Underbelly

More on Gunsel: A Prank?

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:49:35 PST

Bad Attitudes, otherwise unknown to me, picks up on my discussion of "gunsel" offers an additional spin. Recall that "gunsel" may mean "male homosexual"--typically the younger, passive partner--or "gunslinger. Now this:

The two meanings are believed to have originated concurrently but independently. gunsel: Or: gonsil/ gonzel/ gonsel: A 19th century term of German and Yiddish (little goose) derivation for a young, inexperienced gay male similar to the more recent gay slang term, “twink.” See sodomite for synonyms. The latter usage — a gun-toting hoodlum — derives from Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Hammett’s publisher at the time refused to allow any rude or profane terminology in his publication. Hammett slipped in “gunsel” — a street term for a young, gay man — as a joke. Since it is used throughout the book to refer to the character of Wilmer — a gun-toting thug — most people erroneously assumed that is what it meant and it stuck.

He seems to think he is quoting me, but no, I never heard it before. The language apparently comes from the Wiktionary discussion page. The view gains support from the estimable Michael Quinion, who adds a further surprising fillip:

In Australia an equally extraordinary but different shift in sense has taken place. In the spelling gunzel it means a railway or tramway enthusiast (otherwise in various countries a railfan, trainspotter or gricer). In early appearances it referred to the kind of scruffy, obsessive and over-enthusiastic fan who travels with notebooks and cameras and who would bore you to tears with arcane information if you let him get started. The new meaning is said to have grown up at the Sydney Tramway Museum in the 1960s through the reading of old American comics. These days, I am told, the term is worn with pride.

See id. for "gooseberry lay." Accord, William Safire, with a cute anecdote about James Carville.

The Best Finance Book I've Read So Far This Year[aka, Cliff Notes for Finance Professors]

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:13:25 PST

The best finance book I've read so far this year (and I've read a slew of them) is Robert C. Pozen's Too Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System. But it fits in a somewhat specialized niche. If you are new to the current crisis, it is not the first book you should read on the topic. For narrative framework, I'd recommend this or this, either followed by this. No: instead of overview, what Pozen offers is an analytical framework on virtually every important practical issue in finance, together with recommendations. In short, what we have here is the book that every business/finance professor ~~wants~~ needs. Not to assign to his students: nothing to vulgar as that. What you do with Pozen is stuff it in your top drawer and sneak a peek whenever you want to look brilliant. I can't think of anybody who has covered such a range of issues so efficiently or so well.

But it's not a simple miracle. Pozen brings a lot to the table: he's chairman of a major money manager. He's had a string of posts in the finance industry, with a strong minor in public policy (I assume that he is the same Robert Pozen who, back in a simpler time, co-authored a Ralph Nader report on the state of Delaware). So he has to be in command of a lot of technical detail that most professors don't know (he also authored a couple of academic textbooks, so there is some crossover). What comes closer to miraculous is his talent for exposition: there may be others who can command this kind of detail, but I don't know anybody else can make it march in serried ranks. Pozen has the presentational skills of a journalist (which he is not). In his current guise, it's a blessing.

What we have here, then, is a comprehensive aide-memoire, but Pozen goes it one better. At the end of each chapter he offers up a "summary"--some of them not a lot shorter or less detailed than the original, to serve as an aid to an aid. I wonder if he has a third version tucked away in his laptop somewhere--the superlong version, written before his publisher made him cut it down to a book.

I almost wrote that the book was "about the current crisis," but that's not quite right: Pozen covers a range of issues, and if they all seem to be related to the current crisis, it is more because of the reach of the crisis than the narrow relevance of the issues. So what we have here is not quite an encyclopaedia, but an impressively extensive review of so many of the issues that concern anybody who cares about finance.

With so many specific practical recommendations, it is hard to provide a useful summary but it is possible to note some patterns. Pozen is clearly a guy who likes markets but has seen enough of them to know that they don't just invent themselves. Virtually all of his solutions, including those that involve some kind of government intervention, seem pretty clearly directed at making markets function better.

In the current uproar, he is refreshingly unimpressed by some of the popular shibboleths. He seems to have no truck, for example with the "all-Jimmy-Carter's-fault" school of policy criticism, which argues that all our travail can be laid at the door of those who wanted to increae home ownership. In the case of FNMA and GNMA, for example, Pozen seems much more impressed by the pressure the mortgage-buyers experienced from the CEO of Countrywide Finance than anything they may have felt from Chris Dodd or Barney Frank. He's similarly unpersuaded by those who say it was all the fault of marke-to-market accounting. Pozen does his best to lay out the classic case for truth in disclosure; on the way he provides an admirable nontechnical introduction to the narrow accounting issues.

