Serendipity

Most books I read come to me because of my previous knowledge of the author’s work or the recommendation of a review or by someone I respect. And such is the case with Firmin but the way it came to me was through a chance chain of events befitting the role of chance in the book itself, a serendipitous journey of the book into my hands. My son, Jonathan, had recently been in Sardinia, quietly enjoying a cappuccino in a local café and a woman was nearby, tearfully finishing Firmin and they struck up a conversation. “Here,” she said, "take the book and read it; you’ll love it,” offering him her worn paperback copy of a UK edition with a sticker on it, “Choose from any 3 for 2 at Waterstone’s.” At first Jonathan politely demurred thinking that it was probably some maudlin potboiler, but she was insistent and so he accepted. He read it on the plane when he left and suggested I read it when he last visited, so via happenstance the copy wound up with me.

Now, if I could imagine a Venn diagram of my 30-something son and my literary taste, there would be a majority overlap of books we both care deeply about, but the non-shaded area of books we do not mutually enjoy is meaningful enough to raise doubts regarding a book about “a well-read Rat” with a debonair soul who lives in the basement bookstore on Boston’s Scollay Square in the 1960’s. But Jonathan said: “trust me on this one” and as it is a book about books as well, I read it and I’m glad I did. It is quite a find under the proverbial radar.

Interestingly the subtitle of Sam Savage’s work has morphed from “Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife” in the UK edition to “A Tale of Exile, Unrequited Love, and the Redemptive Power of Literature” in the American edition. Both are accurate but I suppose the latter makes it more marketable. Below there is the review of the book from Publisher’s Weekly. There is also a brief, amusing You Tube promotion of the book that warrants attention.

Like most novels narrated by a rat :-), it is a metaphor of life we human rats endure and bring upon ourselves, with themes of Hardy and Dickens running beneath the surface of lovable Firmin’s narrative. It is a highly imaginative work, one you are doomed to compulsively read to the end in one sitting and at times a SOL (smile out loud).

And, for me, what is there not to love about a rat who is a voracious reader and plays the piano as well? But, Firmin’s narration touches so many truths for me: “A rat’s life is short and painful, painful but quickly over, and yet it feels long while it lasts….I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does. In fact nothing exists longer than an instant except the things that we hold in memory. I always try to hold on to everything – I would rather die than forget….One of the things I have observed is how extremes coalesce. Great love becomes great hatred, quiet peace turns into noisy war, vast boredom breeds huge excitement. Great intimacy spawns huge estrangement.”

And those are but a few.

From Publishers Weekly
Savage's sentimental debut concerns the coming-of-age of a well-read rat in 1960s Boston. In the basement of Pembroke Books, a bookstore on Scollay Square, Firmin is the runt of the litter born to Mama Flo, who makes confetti of Moby-Dick and Don Quixote for her offspring's cradle. Soon left to fend for himself, Firmin finds that books are his only friends, and he becomes a hopeless romantic, devouring Great Books—sometimes literally. Aware from his frightful reflection that he is no Fred Astaire (his hero), he watches nebbishy bookstore owner Norman Shine from afar and imagines his love is returned until Norman tries to poison him. Thereafter he becomes the pet of a solitary sci-fi writer, Jerry Magoon, a smart slob and drinker who teaches Firmin about jazz, moviegoing and the writer's life. Alas, their world is threatened by extinction with the renovation of Scollay Square, which forces the closing of the bookstore and Firmin's beloved Rialto Theater. With this alternately whimsical and earnest paean to the joys of literature, Savage embodies writerly self-doubts and yearning in a precocious rat: "I have had a hard time facing up to the blank stupidity of an ordinary, unstoried life." (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Inspirational Diplomacy

I am an early riser so was able to see President Obama’s entire speech today as he delivered it at Cairo University. If a main criterion of being a successful President is to be inspirational, Obama passed that test.

It was not a speech of diplomacy per se but its prelude, setting a tone and putting forth ideals. I fear progress on the broad objectives President Obama set out in the speech will be delayed, another victim of our economic malaise. This dilutes the energy that can be focused on international goals and until domestic issues such as the deficit and unemployment are under control, the ability to make significant progress abroad will be impaired.

Nonetheless, the speech is one that realizes the hope I expressed more than a year ago in an open letter to then Senator Obama: “Some people have pointed to 9/11 as a manifestation of the clash between the Muslim and Christian worlds. Given your personal background, you have what may be a unique opportunity to establish a dialogue between these two worlds and in so doing begin to restore our international standing. Just electing you will demonstrate to the world that we can put our ideals into action.”

