Ideoblog

Poetry in money

In the 12/8 New Yorker Rebecca Rothbaum reminds us of Robert Graves’ old saw that “just as there is no money in poetry, there is no poetry in money.” [I learn from the Spectator that Graves said that in a speech to the London School of Economics in 1963.]

Of course it's well known that there's no money in poetry. As proof, the Spectator article notes that the job of Poet Laureate pays £5,000 and a "butt of sack" a year (which actually isn't that bad, considering that a butt of sack is 108 gallons of sherry). 

This supposed incompatibility between poetry and money is one of the possible explanations I give for the treatment of business in film in my Wall Street and Vine.

But poets do have to eat.  In the New Yorker piece, Rothbaum discusses Katy Lederer, MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, who until recently worked at a hedge fund (until the publication of her recent poetry collection about money).

So, I wonder, what kind of a hedge fund person was this poet? Well, Lederer says she could see from her vantage point at the hedge fund that the bubble was about to burst:

It was in the air three years ago. Like, at work everyone knew. Even I could tell it was going to happen. I wondered, why would people trade if they knew the bubble would burst? That’s what the whole book is about.

Maybe bubbles officially burst when the poets find out about them.

Anyway, I beg to differ with the premise:  there is, in fact, a lot of poetry in money. To begin with, you can’t do poetry without money. To quote the above Spectator article:

Dorothy Rowe, psychologist and author of The Real Meaning of Money, thinks, by contrast, that there is a kind of poetry in money, because money ‘can allow us to express something that’s within us that we’ve never been able to express’. By contrast, people who are genuinely destitute ‘have to abandon or never acquire a certain amount of humanity; they are always just trying to stay alive so can’t consider other people. You have to be able to stop thinking about money in order to think about other people.

A productive society produces more and better poetry. Poets and other anti-capitalists should try to keep that in mind.

And there’s tragedy, a kind of poetry, in money. Rothbaum describes a Lederer poem, “Intimacy,” as

probably the first love poem to cite the nineteen-eighties junk-bond king Michael Milken” * * * Lederer said she views Milken as a “Gollum-like” figure. “He was a creative genius, the way that he packaged debt,” she said. “In finance, that makes you Mozart. Ultimately, however, that was also his downfall.”

But wasn’t Milken’s (or Skilling’s) downfall tragic? Like Oedipus, Macbeth or Icarus, his ambition challenged the regulatory gods, and he was brought down by his excessive pride, $550 million bonus and his Predator’s Ball. The parking violation was just the mechanism.

The story of the Milken types won’t likely be presented this way because in our society the money people are generally considered too trivial to be worthy of tragedy. The supposedly important people are thought to be the artists, journalists, novelists and screenwriters, though they perform on the stage that the capitalists built for them.

And, finally, poets have indeed literally found poetry in money.  I'll close with a couple of quotes from the Spectator article.

Money Money, the long green, cash, stash, rhino, jack or just plain dough. Chock it up, fork it over, shell it out. Watch it burn holes through pockets. To be made of it! To have it to burn! Greenbacks, double eagles, megabucks and Ginnie Maes. It greases the palm, feathers a nest, holds heads above water, makes both ends meet. Money breeds money. Gathering interest, compounding daily. Always in circulation. Money. You don’t know where it’s been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks. [Dana Goia]

Which leads to our topical closer, from Richard Armour: "That money talks I’ll not deny, I heard it once,It said ‘Goodbye’."

Kindle and the sociology of reading

[This post initiates a proposed weekly series on what I call “Sunday thoughts” -- that is, thoughts that are suitable for brains that are on idle. Please give me some feedback on whether I’m totally or just partially wasting my time.  Keep to yourself the comment that you can't distinguish these from my other posts.]

I’ve already mentioned that I’m reading on Kindle this summer, still liking it. Now I’m thinking about what broader social effects Kindle-type products might have if they catch on.

One thought was triggered by a book I’m now reading on Kindle: Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother (a great book, despite its dismissal by some critics who either don’t appreciate fine characterization or have decided to compensate for their wild praise of Haddon’s first book, Curious Incident).

A character in Haddon's book generally reads trashy novels at home. But when he’s reading in coffee shops, he takes along Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, not because he likes the book (he doesn’t like or even comprehend it) but because it makes a better impression on passers-by.

Can’t do that with a Kindle, which looks the same whatever you're reading. Of course you can always put an anonymous cover on a book, but most people don't take that extra step.

