satoriworks

20 Essential Albums: The Nymphs

2012-01-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

The Nymphs - The Nymphs

The only album by LA’s The Nymphs appeared in 1991, at the ascendance of grunge to the mainstream, when I was spending time playing in rock band and spending my evenings living an appropriately rock-influenced lifestyle. The Nymphs, though, weren't grunge, they were dirty glam. The sound is of a life lived large. A sound and a life that demands high volume. It was music to be played out of open car windows and the way to a night out.

Singer Inger Lorre’svoice sails above guitars that slide along both rough and glossy. The rhythms, even when playing straightahead, lay back, everything coming down right behind the beat. The song “Heaven” does exactly this. The second guitar slugs along while thelead’s notes fall down, and again Lorre’s voice has to cut through.

Unfortunately, TheNymphs never went on to make another album. And this one is relatively unknown. I would take another dozen albumslike this.

20 Essential Albums: Shabooh Shoobah

2012-01-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

Shabooh Shoobah - INXS

Named after the sound of the drum beat prevelant on the album, INXS’s Shabooh Shoobah contains a couple of the staples of 80s retro. Both “The One Thing” and “Don’t Change” remain great songs, no matter how they get overplayed today (and appreciated today by people who never would have listened to INXS in the 80s). They showcase the Michael Hutchence swagger, but the album’s deeper cuts reveal the band’s creativity.

The second track of an album is often the most representative of the character of the record. Here it is the case with “To Look at You.” The strong rhythm guitars steps aside to leave space for us to get inside, the drums stagger and shuffle, and Hutchence holds back on his strong voice until the chorus. And it is like this throughout the album. It forms a unique sound that I’ve never heard anyone imitate successfully.

The drums are a lot what makes this album great, but it is the voice of Michael Hutchence (and his swagger) that made INXS one of my favorites. My long hair in the 80s had a lot to do with Mick’s hair during the 1985 Listen Like Thieves era.

20 Essential Albums: The Head on the Door

2012-01-13T07:01:00.000-07:00

The Head on the Door - The Cure

Originating in the ‘70s and still going today, The Cure has had a long and varied career in alternative music. And no single album by the group is more representative of everything they have ever been than The Head on the Door. The pop hits are here, the darkness is here, and then there’s Robert Smith’s hair. Released in 1985, The Head on the Door came to me when I was 15 years old. It was easy to like to dance to songs like “Close to Me” and “In Between Days”, but it was the open, atmospheric melancholy of “Kyoto Song” and others that, while never really knowing what the song was about, reached inside. And then there’s “Sinking,” which perfectly captures the sort of depression that can strike someone at 15. When Robert Smith sings “I am slowing down / as the years go by / I am sinking,” over that perpetually descending bass line, you get the feeling that someone knows exactly how you feel.

This album prompted me to reach back through The Cure’s back catalog at the time, unearthing other pop treasures (Japanese Whispers) and true darkness (Pornography). Then 1986 brought the compilation Standing on the Beach and its companion b-side compilation, followed by 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (a close runner-up for this list), and The Cure was solidified as one of my favorite bands.

20 Essential Albums: Introduction

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

There are great albums. There are influential albums. There are also albums that make us who we are. These are the albums we wouldn’t give up, that we continue to play, and that hold up over the years. These albums that, when heard in the right mood, one can recall a pivotal event or some small memory that is emblematic of the time in which it came into your life.

These are my essential albums. Or at least twenty of them. It is no easy task, to identify just the twenty albums that have made the difference. And how do I limit it to one album by artist over the whole list? Some titles on this list barely won out over rival albums by the same artist.

This is my list. From the albums listened to on weathered tape players carried around to a teenager or even albums played off vinyl by my mother when I was a child, to records discovered in my late twenties, when one stops expecting to be surprised by music anymore. Certainly there have been other albums from the last decade that are often in my rotation, but they have yet to stand the test of time.

These albums are the ones that have made all the difference to me. These are the albums that both reflect and made me who I am.

Over the next several weeks, I will post about each of them, starting with....