President Obama’s made several references to the need for honesty, putting forth some very sensitive key issues to his Egyptian audience, such as the future security of Israel and the need for Palestinian statehood, and Iran’s place in a nuclear world.

And if I am to be honest, during my lifetime the American Presidency sometimes has been a source of embarrassment, culminating in President George W. Bush having to duck shoes thrown at him. When I traveled the world I would occasionally feel the undercurrent of anti-Americanism, the stereotype of the “ugly American” that President Obama has asked the Muslim world to renounce as he has said we must “fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

During my adult lifetime I can think of only two comparable speeches as noteworthy as Obama’s: President Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” June 26, 1963 speech (ironically three days before my first marriage) in West Berlin and President Reagan’s June 12, 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate, proclaiming “Tear down this wall!” a challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to destroy the Berlin Wall. I was in Frankfurt Germany on October 3, 1990 when Berlin was united into a single city-state and East/West German unity was achieved, the words of Kennedy and Reagan resonating in history.

Hopefully President Obama’s Cairo speech similarly will be recognized as an inspirational turning point sometime in the future. Words and leadership make a difference.

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Krugman Vs. Hussman

John Hussman, the erudite economist who runs his own mutual funds, and Paul Krugman, the Nobel Memorial Prize winner in Economics have a bone to pick over inflation. Essentially, Krugman thinks such an outcome from the current economic turbulence is a non sequitur as the funds being created with all this debt is essentially not being lent out – they are going back into Treasuries. Therefore, he concludes, “when it comes to inflation, the only thing we have to fear is inflation fear itself.”

Hussman has some pointed rejoinders to this view. The lack of money velocity will have to be indefinite for inflation to remain tame. Eventually this debt will have to be addressed via inflation or through a dramatic expansion of economic activity. He expects a doubling of the U.S. price level over the next decade.

Their discussion takes me back me to the 1970s when the fear of inflation led Paul Volcker to raise short-term rates to unheard of levels, with ultimate success but not before the inflationary genie escaped the bottle. Certainly, recent gyrations in the Treasury market as well as the resurgence of commodity prices show this debate is now being waged in the marketplace as well.

Prelude to Panic

That’s the headline from today’s Palm Beach Post: Prelude to panic: Tax rolls plummet.
Surprise, surprise? More antidotal evidence that the recession is indeed the “Great Recession” and local government is out to lunch “with countywide values lower than feared.” Where have they been during the past year while the clock was ticking towards the end of their June 30 fiscal year and the beginning of the new one? Foreclosures and rising unemployment should have spelled out reality. All one needs to do is to drive through many of the neighborhoods in Palm Beach County where “For Sale” signs are interspersed with euphemistic “For Rent” signs.

Here are some bullet points:

* Property Appraiser Gary Nikolits had been expecting “the quickest free fall since the Great Depression” but his estimate of a 12% decline has now been revised to 13.5%

* Taxable countywide property has declined to $138 billion from $159.6 billion last year with 38 cities, towns, and villages having larger percentage declines

* Given the 13.5% decline in values, county administrators proposed a 13.5% tax rate increase (as well as laying off 175 workers, an undisclosed percentage of total employees)!

When times were “good” (fictitiously good, that is), our town in PBC was eager to spend. $Millions went into the ”beautification” of a street which might have been more beautiful if some of the homes were updated, but as the municipality can not just hand out money to homeowners (only the federal government can do that), they constructed little islands in the middle of the road and planted vegetation. Much of this beautification is now gone but the islands remain, constricting traffic and leading to a reduction in the speed limit: so much for handing municipalities the “benefits” of inflation. Now, faced, with deflation, and rising unemployment, no problem, presto, a proposed tax increase.

Prelude to panic, perhaps, but they can’t tax this away from us....


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Bombshell

“We are out of money.”

This is the “news” we’ve feared, although expected, but not so soon: the admission that the US economic system (not necessarily the stock market which lives in its own fantasy land before it adjusts to reality) is insolvent. President Obama, responding to a question about the cost of health care in an interview on C-SPAN yesterday, said, “Well, we are out of money now.”

Just a couple of weeks ago I noted, “One gets the feeling that the Obama administration has little choice but to let this kind of bad news out slowly, hoping the market and the psyche of the country can absorb it without disrupting the tenuous nature of the recovery, particularly in the credit and stock markets. Until REAL unemployment recedes deficits will inevitably grow beyond forecasts.”

