A podcast about books & life — not necessarily in that order
I suppose that when I ran a link to the NYMag article on “the death of book publishing,” I should’ve made it part of my F*** You, You Whining F*** series. I failed you, dear readers.
Fortunately, Kassia Kroszer is out there as my F*** You Backstop with a good post that bashes the living crap out of that article and its synecdochal contention that “literary fiction” is book publishing. Thanks, KK!
Two anecdotes that help me make sense (of humor) out of the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy, the Merrill Lynch buyout, the Fannie/Freddie seizure, Bear Stearns debacle and all else:
1.
Around 1991, I walked into a local-ish comic store, as is my wont. As I was checking out, I noticed that the store had the first issue of Justice League International for sale at $20. It had come out in 1987 and I had a copy at home. A semi-impoverished college student, I figured I could use a few bucks, and asked if they were buying copies of that comic.
The clerk said, “No, man. We’ve got a whole box of that issue back in the storeroom.”
“Then why are you selling it for $20?” I asked.
“Because that’s what [The Guide] says it’s worth,” he told me.
Ah: [The Guide]. I don’t recall which price guide was in vogue back then, but I think that was the beginning of the era when comic magazines were publishing revised price guides on a monthly basis.
“But [The Guide] doesn’t make money selling copies of JLI #1,” I replied. “It makes money selling copies of [The Guide]. You oughtta put ‘HALF-OFF!’ signs up and I bet you could move the whole box pretty quickly.”
“But [The Guide] says they’re worth $20!”
“It’s only worth what you can get for it,” I said. Never let it be said I didn’t learn anything from my dad.
Mark to market. That’s why Lehman Bros. went into bankruptcy while Merrill Lynch managed to get itself bought.
2.
My next-door neighbor took his stockbroker exam in October 1987. This was three days before the Black Monday collapse, in which the Dow tanked 22%. He went on to work as a substitute teacher in our high school for the next several years.
In that spirit, congratulations to Slate, which launched its new business/finance site, The Big Money, yesterday.
What I’m reading: The Long Goodbye
What I’m listening to: Beck’s Modern Guilt
What I’m watching: Your mom. There. I’ve said it. (Amy had a pretty busy week, so we didn’t get around to finishing up the last season of The Wire. Two episodes left!)
What I’m drinking: Red Stripe! Hooray beer!
What Rufus is up to: Accidentally showing up at a greyhound meet & greet! The admin of the Greyhound Friends NJ list dropped our e-mail by accident, so we didn’t know that our local pet store was hosting an event on Saturday. Coincidentally, we took Rufus up there to buy his pet food (we could’ve done it without him, but he loves going to the store), and discovered 4 or 5 greyhounds & owners in the parking-lot. Rufus, of course, was very happy to make some new friends.
Where I’m going: To the GFNJ Annual Fall Picnic/Greyhound Planet Day on Sunday in Bridgewater, NJ! My pal/co-worker Jason & his wife are picking up their grey at the picnic, so we’ll find out if their girl gets along with Rufus before we set up a playdate.
What I’m happy about: Having a quiet weekend, between pretty busy weeks.
What I’m sad about: David Foster Wallace’s suicide, even though I hadn’t read a book of his in around 10 years. (I suppose this title
What I’m pondering: How SiteMeter made so many poor decisions when it “upgraded” this weekend.
Condolences to the family of David Foster Wallace, after DFW hanged himself on Friday.
My brother-in-law’s sister killed herself last week, so I’ve spent a bunch of time in the last few days thinking about the frame of mind someone has to be in to commit that act and leave family/friends to pick up the pieces.
Looking for a bunch of oddball links to ease you into the weekend, dear reader? You’ve come to the right place! Just click “more”!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Sept. 12, 2008”
I recently read When Genius Failed
Once the bottom fell out, the Fed had to coordinate a bailout of LTCM by the world’s leading banks. Many of these banks were treated as doormats by LTCM during its meteoric rise. Trust me; it’s a really entertaining story that Mr. Lowenstein tells. As David Pflug, Chase’s head of global credit, put it, “You can overintellectualize those Greek letters [in LTCM’s formulae]. One Greek word that ought to be in there is hubris.”
Two major issues — beyond the failures of “risk management” — struck me while I read the book. For one thing, LTCM’s collapse was precipitated by a series of regional financial crises in 1997-98. The final straw came when Russia defaulted on its foreign bonds in order to pay workers at home. This means, “Russia welched on its worldwide obligations because it barely had money to keep its government afloat.” And this occurred only ten years ago. So if oil futures didn’t rise 1000% in the past few years, how brazen would Russia be right now? (and if they drop significantly, where will Russia end up?)
