last day before the vacation. Afterwards, I got to see BOA Editions’ offices:
Here is Thom Ward, who edited my manuscript; great guy:
*
Money is a kind of poetry… poverty is a kind of prose.
Back to the New Yorker for a second: two corrections (never fact check when you’re speeding 80 miles down the highway on your way to Buffalo, New York);
I didn’t say “eros and vanitas”; rather it was “eros and thanatos.” This mistake is a little humorous as I remember the writer repeating it back to me when I first said it on the phone:
“Eros and vanitas?” she (must have) asked.
“Yes, eros and thanatos,” I (must have) replied.
“Eros and vanitas?” she (must have) asked again.
“Yes, eros and thanatos,” I (must have) replied.
Then I must have done the whole rigmarole again with the fact checker. Oh well. From Wikipedia:
"
The life and death drives
Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive (libido) (survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death drive (Thanatos). Freud's description of Cathexis, whose energy is known as libido, included all creative, life-producing drives. The death drive (or death instinct), whose energy is known as anticathexis, represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm: in other words, an inorganic or dead state. Freud recognized Thanatos only in his later years and developed his theory on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud approached the paradox between the life drives and the death drives by defining pleasure and unpleasure. According to Freud, unpleasure refers to stimulus that the body receives. (For example, excessive friction on the skin's surface produces a burning sensation; or, the bombardment of visual stimuli amidst rush hour traffic produces anxiety.) Conversely, pleasure is a result of a decrease in stimuli (for example, a calm environment the body enters after having been subjected to a hectic environment). If pleasure increases as stimuli decreases, then the ultimate experience of pleasure for Freud would be zero stimulus, or death.
Given this proposition, Freud acknowledged the tendency for the unconscious to repeat unpleasurable experiences in order to desensitize, or deaden, the body. This compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences explains why traumatic nightmares occur in dreams, as nightmares seem to contradict Freud's earlier conception of dreams purely as a site of pleasure, fantasy, and desire. On the one hand, the life drives promote survival by avoiding extreme unpleasure and any threat to life. On the other hand, the death drive functions simultaneously toward extreme pleasure, which leads to death. Freud addressed the conceptual dualities of pleasure and unpleasure, as well as sex/life and death, in his discussions on masochism and sadomasochism. The tension between Eros and Thanatos represented a revolution in his manner of thinking. These ideas resemble aspects of the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, expounded in The World as Will and Representation, describes a renunciation of the will to live that corresponds on many levels with Freud's Death Drive. Similarly, the life drive clearly parallels much of Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy. However, Freud denied having been acquainted with their writings before he formulated the groundwork of his own ideas.
"
I do believe speculative bubbles have something to do with the intertwining drives of eros and thanatos; the concept explains (or at least describes) in particular why people are able to exist in denial for so long during booms, in my view.
Then again, I don’t need Freud or wikipedia to tell me that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” and “what goes up must come down.”
Second correction is that I didn't pay for the entire trip. I did about 30 readings; for 7 of them (6 academic) I was paid an honoraria; all of these combined covered the costs, more or less, of the rest. I clarified this for both the writer and the fact checker, but I think they liked the narrative better the way it was (and it wasn't utterly inaccurate).
All of this said, I don't mean to dis on my profiler or fact checker. My profiler spent literally hours with me on the phone to get that little bit of text, and the fact-checker struck me as very thorough. What should be dissed, I suppose, is the quality one can get out of an iPhone connection, especially while driving. I wanted to mention the eros/thanatos correction somewhere, though, just for the record...
This is Bad Kitty angling for a pat. I must attend:
November 23: Reading with Rebecca Wolff at the Spotty Dog Bookshop, 440 Warren Street, Hudson, NY. 7PM.
November 24: Reading with Andrew Zawacki at Buffalo State University, room 210, Butler Library, Buffalo, NY. 4PM.
*
So I think the first section (500-800 words) should be about money qua money—as distinct from commerce or trading or the current financial crisis, for that matter. The second section, which I want to call “The Heaven-Sent Leaf,” should include some examples of poems about money—for and against—probably one renaissance poem (perhaps John Donne’s “Love’s Usury”); one Romantic poem (Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us” is a likely choice…); a Modernist poem (this one is harder—much of Pound’s Cantos deals with class, but it’s oblique… of course, the Modernist period was the great age of upper-middle class poets with professional jobs—eg Eliot, Stevens, Williams); probably the (eerily anticipatory—Spicer, Berrigan, etc. eat your hearts out) poem “Twenty-Four Years,” by Dylan Thomas (published in 1938); and then the poem “Money,” by Philip Larkin, published in the 70s. I think this is a good list—a good way to illustrate the ways in which money has figured (representatively or no) in poetry over the years.
Bused it back from Turners Falls this afternoon… a disaster as the Greyhounds weren’t running on time… Watched TV about hideous Rod Blagojevich… more and more this life seems like a drama by Shakespeare (comedy and tragedy both)… corrupt governor trying to sell off the senate seat of the recently anointed prince; there is a parallelism to it—a symmetry, even, in classic Shakespearean style… Or the attacks in Mumbai; just as the new regime displaces the old, so too does a new style of terrorism—terrorism 2.0—usurp the style that came before.
Everything menacing. People in the station at Springfield were menacing—across their weathered faces was a slavering, for money? Restaurants set up so you stand while you eat—you wouldn’t want them to sit down, those hungry people with no money. Money is a kind of poetry; is poverty a kind of prose?
*
The day after the Stain reading, I trained it up to Providence for what would turn out to be one of my favorite readings of the trip (speaking of poems, of prose). I read at Ada Books. A nice woman named Kate Schapira hosted me along with Jeffrey Yang. Forrest Gander—who is an old teacher of mine—was billed as a sort of special “guest star.” At this reading, more than any other on the trip, I felt “received.” There was a drawing room feel to things—a kindly formality. It felt like a good part of the community was present. There were also some old faces—my good old friend from high school Annie White was there (I stayed at her house with her adorable husband and toddler), Gillian Kiley, who was a peer of mine at Iowa. Many of us went out to dinner afterwards. I was busy catching up with Annie, but managed to chat with Jeffrey and his wife, Forrest, Kate Colby (Kate Schapira and Kate Colby and I read a few months back in St. Louis as part of a reading called “Eight Kates”; the reading also included Katie Ford, Katie Peterson, Kate Greenstreet, Cate Marvin, and Kate Pringle… what a show), etc. It was lovely (though so awfully cold!). My iPhone broke that afternoon, so I don’t have any pictures.
The next day, I drove over to Hudson to read at the Spotty Dog with Rebecca Wolff. This was another favorite reading in that I was reading with and for old friends, the place was pretty packed, and I was feeling back at home, having come from Annie in Providence, and knowing I’d be staying that evening with Caroline Crumpacker, a co-editor at Fence and wonderful hostess. We all went to a great Italian restaurant after and devoured some spelt pizza.