So I wonder if e-books become more popular whether sales of challenging or other public-worthy books will decline, while trashy or other private-worthy books become more popular. Or maybe they'll figure out a way to clothe the appliance with the cover of the book the user is currently reading, which would itself be a telling development.

One book for new law students

From Conglomerate comes the question, if I could recommend one book to prospective law students, what would it be? With so many possibilities, this would seem to be a hard question. But as with any question, it gets easier if you use filters to boil it down.  Here are my criteria of the book’s characteristics:

1. Expresses my philosophy of the role of law.

2. Accessible and engaging, so the students will actually read it.

3. Poses questions that the students can think about throughout their law school careers.

4. Takes a perspective that the students may not otherwise have or get in class.

5.  Addesses issues that are important to most practicing lawyers on a day to day basis.   

And the answer: R.H. Coase, The Firm, the Market and the Law – a collection of some of Coase’s best writings.

Entering students learn

--some humility about the role of law -- that it doesn’t always matter, and why it does when it does.

--the continuity between the law and market devices (i.e., the firm) that address similar problems.

--the surprising example of the lighthouse to consider whenever they are told we must have a government solution.

--to distrust “blackboard” theories in favor of learning how the world operates.

--what the Problem of Social Cost actually says.

I would suggest, though, that entering law students skip The Marginal Cost Controversy.

Humiliations

There seems to be a new game sprouting up – “ten things I’ve never done.”  Althouse, Taylor and Bainbridge have played it. 

The Althouse and Bainbridge results aren’t that remarkable, though I’m intrigued by Althouse’s never “used cocaine or heroin.”  I’m not sure what the rules are.  Is this like “never ate a cocker spaniel” or “never killed my aunt”?

I was much more interested in Taylor’s list, in which he confessed, among other things, that he’s never “been out of the Western Hemisphere,” “seen any of the Godfather films,” “been to New York City,” “read any of Ayn Rand’s novels,” or “taken calculus.”

Wow.  You beat me. 

This reminds me of a more interesting game that David Lodge wrote about in Changing Places, called "Humiliations," in which the players have to admit, truthfully, books they've never read. You get points for each other player who did read the book. There is a hilarious scene at a faculty dinner party in which a young literature professor is torn between his social climbing self, which wants to win the game, and his career preservation self, which doesn’t want to admit the sort of appalling ignorance that would gain a victory. The former self wins and he admits that he never read Hamlet, much to the detriment of his career.

This game could be played on the Web – and was, on Slate a few years ago, though it didn't seem the contestants were quite in the spirit of the game. 

12 books to read

Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek has a very useful reading list of the most influential books he has read. Of particular interest, one I hadn't seen:  I, Pencil.

The recommendation of James Buchanan's What Should Economists Do? reminds me of a speech I saw Buchanan give at George Mason in around 1992, several years after he won the Nobel Prize.  He was asked to address a roomful of federal judges on the subject of what advice he would give newly elected President Clinton.  The very distinguished group on the stage all gave very nice sounding and soporific advice. Buchanan stood up and said:  "Don't just do something. Stand there." Long pause.  He might have said something else, but I forgot it.

At lunch after the talks I sat with some of the judges and asked them what they thought.  The consensus was that all of them were wonderful except that guy Buchanan.  What kind of a nut was he?

This conversation left me with a lasting impression of the daunting task free market people have when talking to lawyers.

A curious (to me) omission from the list:  Coase's The Firm, the Market and the Law.

Politics and Prose

I have often wondered what the business world would look like if the anti-business types had their way. Now you can have a look with this W$J story about DC’s famous bookstore, Politics and Prose.

It seems the business practically became unraveled when the founders thought to turn it over to somebody who smacked of being a (gasp) “traditional businessman.”

The story reminds me of the Tom Hanks film, You’ve Got Mail, in which the big bookstore chain swallows the little bookstore. But that story had a happy ending, celebrating the “creative destruction” of modern business: the owner of the little bookstore was able to free herself from a business in which she had become imprisoned and move on to a better life.

The ideal world of the anti-business types is that of the pre-industrial 19th century partnership. Business people shackled to their firms, handed down through generations, and opportunities limited. It’s a great life for those lucky enough to be working at Politics and Prose. Let’s hope these people aren’t able to impose it on the rest of us.

