Clunker Consequences

The cash for clunker’s program has been proclaimed a “success” by politicians lining up to take credit, to show their constituents that they know how to sprinkle a little money on the little guy, a mere $3 billion when it is all said and done, while $trillions go to Wall Street in one form or another. But, as with many of these bailout programs, when the government steps in, there are unintended consequences, some of which can’t be seen until the deed is done. Clunkers Plan Deflates Mechanics proclaims the Wall Street Journal. While car dealers are delighting in their windfall, 164,000 auto repair shops, as well as their suppliers, are left with less work. As one spokesperson pointedly said: "How do we get on the special interests, special treatment bandwagon? How much is it going to cost me and to whom shall I send the check? Who picks the winners in this game 'cause obviously the game is fixed."

And that in a microcosm is the downside of this approach to “fixing” the economy. Cash for clunkers might save some jobs, but at the expense of others. Also, the government has succeeded in doing what public corporations have long done – accelerating sales to make one quarter look better than it would otherwise. Wouldn’t these clunkers have to be ultimately replaced anyhow? Merely moving these sales forward does not fix the economy or create permanent jobs and as many automotive repair shops are independents, it certainly hurts small business. But it may make some politicians look good for a little while.
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Headline Tedium

Bailouts, bonuses and Madoff. Are we getting tired yet of the endless litany of related headlines such as the Wall Street Journal’s recent “Bank Bonus Tab: $33 Billion; Nine Lenders That Got U.S. Aid Paid at Least $1 Million Each to 5,000 Employees”?

The rock star of these “fab” financial “leaders” is Andrew Hall who makes a bundle for himself trading energy contracts for Citigroup's energy-trading unit Phibro LLC, with compensation approaching $100 million for 2008. It is interesting to read Sunday’s New York Time’s front page article on his activities and compensation. No doubt he is a talented individual and I suppose if Citigroup didn’t want his operation’s expertise in “taking advantage of unusual spreads between the spot price of oil and the price of an oil futures contract,” other firms would be lining up to pay his price. That is the American way. We know how to lavish money on our superstars, whether from the media or sports, or in this case, dice-rolling trading moguls.

The Times refers to his compensation as “his cut of profits from a characteristically aggressive year of bets in the oil market.” It also says “the company, for example, often wagers that the price of oil will rise so fast during a particular period, say six months, that it can make money by storing oil in supertankers and floating it until the price goes up. “ Finally, “right before the first Gulf War, Phibro placed an elaborate bet that the price of oil would spike and then go down faster than others were anticipating. The company earned more than $300 million from the gamble.” I emphasize bets, wagers, and gamble, as these words cut to the heart of the matter. Arbitrage and hedging can be a means of controlling risk or it can magnify risk to the point of endangering the entire financial system. Is this what our banks should be doing: betting, gambling and waging? Heads they win, tails the taxpayer loses? I have to wonder what the consequences would have been if Mr. Hall’s trades had gone disastrously against Citigroup. Would he have been personally at risk for the same $100 million he “earned” being on the right side? Do we want our banks, the bedrock of our financial system engaging in such activities – aren’t these the domain of the individual entrepreneur and private capital? To what extent does such “trading” create spikes such as $147 for a barrel of crude oil while there is a glut of the commodity?

Then there is the continuing rhetoric about having to reward the financial superstars that got us into this mess in the first place, or they will “walk.” I like Warren Buffet’s homey comments on this topic so I quote from his 2006 letter to his Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Although this is aimed at CEO pay in general, which is also absurdly high in many (but not all) corporations, it applies to our banks and other financial service firms as well:

“CEO perks at one company are quickly copied elsewhere. ‘All the other kids have one’ may seem a thought too juvenile to use as a rationale in the boardroom. But consultants employ precisely this argument, phrased more elegantly of course, when they make recommendations to comp committees. Irrational and excessive comp practices will not be materially changed by disclosure or by ‘independent’ comp committee members….Compensation reform will only occur if the largest institutional shareholders – it would only take a few – demand a fresh look at the whole system. The consultants’ present drill of deftly selecting ‘peer’ companies to compare with their clients will only perpetuate present excesses.”

Another mind-boggling headline “Picowers Rebut Suit Tied to Madoff Fraud” is from Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. and The New York Times version of the same “Big Investor Counters Charges in Madoff Case.” According to the Madoff bankruptcy trustee, Irving Picard, Picower’s accounts posted gains of more than 100 percent a dozen times between 1996 and 2007, with one gaining 950 percent, but this counter suit contends the latter was “only” 37.6 percent and none of his accounts earned more than 100 percent “in any single year.” But the $5.1 billion Picower withdrew over the years may have represented a return greatly exceeding any reasonable return during the same period. How a knowledgeable investor (presumably Picower qualifies) could believe that Madoff can “guarantee” steady returns of 10 to 12 percent a year and be satisfied by the statements received from Madoff to bear out those returns is beyond me. I still think the “idea” of creating a new reality TV show, something we seem to be better at than regulating financial Ponzi schemes (either private or government sponsored) might be just the ticket to fund the innocent victims of Madoff.

