Anti-Newtonian times

One of the most ignored sentences in all of science is found in Newton’s Principia, in which he wrote: hypotheses non fingo. Or, I don’t make hypotheses. Philosophy of science, from Newton’s time onward, has pretended that Newton was Descartes, and that he used the Hypothico-Deductive method – and even, in the time of Popper, that science simply rids itself of induction. Of course, Newton was strongly inductionist, seeing himself as Bacon’s successor there, believing that when the numbers finally came out in your description of natural phenomena, you could get rid of the hypothesis; he was not a logick chopper, no Aristotelian he; and was very finicky about dividing conjecture from what he thought was law (in the draft of the Principia, he changed the term hypothesis of motion into law of motion). Newton was entirely consistent in this. When corresponding about his color theory with Pardies, he wrote: “… it is to be observed that the doctrine which I explained concerning concerning refraction and colours, consists only in certain properties of light, without regarding any hypotheses by which those properties might be explained. For the best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiments and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments. For if the possibility of hypotheses is to be the test of the truth and reality of things, I see not how certainty can be obtained in any science; since numerous hypotheses may be devised, which shall seem to overcome new difficulties.”

Newton succinctly outlines the shape and tenor of economics in that last sentence.
LI was oddly reminded of Newton by the mood and reporting of economic news last week. It was perhaps the most absurd misreporting of any phenomena we have seen since April and May 2003, when the reporting from Iraq was pitched on an equally absurd plane. Indeed, the two events are linked. In both, the mathematics differed wildly from the reporting. In 2003, the mathematics involved an absurdly understaffed occupying force; absurd estimates, or non-estimates, of the cost of the occupation; absurd estimates of the Iraqi “contribution” thereto; absurd underestimates, or non-estimates, of re-building the infrastructure. All of which sank into the background as the strummers of euphoria – reporters, spinners, the usual cast of highly paid liars – created a thick text of delusions. A different set of highly paid liars, but a branch of the same general establishment, looked at the numbers churned out last week by the Executive branch and became positively giddy. Why, there was 0.6 percent growth in the GDP in the first quarter! And employment came roaring back to the extend that there was only a drop of 20,000 jobs in April! And inflation has been nipped in the bud by, well, by magic!

One has only to refer to the numbers to see how insane, and how malicious, this chatter is. An 0.6 percent growth rate that is prompted almost wholly by a business inventory buildup would usually not be good news. An inventory buildup is usually announced as: unsold goods. Which leads to the question of why the doggies aren’t eating their dog food. Which would lead one to plunge into other dimensions of the numbers put out by the Commerce department – the drop in earnings; the rising interest rates for credit cards, auto loans, student loans and mortgages, even as the Fed has put a huge pipeline between the money it has borrowed at one rate and the banks that it loans to at a cheaper rate – which is a way of simply giving the banks money, but pretending not to. This is the largest and quickest government bailout of the wealthy in history. It is also one of the most underreported – where is the headline reading: Government gives Hedge Funds unlimited access to Tax Dollars? Those stories, of course, are re-written so that they are properly oblique, and put in the business section, to be read by those in the know. At the same time that we read the financial crisis is over, we also read that the Fed’s new policy is to accept almost anything for collateral – auto loans, student loans. The absurdity of this policy is in stark contrast with the reporting on individuals making deals with lending companies to refinance their houses. There, of course, it is all about keeping up, with the finest and most Tartuffian references to integrity and morality, the need to pay back, and fucking promptly. I enjoy the outraged comments of householders when these stories appear in the Post – they attach to some errant payer, some holder of two mortgages and a downsized position, and compare life stories – their own of rectitude and all the Prot virtues, the errant payer’s one of Roman debauchery on an undeserved credit line. While, all the while, it is the banks, the financial institutions, the “equity management” companies who own the mortgages who are getting the real deal. And not for chump change. It is important, in trying times in the great era of Inequality, to keep the lens on the small farsidish adventures of the ne’erdowells, and away from the biggest giveaway in U.S. history – except to greet Bernanke as a genius for having produced conditions in which excess inventory will fight excess dollars in the world championship of peekaboo inflation.

The numbers point to numbers down the road that will not be euphoric – and will be underreported as usual, although of course you will register them in your stomach, your routines, in the grocery line, in the mail from the power company. Looking at the employment numbers, for instance, one can venture a cautious, Newtonian hypothesis – a midstream thing, used to explain properties, not model them – that the revision of the numbers will add an extra sixty thousand or more to the unemployed number. Of course, Wall Street quants know this. But they also know that it is best not to know it, and – as Newton points out – if you use hypotheses to mold your data, why, you can come up with any picture you want. We are living, truly, in anti-Newtonian times, and in those times, the truth comes out from the tv marionettes only by accident. So LI was pleased that a truth actually came out of the mouth of Hilary Clinton – which must have surprised both the truth and Hilary – when she said, this weekend: “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”

She should know, since her husband makes his whole and entire living being paid to consult with elite opinion to keep that project going.

the total social fact

Levi Strauss’s introduction to Mauss’s collected works contained an important reflection on one of Mauss’s fundamental theoretical innovations: the notion of a “total social fact.” Since LI’s work in progress on happiness deals with one such ‘total social fact’, the emotional customs that are accepted in a given community or society; and since we have been thinking of how these customs have changed as the market-based industrial system became dominant in Western Europe and the U.S. over the 18th and 19th century, we thought a coupla posts on Levi Strauss and Mauss would not only rhyme, but be timely. Our duel with LCC turned us on to Derrida’s persistent attempt to interrogate the semantic force of the “material” in dialectical materialism – which frames his patient unwinding of Marx’s metaphoric of specters, spooks and spirits. It is here that two total social facts overlap: one is the capitalist rationality of constant movement – of commodities, populations, and technologies - governed by the overarching principle that all agents seek pleasure, and all pleasure is defined by an increase of goods; the other is an older social fact, in which reciprocities are not, in fact, governed by the pleasure principle, but by a construct founded on what an anthropologist have called the sacred, defined by the supposed connection between a worldly temporal power – the sovereign - and the cosmic principle(s) that makes for life. The latter, of course, became the hallmark of the savage in the 18th century, but that savagery was never exorcized by capitalist rationality, which instead chose to either ignore its continued existence within the social whole, under the pretense that it existed in the interstices, or to reduce it – demystify it – as, indeed, the Savage’s form of rational choice. Of course, the savage in this one sided dialogue has no voice in the matter – as Derrida shows, Marx and his opponents all agree on the project of doing away with superstition – and yet, if the savage did have a voice, he or she would recognize pleasure, or the utilitarian’s happiness, to be, indeed, the kind of spirit, or spectre, or mana, whose infinite permutations are embodied in the savage’s cosmology, with all the marks of such a character – the impossibility of anchoring it to one place in the system, the rituals of supplementation that endlessly attempt to make up for its failure, and the curiously rigid theology that has grown up around defining it to a hair’s breadth without ever really explaining it at all – it exists in that breathless space between the self-evident and the impossible. In Marx’s work, the polemical and political texts pull away from the economic work just at this point. To put it simply, the revolutionary moment, which is the moment at which the alienation produced in the capitalist system reaches a saturation point in which it bursts asunder all the social bonds, is impossible to reconcile with the totalizing system of ‘material interests’ that are outlined in the economic work. They work in two different frameworks.

Well, this is a thing to return to later. Now, here, out of the kindness of LI’s heart, is a translation of the key grafs in Levi Strauss’s description of the total social fact.

“One could even say that it [the notion of the total social fact] commands them [Mauss’s preoccupations] since, like them but in a more inclusive and systematic fashion, the notion proceeds with the same care to define social reality; but: to define the social as the reality. Now, the social is not real except in as much as it is integrated into a system, and here we find the first aspect of the notion of the total fact: “After having forcibly a little too much divided and abstracted the social, it is necessary for sociologists to attempt to recompose it in its entirety.” But the total fact does not succeed in being such by the simple reintegration of discontinuous aspects: familial, technical, economic, juridical, religious, under whichever one of which one could be tempted to apprehend it exclusively. It is necessary as well that it is incarnated in an individual experience, and this from two different points of view: firstly in a individual history that permits to ‘observe the conduct of total beings, and not divided into functions”[facultés]; next in what we would love to call (in rediscovering the archaic sense of a term whose application in the present case is evident) an anthropology, that is to say, a system of interpretation giving account simultaneously of what is physical, physiological, psychic and sociological about all the conduits [toutes les conduits] : “The study alone of this fragment of our life which is our life in society is not sufficient.”

