Snippet from The Washington Independent:
On Aug. 20, thousands of people — 1,700 have already committed — are being encouraged to donate to the younger Paul’s campaign in a “moneybomb” modeled after the single-day events that raised $5 million and $6 million for his father during the 2008 campaign.
Darkness from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (Esquire, 1936).
In a previous article this writer told about his realization that what he had before him was not the dish that he had ordered for his forties. In fact — since he and the dish were one, he described himself as a cracked plate, the kind that one wonders whether it is worth preserving…
Sometimes, though, the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the icebox under leftovers…
“To hold crackers late at night”!!! Ha ha ha!!
So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person — to be kind, just, or generous. There were plenty of counterfeit coins around that would pass instead of these and I knew where I could get them at a nickel on the dollar. In thirty-nine years an observant eye has learned to detect where the milk is watered and the sugar is sanded, the rhinestone passed for diamond and the stucco for stone. There was to be no more giving of myself — all giving was to be outlawed henceforth under a new name, and that name was Waste…
The conjurer’s hat was empty. To draw things out of it had long been a sort of sleight of hand, and now, to change the metaphor, I was off the dispensing end of the relief roll forever.
The heady villainous feeling continued…
Let the good people function as such — let the overworked doctors die in harness, with one week’s “vacation” a year that they can devote to straightening out their family affairs, and let the underworked doctors scramble for cases at one dollar a throw; let the soldiers be killed and enter immediately into the Valhalla of their profession. That is their contract with the gods…
So what? This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain that you are, “a constant striving” (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it). only adds to this unhappiness in the end — that end that comes to our youth and hope. My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books — and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural — unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.
* * * * *
And, a pithy retort via “When Novelists Sober Up” by Tom Shone
When Fitzgerald went public about his creative decline in Esquire, in a piece entitled “The Crack Up”—a prototype for all the misery memoirs we have today—Hemingway was disgusted, inviting him to cast his “balls into the sea—if you have any balls left”.
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P.S. “When Novelists Sober Up” has a good bit about “Hemingway’s liver protrud[ing] from his belly like a long fat leech,” and John Berryman, a poet I’ve never had the pleasure of reading, making disingenuous and thus amusing attempts at rehabilitation before jumping off a Minneapolis bridge, “his body splitting like a melon upon impact with the ground.” (Points subtracted for so many shitty indie-rock bands being enamored with this).
P.P.S. More:
Only the advent of rehab, in the 1960s, interrupted this fall—enforced incarceration flattering the writer’s sense of drama, the Kafkaesque me-versus-the-system fable playing out in his head. John Berryman sat in rehab looking like a “dishevelled Moses”, his shins black and blue, his liver palpitating, reciting Japanese and Greek poets and quoting Immanuel Kant. When he found out the doctors around him were serious he buckled under, declaring himself “a new man in 50 ways!” and affecting an ostentatious “religious conversion” which he proceeded to pour into a series of poems to his Higher Power (“Under new governance your majesty”). Ten days after leaving he found he needed a quick stiff one to get the creative juices flowing again and downed a quart of whisky. “Christ,” was all he could say the next morning.
Three or four years ago, I made a mix CD for Neil Campbell and Nick Barbery called “Worst Music,” consisting mostly of really bad hardcore and other crap that I came across.
I had forgotten all about “Worst Music” until Neil refreshed my memory.
We had a nice laugh.
Love the “Corner Office” column series.
Here’s a nice bit from today’s, an interview with Wendy Kopp, founder and chief executive of Teach for America:
Q. Any particular time-management techniques?
A. The best time-management thing I do is reflect an hour a week on the overall strategic plan for myself — what do I need to do to move my priorities forward? And then there are the 10 minutes a day that I spend thinking about, “O.K., so based on the priorities for the week, how am I going to prioritize my day tomorrow?” I don’t know how I could do what I do without spending that time.
I am obsessive about that system because the world seems to be moving faster and faster, so you have to figure out how to still drive things proactively instead of just becoming completely reactive.
LOLZ!
I don’t know anything about Wendy Kopp; she seems like an admirably oriented human being w/saint-like work-ethic, someone whose book I should probably tear several chapters out of and smoke: “…this vision, that one day all children in our nation should have the opportunity to attain an excellent education” — a sentiment essentially beyond reproach, I’d say.