On the eve of President Obama’s inauguration, I had written the following: “The winners in this economy were not only the capitalists, the real creators of jobs due to hard work and innovation, but the even bigger winners: the financial masters of the universe who learned to leverage financial instruments with the blessings of a government that nurtured the thievery of the public good through deregulation, ineptitude, and political amorality. This gave rise to a whole generation of pseudo capitalists, people who “cashed in” on the system, bankers and brokers and “financial engineers” who dreamt up lethal structures based on leverage and then selling those instruments to an unsuspecting public, a public that entrusted the government to be vigilant so the likes of a Bernie Madoff could not prosper for untold years. Until we revere the real innovators of capitalism, the entrepreneurs who actually create things, ideas, jobs, and our financial system will continue to seize up. That is the challenge for the Obama administration – a new economic morality.”

I haven’t changed my view and I fear that while we bail out banks, insurance companies and their like, leaving present compensation practices in place, we just continue to perpetuate financial risk taking, swinging for the fences, making “bets and wagers” that will just dig us into a deeper future hole. As the headlines attest, the “challenge” remains. A true recovery requires jobs, jobs, jobs – and how are they going to be created – by banks trading energy futures? What happened to the commitment to the infrastructure? Our roads, utilities, and public transportation are falling apart. Alternative energy seems DOA. Aren’t these the areas our financial recourses should be focused on, ones that will create jobs, in construction, technology, and finance, and can lead a true economic recovery we can pass on with pride to future generations?

Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road

A while ago I was “tagged” by a fellow blogger to name twenty-five writers who “influenced” my life, and although I began my reply by naming Updike, Roth and Dreiser, Richard Yates could have easily been the first on my list.

He is certainly the only writer where I may have had some small reciprocal impact. Why? Because for almost ten years the only edition of his classic Revolutionary Road in print was the one I republished in 1971. Astonished to find it out of print at the time, we snapped up the rights from Yates’ literary agent, the International Famous Agency. In fact, the Wikipedia entry for the novel incorrectly cites Greenwood Press as the publisher instead of its original publisher, Little, Brown, and Company (1961). No doubt the article’s author was holding the Greenwood hardcover edition.

When our edition was published it was my intention to reread it, but career demands, other literary works, including all of Yates’ later novels and short stories, encroached on my reading time, so on various bookshelves in the homes we’ve lived, this edition nestled in waiting. The catalyst for recently rereading Revolutionary Road was the film of it, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Reportedly, the book was “discovered” as a major American literary work by Kate Winslet and her husband, the film’s director, Sam Mendes. The film seemed faithful to the novel so I finally read the reprint edition to see for myself. In the process I was reminded why I was so taken with Yates’ work in the first place.

Since I am an “old” production guy, I have to describe the edition, republished without a jacket but in a library binding, 88 point binder’s boards, Arrestox "C" weight cloth with gold foil stamping on the spine, 5–1 /2 x 8–1/2 trim size, headbands and footbands, printed on acid free, cream colored high-opacity 50 lb paper. It was probably printed in Ann Arbor, Michigan where we printed the majority of our books. It looked as new as the day it was republished. So, I have come full circle with the book, reading it soon after it was first published, reprinting it when it went out of print, seeing the movie, and now finally rereading my reprint edition of the novel, with more than 40 years intervening.

As I said I thought the movie closely followed the book but after rereading Revolutionary Road, I am struck by its extreme faithfulness. Maybe this is because Yates’ elegantly developed plot moves chronologically and with an inevitability that drives the novel to its conclusion, making it so adaptable to the screen. But mostly, it is Yates’ living dialogue and although I do not have the screenplay to compare, I am certain much of it was wisely lifted from the novel itself.

When I first read the novel I was going through a divorce, having been married at the end of my junior year in college. My ex-wife and I were two kids, not unlike Frank and April in Revolutionary Road. I take literature very personally and the novel spoke directly to me as my own marriage was disintegrating and I was looking for answers.

The relationship of Yates’ men and women can be summed up by the titles of Yates’ two terrific short story collections: Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. I was struck by these two themes, loneliness and self deception, as depicted in Revolutionary Road, relating those to my own experience, not only in my first marriage but the failed marriage of my parents (although they continued the pretense of a marriage to their deaths). Yates’ characters are perpetually struggling with one another, the men unsure of their masculinity, having to prove it in their work, their “need” to be loved by their wives, and to dominate women outside their marriages, while the women are highly neurotic and dependent but oddly headstrong and impulsive at the same time.