My Year in Reading: 2011

2012-01-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

Since Ididn't finish the book I’m reading last weekend, I have read 21 books in2011. Not a bad count considering the pace at which I read.

Lookingback over the year, I am amazed at the number of forgettable books I read.Maybe it’s because I didn’t immediately sit down and record my impression ofevery book, or just because the book left no impression, but there are a numberbooks of which I cannot even remember the plot. Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own and Lorrie Moore’s Like Life both fall into this category.I would have expected to like and find inspiration in both, yet nothingremains. Then there are the pairs of books I read by William Faulkner (Sanctuary and Absalom Absalom!) and Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing and Cities of the Plain). I don’t doubt the quality of any of these novels, but over timethe stories conflate and each pair becomes a muddle.

Thebooks I read in 2011 are more notable for the disappointments, led in sequenceand importance by Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.The book was so highly lauded, and I was already a fan of The Corrections, so how was I not to like this book? The lack of acoherent arc to the novel is really what did it in. It can be as smart, clever,incisive, clairvoyant as possible and still fall down as a book if you can’tconvince me that I need to read the next page.

ButFreedom wasn’t the only let down. Addto it Jennifer Egan’s The Keep(reminiscent of Stephen King, but too childish and novel for its own good),David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (retellingthe same story in different ways and with different facts isn’t exploration--it’sconfusion), and Richard Yates’s Disturbing the Peace (like John Cheever at his most matter of fact and leastinsightful).

Andthen there were the surprises. Jane Eyreproved to be much better than expected. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth proved to me that a book can be a dramaticallydifferent setting and culture than my own (and even my own interests) and stillbe a fantastic book to read. Indignationproved that, despite the failings of Everymanand The Humbling, and other recentnovels, Philip Roth still has it in him to write a great novel. And JohnCheever’s Bullet Park, thought it wasas dull at times as Cheever can be, showed the impact of a sudden, simpleaction and the well-laid phrase. It has the best final paragraph that I haveever seen.

Thebest books I may have read this year were two short story collections that didn’tsurprise as a whole form. The Stories ofJohn Cheever and What We Talk AboutWhen We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver both revealed everything we thinkof as typical of each author. Some stories come out as caricature, like peopletrying to write the Cheever or Carver story. At the same time, there are storiesin each that prove the author to be the master we expect.

Despitethe masters on the list, it was an unremarkable year of reading. It doesinspire a couple of new year’s resolutions. First, to find better books to readin the new year. And the second, to write down at least some thing about each bookI read. It’s the least I can do.

The full list:

Freedom- Jonathan Franzen
Like Life - Lorrie Moore
Zombie - Joyce Carol Oates
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Sanctuary - William Faulkner
Bullet Park - John Cheever
An Invisible Sign of My Own - Aimee Bender
The Keep - Jennifer Egan
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Disturbing the Peace - Richard Yates
Legend of a Suicide - David Vann
Black Water - Joyce Carol Oates
Indignation - Philip Roth
Dusk - James Salter
Absalom Absalom! - William Faulkner
Disturbing the Peace - Richard Yates
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Stories - John Cheever
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
Women With Men - Richard Ford
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
Cold Spring Harbor - Richard Yates

The Usual Year-End Thing

2012-01-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

I suppose the year’s end requiressome sort of reflection. There can be value in looking back, but it seems likewe look back for things to regret, mistakes made, things we’d like to do betterin the coming year. This doesn't seem to me like a fruitful exercise.

I know that there is a long listof failures, objectives unfulfilled. But if I’ve learned anything in the lastyear, it is not to set my sights too high. Trying to achieve too much is boundto lead to failure. Overachiever or not, my expectations for myself need to bereasonable.

In thinking about the new year,and resolutions for it, I know that I need to de-task. I need to get somethings off my to-do list. And not by getting them done. By never putting themthere in the first place. Starting with the stacks of unread magazines. I willnot be renewing any magazine subscriptions in 2012. Sorry New Yorker. Sorry BusinessWeek and Harvard Business Review. My backlog is enough to carry me a year ormore without a new edition appearing in my mailbox.