Here is the audience in Hudson (photos courtesy of Monica Youn):
Here is Rebecca reading:
Me:
Here is Mark Wunderlich, who lives in that enchanted area:
The day after that, I drove up to Buffalo (I sped the whole way up to Buffalo the way I'm speeding through these readings) to read at Buffalo State with Andrew Zawacki. Here is Lisa Forrest, my wonderful hostess up there:
Andrew (more on him later):
And then… phew…. That very night, I drove to Rochester, about an hour, to crash at a hotel. There was a very large accident along the way. It was pouring down snow:
The next morning I guest taught a class of about 50 9-12 graders at the local arts high school. This was a real treat (no pictures, unfortunately). I read a bit and had them do two exercises. The first was to write a persona poem (these turned out great); the second was to write a “speech act” poem—basically a poem composed around a wish (these didn’t turn out as well). The kids were a little antsy as it was the last day before the vacation. Afterwards, I got to see BOA Editions’ offices:
Here is Thom Ward, who edited my manuscript; great guy:
*
Money is a kind of poetry… poverty is a kind of prose.
Back to the New Yorker for a second: two corrections (never fact check when you’re speeding 80 miles down the highway on your way to Buffalo, New York);
I didn’t say “eros and vanitas”; rather it was “eros and thanatos.” This mistake is a little humorous as I remember the writer repeating it back to me when I first said it on the phone:
“Eros and vanitas?” she (must have) asked.
“Yes, eros and thanatos,” I (must have) replied.
“Eros and vanitas?” she (must have) asked again.
“Yes, eros and thanatos,” I (must have) replied.
Then I must have done the whole rigmarole again with the fact checker. Oh well. From Wikipedia:
"
The life and death drives
Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive (libido) (survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death drive (Thanatos). Freud's description of Cathexis, whose energy is known as libido, included all creative, life-producing drives. The death drive (or death instinct), whose energy is known as anticathexis, represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm: in other words, an inorganic or dead state. Freud recognized Thanatos only in his later years and developed his theory on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud approached the paradox between the life drives and the death drives by defining pleasure and unpleasure. According to Freud, unpleasure refers to stimulus that the body receives. (For example, excessive friction on the skin's surface produces a burning sensation; or, the bombardment of visual stimuli amidst rush hour traffic produces anxiety.) Conversely, pleasure is a result of a decrease in stimuli (for example, a calm environment the body enters after having been subjected to a hectic environment). If pleasure increases as stimuli decreases, then the ultimate experience of pleasure for Freud would be zero stimulus, or death.
Given this proposition, Freud acknowledged the tendency for the unconscious to repeat unpleasurable experiences in order to desensitize, or deaden, the body. This compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences explains why traumatic nightmares occur in dreams, as nightmares seem to contradict Freud's earlier conception of dreams purely as a site of pleasure, fantasy, and desire. On the one hand, the life drives promote survival by avoiding extreme unpleasure and any threat to life. On the other hand, the death drive functions simultaneously toward extreme pleasure, which leads to death. Freud addressed the conceptual dualities of pleasure and unpleasure, as well as sex/life and death, in his discussions on masochism and sadomasochism. The tension between Eros and Thanatos represented a revolution in his manner of thinking. These ideas resemble aspects of the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, expounded in The World as Will and Representation, describes a renunciation of the will to live that corresponds on many levels with Freud's Death Drive. Similarly, the life drive clearly parallels much of Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy. However, Freud denied having been acquainted with their writings before he formulated the groundwork of his own ideas.
"
I do believe speculative bubbles have something to do with the intertwining drives of eros and thanatos; the concept explains (or at least describes) in particular why people are able to exist in denial for so long during booms, in my view.
Then again, I don’t need Freud or wikipedia to tell me that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” and “what goes up must come down.”
Second correction is that I didn't pay for the entire trip. I did about 30 readings; for 7 of them (6 academic) I was paid an honoraria; all of these combined covered the costs, more or less, of the rest. I clarified this for both the writer and the fact checker, but I think they liked the narrative better the way it was (and it wasn't utterly inaccurate).
All of this said, I don't mean to dis on my profiler or fact checker. My profiler spent literally hours with me on the phone to get that little bit of text, and the fact-checker struck me as very thorough. What should be dissed, I suppose, is the quality one can get out of an iPhone connection, especially while driving. I wanted to mention the eros/thanatos correction somewhere, though, just for the record...
This is Bad Kitty angling for a pat. I must attend:
Monday, December 8, 2008
Brooklyn/American Poet
November 21: Reading as part of The Stain of Poetry Reading Series, Stain Bar, 766 Grand Street, New York, NY. 7PM.
*
On a train right now writing… on my way to read in Turners Falls, Massachusetts as part of the Slope Reading Series at the Rendezvous Café… Freaking out because I have to write a 1500-2500 word essay on “poetry and money” for American Poet, due December 15th. I know December 15th is a hard deadline because the essay was initially due December 1, and I wrote about 2000 words, but the editor didn’t like the style (too autobiographical). Here is some of what I wrote:
“
Aesthetics as Autobiography
I’ll begin with 9/11, as, in my mind, this is the first day that I started writing poetry on money: I was having a dream. Of me in the womb, all balled up. And then a loud boom—the sound of my mother’s body as it willed me to be born (in reality, this was the sound of the second plane hitting)—which woke me up.
The poet Claudia Rankine phoned. ‘Just wondering how you are doing with all of this strangeness,’ she left on my answering machine. I was working as Claudia’s assistant at Barnard back then—an odd job—and was also working on a memoir I had sold to Crown Books to make money. The two classes I was teaching for Gotham Writers’ Workshop helped a little with the money situation, but not much (‘the writer must earn money in order to be able to live and write,’ the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote. ‘But he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money’). I was tired and broke, not getting up. In the kitchen, some jam and some bread. I was hungry. On the TV, some people, some ashes. The talking of heads.
I lived next to Bellevue. All morning the screaming of sirens going up and down the avenues. Cop cars, I guess, and the ambulances hoping, but no people were left.
According to the government, the terrorists were planning to go after our financial system next.
It seems almost quaint to write about it now. We all have our story—it’s generational really: ‘I was living near Gramercy Park in a rent-controlled apartment when the second plane hit.’ ‘The guy who held the lease had lived in Vegas for ten years.’ ‘His name was ‘Larry the Lock.' ‘He had a crush on Stephanie Seymor’ ‘Had met her in the Hamptons.’ ‘‘Larry the Lock’ had always wanted to be a stock broker, but had never gone to college.’ ‘When he found out that all of those bankers from Cantor Fitzgerald were dead, he decided it was time to move back to the city from Vegas.’ ‘He would become a stock broker.’ ‘He would make lots of money.’ ‘He would marry the model Stephanie Seymor.’
‘I didn’t have money to secure a new apartment, so I left for Las Vegas, where my brother was living in a really big house.’
In Las Vegas: I lived with my brother for a couple of months, and then—as it became more clear I wouldn’t be returning to New York anytime soon—a really lousy tenement on the North end of town. Late with the rent: fifty dollars a day. Strange man in the mornings, black phone at his ear. Woman sitting next to him. On drugs. They had to be on drugs because they sold them for a living. Men creeping all along the yard. Terrible faces and terrible mouths; puckering. (Hoodlums, I’d write in a diary entry.) Who would live there in that building? Only people who’d gone bust. I was a poet. I was always bust. Efficiency apartment: lumpy Murphy bed, a small green couch; I would move it front of the door every night to make it harder for the hoodlums to break in.