On the other hand, Pozen is no more impressed by the idea that it was all the fault of the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Pozen makes a fairly sophisticated argument here. He grants that commercial banks gained some new freedom after repeal. But he says that many of their goals they had already achieved interstitially years before outright repeal. And (we are getting close to the point now) some banks exercised their newer, broader powers; some did not. The kicker is that those who did use their broader lending powers appear to have got into no more--and perhaps less--trouble than their brethren who did not. I might add:there might be other reasons why repeal of Glass-Steagall was a bad idea, but if Pozen is right, then culpability for the late meltdown is not one of them.

This is so rich that it seems captious to ask more of it. Still, one's appetites are insatiable and every frontier is a horizon. For example, I wish he had used a bit more of his formidable power as an explainer to throw some light onto the process of securitization--to show why the core idea of securitization really is quite a good one, while the recent innovations are justs betrayals of its good name.

Similarly, although Pozen didn't pretend to write a big-picture book, I'd love to know how he feels in general about the "asymmetry" issue that Barry Ritholtz treats so well: to what extent, for example, does he think we can blame our troubles on the shift to corporate structure at the great investment bank, and the corollary institution of heads-I-win, tails-you-lose incentives. And if I am on the right track so far, why (in the name of all that is holy) did shareholders ever let them get away with it.

And just to show I kept my eyes open, let me offer one policy point that seems to me germane to his discussion, but which he didn't touch on. The issue is executive compensation. Pozen is justly (I think) skeptical of the capacity of government to solve the problem of compensation obscenities; the job will be done, if at all, by better structured boards. In general, Pozen favors incentive-based compensation--but much reformed and improved from the phony incentives on offer today. But here's what he overlooks: almost every serious incentive scheme keys executive earnings to stock value. The trouble with this is thar stock value is not asset value. And as against the assets, shareholders on a leveraged balance sheets have perverse incentives from the get-go. They are impelled by the structure of the enterprise to take value-reducing risks. I admit I am not a careful follower of the debate over executive comp, but I don't know of any serious player who pays any attention to this issue. Pozen is ideally positioned to do so; I wish he would.

So, two points off for incompleteness, but it still leaves him way ahead of the pack. Although there is a final irony here. This book is nothing if not "timely": completely up-to-date and apposite to our current concerns. The irony is that it will be out of date next week. So read it quickly, and enjoy.

Oh, but a word of caution: don't get the Kindle (unless, perhaps, you have one of those new giant jobbies, of which I suspect they have sold about two). This book has far too many charts and tables, unreadable in the tiny format. And right now in the mess on my desk I can't even find mine, but that is another problem.

Anonymous Flattery: Keynes

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:10:07 PST

Commenting on my Bruce Bartlett post, Anonymous asks:

Can you recommend a book on Keynesian economics suitable for an adult with a financial services background and an MBA? I want something more detailed than a "Dummy's Guide to" but not something that will cause me to research lots of things to understand each chapter (It's been 20+ years since MBA school and I barely remember the Black & Sholes option pricing model....)

Ha! That's one of those questions usually asked of people far above my pay grade, but let me give it a thought. I suppose a simple answer is that the Bartlett book itself, on Keynes (unlike supply side) is actually quite wonderful--deft and accessible without great sacrifice of technical content.

The next point would be to stress that Keynes himself never intended to be that-all technical. It was his "friends" (from which heaven save me) who dressed it up iin the full regalia of academic geometry. Beyond that--if you are ready for a bit more technicality, I suspect you might be pleasantly surprised at how accessible the average textbook has become since your time in school (a triumph of the free market?). And needless to say, no reason at all the plunk down the big bux for a new edition--on this topic as with so many others, a used second hand, available for pocket change at Amazon, etc., will suit you just fine. Example: I don't have a macro text at hand at the moment but I find a perfectly readable presentation in my copy of Frederic S. Mishkin, The Economics of Money, Banking and Financial Markets (8th ed.)--which as it happens, I picked up used on Amazon myself.

Beyond that, there re few academic biographies more filled with the sinew of life than Robert Skidelsky's three-volume product on Keynes--true not least because Keynes himself was so full of the sinew of life (there is also an abridgment available). Skidelsky has a new single volume work out with the title Keynes: The Return of the Master, which sounds suspicioiusly like a quicky designed to capitalize on the current resurgence (haven't read it; sounds promising, but note the negative Amazon reviews).

Finding Evan (Caution, Spoiler)

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:21:58 PST

I don't regularly read Wired, but idling through (and not paying for) a paper copy at Barnes & Noble this morning, I ran across the most interesting thing I've read all day: the story about the contest to find Evan Ratliff, the writer who challenged readers to crack his scheme to scrub his identity--including a 60-percent-Ben-Stein double-dare to pay the prize (in part) out of his own money (paper edition on newsstands now; you could even buy it).