Another objective must be tofocus. At any given time I have many projects in the works. I make plans to dothis little bit on this project, another little bit of another, filling myspare hours with this variety of tasks with completion expected by the end ofthe week. This might just be unreasonable. It just leaves me with a long listof partially finished or unfinished and neglected objectives. Pick the nextimportant thing on the list of things to do (let’s keep calling themobjectives) and see it through until it’s done. I am more productive when I’mallowed to obsess over one thing instead of multitasking.

This, though, applies toeverything but writing. I have found that I work better in short bursts. If Isit down, writing a first draft, for much longer than an hour, I find I beginrushing to the next sign post, the next major event. When I work for shortperiods, I am allowed to keep my creativity focused on what is before me. In anextended period, I start trying to look further down the road, and rush to getthere.

Without the looking back andbeating myself up, I’ve managed to make some resolutions. Now to stick tothem--and not beat myself up if I don’t.

I Picture

2011-12-29T18:42:00.000-07:00

I picture a smallapartment, in a hundred-year-old building, with architectural features they wouldn't bother with today. Arches and the like. One bedroom. The walls thickwith paint. A smell that can’t be eliminated or replicated. And it gothollower, emptier toward the end. It wasn't just the stuff she sold.Everything, the stuff, was useless, pointless, insignificant. It was, then,just her and those walls. And the bottle.

She wasn’tworking. Couldn’t. A friend, a former lover, was paying the rent now. Thethings she sold paid for the booze and boxes of organic rice. And then therewas no point in the rice. All she needed was the bottle and a place to drink italone.

She would havefits of energy that sent her out into the streets. At first it wasinvigorating, inspiring, all that life. It quickly became too much. Shestumbled. The sights, the sounds, the people swam around her. Scared that she’dhave to hide in an alcove, lying on the concrete until it passed, somethingpassed, she’d make her way back to the apartment, those soft walls, her hollowhome.

And then she didn’tgo out anymore. She didn’t get up anymore. Her body gave up, just as she had.

I picture a sunnysummer morning, the wind tossing the boat as it idles. The boat’s passengers,including the rented captain, stand with their legs apart for balance. Hermother cannot pour the ashes. She can barely see through her tears, but atleast her sobbing has subsided.

The others aresurprisingly sad. They think of how they thought they knew her, but they didn’t.They think about how the rest of the day would feel after starting it this way.They want to think that she is somewhere better, somewhere she can be asbeautiful as she was. Somewhere she is rewarded for all of her goodness.

The former loverpours the ashes slowly and the others toss sunflowers that float, dip, anddive, in the water. They hoped that she was on to something better. They wonderedwhy her mother was the only one here to have known her more than five years.Would it be like this for them? Where were the other lovers? Everyone else? Whywas she this alone? Would they be this alone? Could they still be as beautiful,as loved as she was. As loving as she was. She was.

I picture the oldlover, her proclaimed first love, a half a country away. He doesn't know. Hestill thinks of her fondly, thinks of her ‘out there’, living her life. He issure that someday their paths will cross again. He thinks that there connectionis strong, though they haven’t spoke in years. Her influence still remains overhim. The memories of their volatile years together, vital, formative years, arestill strong.

He loves another.His life is good, comfortable, complete. And when he thinks of her, he has noidea what has become of her. He has no idea that a part of him has died.

(for Lo)

The Meaning of My Library

2011-11-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

I have never counted the books in my personal library. Indeed, the total figure grew within the last few weeks after the library's book sale. I'm nervous, though, that the number of unread outnumber the read.

Maybe this isn't all bad. If I had read them all, where would be the fun of browsing my library for the next book to read? An argument could be made for disposing of all books already read. Save those one might want to return to for reference.

A personal library, though, is so much more than a grouping of books either read or unread. The books are there to tell the observer something about the library's owner. Even if that observer is the owner. I don't get many observers down to my basement office where most of my library is confined, but I still enjoy looking over my books. The various titles, the colored spines, remind me not only of the stories within, but also of the person I was at the time. Various bits of my collection remind me of who I was an who I think I am.

