Zona Komiks!

“People are grieving,” said Ms. Goldsmith, a semiretired psychotherapist who counsels fellow residents of the Gleneagles Country Club, a gated community here. “There was a death. Their money died.”

The zona is proving to be quite the beast. Even LI, in whose head wheels of fire turn, and who could stick out his hand anytime to Jonah, Isaiah or Jeremiah and say, cousin, is surprised by the claws on this thing. Our own, perhaps naïve thought was that all the money in the world wasn’t going to help – that in fact, sooner or later, about 65 trillion dollars in derivatives would be nullified. A haircut! Think of the surprise lines drawn around a cartoon character whose been stunned by some sudden news – think of those surprise lines as a trillion each. Nothing, right? But lo and behold, looks like this magic money got comingled with real money. Magic money is, of course, the chief concern of all right thinking people, which is why AIG gets a nice little 30 billion dollar snack yesterday, and today the Bushies are for vetoing any aid to GM. GM evokes a lot of anger from the GOP crowd, because they realize that GM hired thousands and thousands of Union workers – the horror! Not like those wondrous AIG people, people you can recognize, people you might want to have a drink with, or go pussy-hunting with after a long hot day fleecing the rubes – in contrast with those greedhead workers, always trying to get health insurance and pensions. Imagine! It makes a person sick, it really does. Howwegonnastaycompetitive, as the economists always say. After they explain that trade deficits are nuthintoworryabout. That might seem contradictory, until you realize that the world in which innovative financial instruments lead to utopia is in a different column than laborflexibilitycreativedestructioncompetitiveadvantage and other words of that ilk, assuring us that maximizing inequality, stabilizing incomes and invest invest invest is the best thing in the whole world, though it does sometimes lead to crackup, the end of the atmosphere, endless war, and the stupidest sitting with riding crops poised on top of your neck and you watch your life turn into a senseless and pointless debttrap.

But, though it might break the bank and your heart, still, the zona has its charming side. It is funny! Surely this is the funniest depression ever. LI is serious – the best thing I’ve read about the ‘bubble’ so far is this fantastic article by Michael Lewis, of Liar Poker fame, in Portfolio. I read it last night, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

Recently, I read a buncha comments in various blogs mourning the passing of Michael Crichton. Those remarks puzzled me, because all of them would announce that Crichton was a lousy writer who seems to have been addictive. But why? And the plots that he apparently worked out seem, well, to have been either done before and better – Jurassic park, meet the lost world – or not worth doing. Contrast this with fi fiction – or faction, which is what Michael Lewis does. For one thing, he can write – he is definitely not clunky. He has the prose style of the Moviegoer - unsurprisingly, coming from Walker Percy's town. And for another thing, the characters he writes about, who inhabit Wall Street, are monsters ten times scarier than a band of people with star influenza, or who, I don’t know, conspire to trick the world into thinking global warming is a fact. But they are also, as supreme egotists with no culture, extremely funny. The things Lewis' characters do to ruin companies, the lives of individuals, and anybody who gets in their orbit merely to make the next million bucks have just that horror movie note of the unstoppable evil force. At the same time, it is wildly funny. The way they package instruments they don’t understand and sell them to each other is funny. The way they got America, where it is morning and Reagan is the sun, on the hook, the one that is dragging us under. This is what comedy is about. What’s not to love about these characters? Plus, they are real.

The hero of Lewis’ piece is a hedge funder named Steve Eisman. Eisman, like a Michael Crichton character, is set down in the midst of suspicious and whacky doings - Wall Street, 2003. As in Jurassic Park, there seemed to be something genetically suspicious going on – animals were getting bigger and bigger on resources that were lean enough to support merely a crop of mice. In what, to me, is the key to the whole fascinatin mystery, Eisman and his crew at FrontPoint, his fund, learn this:

At the end of 2004, Eisman, Moses, and Daniel shared a sense that unhealthy things were going on in the U.S. housing market: Lots of firms were lending money to people who shouldn’t have been borrowing it. They thought Alan Greenspan’s decision after the internet bust to lower interest rates to 1 percent was a travesty that would lead to some terrible day of reckoning. Neither of these insights was entirely original. Ivy Zelman, at the time the housing-market analyst at Credit Suisse, had seen the bubble forming very early on. There’s a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” Zelman says. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren’t real buyers. They were speculators.” Zelman alienated clients with her pessimism, but she couldn’t pretend everything was good. “It wasn’t that hard in hindsight to see it,” she says. “It was very hard to know when it would stop.” Zelman spoke occasionally with Eisman and always left these conversations feeling better about her views and worse about the world. “You needed the occasional assurance that you weren’t nuts,” she says. She wasn’t nuts. The world was.