The spoiler is that he lost; his cover was blowen by a pizza guy in New Orleans, collaborating with a yelping horde of online searchers. But he gave them a run for his money: even though he and the mag had double-dared and taunted--and even upped the ante for--his searchers, he still made it within sight of the finish line. On the other hand, I suppose you could expect the same sort of full-court press if, say, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed jumped from a moving van on the Jersey Turnpike and vanished into the Pine Barrens.

I suppose the most impressive part to me--but you will say you knew this--is the number of really, really smart people who had the time and the energy to devote to the enterprise. Money must have been a factor but these guys are smart enough to multiply the size of the award by the probability of success, and then offset against the lost earnings from not working at Dairy Queen. Is this a sad testimony to our unemploymPasent rate, or where they all Googlers on their free day?

A minor not-very-technical note: I was intrigued to find how easy it is (or was) to beat the Airport Security prohibition on going to the gate: just buy a refundable ticket. Pass through the gate, do what you will, and return.

Welcome, Ordinary Gentlemen

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:40:43 PST

Would not have guessed there are so many of you. But c'mon in, there's pie.

Short Memories: Republicans and Civil Rights

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:30:25 PST

There's a curious case of memory loss that seems to be afflicting both left and right this morning over the history of civil rights legislation. Link, (link). Start with Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina:

Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the '60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle," said Fox. "They love to engage in revisionist history.

Shift now to Democratic Rep. Dennis Cardoza of North Carolina:

Today, what I’m hearing on the floor really takes the cake. The gentlelady from North Carolina, in her statement just now, indicated that the Republican GOP had passed the Civil Rights Act legislation with almost no help from the Democrats. I can’t believe my ears. It was the Kennedy and Johnson administration where we passed that Great Society legislation. It was over the objections of people like Jesse Helms from the gentlewoman’s state that we passed that civil rights legislation. John Lewis…

In response, Republicans gleefully jumped on the fact that Cardoza was wrong about Jesse Helms: he wasn't even in the Senate until 1972.

But on the larger issue--comments are still pouring in and I won't pretend to be keeping up with them; still, the fact is that Foxx actually had a kind of a point here. What she was really talking about the Civil Rights of 1957, which was passed on the initiative of the Eisenhower Administration, over the dead-body opposition of the Senate Democratic leadership--and only after the Democrats had so gutted it as to leave it largely meaningless.

How fast memories fade: recall that the pre-1960 Democratic party was a monstrous two-headed beast with liberal (sometimes radical) union members, blacks and intellectuals on one side and reactionary So;uthern whites on the other. It was the Republicans who still carried a progressive tradition on civil rights, going back to the founding of the party at the beginning of the Civil War.

Eisenhower himself, as many have observed, wasn't deeply hostile to blacks, but he just didn't get it:the real motivation came from the "northeast" wing of the party, notably Attorney General Herbert Brownell. Leading the Senate opposition was Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. As others have remarked, this created thre ironic mirroring in which the forces in fazvor of enhanced civil rights were led by a man who had no particular taste to it, while the opposition came from one southerner whose attitude towards racial minorities was one of genuine compassion.

When he signed the Civil Rights Act, Johnson famously said he figured he'd delivered the south to the Republicans for a long time to come. That was the year Rep. Foxx turned 21.

Update: I am catching offline flac for having saddled Lyndon Johnson with the onus of "leading the Senate opposition." The point is made that Johnson was in fact the person who jammed the bill through. ITechnically correct, but am unrepentant. I don't doubt the sincerity of Johnson's compassion for blacks. But he had two choices: one, let the bill fail, at the behest of the old bulls who still dominated the august body (e.g., Johnson's personal mentor, Richard Russell of Georgia). And two, strip it naked and deprive of all nourishment and push it forth into a hostile world. Johnson knew he couldn't make his bones as a Presidential candidate in 1960 without a civil rights scalp in his belt. So he chose the path of betrayal.

I am, at the end of the day, something of the Johnson fan. He certainly is the most interesting president of my lifetime (or perhaps a close second, behind Richard Nixon). But there is no point in obscuring how many grandmothers he had to pitch under how many speeding locomotives to get where he wanted to be.

Apprciation: Return of the Soldier

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:40:55 PST

The Buce readaloud sodality recently undertook a perusal of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier. I think the immediate impulse was that Mrs. B's sister had read it in a book club and wanted out opinion. I was happy to oblige: I had taken great delight just last year from our reading of The Fountain Overflows, and I think that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one of the great whaddycallums of the lat century.

I wasn't disappointed: at just 90 pages Return of the Soldier is a slight thing, and the plot--a riff on Rip Van Winkle--offers little by way of substance that you haven't seen before. But West is an absolutely distinctive sensibility and even in this youthful trifle, she has a way of putting her own stamp on things. Indeed, my only strong complaint is that it is almost impossible to read aloud right, at least at sight. Her sentences re so serpentine, not to say feline or leonine, that you almost stub your toe on the syntax and bloody your nose on the iimplacable structure.