Not my library. You can tell by the Ken Follett and the Janet Evanovich.

To see on my shelf Updike's The Afterlife, I remember the day of waiting for jury duty. To see Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, I'm reminded of two distinct points in my life when I read the novel. The first time makes me recall an early morning after a late night, drinking coffee downtown watching the business world start up its day. The second time, I was well ensconced in that business world. Or McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, devoured while laying on the couch of my current home.

When visiting someone's house, I am drawn to the books on their shelves. Yes, I am judging them by what they've chosen to put on display. The books there are meant to be a representation of the owner. And if there is a disregard for which books are on the shelves for public display, that tells me something (disappointing) too.

In an article, "Shelf Life", in last week's New Yorker, James Wood explores the meaning and meaninglessness of our libraries. He sums up the sentiment thus:

Libraries are always paradoxical: they are as personal as the collector, and at the same time are an ideal statement of knowledge that is impersonal, because it is universal, abstract, and so much larger than an individual life.

The books on my shelf mean something to me not only because they represent me to myself, but because they represent me to the observer as well. And as personal as the identity that is created can be, it is in the universal that it finds meaning. But, as Wood asks,"Isn't a private library simply a universal legacy pretending to be an individual one?"

A library is a showcase and I've known more than one person who has used bookshelves to demonstrate superiority. Some would likely say I'm guilty of the same. The trashy novels are relegated to a bookshelf in the guest room.

Where, though, does this universality go when all of these titles are contained in a small piece of electronic hardware? Do I care about the representation they form? I would say they mean significantly less.

When books are commoditized, stripped of their physical presence, their abstract value is reduced. They have no presence. They are experiential only. We have the pleasure of reading and the meaning found in the words, but those e-ink letters don't represent me in the same way a book, those same words on paper and bound between covers, does. The electronic list of titles, browsed with a push of a button, does not please me, does not force recall of memories and desire, as much as does a simple glance at my shelves.

The materialism of it is something that probably gives many book owners/collectors worry. There are many books on my shelves that I will never open again. But still they are there to tell me something. They are there, though, to give me pleasure, to help me recall the stories within and the stories of my own life when I read the book. And it real is this pleasure that matters. It is this pleasure that gives my library meaning.

Book Review: Jane Eyre

2011-09-27T17:54:00.000-06:00

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

I had alwayslumped Jane Eyre in with the books of Jane Austen. These are important works inthe canon of English-language literature, but I didn’t figure that I would findtoo much appealing about them. I would get to them at some point. With a freeversion of this book for my Kindle, I finally decided it was time.

I chose Jane Eyreprimarily because of the previews I’d seen for the movie version released thisyear. It looked much more dramatic than I would’ve imagined. And I wasimpressed with the book right away. It felt very comfortable, as if I’d readthese pages before. The tale of an orphan left to live with a family thattreats her horribly then sends her away to a boarding school where she is alsotreated horribly before becoming a governess. I could see Henry James and Anna Kavan in the set up. When, in the firstsection, Jane is locked up in the red room and believes she is visited by thehome’s deceased master, the story takes on a bit of added depth and mystery. Italso tells us that Jane is something different. She is susceptible to certainflourishes. And when she finally rails at her mistress before being sent away,we get a glimpse of the will--often irrational--that will guide her later inthe novel.

The language ofthe novel is both difficult and beautiful. While I enjoy the opportunity to ingestsyntax that is twisted, words in odd order, atypical word choice, it isdifficult to know if this is the work of the age of the novel or the work ofthe author. I can also imagine that the language could also be a hindrance forsomeone attempting the novel who is without an appreciation of the particulartexture of the text.

When the romancefinally arrives in the novel, we are well prepared for the importance Janeplaces on everything. She is not one to feel an emotion only slightly. But atthe novel’s most dramatic moments, she confounds. She does not act as expected.And while this provides purposeful twists, it can frustrate the reader. I foundmyself speaking out loud to Jane at these moments, shouting the direction sheobviously needs.