By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn’t understand who was making all these loans or why. He had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street. But he’d spent his life in the stock market, and it was clear that the stock market was, in this story, largely irrelevant. “What most people don’t realize is that the fixed-income world dwarfs the equity world,” he says. “The equity world is like a fucking zit compared with the bond market.” He shorted companies that originated subprime loans, like New Century and Indy Mac, and companies that built the houses bought with the loans, such as Toll Brothers. Smart as these trades proved to be, they weren’t entirely satisfying. These companies paid high dividends, and their shares were often expensive to borrow; selling them short was a costly proposition.”

What is the meaning of the shift from 3 to 1 to 4 to 1? Well, we will hear, we are hearing, our ears are deaf with hearing, that we brought this on ourselves, us selfish pigs, overspending, never saving, bad bad bad people. Of course, this is a pile of shit. What this means is that housing prices were going up while the benefits of increased productivity went solely to the investor class. In actuality, people, selfish greedy pigpeople, were operating under the rational assumption that they were going to make more money as time went along. That is because they had four decades of experience in which, as time went along, they made more money: the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. What was different under the Great Fly’s years? They hit a wall. The wealth was spread among the wealthiest, while the little people – greedy fucks! – finally got shut out. After all, as suave economists like those who write for Freakonomics point out, the poor are really the lucky duckies – look at how prices for plastic tat from China have plunged! Why, Walmart is proof positive that the hillbillies are engrossing the benefits of free trade, free markets, and our wonderful health care system! While the rich (sob!) have to be content with taking the profits from the system for themselves. This makes the Freakonomic guys emotional, it really does.

Anyway, to get back to our pump and dump saga, Lewis shows Eisman and associates going to various new housing developments, talking to dealers in CDOs, and getting a feel for the New World. It is pod people time.

For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

As an investor, Eisman was allowed on the quarterly conference calls held by Moody’s but not allowed to ask questions. The people at Moody’s were polite about their brush-off, however. The C.E.O. even invited Eisman and his team to his office for a visit in June 2007. By then, Eisman was so certain that the world had been turned upside down that he just assumed this guy must know it too. “But we’re sitting there,” Daniel recalls, “and he says to us, like he actually means it, ‘I truly believe that our rating will prove accurate.’ And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, ‘What did you just say?’ as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Daniel told the C.E.O. deferentially as they left the meeting, “you’re delusional.”

I’d continue this story, but I’d rather just whet your appetite for it. Go and read the terrific Portfolio piece. Have a laugh! Then figure out how you are going to eat for the next coupla years.

On 2666

Here’s a small factoid. “Hyle”, the Greek for matter, is also the Greek for wood. It should be translated into Latin as materia. However, Calcidius, whose translation of Plato into Latin was what the medievals read when they read Plato, translated hyle as “sylva” – woods, or forest. So that if, say, Thomas Acquinas wanted to read the Timaeus, every time Plato uses the word matter, Acquinas would have read the word “forest”. Imagine the metaphysics of that.

Translation matters. It also forests – as every translator knows, the words in the text in one language branch out and root differently in another language. I’m pleased that the New York Times, with its dogged, lagging sense of fashion, recognized that Bolano is cult and cool, and hired Jonathan Lethem to review Natasha Wimmer’s translation of 2666. However, the review, while glowing, glowed around no central fire – for it wasn’t the burning novel to which the reader’s attention was drawn so much as the unceasing flurry of names in Contemporary World Literature. And, frankly, I felt the acknowledgment of Wimmer “(by Natasha Wimmer, the indefatigable translator of “The Savage Detectives”)” was unworthy.

Slate’s Adam Kirsch produced a more thoughtful review, and the gracenote about the translation is not such a toss-off: “That is one reason why the book is so hard to summarize—and why Natasha Wimmer's lucid, versatile translation is so triumphant.” The versatile is reviewer speak – as the reviewer of at least 1500 books, I have the intonations grooved into my brain. If you begin with one adjective, like lucid, you have to throw in another one – and if you are feeling particularly puff-y, you throw in a third. Still, I don't want to dismiss the versatile, here, entirely. It means something. Wimmer had to come to grips with very difficult matters, here. A lesser translator could easily have gotten lost in the woods.