The total social fact thus presents itself with a three dimensional character: it must make coincide the literal sociological dimension with its multiple synchronic aspects; the historical dimension, or the diachronic; and at last the physio-psychological dimension. Thus, it is only with individuals that this triple relationship can take place. If one is attached to this “study of the concrete which is complete”, one must necessarily perceive that “what is true is not the prayer or the law, but the Melanesian of such and such an island, Rome, Athens.”

About which, more in a post to come.

birthdays of the LI-osphere

LI wants to congratulate our far flung correspondent, Mr. T from NYC, on crashing the barrier into middle age - middle age will never be the same again! In the above pic, Mr. T.'s son is trying to get dad to shut up. Ah, I can tell this is going to be a lifelong process!

Happy birthday!
And of course this:

And, of course, this:

When questioned on his views
On the crux of lifes philosophies
He had but these few clear and simple words to say

I am going, I am going
Any which way the wind may be blowing
I am going, I am going
Where streams of whiskey are flowing

go to another party/and hang myself

It should be noted that the “third way” – the idea that left/liberal parties would adopt rightwing policies, nourish a wildly wealthy oligarchy, and then achieve popularity managing our consequently affluent lifestyles by superbly clever triangulating – has, predictably, led to the mass extinction of Socialist parties in Europe. There is no longer a leftist option in the UK or Italy – and in Germany, it is in the death throes. In France the left is riven by the struggle between the third way parasites and nostalgia.

Of course, the whole idea was insane from the beginning. To believe that one would protect and nourish a system of vast inequality is to believe that the people on the top will not use their money to enlarge and entrench their advantages. It was a fairy tale for feebs. It got a wonderful press, however, the media having long ago become the most reliable tool of the wealthy. And if you destroy all remnants of a traditional leftist program for a generation, you eventually remove it from the collective memory – it becomes the heirloom of outliers, of academic enthusiasts, of the millionaire revolutionary, the tourists to Chavez land and the like. In other words, it becomes something like high fashion – existing in no relation whatsoever to the vast mass of the populace.

So, the end of the Blair witch project arrived, and predictably, New Labour finished its destruction of Labour by thinning the party to the point that it may go to the happy hunting ground inhabited by Britain’s Liberal party – into the memory hole of history. Blair and Asquith – now there’s a ripe combo for the history books. Somehow, what New Labour had to offer turned the stomachs of the population: a corrupt gang of incompetent neo-imperialists, with the taint of Saudi bagmen and other mysterious sources of billionaire money, the grand producers of a social attitude that would make it impossible to finance the necessary public investment that actually would make Labour significant, rather than popular in a suburban pocket election, an enterprise that refused to put the boot into the House of Lords when it had a chance, the party of the authoritarian attitude towards the human right to smoke dope or access information about the workings of the State - the whole ghastly machine has come crashing down. This is the direct result of letting Blair have his last run. One wonders if the Labour poobahs rue having let the vanity of that disgusting creature overrule common sense? But then, it was a conspiracy of vanity – the poobahs of ‘Labour’ without the ‘New’ are now a dinosaur’s age, and Third Way-ers cast their lots with and made their fortunes on reheated Thatcherism, so they were in no position to see that vanity was leading them to a big fall.

The signs of the times are not good – the first openly fascist party in 70 years has taken power in Italy, with the mayor of Rome giving the fascist salute; an open racist has won the London mayoralty election, and the defenders of ‘tolerance’ and ‘enlightenment’ are also still defending their participation in the indefensible Iraq war. The war was, in foreign policy, just the kind of escamotage Blair produced in domestic policy – a now you see it, now you don’t surrender to the vilest impulses of the right, wrapped in the appropriate pop references and smirky nostalgia for the enlightenment “left”. The decents have the reach and influence of a planter’s mole on the buttocks of the behemoth, but they gather, in their collective crapulence, all the energies, all the hysterical rhetoric, all the contradictions, all the mock Trot gestures, that made New Labour such an obscenity. The combination of an economic slowdown and right wing racism, sure to be a popular card, are just unfolding their tender shoots.

The death of the party
came as no surprise


PS: there’s an excellent post by Yves Smith about the recent Milken Conference thrusts a little proctologist’s scope into the sites where the press attitude, politics and finance come together – the kind of places that loved to invite Blair to talk, and that Blair loved to talk to. Contrast Smith’s honesty with, say, the NYT reporter’s own description of the conference. It should also be pointed out how the crimes of the wealthy are normalized by the press. Imagine the NYT sending a reporter to the Pablo Escobar Conference. Wouldn’t happen. Yet of course the Milken Conference was organized by a convicted criminal, who was able to defend his considerable gains from seizure by the government only because – he used his leverage.

Here’s the first two grafs:


I am still recovering from the Milken Conference, and unlike my fellow blog panelists Paul Kedrosky, Felix Salmon and Mark Thoma, have not written any posts on particular sessions. In part, that was because in my other life as a consultant, I am well aware of the dangers of relying on memory even though mine is pretty good, and I had decided to listen rather than take notes.

But the other reason was in almost all the sessions has a strong element of overt pressure on the speakers to maintain an upbeat tone, combined with repeated reinforcement of Republican/Chicago School of Economics ideology. Normally I would not deem that sort of thing worthy of mention if it were a minor and only occasional element of the program; indeed it would have been valuable if other views had been tolerated and some sparks flew. No, the private sector/deregulation cheerleading was pervasive and baldfaced, and made it hard for me to sort out signal from noise. There were enough cases where I knew the data and knew it to be misrepresented so as to call a lot of what I was hearing into question.

On the idea that conservatives are a happy lot

My editor at the Statesman has been kind enough to shoot me the many unreviewable books about happiness which come in the mail for him. They have been churning and burning off the presses lately – once again, LI is ahead of the curve! (put your hands in the air like you just don't care!)

Of course, LI might be as against the curve as a hot and horny salmon facing a concrete dam, given our goals and assumptions. Everybody, it seems, thinks happiness is a good thing.

One of the books is by a conservative egg head named Arthur Brooks. We tossed the book when we noticed a footnote to a blog post by Jonah Goldberg. We don’t have infinite patience. However, Brooks does make a big deal out of a standard right wing chestnut. Since the seventies, Pew Research has found that Republicans, and conservatives generally, are more likely to say they are happy than Dems, liberals or independents. Pew Research helpfully broke this out by income, so that we aren’t being mislead here by the fact that your hedonic gradient goes up as your income takes you into the upper percentiles. Rather, Pew contends that the big factor is religiosity.

The usual liberal conclusion is that those who want a better regulated financial system and the legalization of gay marriages are more sensitive to the unhappiness of others, as in wishing for a more just and equitable system, for which we bleed. While those who are afraid that socialism is going to creep into the medical system and that we are going to cut and run in Iraq are simply self involved bubble children.

LI, however, sees the hedonic gap as a precursor, a little light, that maybe we aren’t alone in wanting to throw off the conjunction of the happiness norm and our Lebensordnung. In fact, it might be that the assumption that our social arrangements are all about making us happy could be in decline.

As is obvious, over the last two years I’ve been hammering away at happiness triumphant (which is a little like one little termite working on the toe of the Colossus of Rhodes – but eventually, all Colossi fall). I am firmly of the belief that our social arrangements should not be judged on whether they make us happy. Instead of a scale of well being, I would like to see a scale of passional being. Instead of continuing to meekly submit to an order of life that points us all to the synapse linking happiness and more, and urging us to have our little chemicals make that leap en masse and permanently – every day is Christmas in Serotoninville! – I’d like that monkey business overturned, before it wipes out all the monkeys.

My fellow liberals – ask not if you are happy, but if you are in love.

God's curse on em

Mission accomplished day. 50 American soldiers killed in April. Reports in the NYT say 450 some Iraqis have died in battles so far in Sadr City, which means about 800 to 1,000. So perhaps one life in Florida is nothing, but still – today LI thinks about Deborah Jeane Palfrey, a woman mercilessly hounded by a criminal Justice department, ridiculously charged under the RICO act, and so convicted in a kangaroo court by a local Torquamada who got his jollies bullying old prostitutes. Meanwhile, the Johns are forever free, of course, to visit prostitutes again. The old game of threatening them, beating them, killing them, America's number one sport, goes on and on.