The novel also suffersfrom--like many novels--an Act IV lag. She must go through some experiencesthat should prepare her for the novel’s conclusion. It is, though, a divergencefrom the central plot line. New characters appear, a new existence established.And all I wanted was to return to the course we were on previously.

I will not offerhere any social critique. I don’t think I could properly determine what Bronteis saying about the convention of marriage, or the role of women, or even thedistinction of the social classes. She is certainly examining these issues,revealing them, but I can’t say that she was looking to shatter convention or evenmake a real statement about these issues.

Jane Eyre iscompelling in unexpected ways, and worth recommending to those whom think theywouldn’t have an interest.

An Economic Worse-Case Scenario

2011-07-20T09:30:00.000-06:00

The other day, a man asked me where I thought the economy was heading. I'd made the mistake of mentioning that I work in finance (it's easier than launching into the long list of what I really do). This man, this stranger, began speaking to me as I sat on one of my writing mornings, despite the earbuds in my ears, the moving pen. He said he was surprised to see someone writing by hand in a journal. "A diary", he called it. So, this bit of small talk led suddenly to the economy. My answer for him? I told him I'm more frightened now than I was six months ago.

I can easily envision a future where things get worse for most Americans, where wealth is harder to attain for most people. Jobs don't come back. At least until workers are so desperate for income that they're willing to accept pay at nearly the same depressed levels as Mexico or Vietnam. Prices for staples continue to rise, squeezing out spending for discretionary items. Government slashes so-called entitlement programs, all sorts of public assistance. State and local governments are in trouble. Basic services disappear. I can envision towns that can't fix roads, that can't ensure public safety. Lawlessness and decay. The middle class disappears, with some ascending to the rich classes and the others falling behind. The housing situation only gets worse. The suburbs drain of life. I can see things getting difficult. (There's a story somewhere in this worse-case scenario.)

The reason for his scenario is politics. All of this nonsensical grandstanding. No one has the will to take a position unless it is opposition to the other side. Real work needs to be done. But any attempt to speed up a flagging recovery has devolved into a fight over the deficit and the debt ceiling. This argument has only made things worse. Everything things that they benefit from holding some righteous position, forgetting that the real work of politics is the crafting of compromise. If we wanted the most radical to govern we would let everything be decided by popular vote.

This man put the whole stalled recovery down to the Administration's energy policy. He was in energy. While he might benefit, it's not like opening up development--drilling--would lower fuel prices or make companies feel like spending money or hiring. And it isn't likely to make the consumer feel like suddenly spending money. He went on to use the words "environmentalists" and "socialism." It was time for me to leave.

The truth is that I'm frightened. I feel like squirrelling away every penny. I don't know that things are likely to turn negative again, but I think that it's more likely today. And in my mind I'm picturing dusty streets, dead grass and hollow, empty buildings.

Keeping the Pen on the Paper

2011-07-03T10:04:00.000-06:00

Sometimes the writing comes easily. Most of the time, in fact. With the pen in my hand, the facts and details seem to come right out of the ink. Not always the right word, but that's a discussion for another time. And then there are times when you need a particular scene, to serve a particular purpose.

Right now, I need a fight scene between my protagonists. This is late in the novel and so far we've seen how they are disconnected from each other, off in their individual struggles. But we haven't seen them really clash, not in a significant way. I need to show that they may be close to the end of their marriage than they believed when the novel began.

What, then, do they argue about? What would be so severe that it might show that maybe they shouldn't really be together? I don't want to go so far as to justify their later actions with this blow out. But it can't just be an argument about the house or money. It needs to demonstrate that Darren doubts Nicole's integrity.

I would like it to center around their son, Hunter. They both spend a surprising amount of time not thinking about the boy through the course of this thing. I'd like to show that they do take his upbringing seriously. And somehow I need to get around to the notion of his doubt of her.

Here, though, I should have faith in the writing. Over-thinking, over-planning, can debilitate. A vague notion of where I'm going and a vague objective should be all I need. Put the pen to the paper and see where it goes.