In fact, the two Bolano novels are a translator’s triumph. Wimmer (I say this through gritted teeth, and with envy aforethought - why couldn't it have been me, God?) is the only person I know, personally, who I am confident will be read in one hundred years. I have read a number of her translations – for instance, her translation of Vargas Llosa’s Gauguin novel, of which I can only say, read Somerset Maugham’s Gauguin novel. I’ve read her translation of Rodrigo Fresan’s Kensington Gardens. Both were more than competent (and really, we Americans are living in the age not only of a scandalous lack of translations, but translation scandals as well – Orhan Pamuk’s novels seem to have been translated by the first person the publisher met who could speak Turkish and a sort of English, for instance), but the Bolano novels are brilliant. She has shapeshifted those novels into English. I think the best comparison for this feat is Ralph Mannheim’s translations of Celine.

I think Lethem goes astray with his references, but he is certainly on the right track about Bolano as a very writerly writer. By this, I don’t mean an avant garde writer, or a writer whose technical inventions should be studied by other writers – I mean a man who has a burning belief in literature in the world. Bolano had an overwhelming and overwhelmed sense of how literature has failed the world, which can only be held by someone whose belief in literature is bonedeep. This cosmic failure is his starting point: he is the anti-Paul, for whom lack of the letter killeth. Hell is the degree zero of literature – its disappearance from the world. Hell, in fact is depicted in the fourth book of 2666. It is a factory for raping, torturing, killing and dumping women. It is the city of Santa Theresa.

2666 does not remind me of any contemporary writer’s work – rather, it reminds me of the Chroniclers of the wars of religion. Or of their closest modern spiritual kin, the writer Johann Hebel (1760-1826), whose stories, put out as Kalendargeschichte in almanacs and collected in the “Little Treasure Chest of the Rhenish Family Friend”, were admired by Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, among others. Benjamin and Bloch singled out the “Unexpected (Unverhoffte – Unhoped for) Meeting” as one of the greatest of short stories. It is a story about a woman whose husband to be, a miner in Falun, Sweden, dies in an accident before they get married. And it contains this famous passage, which I’ll translate:

“He never came back out of the mine, and she vainly hemmed a red border on his black neck-cloth for him that very morning for the wedding, be as he never came, she laid it away, and cried for him and never forgot him. In the mean time the city of Lisbon in Portugal was destroyed through an earthquake, and the seven years war went by, and King Franz the first died, and the Jesuit order was dissolved and Poland was divided, and the Empress Maria Theresia died, and Count Struensee was executed, America became independent, and the united power of France and Spain could not conquer Gibraltar. The Turks bottled up General Stein at Verteraner Cave in Hungary, and Emperor Joseph also died. King Gustav of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, and the French Revolution and the long war began, and Emperor Leopold the second also went down into his grave. Napoleon conquered Prussia, and the English bombed Kopenhagen, and the peasants sowed and reaped. The miller milled, and the smith hammered, and the miners dug for veins of metal in their underground workshop. But as the miners in Falun in the year 1809 somewhat before or after St. John’s day between two battles attempted to open another tunnel, a good three hundred ells deep under the ground, they uncovered out of the rubble and sulfuric acid the corpse of a youth, who was completely saturated in copperas, but otherwise undecayed and unchanged. Thus, one could see his facial features and his age completely, as if he had just died an hour ago, or was taking a little nap, at work.”

The interweaving of public and private time here partakes of both the Chronicler’s vision – a vision fed by the Bible’s histories, where kings could be brought down by the commonest of sins – coveting a man’s vineyard, or a man’s wife – and prophets could arise seemingly randomly out of the population – and by the ironic modern sense that, on the one hand, political organization should not be like this, should be radically changed, and on the other hand, that no change abolishes the central, sweeping inevitabilities – work, desire, death, mourning.