Whether she hung herself or was murdered, what happened to her was a disgrace. LI is scraping the bottom of the barrel for the language of indignation. It is not that we want to describe or analyze – no, we want to hurl, to throw. Sticks and stones. The word, thrown out of the mouth at the right time by the right person, can cripple. But we who stand outside of bubbleville, the Closed Gate Communities of the kleptocracy, can hurl any words we want – they won’t get through.

The NYT has a media smirky headline for Ms Palfrey’s death that says everything about those bottom feeders: The Story Ends for the ‘D.C. Madam’. Yeah, it is a story. Not a person. Fuck persons who aren’t in the gated community. Fuck them up the ass. No, just an amusing giggle at the end of a rope.

Ah, may their tongues gangrene and rot off, those tellers of the story. May the stories rise up, someday, and rip them limb from limb.

And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!

Children and monetarists beware

For those of you who delight in the spilling of ichor – the blood of intellectuals – hie ye to Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View, which reprints Jamie Galbraith’s address on the 25th meeting of the Milton Friedman society. A sign of the times that they would invite Galbraith, son of Friedman’s blood enemy. Galbraith begins with a few courtesies, and then utterly destroys Friedman’s work, and then makes like Jack the Ripper with Bernanke’s reputation. It is a rare sight to see such thorough slaughter. There must have been a long pause after it was all over. Did anybody move? Did the master of ceremonies heave himself out of his seat and finally say, what a veeery interesting talk, Professor Galbraith. Oh dear, you have some kind of foaming ectoplasm all over the front of your tuxedo.

The society should pay attention to this useful film about not accepting rides from strangers.

PS – the music of America! that barbaric yawp is still spawning rib tickling vocables. For instance, this is a Wall Street term that comes from the very heart of the Bush culture. From Frank Norris at the NYT:
http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/how-much-capital-do-the-banks-need/
Carlyle has done its part to create those holes. Mr. Rubenstein delivered a hilarious recollection of the credit markets at the top of the market, in which Citigroup and J.P. Morgan competed to lend, offering low interest rates, no covenants (covenant-light in the jargon) and toggle-PIK, meaning the company could pay in kind, with more securities, if it did not have the cash.
As he told it, with a hypothetical billion dollar acquisition, Carlyle funds put up $350 million and borrowed $650 million.
When the music stopped in the credit market last year, the bank was unable to sell such loans in the securitization market — to investors Mr. Rubenstein called the “stuffees.”
The stuffees! Don’t you love living under the Great Fly? Forget comrades, forget citizens, forget motherfuckers. It is a nation of stuffees. And happy to be stuffed!

duellum

Deux guerriers ont couru l'un sur l'autre...

For those interested in such things, the long promised duel between LCC and Jackie Derrida is finally commencing in earnest. Yours truly is in attendence as J.D.'s second.

PS - We are still dueling over there, though we are a little off topic - not too much, I hope. Entertaining stuff for those who enjoy liberal-Marxist dialog - and let's face it, who doesn't?

In this duel, LCC overlooks my sometimes off topic meandering - as, for instance, that I have signally failed to really reference Derrida yet. And I overlook LCC's mimicry of Jacques Derrida as a sort of malevolent Punch, starring in a remake of the Exorcist underwritten by Encounter Magazine.

barthes, the perfect storm, and business bullshit

Groupies of Barthes principle of mythology, that “false nature”, have been having a field day lately with business news. You’ll remember the lyrics to the famous Nature/Culture divide – of course you do:

The point of departure for this reflection was most often a sentiment of impatience before the “natural’ in which the press, art, common sense ceaselessly array a reality which, even as it is the one in which we live, is nevertheless perfectly historic: in a word, I am pained to see, at every moment, how in the story of our actuality, Nature and History are confounded, and I wanted to tighten my grasp, in the decorative exposition of the “it-goes-without-saying”, [ce-qui-va-de-soi] of the ideological abuse which, in my sense, is found hidden in it.” – Mythologies.

With this in mind, LI has been thinking of the “perfect storm.”

In 1997, Sebastian Junger published his story that, as they say, soared to the top of the best selling lists. Finally, a story for the testosteroned among us – brave men and their ships! It proved especially popular among the yacht set.
But what interests me is not so much 1997, but 1998. Oh, if Barthes had only had google and Factiva! For with these simple tools, one can observe the leaping of the memes. In September of 1998, three things happened – the Russian’s defaulted on their loans, the Asian tiger cubs – Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea – suddenly started bailing capital, and Long Term Capital Investment, our favorite hedge fund, started by John Meriwether and co-starring too hard right libertarian Nobel prize winning economists, went belly up. It was a model flop – a model for the current age of flops, with Greenspan timidly managing a bail out that presaged the massive bail outs being effected, at this very moment, by the Fed – who, to the vast indifference of the American public, is making the financial sector all happy by loaning out money at below par rates, so those banks can buy U.S. government debt at par rates and rake in the money, and we can pretend that we aren’t giving it to them. This is called capitalism, my friends. In any case, it was in the golden autumn of 1998 that this started happening:

From Business Week
21 September 1998

Why did rocket science backfire? Sure, the models do take into consideration the possibilities of some failures occurring in the market system that upset normal historical relationships. Indeed, that's why these bets usually involve a series of hedges. What occurred, however, was the financial world's equivalent of a ''perfect storm''--everything went wrong at once. Interest rates moved the wrong way, stocks and bond prices that were supposed to converge diverged, and liquidity dried up in some crucial markets. As Long-Term's Meriwether told his shareholders in a Sept. 3 letter: ''We expected that sooner or later...we as a firm would be tested. I did not anticipate, however, how severe the test would be.''

That is one of the first mentions of the perfect storm to explain a financial disaster. Notice the beauty of it. First, the bilocation – on the one hand, who is more “part” of the financial weather system than a hedge fund? And on the other hand, you have the almost peasant like hedge funders, hunkering down as the rain comes pouring upon them – surely no fault of their own! Although we shouldn’t pursue that thought to far – for if the hedge funders aren’t responsible for the “perfect storm”, why should we hold them responsible for the golden sunshine? Why do we say they make those profits? Why pay them those premiums if it is all weather?
But those who ask such questions are obviously losers and dipshits, and have no place sticking their nose into the Fed’s wonderful equity bubble machine.

The perfect storm of “perfect storms” grew all that autumn. Here’s a sample:

“CNN Interview with Jeff Davis, State Street Global Advisors:
25 September 1998
DAVIS: Well, I think there are -- certainly there potentially could be. I mean, it's been a big -- a big couple of years for hedge fund investing. And investors are looking for protection during crises like this. But we call the August fall the perfect storm where there is a combination of crises around the world that were, you know, one of those once-in-a-lifetime events that keep arriving every three years, to quote a friend of mine. And so we really are nervous about where the risks are right now. And it's difficult, again, for the transparency in the marketplace to let us know where those risks are.”

From the Financial Times, 12 December 1998
12 December 1998
“Allen Wheat, chairman and chief executive officer of Credit Suisse First Boston, made no forecasts when he spoke at a gathering of the investment bank's managing directors in Florida in November.

He said A Perfect Storm, the title of a recent best-seller about a catastrophe off the coast of New England, reminded him of this year's market.
The only difference, he said, was that nobody knew whether it could get no worse or whether they were simply enjoying a brief lull while resting in the centre of it.”

The Economist, 5 December 1998

“Academic financial economists, unsurprisingly, still stand up for the science. Rene Stulz, who edits the profession's top research publication, the Journal of Finance, says, in a new book he is writing, that LTCM's only impact will be as "a nice case study". Most academics hint that LTCM's downfall had nothing to do with the financial models of the two Nobel laureates (an argument that rather irks those Wall Street firms persuaded to invest in the hedge fund precisely because it was using their models).

Their consensus view is that, at worst, the two Nobel winners were guilty of hubris. At best, they were the victims of a "perfect storm" in the markets: several extremely unusual events took place at once, with consequences that could not reasonably have been foreseen, and are unlikely ever to be repeated. And if even the cleverest academics lose money, doesn't that prove their point? The deepest insight of financial economics is that markets are fairly "efficient", meaning that you can earn high returns only by taking big risks. There really is no free lunch.