Writing a Philosophical Novel

2011-06-24T16:09:00.000-06:00

I hadn't realized until this week that I am writing a philosophical novel. I thought of it as contemplative, meditative, psychological. A wandering quest novel. But, more than any of these, I believe now it is philosophical. Without a doubt, morality is at the center of the novel. Darren and Nicole are both having existential crises, but the book's root is in the question of morals.

Darren believes he has always had a strong moral sense. Some of this may be his nature, but in his adult life it comes out of his father's actions. Of course, one doesn't have morality without responsibility and guilt. Indeed, this is a key question. How does one live with a subjective morality without the guilt? He doesn't understand how his friend can commit what he sees as an immoral act with its accompanying guilt. The lines blur for Darren. What is wrong becomes more subjective. His experiment in the end is to see if he can live with the guilt of his actions. If guilt is part of the immoral act. He is held frozen by the prospect of the freedoms provided when guilt is absent. If he can commit the immoral act, the faithless act, without being held captive by his own guilt, then his future opens up. His morality, his sense of responsibility has locked him into his course in life. One should question if he can return, not only to his wife, but to his work as well. His work in law, in the area of contracts in particular, is rooted in his sense of moral justice. With that center gone, his work will lack meaning.

There is also the question of religion in the novel. Its blows within the text are glancing (and more of a concern for Nicole than Darren), but one cannot discuss morality without at least the undiscussed notion of Christianity. That Darren and Nicole are not religious, are lacking faith, opens them up to the moral questioning we witness. Not that faith, by itself, would wipe away their doubts about the righteousness in morality. But maybe some of Nicole's despair is 'the sickness unto death'.

Nihilism, I think, is also at play in the novel. Darren encounters people along the way who reject the standards by which we live, judge. He sees this as narcissism. An excuse to live by one's independent standards in rejection of one's inherent moral responsibility to others. This moral order is also part of his foundation, and in the end this might be more of a determining factor for him than any sort of inherent right or wrong.

I don't know that I can see Nicole's struggles in the same terms. She lost her notion of morality in her youth. Her feelings toward Darren are not guided by morals. She does not wonder whether her actions are right or wrong. Things for Nicole are more personal, less abstract. More existential and metaphysical. She does have trouble in her perception of the world. She seems to know that she sees the world differently, experiences the world differently. She feels its imposition. This part of what separates her from those around her. This difference.

But her real problem is the sort of void she feels within. There is a hole that, in her twenties, she seeks to fill with drugs and sex, experience. Later she chooses marriage and child-rearing to fill the void. And we come across her she is again realizing her dissatisfaction. Her thinking of life alone is not the end. It is not what she's after. Its a sort of displacement. A way of trying to fill the void with fantasy, another life. The internet itself is part of this alternate existence. It has not taken over her real life. Her cleaning is a way to constantly order her life, seeking to control and contain it. As much as possible. But life is an imposition. The outside world, the suburban city blocks, even the houses and lawns of the neighborhood, are part of an externally imposed order. What philosophical school of thought all of this falls under, I'm not sure.

Of course, some of my favorite novels are philosophical novels. I didn't set out to write one, though. And I certainly don't think I'm trying to forward some sort of treatise. The realization, though, has given me another way to look at what is happening within the pages of text.

Shiverfix: Part II

2011-06-18T13:00:00.000-06:00

The Swoon thing was a necessary excursion and it took some time afterward before David and I were playing together again.

Shiverfix in leather, 1997

In 1997, we were reworking old songs, recording demos, and trying to find musicians to fill the lineup. I started playing the guitar full time and we recruited another bassist, Aaron. We recorded with the drum machine. We tried out drummers. There was one who seemed to get what we were doing and we thought it might work out. But then he never came back for his drums. We finally had to call him and threaten to throw them out before he picked them up.

Here's how "Shattered" sounded in 1997:

After some time without progress, Aaron also never came back.

Grace finally came to the newly-dubbed Shiverfix in 1999 in the name of Travis, a loud and loose drummer. He was what we’d looked for for years, quickly learning and improving on the programmed drums, freeing us up to jam, practice harder, and write new songs.