Without access to excellent education, how will young people learn to participate in society, to drive things faster and faster, proactively? How will they learn to develop paradigm-shattering marketing techniques and implement superior conduits and methodologies for information- and data-sharing? We’ll need plenty of people who shit spreadsheets and circuit-bend the internet as preventative treatment for impotence; much health care professional teams to nurse our bloated, bluetoothed bodies into septuagenarianism (time to catch up on yr reading!), those GOOD mathematicians and engineers who will trailblaze the maze out of climate change, over-population, and fossil-fuel scarcity while simultaneously providing a new speculative investment bubble to revive the economies of the Northern hemisphere. Let’s make sure that every child has the self-esteem, confidence, and intellectual toolkit necessary to navigate the marvelous and invigorating labyrinth of modernity that leads to the bureaucrat’s cubicle, the conference room table, and the catered reception.
“We made you poor — join us!”
Alerted to the existence of this funny thing by N. Chomsky, by way of Bookforum:
From The New Yorker (again…not cool, I realize…):
Finally, as Obama said, “there remains the question of detainees at Guantánamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here—this is the toughest single issue that we will face.” This group, “who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted,” might be held in preventive detention, perhaps forever. It’s a sobering thought, that Obama could consider approving this kind of long-term detention, and it remains to be seen how much evidence would be required to justify such an extraordinary step and how many cases it would involve…In any case, it’s hard to imagine any President agreeing to release people who, as Obama put it, “in effect, remain at war with the United States.”
Doesn’t need to be said again, but still:
Yes, it is hard to imagine any President releasing prisoners who are at war with the United States. But why do we care about the United States if the rule of law is applied randomly or to complement political moods? What exactly is worth protecting (besides all of our stuff) in a nation with no legal or theoretical skeleton?
I’ll answer my own question: The sun rising/setting over the Grand Canyon, the towering majesty of the Redwood; Pollack’s manic manifestations of the modern human psyche, Coltrane’s quest for musical union with the Divine; the taut prose of Raymond Carver, and the excitement of televised professional football. Let’s not forget the quiet, God-like smile that curves the corners of your firstborn, wrapped in swaddling clothes as she is, cradled in warmth and light.
I hope the recession ends soon:
A world where 8 billion to 10 billion people are competing for diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done in Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be unsustainable. The collapse of industrial farming, which is made possible only with cheap oil, will lead to an increase in famine, disease and starvation. And the reaction of those on the bottom will be the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the chaos and bloodshed will be so massive that overpopulation will be solved through violence, but this is hardly a comfort.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090309_we_are_breeding_ourselves_to_extinction/
So this one is about how those belonging to the “lower upper” class may be starting to feel that our economic system is unfair:
In the old days, if you didn’t end up on top, it didn’t say anything about you personally. It was God’s will; you were playing your role in the great chain of being; you’d get your reward in the next life. But now, if you’re merely a corporate lawyer or a senior vice president of marketing in a world where your former classmates have private planes, something has to be wrong with you. And if they got the plane by engaging in activity that wrecked the national economy, the insult is even more galling – and the world itself more perverse.
* * *
“I’ve seen it in my research,” says Doug Schoen, a pollster who has counseled Mike Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton, among others. “If you look at the lower part of the upper class, or the upper part of the upper middle class, there’s a great deal of frustration. These are people who assumed that their hard work and conventional ‘success’ would leave them without worries over the quality of their lives. It’s opening their eyes to things that are wrong with the economy more broadly.
This is the last section of this NYT article about Dr. Joseph Biderman, an huge asshole who also appears in this NYRB article (if only I had a Harper’s link!) – I have nothing particularly to add to the discussion, rather I simply continue to marvel at the audacious mendacity of pricks of this nature, and wonder when oh when there will be some effort to rein in this flavor of monstrous corruption in our craven lil’ culture. What fiendishness! Utilizing utterly biased research, these wild eyed motherfuckers claiming to be scientists fabricate a medical consensus prescribing expensive pills for everyone (infants on up) with an Attitude Problem, thereby placing tremendous financial, sociological, psychological strain on vast segments of the subject population as they spend years and years and thousands and thousands worrying about Fixing their bad brains, which are probably not bad at all, and which might to the benefit of all be better engaged examining and critiquing this world of bullshit. Not that I’m a raving crank or anything.