Yet there is no denying that the recent market turmoil confounded existing financial-economic models.”


By the end of the year, “perfect storm” was in like flint. It was the perfect excuse. It sounded manly. It took responsibility out of the hands of the responsible, and turned it over to the weather – and as all we biliously banal Americans know, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Ha ha! Nature, you see. And as storms interrupt your train of thought – you who think about these things, in the commercial time right before we find out what Celebrity Dancer will win the big prize tonigth! So, too, we don’t throw a thought at what the metaphor implies about paying people to experience weather. Oh, paying them a billion here or there. Because they are geniuses. Rocket scientists. Who just happen to contribute less to the productive life of this society than a puppy with diarrhea.

So, being connoisseurs of biz bull shit, we were delighted with the incredible interview in the NYT with Robert Rubin, Citi’s consiglieri, who has one message for you and me – Citi might have dropped 20 billion lately, but it isn’t his fault! No sir. Guess what happened? Come on, guess. Begins with P. Ends with m. Two words.

“By the time I finished at Treasury, I decided I never wanted operating responsibility again,” Mr. Rubin, 69, said during a two-hour interview in his office. Sitting in a red-cloth chair and propped against a thick book to support a bad back, he made it plain that responsibility for Citigroup’s staggering losses can’t be laid at his feet.
“People know I was concerned about the markets,” he says. “Clearly, there were things wrong. But I don’t know of anyone who foresaw a perfect storm, and that’s what we’ve had here.”
“I don’t feel responsible, in light of the facts as I knew them in my role,” he adds.
But did he make mistakes?
“I’ve thought a lot about that,” he responds. “I honestly don’t know. In hindsight, there are a lot of things we’d do differently. But in the context of the facts as I knew them and my role, I’m inclined to think probably not.”

As we peons know, nowadays, when you go through that ritual in humiliation called a job interview, one of the standard questions is, describe one of your mistakes. The idea is that, as a peon, you are surely just the kind of drooling idiot to smoke around the gas pumps, so lay it out on the table. Give them reasons to pay you less. Luckily, as we get higher and higher, mistakes magically vanish. Weather intervenes. Perfect storms.

Of course, a people who were not utterly servile might rise up in revolt at being served a continuous mixture of the ripest bullshit ever known to man as their pockets were picked.

I can’t wait to meet such a people. I wonder where they live?

Interview with Amanda Marcotte

My interview with Amanda Marcotte is here. As this interview was conducted for my paper, I couldn't really supply a lot of the hilarious bits from Marcotte's book. This had to be edited out, but it gives a concise feel for the book:

On the evidence of her new book, It’s a Jungle Out There, she is a Fight Club Feminist. As in the famous scene in Fight Club in which Brad Pitt announces the rules, Marcotte’s prefaces her book with her own rules:

“Why are people so mean to feminists? Because so much of feminism is the fine art of calling bullshit, and calling bullshit makes people uncomfortable. The first rule of understanding bullshit is that people really love their bullshit.”

The interview was done before the flame wars, and before Seal purged the book of the racist imagery in the cartoons that were used to divide the sections of the book. That's a long story, especially for those of you not following it. In brief, I like Marcotte, I like her work, I like her temper - but in the controversy about her, BFP, and the appropriation of the work of WoC bloggers, her temper has lead her to uncharacteristically underestimate her own bullshit as a white woman. That said, I am particularly pissed off at the shit stirrers who seem to think Marcotte bears the burden for the racism of the whole power structure in America, when she has always tried to reveal it when she sees it. For instance, she was out front in the 'victimization' controversy when Clinton's supporters took to making invidious comparisons between the mild 'victimization' of blacks and the truly awful victimization of women in America - as if one should really feel that Scarlet O'Hara was the victim of Tara - and she has always been vocal about it. Instead of the use of gentle persuasion - to say, look, you are missing the point here - it all became immediate denunciation of Marcotte. On my paranoid days, I think this is because Marcotte's been pretty clear about her preference for Obama, and this is payback by the Clinton people. But on consideration, that isn't right. The exaggerated response is about a silent and amplifying wrong - the lack, in the liberal/left press, of people of color - there are investment firms that hire more African Americans and Hispanics than you find writing for, say, the Nation -and it came out against Marcotte.

More news from the Kingdom of the Great Fly

One of the amusing things about dancing on the precipice in the era of the Great Fly is that every paranoid vision gains a foothold in reality. Take the food crisis. Let’s see, you combine phenomenal growth in former LDCs, climate changes the fact of which are resisted by the moronic inferno, and the richest country in the world making its primo manufacturing objective the export of packaged debt. And whaddya get? Oh, famine and war, war and famine.

Norman Borlaug has an opinion piece that is sure to be unread and unheeded until, say, next year, when bread is five dollars a loaf. Borlaug is the great Green Revolution agronomist. Let’s just say that the Green Revolution gave us ambiguous results – while the Soviets collectivized their farms, the capitalist world treated its agricultural sector to a form of shock therapy, agroteching their way to global corporate farming monstrosities, and the resulting flight from the peasant pea patch to the barrio and bidonville is going to rule our world for a long time. But that is the way the world food supply went. So, if you are going to ruthlessly exterminate varieties and promote monoculture through the length and breadth of the planet, you better be prepared for the consequences – blights that can quickly wipe out the vulnerable predominant strand. This is where the fun stops in the evolution debate, which isn’t just about whether we should create even dumber American yokels than we are wont to mill out of our schools – natural selection as a fact about the relationship between species and environment can come gunning for you, hypocrite lecteur.

First, a little history:

“WITH food prices soaring throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, and shortages threatening hunger and political chaos, the time could not be worse for an epidemic of stem rust in the world’s wheat crops. Yet millions of wheat farmers, small and large, face this spreading and deadly crop infection.

The looming catastrophe can be avoided if the world’s wheat scientists pull together to develop a new generation of stem-rust-resistant varieties of wheat. But scientists must quickly turn their attention to replacing almost all of the commercial wheat grown in the world today. This will require a commitment from many nations, especially the United States, which has lately neglected its role as a leader in agricultural science.

Stem rust, the most feared of all wheat diseases, can turn a healthy crop of wheat into a tangled mass of stems that produce little or no grain. The fungus spores travel in the wind, causing the infection to spread quickly. It has caused major famines since the beginning of history. In North America, huge grain losses occurred in 1903 and 1905 and from 1950 to ’54.”

Then a little natural history:

“Today, wheat provides about 20 percent of the food calories for the world’s people. The world wheat harvest now stands at about 600 million metric tons.
In the last decade, global wheat production has not kept pace with rising population, or the increasing per capita demand for wheat products in newly industrializing countries. At the same time, international support for wheat research has declined significantly. And as a consequence, in 2007-08, world wheat stocks (as a percentage of demand) dropped to their lowest level since 1947-48. And prices have steadily climbed to the highest level in 25 years.

The new strains of stem rust, called Ug99 because they were discovered in Uganda in 1999, are much more dangerous than those that, 50 years ago, destroyed as much as 20 percent of the American wheat crop. Today’s lush, high-yielding wheat fields on vast irrigated tracts are ideal environments for the fungus to multiply, so the potential for crop loss is greater than ever.”

And then, of course, the natural history of our Great Fly, that glorious combination of cretinism and short term advantage that we’ve all grown to know and love:

“The Bush administration was initially quick to grasp Ug99’s threat to American wheat production. In 2005, Mike Johanns, then secretary of agriculture, instructed the federal agriculture research service to take the lead in developing an international strategy to deal with stem rust. In 2006, the Agency for International Development mobilized emergency financing to help African and Asian countries accelerate needed wheat research.

But more recently, the administration has begun reversing direction. The State Department is recommending ending American support for the international agricultural research centers that helped start the Green Revolution, including all money for wheat research. And significant financial cuts have been proposed for important research centers, including the Department of Agriculture’s essential rust research laboratory in St. Paul.

This shocking short-sightedness goes against the interests not only of American wheat farmers and consumers but of all humanity. It is tantamount to the United States abandoning its pledge to help halve world hunger by 2015.”

Imagine that – the U.S. breaking a promise!