For nearly a year, I was living like this. Driving in my brother’s nanny’s car to his house, where I’d sneak into the living room and drink all his wine. Driving in my brother’s nanny’s car to the casino, where I’d beg him for filet mignon. In the morning, I’d eat cheerios, no milk since I couldn’t afford it; at night, in the casino, I would beg myself some money to get gas and drive around.
My first poetry book, Winter Sex, came out in February. I went back to New York to have a party. It was the one thing I had been looking forward to—the poets were back in New York! Were my friends! The poets would be there, would welcome me back! But they didn’t come. There was a man, another poet. I had written some poems about him in the Murphy bed with the little green couch flush up next to the door. I was hoping that the man would come, but he didn’t come. It was raining that night. My heels were too high. All the books that I’d ordered just sat in the pile, and I wondered: could the poets have forgotten me so quickly?
One day, I woke up. The poet Gillian Conoley had chosen me for the Poets Sampler section in the Boston Review (take this figuratively). I didn’t have many new poems to give her and I felt really sad. I looked at the Boston Review (both literal and figurative) on the computer. I read the reviews and I cried. I read the reviews and I cried because the language was so beautiful and accurate—so literary, really. I’d been living in a place where no one cared all that much about English. I missed hearing English the way that they wrote it in the essays that appeared in the (literal and figurative) Boston Review.
The poets had forgotten me, but I hadn’t forgotten the poets. I wanted to get back to the language I loved—to the people who wrote it like I did—but because I had no money, I was trapped there in that city with those people who loved money and not English. Do you see how ironic that is? To be trapped where the people love money and not English just because I was a busted poet? The key to getting back to where the people loved English—it became apparent to me then—was to make lots of money. Ergo: poetry became for me back then synonymous with money.
“
But it’s not going to happen… this part of the essay… and I have to start again. Where to start? What do I really want to say? The editor wants me to write the kind of thing that would work as an introduction to an anthology… I can imagine this, get this, but am feeling really blocked…
I do know I want to start with notion that money is neutral—a medium, a messenger (when I proffer this in this economic environment, it really pisses people off—but more on that later)… I have this so far:
“
‘Money is a kind of poetry’
‘Money is a kind of poetry,’ Wallace Stevens once wrote, which, as Dana Gioa remarks, is ‘not an allegory, but a metaphor.... Money is the one thing in society you can turn into almost anything else.’ Or, as Kant says, money ‘represents all goods, since it is conceived as a universally accepted mere means of commerce [and has] no value in itself as opposed to things which are goods.’
“
I also have this quote from Wallace Stevens, which I think is related—at least in a lateral sort of way: “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.”
While I am here on the train “brainstorming” (“procrastinating” might be the more accurate word), thought I’d write a bit about my Brooklyn reading at The Stain Bar. This reading series, though old and venerable at this point, is not what I would call the biggest reading series in the New York metropolitan area. I had flown in from Cleveland and was set to read at The Stain, and figured it would be a bit of break for me, a breeze.
But it wasn’t. My old friend from high school John Colpitts showed up, for one, and I was somehow embarrassed or felt like I wanted all the readers to be really good—wanted John to have a really good time at the reading because he isn’t a poet and doesn’t go to poetry readings all the time. He does go to rock shows, however, because he is a drummer (known as “Kid Millions”) for the band Oneida. John was kind enough to bring me a copy of his newest CD, which I listened to the next morning as I prepared to train it up to Providence (more on that later), and then when I got back from Rochester, NY (more on that, too). It was really excellent—I recommend it highly if you like Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, or Radiohead (John mentioned as influences Can and Neu, which I don’t know… I hope I am not insulting him by pointing to Mac and Floyd, I am so out of it). Here is Oneida’s “press alcove”: http://www.jagjaguwar.com/press/oneida/oneidapress.php
The line-up at the Stain included six readers—a big line-up—and, maybe because of this, the place was packed… probably 40 or 50 people showed up, and I couldn’t help but think to myself: “Ah, this is why so many writers never leave New York.” I had such a great time reading in so many different parts of the country, but I can also see how easy and, well, kind of cozy it would be to just stay put…
Here is E. Tracy Grinnell reading with a collaborator (didn’t catch her name):
Here is the (blurry) crowd… I was both drunk and kind of shaky… all the traveling had done me in:
A, um, table. Trivial Pursuit?...:
Some more people (I think that is my friend John at the doorway, but maybe not):
The second set of readers included Matthew Rohrer, whose new poems were really amazing. I loved them (so did John, for that matter—always great when non-poets like your poems).
After the reading, John, who is a big fan of Frederick Seidel, said I need to read the Cosmos Trilogy, which I will do—many people have recommended Seidel to me, not only because he is a great poet, but also because he treats (from a different point on the class spectrum—he is apparently phenomenally wealthy) some of the same themes I treat in my work.
Speaking of themes… money… money as a kind of poetry…
*
On a train right now writing… on my way to read in Turners Falls, Massachusetts as part of the Slope Reading Series at the Rendezvous Café… Freaking out because I have to write a 1500-2500 word essay on “poetry and money” for American Poet, due December 15th. I know December 15th is a hard deadline because the essay was initially due December 1, and I wrote about 2000 words, but the editor didn’t like the style (too autobiographical). Here is some of what I wrote:
“
Aesthetics as Autobiography
I’ll begin with 9/11, as, in my mind, this is the first day that I started writing poetry on money: I was having a dream. Of me in the womb, all balled up. And then a loud boom—the sound of my mother’s body as it willed me to be born (in reality, this was the sound of the second plane hitting)—which woke me up.
The poet Claudia Rankine phoned. ‘Just wondering how you are doing with all of this strangeness,’ she left on my answering machine. I was working as Claudia’s assistant at Barnard back then—an odd job—and was also working on a memoir I had sold to Crown Books to make money. The two classes I was teaching for Gotham Writers’ Workshop helped a little with the money situation, but not much (‘the writer must earn money in order to be able to live and write,’ the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote. ‘But he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money’). I was tired and broke, not getting up. In the kitchen, some jam and some bread. I was hungry. On the TV, some people, some ashes. The talking of heads.
I lived next to Bellevue. All morning the screaming of sirens going up and down the avenues. Cop cars, I guess, and the ambulances hoping, but no people were left.
According to the government, the terrorists were planning to go after our financial system next.
It seems almost quaint to write about it now. We all have our story—it’s generational really: ‘I was living near Gramercy Park in a rent-controlled apartment when the second plane hit.’ ‘The guy who held the lease had lived in Vegas for ten years.’ ‘His name was ‘Larry the Lock.' ‘He had a crush on Stephanie Seymor’ ‘Had met her in the Hamptons.’ ‘‘Larry the Lock’ had always wanted to be a stock broker, but had never gone to college.’ ‘When he found out that all of those bankers from Cantor Fitzgerald were dead, he decided it was time to move back to the city from Vegas.’ ‘He would become a stock broker.’ ‘He would make lots of money.’ ‘He would marry the model Stephanie Seymor.’