In a contentious Feb. 26 deposition between Dr. Biederman and lawyers for the states, he was asked what rank he held at Harvard. “Full professor,” he answered. “What’s after that?” asked a lawyer, Fletch Trammell. “God,” Dr. Biederman responded. “Did you say God?” Mr. Trammell asked. “Yeah,” Dr. Biederman said.
From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15cornerweb.html?pagewanted=1&em:
Q. Do you have a favorite gadget?
A. I’m pretty addicted to the BlackBerry. I love the iPhoneApple because I think they’ve so figured out computing. It’s hard in business to make that leap when you’ve distributed systems that use I.B.M. and Microsoft so much. But I’m pretty addicted to that BlackBerry.
I started taking them away in meetings at Quiznos, but the C.F.O. there is just addicted to it, beyond probably what most people are, and he was just watching that light, and he wouldn’t answer it because I said you couldn’t answer your BlackBerry in this meeting. But he’d look at the light and the light would drive him nuts, so I had him turn it over. And then, of course, I took it. He was doodling during the meeting as we were talking, and when he got up to leave the room I grabbed the paper he was doodling on, and he had doodled a complete, to scale, picture of a BlackBerry. Subconsciously, he doodled one while we were sitting in the meeting. That’s how addicted he was to it. I actually still have this. I’m going to give it to him framed.
* * * * *
I think it’s important to talk to people about how we’re in a fundamentally different world. Ask the question, “If compensation isn’t going to be the same for a while, where do you get your fulfillment in life?” Certainly, work is a big piece of that and work is rewarding well beyond compensation. But faith, family, friends and hobbies create real balance. The conversation I’ve had with a lot of people, both in large groups and small, is make sure you have balance in your life and make sure that all your fulfillment doesn’t come out of economic gain.
I’ve talked to a lot of people on Wall Street where their entire fulfillment came from the answer to, “Is my bonus bigger this year than last year?” Or, “If I worked 100 hours a week this year, can I work 101 next year?” It’s actually a great time for us as leaders to help people to step back and ask the question: “Where do I get the fulfillment in my life? And how do I make sure my job is a big piece of that?” I’ve found that employees who are fulfilled on a much broader basis in their lives usually do a much better job of work than those that are completely, single-mindedly focused on and get all their value out of work.
I think that’s one of the bigger questions we have as a society. We’ve gotten so used to every generation doing better economically than their parents. Are our kids going to do better than we’ve done? I hope so, but I’m not sure. So it seems like we ought to tell them that socioeconomic wealth is not the only, or even the most important, metric of personal happiness.
Shiitake potstickers, sesame crusted tuna
Sweetbread sausage, squid and artichoke galette
Spanish octopus and lobster paella, suckling pig
In the short term defending capitalism means, paradoxically, state intervention. There is a justifiable sense of outrage among voters and business people (and indeed economic liberals) that $2.5 trillion of taxpayers’ money now has to be spent on a highly rewarded industry. But the global bail-out is pragmatic, not ideological. When François Mitterrand nationalised France’s banks in 1981 he did so because he thought the state would run them better. This time governments are buying banks (or shares in them) because they believe, rightly, that public capital is needed to keep credit flowing.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12429544
How can one say that the “bail-out is pragmatic, not ideological”? The bail-out is a pragmatic solution to a problem, yes; a problem that stems directly from an ideology that prohibits such solutions. Hence, the paradoxical state intervention to defend capitalism. Why the sudden faith and reliance on pragmatic solutions to economic problems? For God’s sake, where’s Richard Rorty now when we need him most??
“Exxon Mobil on Thursday reported that second-quarter profit rose 14 percent, to $11.68 billion, the highest-ever profit by an American company. Exxon broke its own record.”
Yeah!!!
from an old Guy Davenport review of a book on the Maya:
“Their art is so distinctive that any small detail of it is recognizable … At least one eye capable of appreciating their art got to see some of it. Charles I of Spain summoned Albrecht Durer to show him Mayan and Aztec artifacts (an ear of maize perfectly rendered in gold was in this treasure). Durer marveled: Here was a culture that must have one hundred Cellinis for Italy’s one. Charles had wanted Durer to see these things before they went to his mint, to be melted and recast as coins.”