Bolano, like the Chroniclers, and like Hebel (witness to the Napoleonic wars), lived in an age marked by massacres and internecine struggles animated by what were essentially mysteries – the mystery of socialism, the mystery of the drug wars, the mystery of the universal, media drenched numbness. The 4th book contains accounts of what seems to be about three hundred murders. But the 4th book also contains the entangled stories of an American freelance detective, of a Geman man named Haas, imprisoned for all the murders (and obviously not guilty of most of them, or perhaps all), a television prophet, etc., etc. Here’s a bit from the 4th section. Tell me if this doesn’t remind you of Hebel:

"In the middle of November, Andrea Pacheco Martinez, thirteen, was kidnapped on her way out of Vocational School 16. Although the street was far from deserted, there were no witnesses, except for two of Andrea’s classmates who saw her head toward a black car, probably a Peregrino or a Spirit, where a person in sunglasses was waiting for her. There may have been other people in the car, but Andrea’s classmates didn’t get a look at them, partly because the car windows were tinted. That afternoon Andrea didn’t come home and her parents filed a police report a few hours later, after they had called some of her friends. The city police and the judicial police took charge of the case. When she was found two days later, her body showed unmistakable signs of strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. She had been anally and vaginally raped. There was tumefaction of the wrists, as if they had been bound. Both ankles presented lacerations, by which it was deduced that her feet had also been tied. A Salvadorean immigrant found the body behind the Fracisco I School, on Madero, near Colonia Alamos. It was fully dressed, and the clothes, except for the shirt, which was missing several buttons, were intact. The Salvadorean was accused of the homicide and spent two weeks in the cells of Polcie Precinct #3, at the end of which he was released. When he got out he was a broken man. A little later he crossed the border with a pollero. In Arizona he got lost in the desert and after walking for three days, he made it to Patagonia, badly dehydrated, where a rancher beat him up for vomiting on his land. He was picked up by the sheriff and spent a day in jail and then he was sent to the hospital, where the only thing left for him was die in peace, which he did."

on not needing a weatherman...

I'll be the man with the broom
if you'll be the dust in the room

Under the “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” department, this story in the NYT about a town where everybody is below average – that is, 90 percent of the owners of houses in the town owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth – the story of Gerry Martinez leaps out. The town is one of those jumped up suburbs of the Bay area, built because the Bay area is way too expensive. The Martinezes don’t proclaim their income in the article – but one guesses it is South of 100 thou a year. Here’s the infarction graf:

“The Martinezes bought their house in early 2005 for $630,000. It is now worth about $420,000. They have an interest-only mortgage, a popular loan during the boom that allows owners to forgo principal payments for a time.
But these loans eventually become unmanageable. In 2015, Mr. Martinez said, his monthly payments will be $12,000 a month. He laughed and shook his head at the absurdity of it.”

12,000 per month Not in lira. Not in yen. Not in penguin dung. They are called dollars. That was the hook he and his wife evidently thought they would be spared – the fish would sell the hook to the other fish. And thus, everybody would get to dine on big, sloppy fat worms. It would be the ownership society. Paradise, man!
It would be interesting to see how many people in this country are hooked into the same kind of deal, and don’t know it.

That economists were still generally talking, this spring, about a turnaround in the fourth quarter should tell you all you need to know about the priesthood. Like all priesthoods, its goal is to weave stories around the wealthy to make them appear mythically heroic. Besides that, they have no function. Their predictions are shit. Mr. Martinez is a much better indicator of what our near future is gonna be like, economy-wise. It is going to be ugly.

fantasy politics and the new deal

LI has enjoyed the round-the-blogs discussion about the New Deal, which started with Eric Rauchway’s takedown of Amity Schlaes country club revisionism regarding Roosevelt (here and here and here ) and the Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabbarok’s attack on Rauchway (here)

LI’s notion is that Rauchway is, obviously, right about the success of the New Deal – if one judges success as ‘did this get entrenched into the economy’ – in the same way that neo-liberalism succeeded after Reagan. In the thirties, the depression in the U.S. was prolonged not because Roosevelt was too radical, but because he was too timid. Oddly, although the Great Depression was an international slump, nobody has expanded the frame of the argument to compare the U.S. performance to other economies – which would tell us, trivially, that the 1937-1938 period was a slump elsewhere as well, but would also give us a larger picture about the Great Transformation of the Great Transformation. Among the developed countries, the U.S., during the twenties, was rather unique in producing a recognizable social welfare net – even the Conservatives in the U.K., however viciously they squelched the General Strike, did not even try to go back to classical liberalism. And this turned out to be their ace in the hole. In fact, in parts of England, there was actually a consumer boom in the thirties. Why? Well, partly because of the Conservative Party’s break with free trade doctrine. Instead, Chamberlain’s government came in on a promise to raise tariffs – which, in the U.S., we’ve all been taught is the devil’s instrument. This contributed to the relative healthiness of the British economy – although the tariff policy has to be viewed in the context of Britain’s special place at the center of a worldwide empire, the Imperial Preference policy, which was knocked down at the end of WWII by the Americans at Bretton Woods, who treated Britain as a defeated country. The import restrictions, as a matter of fact, acted as a stimulus to domestic industry, which had lagged in the twenties, and – in the end – Britain actually imported more goods, even with the tariffs in place. This doesn’t mean Britain escaped the Slump unscathed - the North of England, Scotland and Wales suffered enormously – but that the libertarian fantasy of responding a la Mellon by liquidating everything – letting markets clear – was adopted by nobody, on the sound principle that it was insane.