‘I didn’t have money to secure a new apartment, so I left for Las Vegas, where my brother was living in a really big house.’
In Las Vegas: I lived with my brother for a couple of months, and then—as it became more clear I wouldn’t be returning to New York anytime soon—a really lousy tenement on the North end of town. Late with the rent: fifty dollars a day. Strange man in the mornings, black phone at his ear. Woman sitting next to him. On drugs. They had to be on drugs because they sold them for a living. Men creeping all along the yard. Terrible faces and terrible mouths; puckering. (Hoodlums, I’d write in a diary entry.) Who would live there in that building? Only people who’d gone bust. I was a poet. I was always bust. Efficiency apartment: lumpy Murphy bed, a small green couch; I would move it front of the door every night to make it harder for the hoodlums to break in.
For nearly a year, I was living like this. Driving in my brother’s nanny’s car to his house, where I’d sneak into the living room and drink all his wine. Driving in my brother’s nanny’s car to the casino, where I’d beg him for filet mignon. In the morning, I’d eat cheerios, no milk since I couldn’t afford it; at night, in the casino, I would beg myself some money to get gas and drive around.
My first poetry book, Winter Sex, came out in February. I went back to New York to have a party. It was the one thing I had been looking forward to—the poets were back in New York! Were my friends! The poets would be there, would welcome me back! But they didn’t come. There was a man, another poet. I had written some poems about him in the Murphy bed with the little green couch flush up next to the door. I was hoping that the man would come, but he didn’t come. It was raining that night. My heels were too high. All the books that I’d ordered just sat in the pile, and I wondered: could the poets have forgotten me so quickly?
One day, I woke up. The poet Gillian Conoley had chosen me for the Poets Sampler section in the Boston Review (take this figuratively). I didn’t have many new poems to give her and I felt really sad. I looked at the Boston Review (both literal and figurative) on the computer. I read the reviews and I cried. I read the reviews and I cried because the language was so beautiful and accurate—so literary, really. I’d been living in a place where no one cared all that much about English. I missed hearing English the way that they wrote it in the essays that appeared in the (literal and figurative) Boston Review.
The poets had forgotten me, but I hadn’t forgotten the poets. I wanted to get back to the language I loved—to the people who wrote it like I did—but because I had no money, I was trapped there in that city with those people who loved money and not English. Do you see how ironic that is? To be trapped where the people love money and not English just because I was a busted poet? The key to getting back to where the people loved English—it became apparent to me then—was to make lots of money. Ergo: poetry became for me back then synonymous with money.
“
But it’s not going to happen… this part of the essay… and I have to start again. Where to start? What do I really want to say? The editor wants me to write the kind of thing that would work as an introduction to an anthology… I can imagine this, get this, but am feeling really blocked…
I do know I want to start with notion that money is neutral—a medium, a messenger (when I proffer this in this economic environment, it really pisses people off—but more on that later)… I have this so far:
“
‘Money is a kind of poetry’
‘Money is a kind of poetry,’ Wallace Stevens once wrote, which, as Dana Gioa remarks, is ‘not an allegory, but a metaphor.... Money is the one thing in society you can turn into almost anything else.’ Or, as Kant says, money ‘represents all goods, since it is conceived as a universally accepted mere means of commerce [and has] no value in itself as opposed to things which are goods.’
“
I also have this quote from Wallace Stevens, which I think is related—at least in a lateral sort of way: “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.”
While I am here on the train “brainstorming” (“procrastinating” might be the more accurate word), thought I’d write a bit about my Brooklyn reading at The Stain Bar. This reading series, though old and venerable at this point, is not what I would call the biggest reading series in the New York metropolitan area. I had flown in from Cleveland and was set to read at The Stain, and figured it would be a bit of break for me, a breeze.
But it wasn’t. My old friend from high school John Colpitts showed up, for one, and I was somehow embarrassed or felt like I wanted all the readers to be really good—wanted John to have a really good time at the reading because he isn’t a poet and doesn’t go to poetry readings all the time. He does go to rock shows, however, because he is a drummer (known as “Kid Millions”) for the band Oneida. John was kind enough to bring me a copy of his newest CD, which I listened to the next morning as I prepared to train it up to Providence (more on that later), and then when I got back from Rochester, NY (more on that, too). It was really excellent—I recommend it highly if you like Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, or Radiohead (John mentioned as influences Can and Neu, which I don’t know… I hope I am not insulting him by pointing to Mac and Floyd, I am so out of it). Here is Oneida’s “press alcove”: http://www.jagjaguwar.com/press/oneida/oneidapress.php
The line-up at the Stain included six readers—a big line-up—and, maybe because of this, the place was packed… probably 40 or 50 people showed up, and I couldn’t help but think to myself: “Ah, this is why so many writers never leave New York.” I had such a great time reading in so many different parts of the country, but I can also see how easy and, well, kind of cozy it would be to just stay put…
Here is E. Tracy Grinnell reading with a collaborator (didn’t catch her name):
Here is the (blurry) crowd… I was both drunk and kind of shaky… all the traveling had done me in:
A, um, table. Trivial Pursuit?...:
Some more people (I think that is my friend John at the doorway, but maybe not):
The second set of readers included Matthew Rohrer, whose new poems were really amazing. I loved them (so did John, for that matter—always great when non-poets like your poems).
After the reading, John, who is a big fan of Frederick Seidel, said I need to read the Cosmos Trilogy, which I will do—many people have recommended Seidel to me, not only because he is a great poet, but also because he treats (from a different point on the class spectrum—he is apparently phenomenally wealthy) some of the same themes I treat in my work.
Speaking of themes… money… money as a kind of poetry…
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Brooklyn/Faust/Saturday Night
I love this, from the introduction to the rather old edition (Routledge, 1886, John Anster, trans.) on Google Books… quoting Goethe himself on Faust:
“Faust’s character, in the elevation to which latter refinement, working on the old rude tradition, has raised it, represents a man who, feeling impatient and imprisoned within the limits of mere earthly existence, regards the possession of the highest knowledge, the enjoyment of the fairest blessings, as insufficient, even in the slightest degree, to satisfy his longing: a spirit, accordingly, which struggling out on all sides, ever returns the more unhappy….”
*
Mephistopheles (as the fool):
Search the world round, and is there to be found
On earth one quiet corner that has not
A something wanting, which, are we unable
To come at it, makes life uncomfortable?
This man wants that thing, and that man wants this.
Here, our want is hard cash; and hard cash is,
When men most want it, cash hard to be got.
’Tis not a thing that from the streets you sweep;
It lies deep down, but Science lifts the deep.
In mountain veins—in walls—and underground—
Much gold in coins, or uncoined, may be found;
And, if you ask who brings this gold to light?—
The gifted man, ruling the Infinite
Of Nature, mighty in the Spirit’s might.
…
Kaiser:
These wise saws will not make our suffering less;
What you mean you by this lengthened Lent-address?
I’m weary of this endless “if” and “how;”
Get me the money—that’s what we want now.
*
I love this, from the character “Drunken Man”:
Of our host I’m still the debtor:
Plan of life I know no better.