Meanwhile, back in the the District of Columbian Ass-licking, the Washington Post article about the food riots is, of course, larded with the usual praise of the Great Fly – I am rather surprised that the Post hasn’t yet started calling him The Father of the People:

But administration officials and legislative aides acknowledge that they have only recently begun to focus on the severity of the problem, and humanitarian groups fear that assistance from the United States, which already supplies about half of the world's total food aid, may come too late to provide much benefit in the near term.

The mounting crisis, which has unseated Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Édouard Alexis and prompted riots throughout the developing world, provides a particular challenge for President Bush during his final months in office. Although Bush has received many positive reviews for his initiatives to combat HIV-AIDS and malaria, he is hobbled by dismal approval ratings and bitter relations with a Democratic Congress during a presidential election year.”

Oh, the positive reviews on issues having nothing whatsoever to do with food! Surely they could have larded it with better ass licking than that, however. I would have suggested something like: “Although Bush has received many positive reviews on the massive size of his dick, a priapus that promises plentiful rainfall and prosperity for all Christian Americans…”

We live in Great Times, times of the fulfilment of prophecy, when the ludicrous and the murderous have merged into one soul destroying blob. So excellent!

We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we
had no eyes: we stumble at noon day as in the night; we are in
desolate places as dead men. Isaiah 59:10

Beauty tips

LI is very interested in beauty. We are a beauty maven. The whole thing, the aesthetic, the striving for it, the failing, the study of it. Hell, at the moment we are working part time copyediting the fashion issue of a magazine, so we are rubbing our nose in the manufacture of it, right down to the ColorU blush in Lilac. Yet, whenever we see calls to bring beauty back into the study of literature or art, it seems like the machine starts out all over again. First, the lament that somehow – through theory or through identity politics – they’ve guillotined beauty and are cavorting in her shambles. Then of course there is the appeal to the canonical and emotional power of beauty. That it soothes the wild beasts and the undergraduate at the same time. And then the whole train of associations are dragged into it – as we see in this article on teaching beauty by Jennifer Green-Lewis and Margaret Soltan at Inside Higher Education. It begins with an anecdote about the idiosyncratic veneration all readers give to certain of their favorite texts.

“When his turn came to speak at Norman Mailer’s recent memorial service in New York, the novelist Don DeLillo began by simply holding up his creased and worn 50-year-old copy of Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead.

All lovers of literature understand the nature of DeLillo’s gesture; they understand that behind the little paperback that he lifted for the audience to see lay years of private aesthetic pleasure in its pages — from the college student marveling at its prose to the venerated author of Underworld marveling at the same thumbed passages. That’s the sort of writer Mailer was, DeLillo meant to say: He wrote novels you’re never finished with; and the scuffs and scratches and stains you put in them over the years add up to the archaeology of your own literary life.”

This isn’t a bad start. Unfortunately, instead of asking about that contrast between scuffs and scratches and the glamorous spell cast by immersion in a work, by which the work becomes immersed in the reader – the praying mantis work of reading – we are, instead, taken by steps from attentiveness to the soul – and then the soul becomes the launching pad for the usual, quasi-religious complaint:

Who would ever enter a classroom and invite their students to consider the beauty of a work because, as Nicolas Malebranche puts it, “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul"? The word “soul” doesn’t get much exercise in English departments any more, and neither do concepts associated with it — inspiration, consolation, communality, transcendence, love. What do these have to do nowadays with the study of literature? In our public neglect of such concepts in favor of the political and the material, our answer is clear: nothing.
“Of course, literature professors who graduated from English departments in the past 30 years can defend their neglect of matters related to the soul, since in their studies no one talked much about these things either. An English professor recalls the facile “contingency” arguments of her day, which did so much to undermine judgments of aesthetic value: “I felt I had to hide or smuggle in my humanist convictions about ‘what sustains people’ — my faith for example in some quality of shared humanity that makes literary experience meaningful.... I was writing about [James] Joyce’s insights into the touching human need to bury, burn, or otherwise take care of the bodies of the dead — an impulse that is universal, however differently loss and the communal response to it are experienced across cultures. I was afraid I’d be attacked for ‘essentializing’ — for supposing that there are features, shared across cultures, that constitute the essence of being human.”

Surely “essentializing” — a poor choice of word for an acknowledgment of shared humanity — is necessary in the imaginative work involved in recognizing the existence of someone else. As Iris Murdoch argues, that recognition is difficult and demands a leap into the sort of empathy which the imaginative demands of literature encourage. When Murdoch expresses her admiration for T.E. Lawrence because he “let the agonizing complexities of situations twist [his] heart instead of tying his hands,” she reminds us that the real-world value of great and complex art can accustom us to the intricate and often painful ambiguities of the world.”

I can’t resist a side note here – Theophile de Viau, in his Apology, uses the pretty funny verb “quintessentializing.” With which I am well pleased. But to proceed…

This notion of the theory mafia that roamed the halls of academe when I was a grad student – yes, I was a member of Derrida’s Hells Angels in the 80s – would be funny. Except that I had a recent communication, with a professor I am editing, who told me that though my suggestions on how to make her argument tighter were excellent, they would involve “theory” – and, she added, anything that smacks of “theory” now gets you sorted into the non-tenure file. I’m not sure that she wasn’t exaggerating a bit. Still, more than one source has confirmed a backlash against theory in the humanities lately. But as Green-Lewis and Soltan’s article shows, without the constant barking of the theoretical guard dogs, there is an intolerable backsliding into quasi-Victorian malarkey. Which, of course, has nothing to do with beauty. One could well find beauty a universal factor in human societies without finding beauty universal – if that means that some set of objects or styles is universally considered beautiful. This is because the discourse of beauty that, for instance, connects it to the universal is easy to trace to historic conditions. And those same conditions tell us that beauty for the modernists, far from being this soul satisfying moment of universal communion, was considered the result of the most extreme contingency and alienation. For a modernist lineage coming out of Baudelaire and running through the Surrealists, Bataille, pop art, etc., beauty is inseparable from alienation. Here is where I, at least, would begin to talk about beauty – how it transmigrated into an art that hungered for alienation the way the fragment hungers for the whole. It is one of the notable things about surrealism, by the way, that it was quickly adapted by an international group of poets, painters and writers. It was seen to express the landscape of the end of the colonialist period – the twenties and thirties – by Chinese, Turkish and Antillaise poets, Spanish film makers, etc., etc. However, to tell this story about beauty would mean telling a story about transformations, losses, and what the individual attention cannot hold. To block this, Green-Lewis and Soltan bring in the soul.

If they had not so composed their piece as to create that local opposition between theory (which is anti-beauty) and appreciation (pro-beauty) which marks a very limited discourse on beauty, their views on teaching beauty would become much sharper:

“Critics of aesthetics tend to dismiss the “better world” orientation that often accompanies a serious interest in beauty as sentimental, religious, and naïve, an indulgent distraction from the hard truths of our time. But they are mistaken in this dismissal. The ability to establish strong personal agency, and then project certain futures, certain human potentialities, as novelists often do, and the ability to enter into and respond emotionally to those projections, as strong readers do, is a realistic and mature way of expressing faith in the possibility of humanity’s capacity to improve itself.

Dmitri Tymocko, in describing Beethoven’s brilliance, evokes precisely this disposition of passion and reason: “[We] can have tremendous, Beethovenian passions without losing all sense of our own limitation. (As one can have powerful political convictions while still recognizing that reasonable people may disagree.) Beethoven himself may not have achieved the perfect synthesis of these two, complementary qualities. But the evidence of both his music and his life suggests that he tried. Passionate maturity, neither resignation nor moderation nor fanaticism: that, perhaps, is what is truly
sublime.”

The display of “passionate maturity” may be in fact the best that we could ever hope for in our teaching of literature. The centrality of aesthetic experience in the struggle toward adaptation to a world forever changed by the particular political traumas of our time, and in the struggle toward the creation of a more humane world, means that professors of literature have in fact a special, even extraordinary, responsibility. In conveying the fullness of powerful aesthetic gestures, they must convey more than the form and content of particular poems, plays, and novels. They must embody in their very mode of teaching the paradox of passionate control which so often characterizes the greatest works of art; and they must embody the moral value for each individual of this dynamic act of balance.”