Obama’s admission seems to be a continuation of the letting-the-news-out-slowly “strategy” the consequences of which are staggering, not only for holders of US Treasuries, but just about every world currency because of the symbiotic relationships between the lending economies and the consuming economies. For sometime I’ve been concerned about this, particularly because of the mathematical confluence of rising healthcare costs and rising unemployment. “Are T-Bills “risk free,” especially as the US seems to be on a course to guarantee every debt and every major corporate shortfall, not to mention the twin time bombs of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid as the baby boomers retire and unemployment rises? Now there is a Black Swan.” So, today’s headline “Fix is hard for Medicare, Social Security finances” does not come as a surprise, but it is disturbing that we have so long delayed the inevitability of facing up to this hydra headed conundrum. “If we cannot even acknowledge these economic truths, there can be no national plan to deal with the dire consequences.”

Maybe President Obama’s statement was more of a Freudian slip, but it is now out there, to be “pondered" by the markets, and, hopefully, to be finally faced up to by Congress.
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Updike, Roth, Dreiser

This blog entry was really started by my blogger friend, Emily, who “tagged” me to name twenty-five writers who have “influenced” my life (not necessarily because they are great writers). Although I “answered” her with just their names, I had promised to explain why. To me, reading literature is to explore history and psychology, the human tapestry laid threadbare. Basically I am drawn to those writers I can personally relate to and I’m embarrassed to admit that those I like the most I take the longest to read, lingering over the experience so as to savor every word.

Before getting to my more detailed “answer” by writer, this is what I originally wrote to Emily:

“I’m not too good at this – in fact as I don’t “do” Facebook, I don’t even know what getting “tagged” means. But I think I get the gist of it. This is an interesting project, one that I would have to give a lot of thought to explain why I chose my 25 writers. It is something I might get to this summer. Frequently, the reasoning will be that one writer brought me to another wonderful writer, simple as that. So, I promise, sometime in the future I’ll write an entry on this, but I can’t promise I’ll “tag” 25 other bloggers – I don’t even read that many blogs and except for yours, they are mostly financially oriented (that reveals where my own blog is frequently slanted). But I did come up with my 25 authors and so, below, here’s the list in the order as I thought of them (might have to be rearranged when I think this through). There is a heavy bias to contemporary American fiction, with one biographer in the group. I could name scores of writers who have written for me their one-time classic (such as Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” or Alan Lightman’s “The Diagnosis”), not to mention the writers I studied in college (Franz Kafka for instance), who have had an impact on me and therefore could easily be added to the list. I could also add Pat Conroy whom you mention, but he didn’t come up when I went through this mental exercise. One of the best works I read by him is a memoir, “My Losing Season” but you’d have to love basketball as much as I do to appreciate it. Also, I share your admiration for Russell Banks’ “Continental Drift” and “Rule of the Bone” (which I think is his best work). Here are the 25, off the top of my head:”

So, further expanding my answer, I am going to keep the same order, as they came to me, but no other significance beyond that.

John Updike. If one searches “Updike” in my blog you will find other entries. I once saw him at a Pen Writers meeting where he was the main speaker and wanted to go over to him to chat. He seemed so approachable and kindly, but I became involved in a discussion with Russell Baker whose book All Things Considered we had just reissued. So other people surrounded Updike and I thought there would be other opportunities, at the Frankfurt Bookfair or perhaps the American Booksellers Association meetings, or another Pen Writers conference, but our paths never crossed again, other than his speaking to me through his works. Updike’s influence on me is he not only helped explain the American Zeitgeist, but he also explored issues relevant to my “maleness” ten years hence, as Updike was nearly exactly ten years older than I. The stages of Harry Angstrom’s life as depicted in the Rabbit novels are neatly spaced out about a decade apart, so painstakingly capturing the times in America, his maturation and ultimate decline.

I am now reading his last novel, the Widows of Eastwick, with sadness and reverence for a great American writer. Only a man who has walked the walk can write words such as this: "Jim's illness drove her and Jim down from safe, arty Taos into the wider society, the valleys of the ailing, a vast herd moving like stampeded bison toward the killing cliff. The socialization forced upon her -- interviews with doctors, most of them unsettlingly young; encounters with nurses, demanded merciful attentions the hospitalized patient was too manly and depressed to ask for himself; commiseration with others in her condition, soon-to-be widows and widowers she would have shunned on the street but now, in these antiseptic hallways, embraced with shared tears -- prepared her for travel in the company of strangers." Unfortunately, I’ve had similar “hospital experiences” and dread the inevitability of an encore. But, now, with Updike gone, I think of his poem “Perfection Wasted” which you can find at the very end of this blog entry.