The third issue was that the behavior of LTCM and the major banks sounded remarkably familiar to our current mortgage-driven crisis (right down to Lehmann Bros. suffering rumors about its underfunding and impending collapse). The exotic derivatives, the incalculable, illiquid assets, the “too big to fail” mentality: this could be 1998 writ large! Had these financial genii — and many of the major players involved in the recent Bear Stearns collapse also figure into When Genius Fails — managed to ignore every lesson from LTCM’s failure?
Near the end of the book, Mr. Lowenstein wrote:
Permitting such losses to occur is what deters most people and institutions from taking imprudent risks. Now especially, after a decade of prosperity and buoyant financial markets, a reminder that foolishness carries a price would be no bad thing. Will investors in the next problem-child-to-be, having been lulled by the soft landing engineered for Long-Term, be counting on the Fed, too? On balance, the Fed’s decision to get involved — though understandable given the panicky condition of September 1998 — regrettably squandered a choice opportunity to send the markets a needed dose of discipline.
That’s why I was really gratified to open today’s NYTimes and discover that Mr. Lowenstein has a great essay on exactly that topic, “Long-Term Capital: It’s a Short-Term Memory”! He does a good job of explaining the issues without getting overly technical (one of the complaints others have had about his book).
Give it a read; I bet you’ll dig it. (And get irate, when you start reading about the Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac seizure. . .)
“Mr. Crumb makes no bones about his lust for big, muscular women“? Oh, I say he makes plenty of —
— oh, never mind. The important point is, I now have a reason to go down to Philadelphia! (Just gotta do it before December. . .)
What’s in the Arts+ section of The Official Newspaper of Gil Roth today?
Sometimes I think their editors say to each other, “Remember that thing Gil was muttering to himself about in 1997, when he thought no one was listening? We should assign an article on that topic!”
Earlier this year, I had variations of the following e-mail exchange with several NYC literary figures I know:
GIL: Just wondering: do you know Robert Caro?
AUTHOR/WRITER: By acquaintance. Why?
GIL: Would you say he’s in good health?
A/W: Not sure. What’s up? Have you heard something?
GIL: No. It’s just that, well, I loved his biography of Robert Moses, so I grabbed the first three volumes of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. But I know he’s getting up there in years and I’m afraid to start reading it until I know that he’s going to be around to finish the fourth volume.
A/W: . . . You’re a cold person.
GIL: Yeah, but do you think he’s going to finish the biography?
A/W: . . . Good question.
Caro’s own site doesn’t give info about how he’s doing and I’ve been afraid to contact his agent with such a crass question, so I’ve held off on starting the series. The first three books add up to around 2,250 pages, and winds up in 1960, as he becomes vice president under JFK. I confess that I didn’t understand Caro’s desire to devote the half his life (figuring that he started around 1976 or so) to this biography; I don’t know enough about LBJ’s presidency or his character. He’s sort of a void for me, falling between the mythologies of JFK and Nixon.
But, given Caro’s enormous achievement with The Power Broker
Still, I’d seen Caro in Ric Burns’ New York documentary
So I was happy to read that there was a Caro-related party this summer as part of the Authors’ Night benefit for the East Hampton Library (and you scoff at my devotion to Page Six!). I found out about it too late to break out my seersucker suit and crash the event, but I took it as a good sign that Caro was part of the social scene.
Yesterday, I got even more of a boost when I followed an Andrew Sullivan link to a George Packer piece in The New Yorker, where he discusses the importance of LBJ:
Whenever Democrats gather to celebrate the party, they invoke the names of their luminaries past. The list used to begin with Jefferson and Jackson. More recently, it’s been shortened to F.D.R., Truman, and J.F.K. The one Democrat with a legitimate claim to greatness who can’t be named is Lyndon Johnson. The other day I asked Robert Caro, Johnson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer and hardly a hagiographer of the man, whether he thought Johnson should be mentioned in Denver. “It would be only just to Johnson,†Caro said. “If the Democratic Party was going to honestly acknowledge how it came to the point in its history that it was about to nominate a black American for President, no speech would not mention Lyndon Johnson.†Caro is now at work on the fourth volume of his epic biography, about Johnson’s White House years. “I am writing right now about how he won for black Americans the right to vote. I am turning from what happened forty-three years ago to what I am reading in my daily newspaper—and the thrill that goes up and down my spine when I realize the historical significance of this moment is only equaled by my anger that they are not giving Johnson credit for it.â€
Looks like I have a new reading project set once this Montaigne project is over!