Looks he sulkily, my boast is
Of my credit with the hostess
Does the landlady run rusty,
Still the maid is true and trusty:
She’s my sure and safe sheet-anchor;
And, when all else fail, my banker.
So I drink, and still keep drinking;
With the glasses clashing, clinking.
Clash your glasses, each, my fine boys!
Clear them off, as I clear mine, boys!
*
Oh, and this, from Knabe Lenker [Boy Charioteer]:
I am PROFUSION—I am POESY.
I am the POET who feels his true power,
And is himself, indeed, but in the hour
When he on the regardless world hath thrown,
With lavish hand, the wealth, peculiarly his own.
And I am rich—am rich immeasurably:
Plutus alone in riches equals me.
Through me his banquets charm, his dances live:
That which they could not else have had, I give.
*
Ah, and then the scene in the main…:
Marshal:
May it please your Highness, I had never thought
That it at any time could be my lot
Such joyous tidings to communicate
As fill me now with rapture—every debt
Has been paid off, the usurers’ claws are dulled,
My tortures—sharper than hell’s torments—lulled.
There cannot be in heaven a happier man.
[….]
Treasurer:
Ask these men, they will tell what they have done.
Faust:
The Chancellor will please to state the case;
It falls within the duties of his place.
Chancellor:
Who could ever have dreamed such happiness
Would come this day of my old age to bless.
Listen! and look upon the heaven-sent leaf,
That into joy hash changed a people’s grief.
“To all whom it concerneth, and so forth:—
This note of hang, that purports to be worth
A thousand crowns, subjects to such demand
The boundless treasure buried in the land
And furthermore, said treasure underground,
To pay said sum is, whensoever found,
And wheresoever, firmly pledged and bound.”
Kaiser:
Audacity unheard of!—foul deceit!
Who signed the Emperor’s name to such vile cheat?
What punishment can for such crime atone?
Treasurer:
Forget you, Sir, the writing is your own?
This last night you were in the character
Of Pan: we saw the Chancellor prefer
The suit. He said, “A few strokes of your pen
Will bless the people over whom you reign.
Do make them happy on this festal night.”
And then you did take up the pen and write.
No time was lost. A thousand artists plied,
A thousandfold the scroll was multiplied;
And that the good to every one might fall,
We stamped at once the series, one and all.
Tens—thirties—fifties—hundred off we strike!
Never was anything that men so like:
Your city, mouldering and in despair,
Has caught new life, and joy is everywhere.
Long as your name was by the world held dear,
Never did it so brightly shine as here—
The alphabet! What is it to this sign?—
To this “hoc signo vinces” note of thine?
Kaiser:
For gold, then, the Court and camp it passes,
And for good gold is taken by the masses?
I must permit it, though it does seem odd.
[….]
Mephistopheles:
Once used to them, men will have nothing but
These leaves—so easy to receive and spend;
And the realm circulates, from this hour out,
Jewels, and gold, and paper to no end.
“Faust’s character, in the elevation to which latter refinement, working on the old rude tradition, has raised it, represents a man who, feeling impatient and imprisoned within the limits of mere earthly existence, regards the possession of the highest knowledge, the enjoyment of the fairest blessings, as insufficient, even in the slightest degree, to satisfy his longing: a spirit, accordingly, which struggling out on all sides, ever returns the more unhappy….”
*
Mephistopheles (as the fool):
Search the world round, and is there to be found
On earth one quiet corner that has not
A something wanting, which, are we unable
To come at it, makes life uncomfortable?
This man wants that thing, and that man wants this.
Here, our want is hard cash; and hard cash is,
When men most want it, cash hard to be got.
’Tis not a thing that from the streets you sweep;
It lies deep down, but Science lifts the deep.
In mountain veins—in walls—and underground—
Much gold in coins, or uncoined, may be found;
And, if you ask who brings this gold to light?—
The gifted man, ruling the Infinite
Of Nature, mighty in the Spirit’s might.
…
Kaiser:
These wise saws will not make our suffering less;
What you mean you by this lengthened Lent-address?
I’m weary of this endless “if” and “how;”
Get me the money—that’s what we want now.
*
I love this, from the character “Drunken Man”:
Of our host I’m still the debtor:
Plan of life I know no better.
Looks he sulkily, my boast is
Of my credit with the hostess
Does the landlady run rusty,
Still the maid is true and trusty:
She’s my sure and safe sheet-anchor;
And, when all else fail, my banker.
So I drink, and still keep drinking;
With the glasses clashing, clinking.
Clash your glasses, each, my fine boys!
Clear them off, as I clear mine, boys!
*
Oh, and this, from Knabe Lenker [Boy Charioteer]:
I am PROFUSION—I am POESY.
I am the POET who feels his true power,
And is himself, indeed, but in the hour
When he on the regardless world hath thrown,
With lavish hand, the wealth, peculiarly his own.
And I am rich—am rich immeasurably:
Plutus alone in riches equals me.
Through me his banquets charm, his dances live:
That which they could not else have had, I give.
*
Ah, and then the scene in the main…:
Marshal:
May it please your Highness, I had never thought
That it at any time could be my lot
Such joyous tidings to communicate
As fill me now with rapture—every debt
Has been paid off, the usurers’ claws are dulled,
My tortures—sharper than hell’s torments—lulled.
There cannot be in heaven a happier man.
[….]
Treasurer:
Ask these men, they will tell what they have done.
Faust:
The Chancellor will please to state the case;
It falls within the duties of his place.
Chancellor:
Who could ever have dreamed such happiness
Would come this day of my old age to bless.
Listen! and look upon the heaven-sent leaf,
That into joy hash changed a people’s grief.
“To all whom it concerneth, and so forth:—
This note of hang, that purports to be worth
A thousand crowns, subjects to such demand
The boundless treasure buried in the land
And furthermore, said treasure underground,
To pay said sum is, whensoever found,
And wheresoever, firmly pledged and bound.”
Kaiser:
Audacity unheard of!—foul deceit!
Who signed the Emperor’s name to such vile cheat?
What punishment can for such crime atone?
Treasurer:
Forget you, Sir, the writing is your own?
This last night you were in the character
Of Pan: we saw the Chancellor prefer
The suit. He said, “A few strokes of your pen
Will bless the people over whom you reign.
Do make them happy on this festal night.”
And then you did take up the pen and write.
No time was lost. A thousand artists plied,
A thousandfold the scroll was multiplied;
And that the good to every one might fall,
We stamped at once the series, one and all.
Tens—thirties—fifties—hundred off we strike!
Never was anything that men so like:
Your city, mouldering and in despair,
Has caught new life, and joy is everywhere.
Long as your name was by the world held dear,
Never did it so brightly shine as here—
The alphabet! What is it to this sign?—
To this “hoc signo vinces” note of thine?
Kaiser:
For gold, then, the Court and camp it passes,
And for good gold is taken by the masses?
I must permit it, though it does seem odd.
[….]
Mephistopheles:
Once used to them, men will have nothing but
These leaves—so easy to receive and spend;
And the realm circulates, from this hour out,
Jewels, and gold, and paper to no end.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Cleveland
November 19: Reading with Kimberly Johnson at Cleveland State University as part of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Writers/Reading Series, Fenn Tower Theater, 1983 E 24 Street, Room 102, Cleveland, OH.