One thing that still strikes me as ironic, though. Return of the Soldier apparently ranks as a feminist classic, and in a narrow sense, I suppose I can see why this is so. It's a story told by a woman, herself a figure of inarguable raw talent. And it is a war story (or at least a home-from-the-wars story) told from a woman's point of view. Yet it is hard to imagine a story more man-centroc than this: everything and everybody revolves around Chris--poor, damaged Chris, just home from the wars. Plus (what is almost the same thing) the healing power of women: the restorative power of women and their indispensability in accomplishing what seems to be the end: the healing and general well-being of the man.

So it was not until now, when it happened to my friends, when it was my dear Chris and my dear Margaret who sat thus englobed in peace as in a crystal sphere, that I knew it was the mot significant, as it was the loveliest, attitude in the world. It means that the woman has gathered the soul of the man into her soul and is keeping it warm in love and peace so that his body can rest quiet for a little time. That is a great thing for a woman to do.

--Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier 57 (Digireads.com 2008)

West goes on to concede that there are other great things that a woman may do, but that is a detail. For the moment, here is a central mission, here is fulfillment, here is home. From stuff like this, you've come a long way baby indeed.

Dowd on Sarah Pa (snooze...)

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:44:18 PST

The breakfast table at Chez Buce is in unanimous agreement that today's Maureen--on Sarah Palin's new book--is the dullest ever. Seems that when the Beltway Queen of Snark meets the Wasilla Whiner, she really can't figure out what to do with her. Maureen ia reduced to trying to figure out ways in which the two are alike, and in fact, she finds quite a few. They both won VFW Writing Contests for Children. They both read Animal Farm (no kidding?). They both watched Sound of Music.

In short, a big yawn, with one possible exception. That is: maybe they are actually alike, in the sense that political adversaries are often more alike than they or we might notice at first blush. Think Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich: those guys could probably fill each other's suits. The presence of the two together in one room is bound to suck the oxygen out of everything in sight. A little boomlet, like matter and anti-matter. Might be interesting to see what would happen if they traded places: plump Sarah down in the columnisgt's bullpen at the Times Washington bureau and send Maureen up in a helicopter with a Moose gun. Would anybody notice?

Decomposing China

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:24:41 PST

Nothing that the population of Russia is now running about 142 million (down about five percent from the end of the Empire), it occurred to me to wonder--are there provinces in China that big?

Answer, no. Wiki gives the largest Administrative Division of China as Guangdong with about 94.5 million people. So, way smaller than Russia, but about the same says as--what? You thought Germany, Britan, France, italy, but you rejected them all because you knew they were too small, and you are right.

But the winner turns out to be The Philippines, weighing in as the 12th largest nation in the world. I have to say, I think I would have got that one wrong. I've never set foot in the Philippines, and I'm just not habituated to thinking of it as such a heavyweight.

Meanwhile, just as I was doing my looking, The Atlantic Magazine posted this too-cool analysis of "The Nine Nations of China." I've been to five; never been to the deep south nor the far north--never to Guangdong or Hong Kong, although I have been to Beijing, Shanghai, and all the way west to Kashgar. Big country, lots to see. And, come to think of it, three of these nine have a population bigger than Russia.

Boys Club Con't

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:12:09 PST

A few weeks ago I argued that the reason that the bad boys couldn't corral Sheila Bair for their save-the-world program is that they treated her like a girl. In Too Big to Save? Robert Pozen appears to see another episode of the same sort. The subject is Brooksly Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation back in the Clinton administration who wanted to regulate nonstandard credit default swaps.

[H]er views were curtly dismissed by then Federal Reserve Chair [Alan] Greenspan as well as then SEC Chair Arthur Levitt and then Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. As Michael Greenberger, a senior CFTC official at the time, explained: "Greenspan told Brooklsy that she essentially didn't know what she was doing and she'd cause a financial crisis. Brooksly was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street.

--Pozen in the uncitable Kindel edition, citing Peter S. Goodman, "Taking a Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy," New York Times, October 9, 2008, p. A1.

Politics: You Choose

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:25:42 PST

Here's the quote:

For many reasons, this is by far the best book and greatest literary achievement by a political figure in my lifetime.

Forget about the author. The subject is:

a) Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
b) Frederich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
c) Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
d) Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics
e) Other

Update: Silly me. He was born in 1967. He couldn't be expected to know about old fogeys like Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman anyway.

Heart Attacks: Another one Rides the Bus

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:51:07 PST

Liam Hudson, the British psychologist, argued that the real augury of success in science was not brilliance so much as it was a certain habits of mind: a patient and enduring curiosity about the subject, coupled with a knack for picking good projects (I think his showcase example was Ernest Rutherford, but don't hold me to it).