Towards the novel’s dénouement, April, exhausted from her struggles with her husband Frank, determined to follow through on aborting their third child, sends Frank off to work with a little kiss. Frank is confused, astounded, but grateful as he goes off to catch his train. April thinks it was “…a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you’d just met at a party. The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear – until he was saying ‘I love you’ and she was saying ‘really, I mean it; you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.’” Indeed, liars in love. It perfectly described my own experience and I’ve been hooked on Yates ever since.

Yates characters wear different personas, playacting their way through their lives, with a natural capacity for self deception and disingenuousness. The book begins with a play in which April acts in a community theatre production. For a month after April finds she is pregnant with this third child, she and Frank go through their own elaborate play, she wanting an abortion (supposedly for Frank’s sake) and Frank wanting the child (supposedly for moral reasons). Subliminally he realizes that the pregnancy will put to rest April’s impetuous desire to move to Paris and thus leave them with a “comfortable” suburban life: “And so the way was clear for the quiet, controlled, dead serious debate with which they began to fill one after another of the calendar’s days, a debate that kept them both in a finely drawn state of nerves that was not at all unpleasant. It was very like a courtship….His main tactical problem, in this initial phase of the campaign, was to find ways of making his position attractive, as well as commendable. The visits to town and country restaurants were helpful in this connection; she had only to glance around her in such places to discover a world of handsome, graceful, unquestionably worthwhile men and women, who had somehow managed to transcend their environment – people who had turned dull jobs to their own advantage, who had exploited the system without knuckling under it, who would certainly tend, if they knew the facts of the Wheelers’ case, to agree with him.”

Yates tackles the suburban landscape, reminiscent of Cheever and Updike, something that did not resonate particularly with me when I first read the book, but after having lived in the Westport, Connecticut area for some thirty years, now has a special meaning. Yates’ portrayal is more scathing, depicting a desolate place where desperate people, lonely and unsure of themselves, toiling away in an era of placidity on the surface with deep anxiety running beneath. He describes the neighborhood as “invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves.” The women raise the kids in their manicured homes and the men do battle in the city, snaking their way on the commuter railroad with their hats and their newspapers. Yates describes Frank, “…riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.” This is as sad a depiction of the American dream’s corruption as could have been conjured up by Fitzgerald.

Frank works at his father’s old firm, a veneration of cynicism on his part. He gets a job in the Sales Promotion Department at Knox Business Machines, deciding “it would be more fun not to mention his father in the interview at all.” “The sales what? [April inquired]….What does that mean you’re supposed to do?” “Who the hell knows? They explained it to me for half an hour and I still don’t know, and I don’t think they do either. No, but it’s pretty funny, isn’t it? Old Knox Business Machines. Wait’ll I tell the old man. Wait’ll he hears I didn’t even use his name.” “And so it started as a kind of joke. Others might fail to see the humor of it, but it filled Frank Wheeler with a secret, astringent delight as he discharged his lazy duties, walking around the office in a way that had lately become almost habitual with him, if not quite truly characteristic, since having been described by his wife as ‘terrifically sexy’ -- a slow catlike stride, proudly muscular but expressing a sleepy disdain of tension or hurry.” Work too, is nothing more than a performance, something without intrinsic meaning, like other aspects of their lives.

Paradoxically, the one character in the novel who does not suffer from self deception, is their real estate agent’s son, John, who is an inmate in a mental institution, one who occasionally visits the Wheelers when he is released to his parents. When he learns that the Wheelers are not going to move to France and that April is pregnant, he says to them, first referring to Frank, “Big man you got here, April…Big family man, solid citizen. I feel sorry for you. Still, maybe you deserve each other. Matter of fact, the way you look right now, I’m beginning to feel sorry for him too. I mean come to think of it, you must give him a pretty bad time, if making babies is the only way he can prove he’s got a pair of balls….Hey, I’m glad of one thing, though? You know what I’m glad of? I’m glad I’m not gonna be that kid.”

Yates wrote six novels after Revolutionary Road. Among my favorites was Easter Parade, but Revolutionary Road stands on its own. He also had his short stories published in the two collections mentioned earlier, and, finally, he became more widely recognized with the publication of the Collected Stories of Richard Yates a few years ago. The wonderful introduction to this edition was written by Richard Russo who is yet another contemporary author influenced by Yates.

A must read article on Yates “The Lost World of Richard Yates; How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print” was published in the October/November 1999 issue of the Boston Review by Stewart O’Nan. He thoroughly covers Yates’ history and writing, but I was disappointed O’Nan failed to mention the edition of Revolutionary Road we kept in print for those ten years. Nonetheless, I would like to think our edition did its small part in keeping Yates’ extraordinary novel alive.
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Goldman Insatiable Sachs

While Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley, Troubled Asset Relief Program recipients are finding ways to circumvent TARP compensation restrictions, Goldman Sachs, having “paid back,” those funds, may brazenly pay out some $773,000 per employee as total compensation in 2009. This comes on its reported net earnings of $1.81 billion and revenues of $9.43 billion for the quarter ending March, 2009, a nifty operating profit of almost 20% in the depths of the “Great Recession.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for profit and the capitalist system, but Goldman had taken TARP funds, and was the largest recipient of AIG TARP money due to collateral calls on mortgage related Collateralized Debt Obligations, and presumably AIG (we, the taxpayer) may be on the hook for more. The herd of financial firms has thinned and we have handed them monopoly-like power.