Are we to think that beauty is delimited by the “better future” that emanates from the ‘form and content of of particular poems, plays, and novels”? This seems to me to seriously understate the nostalgia in beauty. As for the dynamic act of balance, I’m not sure what exactly that means, here, but I think it entails a very narrow kind of aesthetic practice.

Chabert is back

LI is psyched to see that Le Colonel Chabert is back at her post, after one of her mysterious disappearances from the blogging world - no doubt, she was in deep confab with the Illuminati. LCC's last round was a full scale attack on the 68 French philosophes, like LI's patron saint, Derrida - and you might think it curious that I have any affection for that. But, at least in the world of philosophy, Heraclitus's words apply: polemos panton men pater esti, war is the father of all things. Most of the philosophes are dead now, and depend on us for their continued existence. How sad it would be if that existence consisted of tedious and bureaucratic applications of them to fill in, like a sort of all purpose tar, the crevasses in tenure track papers, continually churning! Far better the fierce response, the sortie from out of the underbrush! And not, either, of the dismissive, Brian Leiter variety, which is all about sheer ignorance - that's not a sortie, that's the tax collector.

the apology of Theophile

LI had more fun with our Theophile post than we’ve had in a good while. Thank you, Amie.

Now, let’s place Theophile de Viau in context, and get on to the marvelous public letter he wrote Louis XIII – in a tone, and with a frankness, that would certainly have been unthinkable fifty years later.

Scholars would place Theophile de Viau in the French Renaissance period. He’s a contemporary of Robert Herrick – of the Cavalier poets. He started out in life with an excellent education – he learned Greek, Spanish, Italian and English at his school, Saumer, and he gained a smattering of the new sciences – or natural magic, as Bacon referred to them. Being relatively wealthy, when he came to Paris, as he confesses in his letters, he fell into vice. Although nowadays he is celebrated as a Gay litterateur – by people who simply sort through history, look for the assfucking, not literature, and pluck out the assfucker – his debauches were, as far as we know from his own words, with women, although Tallement repeats a story that he seduced a boy he was tutoring, and there are enough rumors about Theophile that the hasty searchers for Gay avatars aren’t wholly wrong. But he was not Marlowe – or at least not in this sense. There is a boldness, a recklessness in Theophile that does remind one of Marlowe, though. As Claire Gaudiami has pointed out, for instance [The Cabaret Poetry of Théophile de Viau: Texts and Traditions, 43-5], an 1618 poem, Elegie de M. de C., contains cosmological speculation about the materiality of the soul – composed of the four elements, governed by the stars – and its finitude, on the lines of Vanini, who was burned at the stake in 1619 in Toulouse. And like Marlowe, the record of his banishments, arrests and connections is a strange one – he certainly had influence with King Louis XIII, and the Duke of Buckingham was instrumental in getting him out of some jams – and we do know, following the sodomite trail, that the Duke of Buckingham was rumored to be not only a sodomite, but a corruptor of Prince Charles, and certainly a favorite of King James, famous for his taste in pretty boys. It was this atmosphere that made the Victorians, always eager to find good protestant martyrs to the intolerance of superstition and the Catholic Church, shy away from him. And, of course, it is what makes him wildly attractive to us. Mad, bad and dangerous to know – isn’t this the stuff of our heroes?

So here he is, poet and backdoor man, courtier, connector, the rich man’s son who flees from his debtors, the cabaret poet, to use Gaudiami’s term, the beaux esprit, to use the sneering phrase of his great accuser, the Jesuit Voisin.

Mon esprit, plein d’amour et plein de liberté
Sans fard et sans respect t’escrit la verité.

So, there you have the man who wrote the poem in my last post, more or less.
Which brings us to one of the odder ‘human documents’ of the seventeenth century, Theophile’s Apologie, a letter he wrote the King about his arrest and trial for – well, it is part of his complaint that it was never quite clear what his crime was.
It is an odd document because it mixes a tone of courtly flattery and servility (worthy of an op ed piece in the Washington Post) with the recounting of incidents in a tone that is recognizably modern. That is, recognizably conscious of its modernity – for that is what is modern. Just that. And so the tone in the letter has an intimacy, breaks down the barriers of politesse, with an unusual assurance, as if the way Theophile was writing was just the way everybody wrote. With all the assumption that intimacy, of a sort that did not exist between a husband and wife or a father and son in the seventeenth century, could exist between the writer and the reader – who is, of course, the King. Less invisible than in Velasquez’ Las Meninas, and yet not wholly visible. Well, here is Theophile’s account of his arrest.

“After the interrogation, which contained no accusation, M. de Conmartin assured me that I was dead. I responded that the king was just and that I was innocent. And then he ordered me to taken to Saint-Quentin, after which he took his leave to join the constable, who he had quit in order to help the priests capture me. They tied great ropes around me all over and put me on a feeble, limping horse, which made me run more risks than all the witnesses of my hearings. The spectacle of the execution of some famous criminal never attracted the crowd that I drew to my imprisonment. All of a sudden I am in the holding area, then thrust into a hole in which the ceiling itself was underground. I lay down, still dressed, and draped with irons so rude and weighty that the marks and pains of them remain in my limbs. The walls sweated with humidity; I, with fear.”

Theophile’s first play used motifs from Gongora. Although Don Quixotte wasn’t translated into French until after Theophile died, I don’t think it is so unlikely that he might have read the first volume of it. Louis XIII’s wife was Spanish, Theophile could speak the language – am I stretching to see the intrusion of a new prose style, a cross section of the vernacular of the peasant and the new learning, in this image of a man on a limping horse, surrounded by priests, trussed up like a pig? “The walls sweated with humidity; I, with fear.” It is going to take a long time for English prose to get close to this kind of statement of fact.

Notes for a future study of insanity among the governing class

PARIS — The Credit Suisse Group, the Swiss banking giant, on Thursday reported a first-quarter loss nearly three times worse than analysts had expected as it wrote down $5.3 billion in soured investments.
The bank, based in Zurich, reported a net loss of 2.15 billion Swiss francs, or $2.1 billion, in the first quarter, compared with net income of 2.8 billion francs a year earlier.
“On balance, I was quite pleased” with the results, said Peter Thorne, an analyst with Helvea in London. “In this market, if an investment bank doesn’t report $20 billion of write-downs, you tend to be quite relieved.”

It is no surprise to LI that a system in which inequality of wealth has sharpened as much as it has in the U.S. would spawn a whole new kind of fantasy and reality in the press and the public discourse. So I suppose it comes as no surprise that the Daily Mail - a British tabloid - has a sharper article about inflation than you will read in, say, the NYT. The Daily Mail decided to create its own basket of goods and use them as an index of inflation, and of course what they discover, once you wipe away the wonderful fall in prices of plasma tv, is that inflation as it should be studied - you know, how much extra is coming out of the pocket of your average household income - is a lot higher than anything government reports can account for. Although I must admit, I did admire the butter prices over there in Britain:

"A pack of English butter is up by 36p to 94p..."

Wow, about $1.80 for butter!

PS - Our far flung correspondent, Mr. T., refers us to this article, which tells us - where all the bees went! You will notice that the Floridian beekeeper at the center of the article is doing more productive work for you and me and the earth than all the hedge fund traders put together. Naturally, then, he lives on charity.

I'd never seen anything like it in the State of Texas

I love a millionaire --

The congressional investigation of the credit agencies that looked over the pool of steroidish securities that were pumped into the financial industry and gave them all triple A ratings starts today. The biggest of those agencies is Moody’s:

“Over the last decade, Moody’s and its two principal competitors, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, played this game to perfection — putting what amounted to gold seals on mortgage securities that investors swept up with increasing élan. For the rating agencies, this business was extremely lucrative. Their profits surged, Moody’s in particular: it went public, saw its stock increase sixfold and its earnings grow by 900 percent.

By providing the mortgage industry with an entree to Wall Street, the agencies also transformed what had been among the sleepiest corners of finance. No longer did mortgage banks have to wait 10 or 20 or 30 years to get their money back from homeowners. Now they sold their loans into securitized pools and — their capital thus replenished — wrote new loans at a much quicker pace.

Mortgage volume surged; in 2006, it topped $2.5 trillion. Also, many more mortgages were issued to risky subprime borrowers. Almost all of those subprime loans ended up in securitized pools; indeed, the reason banks were willing to issue so many risky loans is that they could fob them off on Wall Street.”