Anyway, I thought of Hudson last week when I read about the death of this guy:

Jeremy N. Morris, a British epidemiologist whose comparison of heart-attack rates among double-decker bus drivers and conductors in London in the late 1940s and early ’50s laid the scientific groundwork for the modern aerobics movement, died Oct. 28 in Hampstead, London. He was 99 ½. ...
It had long been surmised that exercise and a healthy heart were correlated. ...
Dr. Morris surmised that the proof could be found on the stairs of those double-decker buses. In 1949, he began tracing the heart-attack rates of hundreds of drivers and conductors. The drivers sat for 90 percent of their shifts; the conductors climbed about 600 stairs each working day. Dr. Morris’s data, published in 1953, indicated that the conductors had fewer than half the heart attacks of their sedentary colleagues.
In a follow-up study, Dr. Morris found that a lower incidence of heart attack among people doing physical work was not, for the most part, related to other factors, like body type. Transport for London, the city’s transportation agency, provided him with the sizes of the trousers it supplied to its workers. His data indicated that the conductors’ waistbands were smaller, but that their protection against heart attack could not be explained by their relative leanness. They had a lower risk of heart attack whether they were slim, average size or portly.
To corroborate his findings further, Dr. Morris did a study of postal workers. Comparing those who delivered the mail by walking or riding bicycles with the clerks behind the window at the post office and the telephone operators, he found that the deliverers also had a far lower risk of heart attack. ...

I suspect there must have been young scientists all over the world who read that and asked: why can't I come up with something quite so simple? Alas, I suspect all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. And anyway, it's a knack.

[No real reason for the late posting; I just forgot about it until now.]

The Onion Needs to get Back on Message

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:04:27 PST

I guess this is funny enough, in Onion sort of way (link).

Area Man Passionate Defender
Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be

...but here's the funny thing: the rest of it isn't really funny at all. It's just a tedious whine--virtually all of which I happen to agree with, but hey, you can get tedious whines in any faculty lunch room on the planet. Somebody needs to go reread the mission statement. This, for example is funny.

Susan Graham, Up Close (but not Personal)

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:49:37 PST

We saw Susan Graham a about three weeks back as she disported herself in a queen-sized bedroom frolic with Renee Fleming, as co-stars in Der Rosenkavalier at Lincoln Center in New York. We were watching from the dress circle which is not exactly New Jersey, but it is a good city block from the stage (my favorite location, as it happens, but that is another story). We saw her last night at the Mondavi Center at UC Davis, from a distance of about 110 feeet. Let's just say that you notice the difference.

First point: as U Utah Phillips liked to say, the dude is big-- an easy six feet, pretty much of a head taller than anybody else in her company. We were watching from the third row, so I guess you could say ten feet out plus six feet up, and if I remember my high school geometry, that's actually about 11.6 feet from her eyes to mine, though she missed a chance to lock on. But it brings me to my second point: the dude is loud, in the sense of having enough vocal power to lift the roof off and spin it around a coupler of times. Not quite Joan-Sutherland loud, but that's not entertainment, that's grotesque. Just a naturally powerfull (or unnaturally well-trained?) voice, that cazn command an audience all the way to the dress circle.

The particular item on display was Handel's Dido and Aeneas, which has enchanted me since I first heard it when I was 19 (although come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever saw it live before). And the intimate quarters allowed a third insight. that is: she had a superbly well qualified supporting cast, but not one of them had the belt-it-out power of the star. So you could just see that, for all their talent and training, they were doomed to smaller halls and more stingy paydays than the diva. I felt particularly sorry for Cyndia Sieden who played Dido's sister Belinda: she had to stand right next to Graham and open before her, and I think that would be enough to throw any but another diva a bit off-stride.

Clearly Graham has a lot of raw natural ability, but I don't mean to dismiss her as a mere animal act. She's a meticulous preparer, and we've seen her now in half a dozen different roles, about as different as you could hope for--aside from Strauss, we saw her first as the lead in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride; later in Handel's Ariodante and Mozart's La clemenza di Tito. Mrs. Buce also saw her as Donna Elvira in Mozart's Don Giovanni and anyway, the point is--put that together with Dido and you've got a tremendous range of material, forgetting about all the stuff we haven't seen. A first-rate talent at the top of her game; something to remember.

More than you Want to Know about the Court of Louis XIV

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:09:42 PST

The Duc de Saint-Simon marvels over the impudence of Marie-Adélaide of Savoy, duchesse of Bourgogne, who could "do no wrong" before King Louis XIV of France "because she diverted him." One evening, the King and his mistress came to chat with her one evening before a play. In came Nanon, a chambermaid.

The duchesse de Bourgogne, in evening dress and jewels, stood with her back to the hearth and leaned on a small folding screen. Nanon, keeping a hand under her apron, went behind her and kneeled down. Seeing this the King asked what they were doing.