Reworking lyrics in our (unheated) rehearsal space, 1999

As much as David and I wanted to be in control of the music, to direct the sound of the band, neither of us really wanted to sit down and program drums for a new song. With a drummer in tune to what we were after, songs came together, without that programming step. We were able to play through again and again tricky changes, to test out extending or shortening bits, or otherwise change things up.

The rooftop studio

With a live drummer we were determined to lay down some definitive recordings of the songs in the Shiverfix library dating nearly all the way back to its inception. In a rooftop rehearsal space north of Coors Field, brick walls dampened with blankets and quilts, space heaters tripping the breaker, we recorded a set of the old songs under the title The Hardest Trick and another set of new songs called Such is Such and Such.

Here's "Killing Me" from "The Hardest Trick":

From "Such is Such and Such", this is "Miss You Liar":

It was in the late summer of 2001, with another recruited bassist, that Shiverfix finally began to play live. Over ten years since that first disaster of a show, David and I were finally out there, doing our thing, playing Lion’s Lair, Seven South, and even the Iliff Park Saloon. We had songs played on Radio 1190. We did shows with The Lavellas, Sickness, and others.

Shiverfix, live at SevenSouth, 2001

We were not the same people we had been in the early nineties. We were no longer reckless and young. We were adults trying to live adult lives. Our tolerance for late nights was limited. As it was for bandmates with constant excuses.

Sometime the next year, not everyone was making it to rehearsal as planned and Shiverfix stumbled and fell for the last time. We had been getting better, our songwriting maturing. I was bringing in songs I’d written and played acoustically and David layered on heavier guitar, dreamy guitar maybe. We were enjoying what we were doing.

Here's a rehearsal recording as we worked out a new song, "Loaner":

Maybe we never should have stopped. Even if it meant we were on our own again, doing it all ourselves. Maybe we should have kept writing the music we wanted to listen to.

We played together again in a band called Vellocet, with me returning to bass, in 2004-2005. But it wasn’t the same. We wrote well together, but with a different singer, another songwriter, it just wasn’t Shiverfix.

Still, I think about getting the band back together, of working with David on new songs. My mind wanders with thoughts of how we might do this or that, what David would bring to one of my songs, how we would work out a tricky transition. Now that we don’t even have to think about “making it” and the drum machine isn’t an impediment to making good music, maybe it would be worth it to try again.

Shiverfix: Part I

2011-06-10T13:16:00.003-06:00

In the end Shiverfix was my band. Through all of the others, this was where my heart was.

It began as far back as 1988 or '89, when my collaborator and best friend David Bliss and I recorded a couple of songs in a small apartment with any one around who was available to play an instrument. David had been taking guitar lessons, blues-oriented, in-the box stuff, while I'd been writing some poetry and imagined becoming a singer, a frontman in the vein of Michael Hutchence or Jim Morrison. We weren't after a certain style, didn't have any real goals. We had our influences (The Cure, Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, etc.) and we hoped they would find their way into the music.

From those first two songs, horrible-sounding songs, recorded in an apartment in Aurora, Colorado, we went to other apartments to record more songs. The drum machine always ticking away, unwavering, in each. Tryin the whole time to recruit our friends into playing with us. Even if they had no muscial experience. This paid off when Lori joined us to play bass.

Unloading gear in the alley at 15th and Blake

By 1990, we were rehearsing in a warehouse at 15th and Blake in Denver, back when the area was full of decrepit buildings and viaducts. The warehouse had been an old sporting goods store and some other sort of retailer before that, and it served as the transient home to an eclectic group of musicians, artists, and other outcasts. Under the name Satori, our rehearsals, with the addition of Becky as our drummer, often seen smacking the snare with a stick in one hand and taking a pull on a cigarette with the other, took place in a large open area. People would walk through, stop for a while to watch, move on. It was like playing in a half-lit store, while people milled about. Except elsewhere in the place people were doing drugs, watching TV, or screwing. It wasn't always conducive to experimentation, to the open innovation that a group of nervous, still-learning, musicians needed. It also forced any personal or personnel issues onto display.