And, of course, it is now an historic relic, which is why the argument against the country clubbers has a musty smell. The Republican party has long relied on combining one of the responses to the Depression – military keynesianism, perfected by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany and with us ever since – with the entrenched social welfare net for the middle class (the attitude towards which is best exemplified in the Bush Pill Bill – basically, adding more to the pile) – while retaining a Hooverite rhetoric about small government. From one view, this is a chaotic amalgam of differing ideological positions – from another view, that of class analysis, this is a perfectly coherent program to reward the wealthiest, which has always involved using the Government – the largest holder of money, after all – for largescale peculation, while talking against it in order to lower upper tax rates. Pragmatically, this has positioned borrowing at the center of conservative politics, and slowly that has exerted such a gravitational pull on conservative policy that it has shaped a freerider ethos.

Long ago – in November, 2001 – LI wrote an article for the Statesman about big government conservatism, in which we predicted that Bush would bury the Clinton mantra that the era of big government was over. I should dig that thing up one of these days. There’s nothing sweeter or more elementary schoolish than a good I told ya so.

News we will immediately forget

My friend, M., was so busy watching the results on November 4th that she didn’t notice her whole building shaking. Then her niece called up, crying. The lights were out in the condo she lives in, close to Los Pinos. Was the building on fire?

It turned out that the fire was burning down the street. M. reports that the parade of firetrucks speeding through Polanco was astonishing. But all the President’s horses and all the president’s men couldn’t put the interior secretary back again. In the U.S., few noticed what had happened, and all took the Government’s line: Calderon’s right hand man in the drug war and his best friend, Juan Camilo Mouriño, along with the chief manager of the war on organized crime, José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, had been killed in a tragic accident. The pilot lost control of the plane, that is the official story. And who believes it in Mexico, where the police chiefs of major cities, like Acapulco, have been beheaded by the narcos men, and where Calderon, prodded by the Americans, has staked the legitimacy of the government on a military confrontation with Mexico’s most successful private businessmen, who just happen to deal in the transit of cocaine and narcotics to the world’s hungriest market for such goodies, the United States. Success, of course, is relative: on the one hand, the ostrich boots and the hacienda and the week long parties, on the other hand, the feuds, the children shot down, the flights and territorial wars, the whole meat machinery in which he who does not butcher will be butchered, and none shall be the last butcher standing - there is no power on earth to cover your back long enough. M. reports, in a nice touch that Garcia Marquez would appreciate, that Camilo Mourino’s last sight might have been the monument to Pemex, the bastion of legitimate enterprise in Mexico, state owned, that he and Calderon have been working for years to privatize.

Read Alma Guillermoprieto’s essay on the current misrule and massacre in Mexico. Ask yourself what it means that 4,000 people have died in Mexico this year, due to the narco war. Ask yourself what the fuck, what the fuck the U.S. was doing during the Bush years, concentrated on Iraq. Ask yourself if we have a nation so cocooned in trivia that we think Mexico going into the abyss means nothing to us. Ask who made up those narcotic laws. Ask where the market is. Ask yourself if anything can stop the now 40 years of drug madness, the entrenchment on all sides of a money/punishment engine that serves every low, vile, peculiar political and economic interest. Ask yourself how anybody in Sinaloa with brains and a peasant mom and dad is going to get ahead, except through licking those ostrich boots and trying to shatter a few mere human lives himself – lives that are discounted, every day, in the mad, mad media, in the Moloch of the worldfuck, where an hour or two of nod, or enough of a dose to get through the shift at the third job before you get home and shake the newborn when it cries and take another dose, is what you can expect tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Love/circles

In my head, I often string together themes and topics that seem disconnected on the surface, inherently unrelated flotsam. And then I nag at them. So, lately, it has been running through my head that Ruwen Ogien’s idea about the synthetic nature of informal moral sanctions; the de-Christianization of Europe in the 18th century; the elevation of love as a life-defining sentiment during the latter half of the same period; and the Enlightenment war against superstition all form a pattern, fall under the empire of the happiness culture I’ve been tracking.