While I recognize that the financial mess was primarily an inherited one by the Obama administration, we are not addressing the toxic assets that are still haunting the books of many financial institutions. Bad mortgages and a weak real estate market persist, and unemployment continues to grow. We may have forestalled the complete seizure of the financial system, but the structural weaknesses remain, and taxpayers are underwriting a postponement of a solution, benefiting financial institutions such as Goldman.

Paul Krugman at the New York Times makes these key points about GS’ earnings and compensation plans in his column, The Joy of Sachs:

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

His conclusions are must reading. Wall Street seems to be calling the shots in Washington, all of this while reported unemployment flirts with 10% and with real unemployment substantially higher as dispirited workers who have given up looking for a job, or part-timers who want a full-time job, are not even counted. Sounds like a good time for record payouts at Goldman Sachs.

As Mary Elizabeth Lease wrote in the early 1890’s, “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.” Hat tip: Got Shares? (GotShares.com)

Literature and the Real World

This came to my attention through Zero Hedge (On a Long Enough Timeline, the Survival Rate for Everyone Drops to Zero) a blog I’ve mentioned before, one that has become a first source for a skeptical view of our political and economic world. When reading Zero Hedge I think of the American Revolutionary War pamphleteers; Thomas Paine would be proud of this independent, pseudonymous voice and its mission statement. No wonder traditional media are concerned about the power of the new press.

Zero Hedge pointed to a fascinating interview between Nassim Taleb, the mathematician, hedge fund manager, philosopher, and writer, author of The Black Swan, and Rolf Dobelli “a Swiss novelist and entrepreneur." I read Taleb’s book earlier this year and while I had my own skeptical view of applying his philosophy to the investment world, I was impressed by his intellect and in particular his theory of “naïve empiricism,” a “natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story or our vision of the world.”

So it is not surprising that I was immediately swept into this interview with Taleb’s statement “Newspapers have officially the right facts, but their interpretations are imaginary –and their choice of facts are arbitrary. They lie with right facts; a novelist says the truth with wrong facts.” In effect, fiction is a notch above “truth.” How often have I thought that while reading the novelists I’ve mention in this blog? How often have I felt that a novel was portraying the real world, the one I know and understand? As Taleb says, “Literature belongs to the holy. You can do fiction, nonfiction, a mixture, who cares. Literature is above the distinction. It is sacred.”
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Shock of Recognition

This posting sort of dovetails with the prior one as it further underscores the dilemma of traditional media – how to price their product as the pressure of “free” information and opinions from the blogosphere rises. Mine is just one lonely voice in that universe and its lack of focus (a serious flaw as the Web rewards specialization) is a detriment to developing a following. But a “following” was not my main concern when I began this journey. So, I was surprised, and of course flattered, to be cited by two blogs that I admire, Telecommuter Talk and Got Shares? (GotShares.com).

I’ve mentioned other blogs before (Financial Views from the Blogosphere), but those are investment oriented. Emily’s Telecommuter Talk is subtitled “Ramblings of someone who used to be a telecommuter and who now has grand delusions of being a writer” and Matthew’s Got Shares? (GotShares.com) is subtitled “Quiet Highway: Saga of a Gentleman. A blog about finance, law, and the journey of an amateur economist.” These two blogs couldn’t be more different, but here is what they share in common besides covering some of my main interests, literature, economics, and public policy: they are written with passion, honesty, and understanding. Although I have my opinions, I realize how much I have to learn from the blogosphere, and I am thankful that there is such an alternative place to turn to for information and opinions.

This “recognition” is a reminder of how far I need to go to improve my own contributions, and my blog’s features, and I’m sort of exasperated on our boat for the next couple of months, using wireless dialup, and dealing with a petulant keyboard, the cursor jumping all over the place like a jumping frog, while Google is pulling the plug on my music links. In other words, it’s going to be a painful period – improvements I need to make as well as planned postings delayed until I return to the Halcyon land of my desktop and broadband.
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You Get What You Pay For

Malcolm Gladwell’s “Priced to Sell; Is Free the Future?” in the recent issue of the New Yorker brings up fascinating issues, ones I dealt with my entire career – should “information” be “free.” Part of his article is a critique of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price,”which argues that given the inexorable downward price pressure in technology, there is an inevitability that the content itself will become free. Anderson suggests that musicians learn to make their money “through touring, [and] merchandise sales” and newspaper writer retool to become coaches to unpaid writers who will work “for non-monetary rewards.” Fame, crumbs?