*
Finally blogging again… about CLEVELAND. I am lying in bed, sick with a cold (or maybe—God forbid it—an allergy to the BAD KITTY I LOVE SO MUCH!)… tickly throat, itchy eyes, seemingly continual sneezing…
Since our last installment, I read in Cleveland, Providence (lovely, but more on that later…), Hudson (also later), Buffalo, and taught a class in Rochester. I am off to Athens, GA on Tuesday, and if I don’t get to writing about CLEVELAND now, well… I’ll be impossibly behind.
I am also on tenterhooks waiting to see (at MIDNIGHT) if the New Yorker really is going to publish the Talk of the Town profile that they fact-checked with me last week… it’s never over till the fat lady sings, I always say, and plus: I fully expect to be MORTIFIED.
But back to CLEVELAND: I arrived… dead tired… more tired than I have ever been in my life (OK, hypothermia on the three-month NOLS trip I took before going to college might actually take that cake)… at the Wyndham…. NEVER EVER STAY AT THE WYNDHAM IN CLEVELAND.
I sensed (from my management days at the hedge fund) that the fundamental problem with the Wyndham was not the nice people (everyone from the clerk at the desk to the room service people to the valet was very nice), nor was it the building, which, though a bit run-down was perfectly functional enough; rather it was MANAGEMENT. MANAGEMENT didn’t seem to communicate with the underlings very well… no one seemed to know quite what was going on elsewhere in the building, which resulted (most spectacularly—there were other incidents) in me being woken up my last day to the sound of a VERY LOUD DRILLING SOUND ABOVE MY HEAD. This VERY LOUD DRILLING SOUND caused in me a fight or flight response, and I ended up showering in a kind of freak-out mode and running out of that place with my hair dripping wet and my suitcase poorly packed just to get away from the VERY LOUD DRILLING SOUND.
Before I ran out, however, I called the front desk and, before hearing them say hello or saying hello myself, I put the receiver up to the ceiling so they too could hear the VERY LOUD DRILLING SOUND. I then hung up. A manager then called. I chewed him out about the VERY LOUD DRILLING SOUND saying they should really warn people about this sort of s---. He assured me that 80% of the hotel was usually “out and about” before they started with the DRILLING and I assured him that I didn’t give a f--- because I was a member of the other 20%. He then apologized and tried to offer me a free stay another time, but I told him I was sorry because I WOULD NEVER BE SETTING FOOT IN CLEVELAND AGAIN.
*
But that was the Wyndham. The time I spent at Cleveland State itself was rather lovely. I was hosted by an old friend, Michael Dumanis. Michael, being the highly competent administrator he is really put me to work. Here are some nice poetry students from the first engagement I had—a lunch, which was supposed to be with memoir and nonfiction students, but ended up being attended exclusively by poetry writers, I believe. Here’s one nice fellow:
And another:
A couple more:
[Is New Yorker up? I don’t see why it would be, since it’s 11:20, and they never go up until midnight, but I’m feeling bonkers, so let’s check… Um, nah-ah…]
Here is the CSU building with “CSU” on its façade in bright green letters; Michael is pretty sure the campus was modeled on a prison. (I believe the campus where Cate Marvin—Michael’s co-editor on Legitimate Dangers—works was also modeled on a prison (or maybe it was a mental institution… oh wait… I think her campus actually _was_ a mental institution…. Anyhoo….)):
Here is the class—disbanding—that I spoke with after lunch. It was a nonfiction class (Looks more Superfriends-Hall-of-Justice than prison-ish, this one). Because I have a memoir, Michael really had me do double-time!:
Here is a poster that made it all “feel real”:
Me waiting to talk with Cleveland NPR. All anyone ever wants to talk about is poker!!!:
Here is the link to the interview… I was frightened to listen to this, but it ended up being “OK.” Hopefully the New Yorker will also be “OK” (though I am fully expecting to be MADE A FOOL OF)!: http://www.wcpn.org/index.php/WCPN/an/15311/
(Speaking of—I almost forgot. Back in 2001-2002, when I was TRAPPED in Las Vegas, I actually wrote and pitched a Talk of the Town profile to an editor there named Nick Paumgarten (who was actually a senior at my high school when I was in tenth grade, but that is another story). I think I was baby-sitting for my sister a lot back when I did this, because I remember writing while staying in a sort of condo apartment… I would kind of strew a bunch of salami and cheese—and also fruitloops—all over the apartment for the baby to pre-occupy herself with, and then run into the bedroom to write a little bit (and read Dante’s Inferno—great book!). Pokemon was a godsend back then… Here is the piece. I think it’s not half bad!:
"
Never a city to shy away from the use of superlatives, Las Vegas has, in the past few years, laid claim to hosting the world's biggest gift shop (Bonanza), the world's largest capacity hotel (The Venetian), and now, the country's most successful master-planned community. Just twelve miles southwest of the Strip, a vast expanse of tract housing for the rich called Summerlin has been metastasizing at such a rapid rate that even its planners are astonished. "I was once a reporter," says Summerlin functionary Tom Warden, a tall and dazzlingly tan man with the prickly confidence of Survivor host Jeff Probst, "and I remember when they built the road. We reporters called it 'the road that leads to nowhere.' But now we're the number one master-planned community in the country!" In honor of this distinction, The Howard Hughes Corporation (posthumous corporate scion of millionaire businessman Howard Hughes and Summerlin developer) recently hosted the "Summerlin #1 Celebration," which took place in The Willows, one of Summerlin's seventeen subdivisions. At the center of the festivities was a much-publicized attempt at breaking the world's record for the largest group hug, an achievement that, while it might have pleased the Hughes who was known for breaking a number of air speed records, would most probably have abashed the well-known Las Vegas recluse.
The previous record of eight-hundred and ninety-nine was set by New York brokerage firm Goldman Sachs and reported in a December 2000 issue of this magazine. When asked to explain the reasoning behind this new attempt at breaking that record, Warden chanted, mantra-like that "Summerlin is now the number one master-planned community in the country!" Less vociferously, but more to-the-point, Melissa Warren, Warden's blonde and bubbly Hughes Corp. contemporary, explained, "It's just a really touchie-feelie, warm and fuzzy way to bring the community together!" What better way, in other words, to celebrate the success of a master-planned community, than with a master-planned group hug?
As a lure to the less touchie-feelie segment of the Vegas population (and in grand Sin City tradition), the Hughes Corporation offered a choice of a custom golf tournament, a children's birthday party for seventy-five, or a family-style barbecue for fifty close friends to the winner of a raffle that only participants in the group hug effort would be eligible to win. As an added draw, the Summerlin-area school that sent the most huggers would win $1,000 and a free ice-cream social -- not a bad jackpot for members of the under-age set. But as hug-time drew nigh, no one seemed concerned about the spoils. "We're just two old ladies wanting to do it for the fun and free cake," squealed a jolly retiree named Billie Barry. And then, as if on cue, Cora Williams, Billie's cheery, bird-like friend chirped: "We just wanted to see what it's all about and get a hug!"