Now, outside of Texas, Moody is just a name – but inside of Texas, it is the name of one of the great crazy Texas families. There is something delightfully ludicrous in the fact that Moody’s makes its money by selling its sound judgment, given that the Moody family is better known for inhouse squabbling, jailed siblings, and sex scandals. The Moody family is inseparable from their scene: Galveston. There are people who have been to New Orleans. And they’ve been to France. And so they think they know the world. Ho ho ho, if you haven’t been to Galveston, you are still a little wet behind the ears in this world.

Famously, Galveston stopped on September 8, 1900, when the great hurricane hit, which plucked out 8,000 people – out of 32,000 – and killed em dead. Galveston was the richest city in Texas at the time, as you can see by simply going there and strolling among the mansions. Many of those old mansions remain – they were built to survive about anything except the neglect in which they have now dwindled for a century. But even so – even as Houston took over, as it was going to do anyway, as the most important port in Texas – Galveston still had wealthy families. It was fabulously located, for instance, to become one of the great smuggling cities in the Prohibition era. Like New Orleans, Galveston thrived on vice – gambling and prostitution. And it had the Moody family.

The Moody family started out in the cotton trade, then went into insuring cotton merchants, and then went into insurance. They diversified into other industries – hotels, for instance. In the twenties, they about controlled the island – built the one skyscraper in Galveston, bought the paper, rolled in money from the increase in business brought about by oil. And the family proper began to act like the second coming of the Borgias. One of the really great, spoiled Moody’s back then was Shearn Moody – his wife a showgirl, himself a playboy and a good hater. Running the newspaper gave him plenty of space to vent, which he like to do about various and sundry enemies. Here’s a quote from Cartwright’s book on Galveston about Shearn Moody:

“At the peak of the Depression, the Moodys were making money hand over fist, much of it from repossessions. Shearn Moody filled his home on Cedar Lawn Circle with linens, silver and china that had once belonged to creditors [sic]. Conrad Hilton, who managed the Moody hotel chain in the early 1930s, once described Shearn Moody as the kind of man who liked the Depression” “People are desperate for money,” Shearn had told Hilton. “It’s the time to drive a good bargain.”

Shearn Moody was almost to a tee the kind of millionaire portrayed in There will be blood. Here’s another anecdote. Hilton had lost his hotel to the Moodys when they foreclosed on him, but they offered him a deal – merger with the Moody hotel chain, which he would manage:

“But Hilton instinctively mistrusted the younger Moody. He couldn’t forget the remark Shearn had made about the Depression – or the passion with which Shearn regarded his enemies. Shearn absolutely doted on his enemies: he was addicted to them. When Hilton asked Shearn why it was that nine out of ten men who did business with him ended up as enemies, Shearn replied coldly: “Because that’s the way I like it. I’d like it even better if it was ninety-nine out of a hundred.”

Shearn Moody died before his father, so it was due to the old man that the family money ended up in a tax dodge. However, it wasn’t just the tax dodge that was attractive about the Moody Foundation – it was also the fact that the Old Man’s daughter and his grandchildren would be left forever dependent on this organization he had built. Which is how we segue into the colorful life of Shearn Moody, Jr. Shearn Jr spent his young adulthood establishing a reputation as a great 60s partier. Famously, his bedroom had a door which opened on a slide that you could use to go down to the pool. Here’s an anecdote about Shearn Jr.:

“During the 1960s, the ranch was infamous for its wild parties. Billy Furr, a frind of Bobby Moody, remembered that when he walked throught he front door on one occasion he was greeted by a naked woman who asked him to sign the guestbook. “Then I looked around the room,” Furr said, “and realized there were several dozen naked men and women standing around. Somebody told me they were the cast of the San Francisco Ballet. I never found out if that was true or not, but I’d never seen anything like it in the State of Texas.”

Shearn Jr. had many adventures, some that involved Watergate – he claimed he was targeted by Nixon for dirty tricks as he was a Democratic party funder – and some involving a possible assassination threat to George Wallace, and some involving penguins that were imported for the swimming pool, and some involving money that landed Shearn Jr. in jail for a bit.

This is the Moody family, whose company rates your mortgage pools, America. Don’t that beat all, now. Us Texans are gonna be the death of this country yet!

Everything is fucked up, I'm dying of the pox

In 1619, a collection of poems by different authors was published in Paris under the title: Parnasse satyrique. The star poet in the group was Théophile de Viau. The poem he published went like this:

Par le sieur Theophille

Philis tout est f…tu je meurs de la verolle
Elle exerce sur moi sa dernière rigueur :
Mon V. baisse la teste et n'a point de vigueur
un ulcére puant a gasté ma parole.

J'ai sué trante jours, j'ai vomi de la colle
Jamais de si grand maux n'eurent tant de longueur
L'esprit le plus constant fut mort à ma langueur,
Et mon afficlition n'a rien qui la console.

Mes amis plus secrets ne m'osent approcher,
Moi-même cet estat je ne m'ose toucher
Philis le mal me vient de vous avoir foutue.

Mon dieu je me repans d'avoir si mal vescu :
Et si vostre couroux a ce coup ne me tuë
Je ne fais vuex désormais de ne …tre qu'en cul.

The translation goes like this:

“Philis, everything is f..ed up; I’m dying of the pox
which has me strictly bound in the last throes;
My D..k hangs its head, is on the rocks
and a stinking sore spoils my attempts at prose.

For thirty days I’ve sweated, vomited up bowls
I’ve never seen a sickness last like this!
my exhaustion would have killed firmer souls
and my affliction brings me no consoling bliss.

My most secret friends dare not approach me.
I don’t even dare to touch myself in this stew –
And all this Philis, comes from ..cking you.

My god, I repent of having lived so badly!
And if your anger doesn’t kill me with this blast
I swear that from now on, I’ll only ..ck in the ass.”

(Sorry for my distortions – wanted to see if I could find a few appropriate rhymes, though of course my rough draft scans like a hog in heat).

I’m interested in Théophile as one of the early freethinkers who are separated by a degree or two from Gassendi. He is also, famously, one of the regrets of French literature – what if the French baroque had been allowed to flower, much as the English Jacobin writers were? There is a view, first expressed I believe by the romantics, that the imposition of rules of literary bienseance emptied French poetry of what Theophile called the “natural”. And that old fight isn’t worth fighting.

More interesting is that Théophile was put on trial for this poem, and nearly had the same fate doled out to him as to the Protestant printer, Etienne Dolet - who is, or should be, to translators what the skull is to the contemplating monk – for Dolet, poor guy, trying to convey a bit of Plato in French, translated a line in the Apology Apres le mort tu ne seras plus rien de tout, instead of tu ne seras plus, and so – for that rien - was burned at the stake. That is one way to ensure literalism!

There’s an amusing gloss on the enterprising use of ellipses and acronyms in obscene poems in Joan E. DeJean’s The Reinvention of Obscenity, who claims that the startling thing about Theophile’s poem was the ‘cul’ – a vite as a V. or a foutre as a …tre was, in a sense, a bow to the common dignity, but that ass, stuck at the very end of the poem, it was practically mooning the authorities. I love these discussions that are close readings of readings – the third life’s life. They are so Nabokovian. DeJean introduces the topic like this:

“These four-letter words, primary obscenities, stand out as the principle mark of this basdy poetry’s sexual transgressiveness. With one exception, cul (ass), which was to become key in Theophile’s case, they are never written out. Instead, in an act of self censorship that initially may have helped save the volumes from official prosecution, the words were abbreviated in various ways, and different types of punctuation were inserted to stand as a visual mark representing the suppressed content. This punctuation is the typographical equivalent of the fig leaves that began appearing in Renaissance engravings to veil male and female genitalia without fully hiding the contours.

The typographical fig leaves are, however, less efficient than their visual counterparts. A leaf painted on a representation of a human body means that the viewer, even though he or she obviously knows what presumably is there behyind the cover-up, is nevertheless denied the right to see the offending sexual characteristics. In the case of a text, however, a reader – and there is no reason to imagine that seventeenth century readers were any more conscious of these textual barriers than are their counterparts today – simply replaces the missing letters without a thought, so much so that he or she is immediately unaware that anything has been left out. This is truly the zero degree of censorship. Since, however, it obviously served an important function, I will consider it for a moment more.”