The princess laughed, and said she was only doing what the King did on theatre nights. The King insisted. "Do you really wnat to know?" she asked. "Since you haven't noticed, I am taking an enema." "What," cried the King, "do you mean you are taking an enema right there in front of us?" "That's right," she replied. "How do you do it?" the King wanted to know, and they began to laugh with all their hearts. The princess explained that Nanon brought the syringe all prepared under her apron, lifted her skirts while she held herself as though she was warming herself behind the fire, and Nanon slipped in the nozzle. Then Nanon lowered her skirts and left with the syringe, so no one was the wiser; people usually thought Nanon was fixing the princess's dress.

--Duc de Saint-Simon, The Age of Magnificence: Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV 84

(Sanche de Gramont ed., Capricon Books 1964)

All Those Meetings: Morgan Saves Wall Street While Asleep

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:26:21 PST

Back in my newspaper days, I spent a bit of time at the Kentucky legislature. For a fan of participatory democracy, it was not a very inspiring sight: many of these "legislators" were just country boys who came to Frankfort for the hookers and the booze and whatever other vices they did not feel comfortable indulging at home. But the presiding officer--a guy named R. P. "Dick" Maloney--was of a different stripe: a shrewd and crafty manipulator of people and policy, he played them like a violin. This mostly entailed keeping order in the sandbox, and trying to keep things on schedule. But every so often, Maloney seemed to cede away his responsibilities, and for a couple of hours things would run riot--people would talk on and on about anything at all.

What's going on here? "You've got to let them get off steam," he would explain. After a while, he would take bring down the gavel again and get back to business.

I thought of Dick Maloney this week while reading Panic of 1907, Sean Carr and Robert Burr's absorbing account of the mostly-forgotten near-death financial meltdown on Wall Street early in the last century. It's a fascinating backgrounder on some of what we lived through last year and, not incidentally, a remarkable insight into the career of J. P. Morgan Jr., the old lion who more or less systematically hectored and bullied financial markets back into order.

So we're at the old Union Trust Company on the northeast corner of Thirty-sixth and Fifth Avenue. The order of the day is to squeeze $10 million out of the presidents of New York's most powerful trust companies to help shore up a flagging comrade and thus restore confidence in he system. Morgan (inevitably) presides. For him personally, it was no small matter. He was 70; he was mostly retired from the bank--he spent his time on Episcopal Church matters, and his collection of rare books and Renaissance art. He'd been on his feet in action for days and nights now. And he nursed a persistent, nasty cold.

Still, Morgan's entreaty, the president of Bankers Trust agreed to stump up $500,000, perhaps a million. But the others balked.

Their aimless discussion continued. Morgan was clearly exhausted. At first, he sat quietly smoking, until his cigar went out. Then his head dropped forward and he fell asleep in his chair.

Get that: perhaps the most critical moment in the career of perhaps the most powerful man in the world, and the old goat falls asleep.

But get this also: it didn't matter. Discussion continued to meander around him:

Another 30 minutes passed. Morgan then abruptly awoke, and he immediately asked [his aide] for apencil and a sheet of paper. "Well, gentlemen," Morgan continued...

And he got his money. And the system survived.

What do we see here? I think we see something between Kubler-Ross's six stages of grief and Maloney's "let them let off steam." It really didn't matter what the bankers said. It didn't matter whether Morgan was there or not (maybe he was awake all along and just faking it). They knew they were licked from the start. They needed to reconcile themselves to the fact they they were going to part with a large chunk of their beloved change. And these things take time.

I think there may be a moral here about all those meetings that everybody hates to go to. We never get anything done, you say. We just talk and talk. True, too true. And sometimes, that may be just the point. Deans who preside over faculty meetings, please copy. And consider a nap.

Annals of Judicial Humor

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:32:00 PST

ATL is reporting on the travail of as Minnesota judge who so far forget himself as to utter a one-liner. He said:

I've been married 45 years. We've never considered divorce. A few times murder, maybe.

Okay, har de har. But as ATL recalls, "we live in America, the land of perpetually bunched panties" (har de har again). And the judge is in a spit storm.

I won't begin to recount all the details of the fewferaw, but so far as I can tell, nobody seems to have noticed that the great progenitor of that remark is the wife of the late Billy Grahm (see a Google search with 3.88 million hits). If you can't wrap yourself in that much sanctity, we truly are screwed.