At precisely 11:30 a.m., the desert sun blazing down upon the lush, green, and expertly manicured Willows Park, the huggers congealed into a ring. Warden took the stage with Summerlin Councilwoman Lynette Boggs-McDonald, and recited the rules: "Don't get too carried away," he joked, with a perky élan. "We will feel the love!" The entire group then did a mangled version of the wave, the motion of which traveled the circumference of the giant hug. As final and dramatic prelude to the attempt at breaking the record, councilwoman Boggs-McDonald, led the group in a mass Hokey Pokey dance. "This could be the world's largest Hokey Pokey too!" cried Warden.
As the group hug commenced, "What the World Needs Now is Love Sweet Love" warbled onto the PA system, and for just one shining moment (a full minute, to be exact -- the required duration to make it official in the eyes of the people at Guinness), Cora and Billie and everyone else stood shoulder to shoulder, arms wrapped shyly around one anothers' waists, and -- well -- hugged.
By Monday, the city had returned to business-as-usual. Warden and his partners sat blithely in their air-conditioned corporate offices, and Cimarron High School had been awarded the coveted ice-cream social. Only five-hundred and eighty Las Vegans had registered for the group-hug attempt, a number far short of the record, but Vicki Blazer, another Hughes Corp. crony remained unfazed. "We don't know if there's an existing Hokey Pokey record," she mused. "If not, we'll try to open a new category." The people at Guinness are notoriously miserly with new categories, however, and it remains unlikely that Las Vegas will be able to lay claim to "World's Biggest Hokey Pokey." The ghost of Howard Hughes, producer and director of The Outlaw and paranoid aficionado of sealed-off hotel suites, continues to rest in peace.
"
The editor pointed to the apparently too-recent Talk (mentioned in the body of the piece) on the Goldman Sachs hug (note THE IRONY... also THE LESSON: one should never buy stock in corporations that participate in group hugs is what I've learned)… so he didn’t run my piece… I was demoralized and never tried again...
Anyway.
After the NPR, I went to another lunch (I had three full days in Cleveland, which was fine, but also at THE WYNDHAM, which was not fine); this one was all poets. Here is one nice woman (Michael is to her right):
This is Kimberly Johnson, my co-poetry-reader, giving a completely 100% fascinating (and kind of effed up) talk on infidelity as a trope invoked by Renaissance poets to help illustrate the relationship between God and the human soul:
She handed out this gem of a poem by Robert Herrick (Imagine any “s”s in brackets actually look like lower-case cursive “f”s—apparently that was how the typography was back then… and readers would pick up on the fact the “s” actually looked like an “f” (and vice versa)—a kind of typographical pun):
Luke II
Ble[s][s]ed be the paps which Thou ha[s]t [s]ucked
Svppo[s]e he had been Tabled at thy Teates,
Thy hunger feeles not what he eates ;
Hee’l have his Teat e’re long ( a bloody one )
The Mother then mu[s]t [s]uck the Son.
Completely, flabergastingly disgusting.
Here are our books later than night before the reading looking rather… sex-eh:
Rather smiley audience (Michael is in the front there):
[Oh God, New Yorker… Oh God… I am going to run down and go to the bathroom and… barf or something…]
OK, now I am just waiting, twiddling my thumbs…
OK…
OK…
Ugh… 12:02….
HELLO! NEW YORKER! DO YOU KNOW IT IS 12:10AM! HELLO!?
[This is, of course, hideous: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2008/11/decoding-mumbai.html]
OK, I'm just going to go to sleep now...
Phew!: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/12/08/081208ta_talk_rothbaum
*
Finally blogging again… about CLEVELAND. I am lying in bed, sick with a cold (or maybe—God forbid it—an allergy to the BAD KITTY I LOVE SO MUCH!)… tickly throat, itchy eyes, seemingly continual sneezing…
Since our last installment, I read in Cleveland, Providence (lovely, but more on that later…), Hudson (also later), Buffalo, and taught a class in Rochester. I am off to Athens, GA on Tuesday, and if I don’t get to writing about CLEVELAND now, well… I’ll be impossibly behind.
I am also on tenterhooks waiting to see (at MIDNIGHT) if the New Yorker really is going to publish the Talk of the Town profile that they fact-checked with me last week… it’s never over till the fat lady sings, I always say, and plus: I fully expect to be MORTIFIED.
But back to CLEVELAND: I arrived… dead tired… more tired than I have ever been in my life (OK, hypothermia on the three-month NOLS trip I took before going to college might actually take that cake)… at the Wyndham…. NEVER EVER STAY AT THE WYNDHAM IN CLEVELAND.
I sensed (from my management days at the hedge fund) that the fundamental problem with the Wyndham was not the nice people (everyone from the clerk at the desk to the room service people to the valet was very nice), nor was it the building, which, though a bit run-down was perfectly functional enough; rather it was MANAGEMENT. MANAGEMENT didn’t seem to communicate with the underlings very well… no one seemed to know quite what was going on elsewhere in the building, which resulted (most spectacularly—there were other incidents) in me being woken up my last day to the sound of a VERY LOUD DRILLING SOUND ABOVE MY HEAD. This VERY LOUD DRILLING SOUND caused in me a fight or flight response, and I ended up showering in a kind of freak-out mode and running out of that place with my hair dripping wet and my suitcase poorly packed just to get away from the VERY LOUD DRILLING SOUND.
Before I ran out, however, I called the front desk and, before hearing them say hello or saying hello myself, I put the receiver up to the ceiling so they too could hear the VERY LOUD DRILLING SOUND. I then hung up. A manager then called. I chewed him out about the VERY LOUD DRILLING SOUND saying they should really warn people about this sort of s---. He assured me that 80% of the hotel was usually “out and about” before they started with the DRILLING and I assured him that I didn’t give a f--- because I was a member of the other 20%. He then apologized and tried to offer me a free stay another time, but I told him I was sorry because I WOULD NEVER BE SETTING FOOT IN CLEVELAND AGAIN.