Philip Roth. I think I respond in a similar way to Roth, a writer who seems to know me but in a different way. Where Updike awakens the Calvinist background of my early years and the suburban existence of my later life, Roth explores the “Jewishness” of my New York City years. I’ve long felt his American Pastoral is one of the great novels of the 20th century,

The novel made me relive those Vietnam years of the 60’s and the social upheavals of the times. It is a novel in the negative universe of Updike’s Rabbit, in that the main character is also a former high school star athlete, but from the inner city, one who in his attempt to create the “perfect life” of the American dream, an American pastoral, finds his daughter caught up in Weather Underground violence as he also helplessly witnesses the destruction of his once beloved inner-city Newark in the 1970s. An American Dream turned American Nightmare, capturing exactly the way I felt at the time.

Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman narrates the novel. It is through Zuckerman in many of Roth’s other works that we have a window into Roth’s view of writing itself. The Anatomy Lesson is one of the “Zuckerman” novels. In it Zuckerman is thinking about his writing and what it had become in his life:

“It looked as though life had become bigger yet. Writing would intensify everything even further. Writing, as Mann had testified – not least by his own example – was the only worthwhile attainment, the surpassing experience, the exalted struggle, and there was no way to write other than like a fanatic. Without fanaticism, nothing great in fiction could ever be achieved. He had the highest possible conception of the gigantic capacities of literature to engulf and purify life. He would write more, publish more, and life would become colossal.

But what became colossal was the next page. He thought he had chosen life but what he had chosen was the next page. Stealing time to write stories, he never thought to wonder what time might be stealing from him. Only gradually did the perfecting of a writer’s iron will begin to feel like the evasion of experience, and the means to imaginative release, to the exposure, revelation, and invention of life, like the sternest form of incarceration. He thought he’d chosen the intensification of everything and he’d chosen monasticism and retreat instead. Inherent in this choice was a paradox that he had never foreseen.”

Of course in spite of all of Zuckerman’s protestations, Roth has gone on to write at least a dozen novels after that one, and, thankfully, is still going strong. His more recent works are dark, clearly concerned with his physical decline and the future. But, writing is work, something that I have found, and few work as vigorously and focused as Roth.

Theodore Dreiser. I skip to a writer of my college years, having devoured everything he wrote during those years, either for assignments or just because I found his Darwinian philosophy of life a revelation at the time. I spent a harrowing week in the Brooklyn Hospital ward with pleurisy, the consequence of teenage stupidity because I had taken caffeine tablets for a couple of all-nighters to study for exams and became exhausted. This led to my contracting that most painful condition. In the hospital I began to read Dreiser’s “Cowperwood trilogy,” the first two written before the 1920’s and the last one some thirty years later after WW II, tracing the life of financier Frank Cowperwood. Cowperwood’s life is built around an economically and socially hostile world, where the survival of the fittest reigns supreme. On his way to school as a ten year old, the future financier passes a store window which exhibits a lobster and a squid contained in a fish tank and one day he discovers the lobster had devoured the squid, Dreiser commenting: “The incident had a great impression on him. It answered in a rough way that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past: How is life organized? Things lived on each other – that was it…Sure, men lived on men.” This social-Darwinian leitmotif runs through all of his writings and became a worldview that reverberated throughout my working life. My DNA, though, prevented me from doing the “eating” but I learned how not “to be eaten.” In my very first job after college I was thrown to the wolves in the production department of the now defunct Johnson Reprint Corporation, which was part of Academic Press. By “wolves” I mean coworkers who did not like my intense work ethic and would have eaten me alive except I learned how to deal with them from my Dreiser “education.” That education would prove to be valuable right up to my retirement, helping me negotiate the labyrinths of corporate politics as well.

That’s it for this session, three down, and only twenty-two to go! Just looking over the remaining list I can see that this is going to take a very long time to do thoughtfully. Rather than rushing through it, I’ll post installments as time permits, leaving the rest of the list a mystery although perhaps you can guess many just from the first few.

Slowly Letting Out the Bad News

Among all the talk of green shoots, the recession bottoming, and the hope that the spending will produce growth, a new headline from Reuters: "White House forecasts higher U.S. budget deficit.”

One gets the feeling that the Obama administration has little choice but to let this kind of bad news out slowly, hoping the market and the psyche of the country can absorb it without disrupting the tenuous nature of the recovery, particularly in the credit and stock markets. Until REAL unemployment recedes deficits will inevitably grow beyond forecasts. The recent unemployment figures include some “gains” because of recently hired government census workers and fails to count workers who have just given up or are working part-time, and does not yet include the 1.6 million college seniors graduating this year.

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