No doubt the newspaper industry is under siege, and is probably the most threatened during this Great Recession. But Gladwell’s scathing dissection of the YouTube “business model” points the way to the inevitability of two universes, a subscription model such as the successful Wall Street Journal, one that offers a level of professionalism or specialization people are willing to pay for and then the free one like YouTube, a commodity aimed at a mass market, supported either by advertising or by the provider being satisfied by cornering market share/eyeballs (Google in the case of YouTube).

The New York Times had attempted a subscription model for its Op-Ed Columnists, miscalculating that this is the unique value of the Times. That value, though, as with the Washington Post, is its gestalt and by charging for a part of the paper and not all is to devalue the sum total of its parts. Pay per view is not feasible but dedicated followers will pay for access to such well established icons.

Similarly, newspapers that do not have a national standing, have an opportunity to expand their coverage of local issues – to create the specialization needed to buttress their own brands. Of course, content is not the only issue, it is the subscription model itself. Giving print subscribers nearly free access to the on line version is one approach, particularly as technology such as the iPad become ubiquitous. The pricing of an online version (only) is the more critical issue for these publications, and that will be dependent on their own distinctive market position. The devil is in the details, but Gladwell’s article is a good reading.

Do We Cry for the Sloth?

Coffee House Press, the innovative US Publisher of Firmin, saw my blog piece on their book and asked if I would like to review the author’s forthcoming novel, The Cry of the Sloth (To be published Sept. 1). Sure, I said, thinking that I might be graduating from reading about a lovable rat to an equally lovable sloth, and sloths are much cuter to begin with, sort of an upside down koala bear. The advance copy arrived as we were getting ready to leave for the summer so I looked forward to kicking off the summer reading season with Sam Savage’s new book. Not only did I love Firmin, I was more than curious about the author as he is about my age and it brings hope to us old guys; who knows, there might be a first book in each of us still.

The Cry of the Sloth is an epistolary novel, set in a Midwestern town during the 1970’s, quite a departure from Firmin written in the first person by a very literary rat. It is the first such novel I’ve read since 84 Charing Cross Road, which is actually not fiction but an exchange of letters between a New York book buyer and an antiquarian bookseller in London. The one thing all three books have in common is that they are about the literary world, although the “Sloth’s” world is faux literary.

The “action” mainly unfolds by following our protagonist, Andrew Whittaker, over a four month period, through his letters and other miscellaneous writings, including his interpretations of his correspondents’ replies (in the rare cases when he received one), as well as just about everything else he writes, including fragments of a novel (“meant to be comic [but] it has acquired an overlay of desperation”), notices to his tenants of apartments he inherited (“Do Not Throw Cigarette Butts in Flower Pots”), apartment ads (“Enjoy a Family Lifestyle!”), grocery lists (“t.p”. – toilet paper being prominent on each), fragments of ideas for stories, and notes to himself.

Mainly, his letters are to the contributing writers of his failing literary magazine, Soap, A Journal of the Arts, of which he is the Editor, his ex-wife, Jolie, to whom he owes alimony and on whom he was obviously entirely dependent for keeping his life organized when Soap began, Vikki, a contributor and perhaps Soap’s only donor, creditors who hound him for money, the Rapid Falls Current, the small town newspaper with which he is at war, and successful novelists, some old friends who obviously do not answer his pleas to participate in a spring literary festival. He obsesses on the festival as his salvation, much as Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich saw his Overcoat.

It is a lonely, solitary journey, kaleidoscopic in nature so we, the reader, see only parts of the mosaic and always through the eyes of the 43 year old Andrew Whittaker. But through that prism we witness his slow slide, progressing through various states of mind, with his ranting and ravings, paranoia, even writing letters under pseudonyms to the local newspaper praising “That Andy is a quiet, dignified, private man,” and then responding to his pseudonym under still another one.

His obsessive compulsive behavior leads him to perform all tasks, explain all his actions in minutiae and repetitively, sometimes hilariously but always to the point of sadness. He becomes fixated on why there are no photographs of him between the ages of seven and fifteen in the family album, pursuing an answer from his sister, from whom he is estranged (what else), and from his dying mother who is in a nursing home. “If everything we do not remember did not exist, where would we be?”

While packing up his books he finds an encyclopedia of mammals and it is there he comes across the “ai,” a variety of a three-toed sloth which he sees as having a head too small for its body, “something I have thought about myself” obsessing to the point of having his head measured. But, he happily reports to his friend, Harold, that he moves his “…bowels once every day with clockwork regularity. I mention this because the ai shits and pisses only once a week.”

His wife has run off with an old novelist friend on a motorcycle who he remembers saying “she would never marry anybody as ambiguous as I am.” And there is an amorphous quality to Andrew and the novel itself, leaving the reader with more questions than answers, part of Savage’s intent.