*
But that was the Wyndham. The time I spent at Cleveland State itself was rather lovely. I was hosted by an old friend, Michael Dumanis. Michael, being the highly competent administrator he is really put me to work. Here are some nice poetry students from the first engagement I had—a lunch, which was supposed to be with memoir and nonfiction students, but ended up being attended exclusively by poetry writers, I believe. Here’s one nice fellow:
And another:
A couple more:
[Is New Yorker up? I don’t see why it would be, since it’s 11:20, and they never go up until midnight, but I’m feeling bonkers, so let’s check… Um, nah-ah…]
Here is the CSU building with “CSU” on its façade in bright green letters; Michael is pretty sure the campus was modeled on a prison. (I believe the campus where Cate Marvin—Michael’s co-editor on Legitimate Dangers—works was also modeled on a prison (or maybe it was a mental institution… oh wait… I think her campus actually _was_ a mental institution…. Anyhoo….)):
Here is the class—disbanding—that I spoke with after lunch. It was a nonfiction class (Looks more Superfriends-Hall-of-Justice than prison-ish, this one). Because I have a memoir, Michael really had me do double-time!:
Here is a poster that made it all “feel real”:
Me waiting to talk with Cleveland NPR. All anyone ever wants to talk about is poker!!!:
Here is the link to the interview… I was frightened to listen to this, but it ended up being “OK.” Hopefully the New Yorker will also be “OK” (though I am fully expecting to be MADE A FOOL OF)!: http://www.wcpn.org/index.php/WCPN/an/15311/
(Speaking of—I almost forgot. Back in 2001-2002, when I was TRAPPED in Las Vegas, I actually wrote and pitched a Talk of the Town profile to an editor there named Nick Paumgarten (who was actually a senior at my high school when I was in tenth grade, but that is another story). I think I was baby-sitting for my sister a lot back when I did this, because I remember writing while staying in a sort of condo apartment… I would kind of strew a bunch of salami and cheese—and also fruitloops—all over the apartment for the baby to pre-occupy herself with, and then run into the bedroom to write a little bit (and read Dante’s Inferno—great book!). Pokemon was a godsend back then… Here is the piece. I think it’s not half bad!:
"
Never a city to shy away from the use of superlatives, Las Vegas has, in the past few years, laid claim to hosting the world's biggest gift shop (Bonanza), the world's largest capacity hotel (The Venetian), and now, the country's most successful master-planned community. Just twelve miles southwest of the Strip, a vast expanse of tract housing for the rich called Summerlin has been metastasizing at such a rapid rate that even its planners are astonished. "I was once a reporter," says Summerlin functionary Tom Warden, a tall and dazzlingly tan man with the prickly confidence of Survivor host Jeff Probst, "and I remember when they built the road. We reporters called it 'the road that leads to nowhere.' But now we're the number one master-planned community in the country!" In honor of this distinction, The Howard Hughes Corporation (posthumous corporate scion of millionaire businessman Howard Hughes and Summerlin developer) recently hosted the "Summerlin #1 Celebration," which took place in The Willows, one of Summerlin's seventeen subdivisions. At the center of the festivities was a much-publicized attempt at breaking the world's record for the largest group hug, an achievement that, while it might have pleased the Hughes who was known for breaking a number of air speed records, would most probably have abashed the well-known Las Vegas recluse.
The previous record of eight-hundred and ninety-nine was set by New York brokerage firm Goldman Sachs and reported in a December 2000 issue of this magazine. When asked to explain the reasoning behind this new attempt at breaking that record, Warden chanted, mantra-like that "Summerlin is now the number one master-planned community in the country!" Less vociferously, but more to-the-point, Melissa Warren, Warden's blonde and bubbly Hughes Corp. contemporary, explained, "It's just a really touchie-feelie, warm and fuzzy way to bring the community together!" What better way, in other words, to celebrate the success of a master-planned community, than with a master-planned group hug?
As a lure to the less touchie-feelie segment of the Vegas population (and in grand Sin City tradition), the Hughes Corporation offered a choice of a custom golf tournament, a children's birthday party for seventy-five, or a family-style barbecue for fifty close friends to the winner of a raffle that only participants in the group hug effort would be eligible to win. As an added draw, the Summerlin-area school that sent the most huggers would win $1,000 and a free ice-cream social -- not a bad jackpot for members of the under-age set. But as hug-time drew nigh, no one seemed concerned about the spoils. "We're just two old ladies wanting to do it for the fun and free cake," squealed a jolly retiree named Billie Barry. And then, as if on cue, Cora Williams, Billie's cheery, bird-like friend chirped: "We just wanted to see what it's all about and get a hug!"
At precisely 11:30 a.m., the desert sun blazing down upon the lush, green, and expertly manicured Willows Park, the huggers congealed into a ring. Warden took the stage with Summerlin Councilwoman Lynette Boggs-McDonald, and recited the rules: "Don't get too carried away," he joked, with a perky élan. "We will feel the love!" The entire group then did a mangled version of the wave, the motion of which traveled the circumference of the giant hug. As final and dramatic prelude to the attempt at breaking the record, councilwoman Boggs-McDonald, led the group in a mass Hokey Pokey dance. "This could be the world's largest Hokey Pokey too!" cried Warden.
As the group hug commenced, "What the World Needs Now is Love Sweet Love" warbled onto the PA system, and for just one shining moment (a full minute, to be exact -- the required duration to make it official in the eyes of the people at Guinness), Cora and Billie and everyone else stood shoulder to shoulder, arms wrapped shyly around one anothers' waists, and -- well -- hugged.
By Monday, the city had returned to business-as-usual. Warden and his partners sat blithely in their air-conditioned corporate offices, and Cimarron High School had been awarded the coveted ice-cream social. Only five-hundred and eighty Las Vegans had registered for the group-hug attempt, a number far short of the record, but Vicki Blazer, another Hughes Corp. crony remained unfazed. "We don't know if there's an existing Hokey Pokey record," she mused. "If not, we'll try to open a new category." The people at Guinness are notoriously miserly with new categories, however, and it remains unlikely that Las Vegas will be able to lay claim to "World's Biggest Hokey Pokey." The ghost of Howard Hughes, producer and director of The Outlaw and paranoid aficionado of sealed-off hotel suites, continues to rest in peace.
"
The editor pointed to the apparently too-recent Talk (mentioned in the body of the piece) on the Goldman Sachs hug (note THE IRONY... also THE LESSON: one should never buy stock in corporations that participate in group hugs is what I've learned)… so he didn’t run my piece… I was demoralized and never tried again...
Anyway.
After the NPR, I went to another lunch (I had three full days in Cleveland, which was fine, but also at THE WYNDHAM, which was not fine); this one was all poets. Here is one nice woman (Michael is to her right):
This is Kimberly Johnson, my co-poetry-reader, giving a completely 100% fascinating (and kind of effed up) talk on infidelity as a trope invoked by Renaissance poets to help illustrate the relationship between God and the human soul:
She handed out this gem of a poem by Robert Herrick (Imagine any “s”s in brackets actually look like lower-case cursive “f”s—apparently that was how the typography was back then… and readers would pick up on the fact the “s” actually looked like an “f” (and vice versa)—a kind of typographical pun):
Luke II
Ble[s][s]ed be the paps which Thou ha[s]t [s]ucked
Svppo[s]e he had been Tabled at thy Teates,
Thy hunger feeles not what he eates ;
Hee’l have his Teat e’re long ( a bloody one )
The Mother then mu[s]t [s]uck the Son.
Completely, flabergastingly disgusting.
Here are our books later than night before the reading looking rather… sex-eh:
Rather smiley audience (Michael is in the front there):
[Oh God, New Yorker… Oh God… I am going to run down and go to the bathroom and… barf or something…]
OK, now I am just waiting, twiddling my thumbs…
OK…
OK…
Ugh… 12:02….
HELLO! NEW YORKER! DO YOU KNOW IT IS 12:10AM! HELLO!?
[This is, of course, hideous: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2008/11/decoding-mumbai.html]
OK, I'm just going to go to sleep now...
Phew!: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/12/08/081208ta_talk_rothbaum
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About Me
- Katy Lederer
- This is a journal of readings and interviews I gave between 2008-2009 in support of my second book of poems, "The Heaven-Sent Leaf."