Let’s sort things out a bit. Ogien’s notion of the synthesis between a sanction and a sentiment should give us a sense of the interactional space within which lovers operate. The goal, of course, is to achieve that synthesis – to make it the case that the remark, “I love you’, gears up the sentiment, “I love you” in the person to whom it is addressed. Given the way the interactional space is constituted, its being governed by diffuse sanctions, we can use Ogien’s notion to have some grasp of the material degree of election exercised here – the freedom to love – by looking at the constraints on that election. For instance, do the lovers even know each other? In a society of arranged marriages, they may not until the moment of the marriage. Are they mature? What are the habits they take up with regard to each other and to other possible lovers after they are married? Obviously, a world in which arranged marriages were the norm would display a control over the lovers in terms of hardening the sanctions which made ‘I love you’ binding; yet it is also possible that the arranged norm allows for other love arrangements with other people after the marriage is sealed.

As we all know, the sentimental novel stamped its image, in the latter half of the 18th century, on the lover’s discourse. In the course of doing so, it downgraded ritual in favor of feeling. The legacy of the traditional world of arranged marriages, the rituals centered around marriage, the economics of it, the parental interference with it, became a collateral casualty of the attack on the loveless love bond. Although I should probably say, became a long range collateral casualty – but in any case, one recognizes, here, the kinship between the fashion for sentimentalism in the latter part of the 18th century and the attack on superstition that was mounted in the first half of it, by the first wave of philosophes. If superstition is defined as a rite or act which is performed under the false assumption that it will cause an event, an arranged marriage could easily fall victim to this same critique.

Well, this brings us to the Sorrows of Young Werther and my trying to puzzle out the three circles of his initiation into love.

...

In 1774, Goethe became a European wide star with the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther. In two years, there were two French translations. There were 8 English editions by 1800. Chinese porcelain manufacturers produced dishes with scenes from Werther drawn on them. Goethe himself became a tourist site, an oracle that travelers would go to visit. This, of course, was before Goethe went to Weimar and became a court councilor.

All of this was a puzzle and a vexation to the older generation of German Enlightenment figures, like Lessing and Lichtenberg. Lessing knew K.W. Jerusalem, whose suicide provided Goethe with an all important trouvaille for his book. But it wasn’t just Lessing’s outrage at what he regarded as the misuse of private sorrow – he did not like the ‘sentimentalism’: Do you imagine a roman or a Greek youth would have taken his life in that way and for that reason? They had a quite different protection from the folly [Schwarmerei – enthusiasm] of love. And in Socrates time one would have hardly excused such a ex ‘erotos katoke which spontaneously ti tolman para phusin in a girl. To bring forth such minutely gigantic, comtmptibly admiable, ‘original’ beings was a privilege reserved to Christian education, which is so beautifully able to transform a physiological need into a spiritual perfection.” [Quoted in Boyle, 187 – translation modified].

The last sentence is the true coin of the Voltairian, or materialist, phase of the Enlightenment. It is just the kind of thing one can imagine being said by Prince Andrei’s father, Count Bolkonsky.

…

Lessing looked at the novel through the suicide that Werther finally commits. LI is reading the novel looking at the scene in which Werther falls in love. In a previous post on Cosi Fan Tutte, I remarked on the way in which substitution among the lovers – an old, fairy tale test – becomes playful, a cause of a certain kind of delight, a tempering of love. It is a test of true love, and its result is that love is resistant to the lure of the truth.

In The Sorrows of Young Werther, the chapter in which Werther falls in love is curiously mediated by three circles.