Towards the end of the novel, he writes to Vikki “I have sunk back into all my old vices – slovenliness, sloth, and gargantuan pettiness,” perhaps his most insightful introspective epiphany. In the Christian moral tradition “sloth” is also one of the seven deadly sins, characterized by wasting away and entropy, the essence of Andrew Whittaker. The punishment in hell for such a sin is to be thrown into snake pits and, interestingly, he finds a pair of snakeskin boots in his basement, ones someone had accused him of stealing.

Savage’s writing is precise and engaging, weaving satire and pathos. He portrays an inexorable path for our protagonist, a fascinating, tragicomic portrait of isolation and personal failure, in the tradition of Gogol and Kafka. “All around me things are in decay, or in revolt. If only I could walk out of myself the way one walks out of a house.”

As Andy says at the end of one very long letter: “Imagine a man in a room talking about himself, perhaps in a very boring way, while looking down at the floor. And while he goes on with his monologue, which as I said is of interest only to himself, one by one the other people in the room tiptoe away until he is all alone, the last one shutting the door silently behind him. Finally, the man looks up and sees what has happened, and of course he is overcome by feelings of ridicule and shame. Maybe this letter is now at the bottom of your wastepaper basket, a tiny trivial voice in the depths of a tin well, rattling on and on.”

Are we still in the room listening to Andy? Yes, or no, Savage has established himself, with Cry of the Sloth, and Firmin, as an important “new” literary voice at the age of 67.

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Google Gall

Microsoft has been called the Darth Vader of the software world but watch out, Google is gaining ground. I’m pretty POed at Google as I’ve relied on Google Pages to host music links for my blog, a process which, for the non-techie, is complicated enough, without Google suddenly pulling the plug on me. For months I’ve been receiving an occasional email from Google alerting me to their intention to “move” my links to a new location, “Google Sites,” implying this will be automatic without any concerns on my part. Nuts, I thought, still another thing to learn, but OK, I’ve gone this far and I can do that.

However, this is not going to be automatic by any stretch of the imagination and, contrary to previous communications, this change will apparently render my music links inoperative. Here is their most recent email:

Dear Google Page Creator User:

As was previously announced, Google will soon be discontinuing operation of the Google Page Creator product. We will be migrating your Page Creator sites over to Google Sites so that they continue to operate with no work on your part. However, we've identified you as using Google Page Creator to host files that Sites doesn't support. We are writing to inform you that, as part of this migration, if you take no action to address this, your hosted files will likely break. If they are important then we suggest you move them to a different hosting service.

Contrary to what was posted in the blog post, the shut down and migration of Google Page Creator has been extended and will begin in a few weeks.

Thank you for your patience during this migration.

Sincerely,

The Google Sites Team

Google, Inc.

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View, CA 94043

You've received this mandatory service announcement email to update you about important changes to your Google Page Creator account.

Had I understood their intent months ago, I would have sought an alternative solution when I had broadband access. We’re now living on our boat and I’m dependent on a wireless dialup with slower speeds and bandwidth limitations. Therefore, these links will fail at a certain point. Thanks Google.

I’ve identified the music and their locations and here is a list, something I have to do anyway as a first step to address the matter:

Music: Annie’s Waltz. Location: Annie’s Waltz

Music: Ol’ Man River and Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’ Location He jes' keeps rollin’ along

Music: Not A Day Goes By Location: West Palm Beach Hosts Sondheim

Music: Smile Location: Music For Our Times

Music: Love is Here to Stay and Selections from Porgy and Bess Location: Practice Sessions

Once I find a solution to the problem Google is leaving me with, I will correct the links. In the meantime, they may not work. Sorry about that!

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Citigroup Raises Pay as Unemployment Rises

It is a tired old argument in the financial service sector, raising salaries “to retain the best talent.” Today the New York Times reports Citigroup Has a Plan to Fatten Salaries .

It goes on to note “industrywide, total compensation is expected to rise 20 to 30 percent this year, approximately to the levels of 2005, before the crisis, according to Johnson Associates, a compensation consulting firm.” It was during that time the instruments of financial destruction began to flourish, so why not roll back the clock to then?

Having run a business in both good times and bad times, we all benefited from the former and we all had to tighten our belts during the latter. Why should the financial services industry be except from the financial laws of gravity and why does the Board of Directors approve such policies while their shareholders suffer and their businesses take government funds? Bank of America and Morgan Stanley are also raising base salaries. Guess they too are concerned about “retaining the best talent.” All of this as unemployment rises -- where does this logic end? It almost seems like a back door form of price-fixing, as isn’t it inevitable that the expense of these coordinated salary increases find their way into the cost of financial products?

Juxtapose that to an article in the same edition of the Times: Despite Recession, High Demand for Skilled Labor. Some jobs such as registered nurses, geological engineers, and welders are going unfilled, even during the recession. These are jobs that actually produce something and are critical to our society. One might as well work in the financial services industry where compensation is immune to supply and demand.