You Go, Girl

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:34:26 PST

I think of Jan (formerly James) Morris as the energizer bunny of travel writers: 83 she is, if not necessarily still going, at least still assessing and evaluating and appreciating (link, for which thanks to Joel). I've read a lot of her stuff over the years but the one that sticks on my shelf is a little item that I gather irritated some of her faithful readers. That would be Last Letters from Hav, a charming little jeu d'esprit, casually structured as a novel so as to provide her with a chance to talk about all the places she'd been and the traces they inscribed on her memory. It is a charming and good natured and, okay, sentimental read. It was nominated for thee Booker Prize that year and that, I suspect, may be why polite critics get so sniffy: how dare she presume to compete with the likes of Keri Hulme, who won the prize (for The Bone People) --or, for that matter, with Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Peter Carey and J.L. Carr, the other contenders.

Hav has a Turkish air, but there is a little bit of everything: German electric fittings (undermined by a Russian power plant); a French Maison de la Clugture ("one of Le Corbusier's less inspired works") and, of course, a Chinese Pagoda:

The fundamental shape of the building is, of course, that of the pagoda, the most unmistakably Chinese of forms, with its wide eaves and its gently tapering flanks--the Arabs were to be left in no doubt, not for a moment, as to the identity of the Master. In the five bridges there is apparently a direct refernce to the five bridges over the Golden Water River in the Forbidden City, an allusion that would imply to the Chinese themselves, if hardly to anyone else, the presence here of the imperial authority. The moat itself, with its nine unblinking eye-pools, is claimed...to be a figure of the Lake of Sleepless Diligence, while the high corridor which bisects the ground floor of the building, west to east, is said to be exactly aligned upon Tian Tan, the Tem;ple of the Heavens in Beijing. Finally... the whole edifice, so complex and deceptive, is a sophisticated architectural metaphor and maze.

--Jan Morris, Last Letters from Hav 96-7 (Vintage Paperback ed. 1988)

Fo;r my money, it is not all that far from Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, recognized as a modernist classic. I suspect that Morris does not lose any sleep over the fact that she did not win the Booker; I hope note, for I'd cetainly rather read her than any of those who did.

Laddish Humor: Philippine Insurgency Department

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:20:17 PST

A Google blog search for "Moro Islamic Liberation Front" yields 29,965 hits. Does this represent an intense curiosity about Philippine insurgency, or just a laddish tee-hee about the initials?

Understated Shakespeare

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:00:25 PST

Watching the last of those wonderful "Shakespeare Master Classes" with John Barton (I wish there were 20 more), I see that he picks up on a hobby horse of mine: some of the best moments in Shakespeare are the simplest, far from the legendary bombast.

Barton gets half a dozen actors to recite the first line of Merchant of Venice:

In truth, I know not why I am so sad.

That's Antonio. Ten syllables, ten words, as near to a perfect iambic as you're going to find. But as Barton shows, it can define his character for the rest of the play. He gets half a dozen of the actors in his company to give it a go; they come up with wildly different characters--not all of whom you'd want to watch, but no matter, the point is made.

It also sets Barton up to pursue again a point he has been pursuing through the series: actors have to earn a particular interpretation--a line, or a pause, or whatever. They have to figure out a way to create a context where a particular bit makes sense. So, for example, after Emilia discovers the murder of Desdemona (a few pages after) she shouts "O villainy, villainy!" Her husband Iago responds: "What, are you mad? I charge you get you home." And Emilia says:

Good gentlemen, let me have leave to speak.
'Tis proper I obey him, but now now.
Perchance, Iago, I will ne'er go home.

There is so much in those three lines. She's respectful of authority; she shows respect for her husband, the villain. There's a touch of domestic intimacy. But:

Perchance...I will ne'er go home.

In fact, a few moments later Iago kills her--so she does not go home. Or, ironically, "goes to her final home". Or simply: my life is so altered that no matter what happens, that nothing will ever be the same. In context--and with an actress who knows how to set it up--this can be as effective as anything in the play. But that, I think, is the real difficulty with Shakespeare for the audience--not the antique language, but the fact thst there is so much going on that you've got to be engaged every minute or you are going to miss the good stuff.

Barton also stages two bits of hugely effective poetry from non-obvious sources: one, Ian McKellen as Justice Shallow, only beginning to recognize his own mortlity ("Jesu, Jesu, dead!--a' drew a good bow; --and dead!"); and the other, a boffo performance by Donald Sinden and Peggy Ashcroft as Falstaff and the old whore Doll Tearsheet ("Kiss me, Doll!") as warm-hearted a piece of domestic intimacy as ever you are likely to see on stage. Did Sinden ever actually play Falstaff, I wonder? There are a lot of bad Falstaffs, but I would have gone a long way to see this one. And as to Barton--what a privilege and what an education it must have been to work with this guy: a director who makes everyone around him better. Like I say, I only wish there were 20 more.

Marker

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:48:15 PST

Grace Slick is 70.

Can This Be Right?--Tipping

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:54:57 PST

A reader asks the advice columnist Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic:

My husband and I are law partners and we travel frequently together for business. We get along well, except for one issue: he insists on cleaning up hotel rooms before the chambermaid arrives. I say the chambermaid is paid to clean up the room. He doesn’t go into restaurant kitchens and cook his own food, so why should he clean up the hotel room? Who is right here?