Pens and the art of slowing down

I've long been interested in the interrelationship between modes and content of communication.  I guess it started with EB White's Charlotte's Web, in which the title spider has to spin a web to communicate.  Makes you careful about what you say.  Lately I've been reading Dan Simmons' Ilium, in which the little green men (LGM) die when they communicate, or something like that.

Now I've decided to put this into action by writing with a fountain pen.  For the uninitiated, this has a hard point and a reservoir or cartridge of ink that flows into the nib.

There are two advantages.  First, I haven't found a way to connect the pad that I write on to the Internet.  That's a good thing, since the Internet is one of the great time-wasting inventions of all time (witness this blog).

Second, and more relevant to this communication, you actually have to slow down to write, because the ink doesn't get to nib fast enough to race.  So you actually think about each word, sort of like Charlotte and the LGM. 

Of course I still do use a computer.  I haven't thought about submitting any handwritten manuscripts to publishers.  But I often wonder how much better a lot of what I read (and write) would be if it were instead spun.

Unincorporated Business Entities, 3d Edition

The new and expanded edition of my Unincorporated Business Entities casebook is now in the warehouse and up on the Lexis/Nexis website (and linked on the sidebar of the blog).  This is the "agency and partnership" book for those who prefer the 21st century to the 19th.  Actually, I prefer the 19th century, but my students tend to think that learning about the 21st century is more useful.

The teacher's manual has been completed and is awaiting printing in the next couple of weeks.  If you need it faster, let me know. 

Ron Reagan

Speaking of Bush-bashing as a betrayal of liberal discourse, unfortunately the fruit has fallen far from the tree, the latest evidence being Ron's juvenile tirade. Of course Ron is free to express his opinions no matter who is father is, even if he gets a podium only because of his father, and even if his tone has nothing of his father's class. But that doesn't stop me from wishing he'd just shut up.

The other irritating thing about this is the message in the email that preceded the link: "Now this Son of a Republican President I might have voted for:" No, buddy. You were screeching about Reagan as loudly as you (and his son) are now screeching about Bush.

Bush-bashing in books: Checkpoint

As anyone who has been conscious for the last few weeks knows, Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint is about a man named Jay who wants to murder George W. Bush. I have resisted this book, just as I have all of Baker's since his clever little debut, The Mezzanine. I concluded that Baker's main talent was getting himself noticed in literary salons, and have contented myself with confirmation of this in the reviews that I've read of his innumerable subsequent books.

But Baker now can be credited with provoking one of the more interesting book reviews I have read in a long time -- that by Leon Wieseltier in the Sunday NYT (registration required).

Mr. Wieseltier dispenses his opinion of the book in the second word of the review, which begins "This scummy little book. . . " The rest of the review is a comment on Bush-bashing. Here's an illustrative excerpt, quoting a conversation between Jay and Ben, whom the reviewer describes as "Baker's liberal":

The striking thing about Jay's analysis of the war -- that it is the consequence of George W. Bush's religiosity, and servility before American corporations, and alliance with neoconservatives who are ''not humble enough before the mystery of a foreign country'' -- is that it is not Jay's alone. The same account is familiar from newspapers and television shows and Web sites everywhere. In a sense, Baker has slandered the opposition to George W. Bush by representing it with a disordered mind bent on murder. In this season of ferocity, therefore, it is worth insisting that Bush-hatred is generally not a plot to kill the president. Yet the discussion of Bush-hatred, and of Baker's book, cannot be concluded with a polite absolution. For the virulence that calls itself critical thinking, the merry diabolization of other opinions and the other people who hold them, the confusion of rightness with righteousness, the preference for aspersion to argument, the view that the strongest statement is the truest statement -- these deformations of political discourse now thrive in the houses of liberalism too. The radicalism of the right has hectored into being a radicalism of the left. The Bush-loving mob is being met with a Bush-hating mob. Liberals are forgetting why liberals are not radicals. When Jay demands to know how Ben would feel if Bush were killed -- ''won't part of you think, He's got it coming to him? Huh?'' -- the most that center-left Ben can muster in the way of principle is this: ''I don't -- I'm not -- I can't predict how I would react if the president were actually shot,'' followed by some sensitive mutterings about ''the simple sight of any human being stilled.'' American liberalism, in sum, may be losing its head.

This is the sort of thing I've been trying to say about Bush-bashing, e.g., here.

Not that I agree with everything in the review -- Wieseltier talks about the "deranging influence of blogs." But, really, go read the whole thing.