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Practice Sessions

A couple of months ago Ann and I saw a remarkable piano concert at the Norton Museum of Art , Alexander Wu performing a program of Fascinating Rhythm: Music of the Americas, 20th century pieces by composers from Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and as the title implies, works of Gershwin, including his Three Preludes.

The highlight after the intermission was his virtuoso performance of Fantasy on Porgy and Bess, an arrangement by Earl Wild of Gershwin’s classic opera, as a solo concert piano composition. It is an extraordinary piece: delicate and powerful at the same time, and extremely difficult to play, befitting the talents of Gershwin himself who was a gifted pianist in addition to his genius as a composer. Rare is the composer who can transcend both the popular and classical worlds and one can only wonder where his gifts would have taken him had he not died at only 38 of a brain tumor.

After the concert I met Mr. Wu and asked him about the difficulty of the piece, something he acknowledged. Unfortunately, he had not yet recorded Fantasy on Porgy and Bess (he said he will in the future), but I found one by Graham Scott, Wild Fantasy, which includes other Gershwin pieces as well. So I bought it as a downloadable MP3 and now have the pleasure of listening to Wild’s magnificent arrangements.

It is hard to explain what it is like to passionately love something you think you are on the cusp of being able to do yourself, but the remaining distance between where you are and your goal is only an illusion of closeness. You are looking through the ocular lens of the binoculars, whereas, in reality, your age and ability renders the real view through the objective lens, your dream much, much more distant in reality.

We’ve all been asked the question of what ideally you would have done with your life if you could wave that proverbial magic wand. I’ve always answered the question unhesitatingly: a jazz pianist and not too close behind a baseball pitcher. Luckily, what I actually did do professionally, publishing, would have been third choice.

Well, my pitching days are long over and the Yankees will have to go it alone without me. On the other hand the piano is something one can play for life, and since retiring I have devoted more time to it, even having recorded two CDs in a studio, just so I have something for friends and family.

After hearing the Wild arrangements I focused more effort on playing some of the music from Porgy and Bess, but my interpretations are marred by my limitations as a pianist, and while I can practice from here to kingdom come, there is just so far I can go without the requisite skills to even remotely go to the place where Wild, Wu, and Scott can bring Gershwin, not to mention the composer himself who was a highly accomplished performer. In fact Gershwin said in a preface to his own arrangements in the Spring of 1932: “Playing my songs as frequently as I do at private parties, I have naturally been led to compose numerous variations upon them, and to indulge the desire for complication and variety that every composer feels when he manipulates the same material over and over again. It was this habit of mine that led to the original suggestion to publish a group of songs not only in their simplified arrangements that the public knew [from traditional sheet music], but also in the variations that I had devised.” Just one look at those “variations” reveals the technical difficulty of his arrangements, the confluence of his jazz roots and his classical training.


The hands of the master, himself, George Gershwin

Nonetheless, I wanted to record my own practice attempts. The CDs I’ve recorded were in a studio, all relatively short pieces in a controlled environment, so they don’t sound half bad. But for my “practice sessions,” I wanted an inexpensive digital recorder for home recording, a means to establish a baseline, something I can try to improve upon over time. Therefore, I bought a Sony Digital Voice Recorder with 1GB Flash Memory that handles MP3 recording and playback and plugs directly into a USB port (and is not much larger than a USB storage device). Talk about “practice sessions” – just getting up to speed with this technology was daunting in itself.

And listening to these home recordings, so far removed from the idyllic conditions of a studio, with all the “warts” of background noise, the turning of pages of sheet music, and the mistakes, none of which can be airbrushed out with editing software, is painful for me. And as I can no longer sight-read music other than the melody line, I have to sort of make up arrangements as I go along. But Wild’s arrangement of Porgy and Bess obsessed me, so I continued to practice six songs from Porgy, playing them without pausing with little transitional phrasing, recording them on the Sony. Because of upload limitations I had to divide one such practice session (although played continuously) into two digital files, and here they are, “warts and all,” the first including Summertime, My Man’s Gone Now, I Got Plenty O’Nuttin’, and the second including Bess You is My Woman Now, It Ain’t Necessarily So, and I Loves You Porgy.

As we live on a boat over the summer, I will be without my piano and any means of making improvements, other than studying some theory, until next fall. In fact, this blog will be brief or go silent for a while, as we will be in transit. Perhaps next season I will take the lessons I should have had decades before, become less reliant on the sustain pedal (something Gershwin criticized amateurs for when playing his compositions), and take time to practice scales, something I haven’t done since I was a kid. But it will be difficult breaking bad habits, so I will be looking to make small improvements and have no illusions about making major leaps.