Pause for a moment and consider your own response. Then consider Goldberg's:

When the revolution comes, and the chambermaids and busboys and janitors rise up in righteous fury to judge the lawyers and the lobbyists and the CEOs, you will find yourself defenestrated, or at least disbarred, but your husband will see statues raised in his honor. Which is to say, I also clean up my hotel room before the maid arrives. No one gets through life without troubles, but I think that poorly paid hotel workers get through with more than their share. Why not pick up after yourself and make life a little easier for someone who works harder than you do?

Two things. One, I am 100 percent pro Goldberg on this one. I am quite conscientious about cleaning up the motel room--and if I were to forget, Mrs. Buce would snap my head back until you could hear the crack in my neck. Partly this is self-interest: I stay at the same motel about 75 nights a year and I know which side my complimentary toiletries are buttered on. But I even do it among strangers. So I think that every word Goldberg says at true.

The trouble is, careful reasoning tells me he is wrong. Sure, being a chambermaid is a lot less pleasant a job than being a semi-retired law professor. But it is a job. And she needs the job--certainly she isn't doing it for fun. If I do all my own cleanup, don't I make her more dispensable? And in particular, if I do my own cleanup, isn't there a risk that they might just send her home 15 minutes early?

I suppose one of that great rash of home-made economics books has an answer to this one, but I haven't read any of them: I suppose I'm just too busy cleaning up the room.

Bare Ruined Choirs

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:35:47 PST

Jonathan Raban quotes what may be the single best-known paragraph in 20th Century literary criticism--William Empson on Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

Because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because theyare now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choirboys suits well with Shakespeare's feeling fore the object of the Sonners, and for varius sociological and historical reasons (the Protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of Puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

That's Raban appreciating Empsosn in the London Review of Books, 5 November 2009, 37-41, 38. The quotation is from Shakespeare's Sonnet 73.

Down, Boy

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:26:06 PST

Frank Kermode considers "an element of violence" in the life of William Golding and tells us something Satanic:

"...as drunken assault on a Bob Dylan puppet belonging to the writer Andrew Sinclair and kept in his house, in a bedroom used by the Goldings. Waking in the night, Golding mistook the puppet for Satan, attacked it and buried it in the garden."

London Review of Books, 5 November 2009, reviewing and paraphrasing John Carey,'s new biography of Golding.

Lou Dobbs' Quest (and the non-Lou)

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:00:40 PST

I'm sure it is easy go make too much of it, but I am intriguey the fact (per Wiki) that Lou Dobbs is the son of a propane dealer. And in Childress County, Texas, which looks to be one of the loneliest, most forlorn places on the planet. Not only that, but his father's business failed when Lou was 12. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to look at this past for the seedbeds of his truculence and resentment. I say this with compassion: hell, with a record like that, which of us would not be truculent (at least until we became multimillionaires, but by that point, truculence might have become a habit).

Notwithstanding these obscure beginnings, I see he made it to Harvard, but my guess is he wasn't happy there. The Wiki doesn't mention any marks of distinction and it is hard to see him chairing the Lampoon or cutting up with the Hasty Pudding. And he seems to have begun adulthood with a trackless procession of crap jobs--until (like Rush) he seems to have discovered that he had a face made for radio.

I remember Dobbs as actually a pretty good business reporter before he went off the rails, although even in his heyday, I found something cringeworthy about the pompous chumminess with which he chatted up the economic high and mighty--you suspected even then that the felt he didn't really belong there.

I am dismisive, but I do not want to be too dismissive. You've got to respect the range of concerns that Lou seems to have tapped into with such resonance--general insecurity, declining mobility, the disintegration of middle class lives. But Lou's response seems sullied o'er with such sa crippling failure of imagination: there doesn't seem to be any problem he can't solve by finding some scheming foreigner devoted to making our own lives more miserable. It's an intelligible human response, but a damned unconstructive one, and sometimes it makes you wish he would just high-tail it back home.

Meanwhile Joel commends us to this to Tim Egan's NYT account of the great betrayal in American economics. That would be the Tim Egan who wrote about the Dust Bowl, and The Worst Hard Time (about the Dust Bowl); he also worked on the NYT series, How Race is Lived in America.Af first glance I dismissed it with a snark about "the thinking man's Lou Dobbs"--the non-Lou. I don't know precisely what I meant by that, nor whether I cvan defend it. They seem to have many of the same concerns. But Egan seems at least more discriminating in his choice of villains. In any event, there certainly is an overlsap. Hell, the Dust Bowl almost certainly made it to Childress County, Texas.

Addendum: Here's a far less generous view of Lou. And maybe nore accurate.