And so she does. LI will return to Theophile’s trial, and then to some of his amazing prose pieces.

honeyed drops of spiritual delight

“They don’t enter into their system by the door, they enter in by the window…” Bayle, article on Epicurus

My sometimes commenter, Chuckie K., asked a very good question about my last Bayle post, which, you will recall, ended with a question about whether belief guides behavior. To which Mr. K. said: “Today I'll ask a real question. Is this, "if belief makes no difference to your behavior" this question, or is "if belief does not always completely determine significant behavior'"

Well, that’s a good, hard question, and a hatcher of other hard questions – for instance, do beliefs stand in some apologetic relation to behavior? Do we seek out beliefs to excuse our desires? In fact, defending Epicurus, Bayle opts for the idea that we could, that it is possible, to construct our beliefs according to the facts as we see them, regardless of what we would want to be the case:

“The doctrine that rejects the providence of God, and the immortality of the soul, steals an infinity of consolations from man. Plutarch proves this solidly, that after having read what he exposed, one cannot be sufficiently astonished at the power that our first impression of certain objects have on our mind. The first idea that presents itself to those who wish to exam the state of irreligion that it is about the world’s idea of a happy liberty in which one satisfies all one’s desires without any fear, without any remorse. This idea is so rooted in the soul, and so occupies its capacity, that if someone wants to tell us that the estate of a pious man is incomparably [better], in the way of temporal advantages, to that of an epicurean, we would reject it as an absurd lie. And yet this so called lie has on its side a crowd of strong reasons, as Plutarch makes us see. The good faith of this author in this part of the dispute seems to me to be considerable, in as much as he must have known how much his reasons disculpate epicureanism; for it is certain that in denying the providence of God and the immortality of the soul, one is deprived of a thousand sweetnesses and a thousand consolations; it isn’t by motives of interest, by amour proper, by attachment to volupté, that Epicurus chose the philosophical hypothesis that he taught. He would have chosen another, if he was driven by those motives. “

So one way we could come at the question of belief is to ask about the building of systems of belief. And in fact, Pierre Force’s interpretation of Bayle is not about this or that stray belief – my belief, for instance, that the red light sign will be obeyed by the slowing, oncoming car as I walk across the street in front of it – but rather these vaster temples of belief, which are about the ways the world is made. In Mr. D’s modification of Force’s assertion – “belief does not always completely determine significant behavior” – is the liberal hope here. On the one hand, belief does not so determine behavior that there is no space of tolerance possible between two opposing, absolute beliefs – and on the other hand, that it determines it enough that there is some use in having these vast beliefs.

But notice that the liberal path is fraught with peril. It can never be emphasized enough that the enlightenment leads not only to Kant, Jefferson, and my Republican grandparents, but that it also leads through Sade to Bazarov to… Patty Hearst. Or perhaps I should say that these romantic figures express, with exaggerated gestures, the nihilistic fall of the belief in belief – the belief that anything, and thus nothing, is true or valuable. This nihilism even eats at the aura of seriousness surrounding belief, taking away the shame of going from, say, Maoism to Southern Baptist Fundamentalism by way of alternative medicines and your recovered memory of a UFO abduction.

In the sense that I take nihilism, rather than discipline a la Foucault, as a privileged vantage point to see what is happening in the Enlightenment, I guess you could say that LI is just your typical canned Nietzschian. And of course I need to make the links a lot clearer here – but I do want to… to gesture to what is in the background for these small circles, in the seventeenth century, who began purposefully relating all human endeavor to volupté.

Advice for Britney

LI, making a play for information domination on the Britney issue, has been bluesing about the People story that Brit is going to be starring, again, on some forgettable tv sit com. What is up with this? I know what is up. The artiste in the mouseketeer is being callously starnapped back into the profit stream by her pa - and are we, spectators all, expected to put up with this abhorrent strangling of Britney’s desires in, so to speak, their cradle? No wonder she is bored with her life! My advice – are you listening, Ms. Spears? - is to read about Patty Hearst, or at least listen to this Stereo Total song about Patty Hearst, romantic terrorist. And remember, Tania was never an exceptional earner – you could kick that bitch around the block! You have more revolutionary potential in your little finger than she ever had. Take back your kids, boot your dad, go to Vegas and act like Frank Sinatra to your heart’s content – which means applying the maxim that has an eternal currency among the great celebrity elite (in the VIP area), to wit, to be famous is so nice/suck my dick, lick my ass.

He read Bayle

Via George Huppert’s The Style in Paris: Renaissance origins of the French Enlightenment, LI found this story about the Marquis D’argens in Jean Philibert Damiron’s Memoire sur le Marquis D’argens:

He was never lacking in adventures, and if it wasn’t in one genre, it was in another. In returning from Italy and during the trip across [the Mediterranean] , he encountered a storm, the frightened sailors took vows to all the virgins of their countries of origin; a monk said his breviary in sobbing; two Calvinists trembled while reciting the psalms of Marot; for himself, he read the Pensees diverses of Bayle, and those who saw such cold bloodedness imagined that he was a saint, to whom the tranquility of his conscience procured his repose. – He read Bayle, that was his own breviary, his preferred book, the assiduous nourishment of his soul, which opened more and more to skepticism. If to doubt is to repose, it was that repose which his author of predilection bestowed upon him. [Memoires, 13]

LI likes this story. It is a perfect cameo of the libertine sub-culture that extended into the eighteenth century, connecting the time of Voltaire with the time of Cyrano de Bergerac. Something is happening here when the libertine becomes the double of the saint, doubt becomes the double of belief, and Bayle becomes the double of the breviary. Last year, LI posted a lot about the notion of ‘volupte’ as a sort of intermediary between the humanist’s stoicism and the greatest happiness of the political arithmeticians that Burke denounced in his Reflections on the French Revolution. As Damiron confesses at the beginning of his Memoire, D’argens was not a great personality:

“The marquis d’Argens, in fact, was not a great character, and what is more, he was not an eminent thinker, and in more than one circomstance of his life, he displayed a personality that was little enough serious. He wrote much and on all things, but with no rare distinction, and of philosophy in particular, on which he often touched, he didn’t illustrate with some new light a single thing.”

He was, to use the hobbled language of the advertisers, an early adopter. He adopted a sensibility. Which brings us to a number of questions.

These questions go back to Bayle, and a point made by Pierre Force in his Self Interest Before Adam Smith. Force notes that Bayle, the encyclopedic skeptic of the 17th century (a man whose graphomania, very much of the era, has been rewarded by posterity by being read by practically no one but being preserved as a name, just as a piece of wedding cake might be preserved in a freezer for decades, not to be ceremonially eaten, but as a gesture of etiolated piety) was considered an atheist not because he advocated atheism, but because he stripped belief of the coordinate conduct it was assumed that it entailed:

For Bayle, the principle of pleasure explains the variations that may be observed in the behavior of atheists. At fist sight, someone who does not believe in the rewards and punishments of eternal life would be inclined to indulge in every kind of physical pleasure. Yet we observe that some atheists are more restrained on that count than many Christians. Whether someone indulges in drunkenness is not a matter of opinion regarding the existence of a punishment for it in the afterlife. It is simply a difference in humor and temper. Some people love to drink, others don’t:

“If you examine things in general, you suppose that, as soon as an atheist realizes that he can get drunk with impunity, he will get drunk every day. But those who know the maxim, Trahit sua quemque voluptas, and who have examined the heart of man more carefully, do not go so fast. Before judging the conduct of this atheist, they inquire about his tast. If they find that he likes ot drink, that he is very sensitive to this pleasure, that he prefers it to his reputation as a good person, they conclude that he actually will drink as much as possible. But they do not conclude that he will drink more than countless Christians, who are drunk most of the time. …”

Bayle believes that, in general, differences in behavior cannot be explained by differences in belief. The adherence to such and such system of belief is irrelevant when it comes to explaining concrete human behavior. Preferences are not a matter of opinion.”

Here we stumble upon one of the great themes of modernity, which runs through Balzac, Dostoevsky, Freud, Alcoholics Anonymous and the political industry of polling – the relationship between what we believe and how we conduct ourselves. For after all, if belief makes no difference to your behavior, why believe anything?