Circle no. 1 is outside of Werther. He sees it as a “charming play” that appears to him when he enters Lotte’s house:

“ In the front anteroom, all six children from eleven to two milled about a girl with a beautiful form, of middle height, who wore a simple white dress, with pink bows on the sleeves and breast. She held a loaf of black bread and cut the small ones in the ring about her each a piece according to the proportion appropriate to their age and appetite, and gave it to each with such friendliness, and each call out so naturally thanks, while reaching upwards with their small hands, before it was cut, and now satisfied with their evening bread, either sprang back or after his quiet character were allowed to go to the gate, in order to see the strangers and the coach that was to carry Lotte away.” Here are the elements of the scene: a circle, a distribution, substitution. The children form the circle, Lotte at the center distributes bread, the slices fall into the hands of the children by a rule of thumb having to do with age and appetite, which rule of thumb governs the substitutions that can be made.

In circle no. 2, Werther is part of the circle. Then there is the circle of the ball itself. It is in dancing with Lotte that Werther both falls in love and receives the warning – a repetition of a warning he has forgotten – that she is engaged. The dance has no central distributor, but Werther’s feeling, aroused by this time, makes of Lotte’s position as his partner, or her dancing with someone else, the sign that Lotte still distributes. The rule is that partner switch – they substitute among each other. But Werther remarks that if he were Lotte’s husband, he wouldn’t stand for this rule – in other words, substitution has become, for him, the enemy of love.

It is circle no. 3 that is the oddest of the circles in this initiation to obsession. In order to divert the guests at the ball from the lightning storm that has broken outside – the hostess invites the guests to a room upstairs, where Charlotte quickly has everyone arrange their chairs into a circle:

“We will play counting,” she said. Now, pay attention. I will go in a circle from right to left, and you also will count out in a ring, each one saying the number, that comes next, and it has to go like a wildfire, and whoever stops, or makes a mistake, will earn a slap [an earpulling] and so on up to one thousand. And now it was comic to watch. She went with an extended arm about the circle. One the first began, the neighbor, two, three the following person and so on. Then she began to move faster, always faster. Then it happened, pow, a slap to the ear, and over the laughter, the following one also, pow, and always faster. I myself earned two slaps on the mouth, and believed, with inner satisfaction, that they were stronger than those doled out to the others. A general laughter and enthusiasm ended the game before one thousand had been counted out.” [GW 1899 19 35-36]

Substitution in its purest form is the number system. But as a pure form, it is also rather boring and childish, strikingly so. In fact, the game is conducted as a sort of return to infancy – the numbers are spoken so quickly that they lose their verbal distinctness, and the slaps that are distributed by Charlotte are like the slaps one gives a child: that is, they penetrate the adult space in such a way as to make the receiver like a child. At the same time, Charlotte, who made up the childish game, is seen as a child herself, whirling around the circle of seated adults. And what is one to make of Werther’s inner satisfaction? He is, consciously, like the child with the larger appetite, getting the bigger portion.

NOT SUMMERS

Let’s throw out a few names for the Secretary of the Treasury.

LI was startled that Larry Summers is even being considered. Obama owes his election to women, and it is not a good idea to repay this debt by making Summers his first appointment. The other mention is Timothy F. Geithner, who has been the strongman in the current financial crisis. The names floated immediately to the top in the Post – and I think I can be confident that Summer’s friends had something to do with that.

But how about some more unorthodox candidates:

For instance, how about Esther Duflo, MIT prof and head of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab? Admittedly, there might be a nationality problem. I’m not sure if she is still French or not – and she is below forty. However, she was named among the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy mag. Here’s a q and a with her. Now, perhaps she would be better as the head of the World Bank. But I like her expertise in poverty reduction, and her commitment to testing models against applications – which would be common sense anywhere else but in economics.

How about the economist who is supposedly Obama’s advisor on trade issues, Laura D’Andrea Tyson? She is infinitely preferable in terms of her acquaintance with healthcare economics – which is going to be a big issue for the Obama administration. Tyson is actually on the short list, and she seems to be a much more liberal – in the sense of Galbraithian liberal - economist than such as Summers.


How about Teresa Ghilarducci? The New School economist has written a book about what is wrong with 401(k)s that has already driven conservatives insane – her testimony in October spawned an outbreak of ideological rash, for instance, here. They are, of course, right to be worried – the entanglement of the working class with our investor overlords is the very heart of conservative politics. Taking back retirement would revolutionize the politics of this country.

And finally – on this roll call of what you will notice are all progressive women economists and hotshots – Jane D’Arista of the Financial Markets Center and an expert on the regulation of said markets, former chief economists for the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who was recently celebrated here.