I’ll conclude this entry with my studio recording of Gershwin’s Love is Here to Stay, the last song Gershwin ever wrote. He and Ira were working on Samuel Goldwyn’s film, The Goldwyn Follies in Hollywood even as his headaches were increasing to the point of his having to be admitted to the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on June 23, 1937. He died only a few weeks later. The range and volume of Gershwin’s work are staggering for such a short life; his brother’s lyrics say it all…

Love is Here to Stay

It's very clear
Our love is here to stay;
Not for a year
But ever and a day.

The radio and the telephone
And the movies that we know
May just be passing fancies,
And in time may go!

But, oh my dear,
Our love is here to stay.
Together we're
Going a long, long way

In time the Rockies may crumble,
Gibraltar may tumble,
They’re only made of clay,
But our love is here to stay.


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Fathers, Sons, Distance, and Memories

My older son Chris called today as well as my younger son Jonathan to wish me a happy Father’s Day. Nice to hear from them, but it was a reminder that life has become more complicated, more mobile and, for many, gone are the days of being able to get together for such occasions. Chris is in Worcester, Ma, 1,163 miles from here and Jonathan is visiting Shanghai, China, 8,195 distant miles (mileage courtesy of WolframAlpha, the “computational knowledge engine” – a useful site).

Their absence reminds me that when I was their age, we were able to visit my father as we lived only fifty miles apart. So, in addition to missing my sons, my thoughts are with my Dad who died some twenty-five years ago. I wish I could turn back time and tell him how important he was to me, in spite of our going our separate ways in life. There was always an expectation that I would join him in his photography business, which I did not. I wrote a piece about him soon after he died, sort of an apology in the form of an explanation. I posted that a couple of years ago but I include it below, with love, to my Dad…

Up Park Avenue we would speed to beat the lights from lower Manhattan in the small Ford station wagon with “Hagelstein Bros., Commercial Photographers since 1866” imprinted on its panels. The Queens Midtown Tunnel awaited us.

It is some summer in the late 1950s and, once again, I’m working for my father after another high school year. In the back of the wagon I share a small space with props, flood lamps, and background curtains. The hot, midtown air, washed by exhaust fumes and the smoke from my father’s perpetual burning cigarette, surround me.

My father’s brother and partner, my Uncle Phil, occupies the passenger’s seat. They have made this round trip, day-in and day-out since my father returned from WWII. Their discussions no longer center on the business, but they speak of the city, its problems, the Russians, and politics. I think of where my friends and I will cruise that evening in one of their cars, a 57’ Merc, probably Queens Blvd., winding up at Jahn’s next to the RKO on Lefferts Boulevard.

Over the years, as a summer employee, my father believed I was being groomed for the business, the fourth generation to carry it on. My Uncle was a bachelor and I was the only one with the name to follow the tradition. There were cousins, but none at the time had any interest in photography, so the obligation fell to me.

This was such an understood, implicit obligation for my future maturation, that nothing of a formal nature was needed to foster this direction. Simply, it was my job to learn the business from the bottom up, working first as a messenger on the NY City streets, delivering glossies to clients for salesmen’s samples and for the furniture show (the primary commercial product photographed by my father). Then I graduated to photographer’s assistant, adjusting lamp shades under the hot flood lamps so the seams would not show, and, then, finally to an assistant in the color lab, making prints, dodging shadows to hold overexposures of glass tables. Osmosis was to be my mentor.

At work I see my father, as the camera would reveal contrasts with different filters. These were normally invisible to me. At home he was a more contemplative, private person, crushed into submission by a troubled marriage. But I see him strolling down the halls of his business, smiling, extending his hand to a customer, kidding in his usual way, “How’s Biz?” he would say. His office overlooks the reception area and there he, my Uncle, and his two cousins would preside over lunch, a burger and coffee from the nearby luncheonette.

In spite of my obligation to learn the profession from the inside, I inveigled his support to go to college – with the understanding I would study business. By then I think I knew that this would be the first step to take me away from HIS business, a step, once taken, would not be taken back. The question was how to reveal this to him.

But as silently as I was expected to take over the business, my retreat was equally stealth. We both avoided the topic as I went to college and I continued to work there during the summers. Once I switched majors from business to the humanities, we both knew, but still, no discussion. This was territory neither he nor I wanted to visit at the time.

My reasons were clear to me. In the hallways of the studio he was larger than life but he was also provincial in his business thinking. He, his brother, and his cousins had developed an inbred view of the future of photography. Like Willie Loman, they had bet the future of their business on producing prints for salesmen, unconscious to the developing mass media and its impact on door-to-door sales. Entering the business would mean conflict with beliefs that were sacrosanct, a battle I would surely lose. So, I kept my silence and progressively moved away.

Why he never brought up the subject I will, now, never know. Ultimately, I married, and began a career in publishing, with an office, ironically, only three blocks from his studio. I still joined him for lunch occasionally, with his greeting me when I arrived, “So, How’s Biz?”

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