How the warehouse at 15th and Blake appears today (via Google Street View)

The viaduct across the street, how it appeared in 1987 (via denverphotoarchives.com)

Satori played one live gig at the warehouse before the residents got evicted for having open fires during a show. I was twenty, frightened, and lousy. The band before us had broken a hole in the makeshift stage which I nearly fell in. The drums were on a riser behind us, spearated by a partition that more or less prevented them from being heard. Not the best first show. And then Satori was done. Tensions had been high, and without a place to rehearse, the band dissolved.

Here's a raw demo recorded then of a song called "Shattered":

Of course we couldn't stay apart for long and soon, with Becky replaced by the drum machine, we went back to recording in apartments. We wrote better songs, songs we were proud of, and tried out drummers. Many of the songs from this period would become staples for David and I through the years. Eventually, a mmove to Seattle was debated. This was 1991. Everything good was coming out of Seattle. David moved. Lori left to join St. Lucy Altarpiece. I did nothing. Until David moved back to Denver.

Here's a song from that era,"History's Pedestal":

By the end of '92, David and I found brothers John and Guido to play bass and drums and went by the name Scratch. It came from too much time spent at Calvin’s playing pool. We were certainly after something more rock and raw, something that felt like the late nights and the abandon with which we were living then. Because we worked evenings and stayed out late, rehearsals were usually held mornings in the basement of a house at 6th and Sheridan. The tales of the previous night’s exploits were often too much for the good Catholic brothers.

A Scratch-era version of "Flower Dress":

The gigs didn’t come. Despite what we thought were good songs, a good amount of creativity, nothing panned out. David and I were really more interested in living a rock and roll lifestyle than doing the hard work required to get gigs and really make a go of it.

Eventually, one of the brothers got someone pregnant and Scratch came to an end. Then it was just me and David, and that damn drum machine again.

We moved into an old storefront at the corner of 5th and Santa Fe on Cinqo de Mayo 1993. For years we had struggled finding a place to play. You couldn’t have a drummer if you didn’t have a place to put him. You can get away with recording guitars and bass at low volumes in apartments, but the volumes necessary to play with a drummer required dedicated space. Still, though, drummers were hard to come by. I played bass on some recordings, but still we didn’t get anywhere.

In the fall of that year I bumped into two members of the then defunct St. Lucy Altarpiece on the bus. In just a few minutes’ conversation it was agreed that I would come over to play bass with them, to see if I would play in a new band they were putting together. The level of frustration with the lack of progress with the band was high. The decision to leave and join Swoon was easy.

In some ways, David and I cared about the music more than we cared about “making it.” And that was what was so frustrating. To put so much emotion and care into the music and know what we were the only ones enjoying it was demoralizing. To play in a new band, to have a secondary position, was liberating. I could do something different. I could be creative. I could finally play some live shows.

Until Swoon gave me the boot in early 1995.

Shiverfix: Part II coming next week.

Revising Is Less Fun Than Writing

2011-05-27T19:30:00.000-06:00

I get the importance of revision and I enjoy the shaping and reshaping, the correcting and embellishing. In no way, though, is it as fun as pure writing, as sitting down at the blank page and letting the writing come.

This week, during my revision work on Another Blade of Grass, I need to add a scene. I needed to dip back into Darren adolescence to lay the ground work for particular attitudes he portrays in the novel's present. And as I began writing, the world around me disappeared and I was sucked in. The words came. I discovered new things. Darren's eyes are hazel. I didn't know that before this week.

It happened again when I wrote an additional scene for one of Nicole's chapters. I needed to go back and establish the strength of her first love. We needed to see them in a way that was more detailed, more illustrative than just seeing her thinking about or remembering how she felt. Then, in creating that scene, winter outside, the two of them holed up in their small apartment devouring poetry, the right words came. Without real conscious effort came the terms to describe the strength of that love and why it still has an effect on her. This probably never would have happened if I were just scrawling with my blue pen in the manuscript's margins. It came from writing, from making my way down the blank page.

It is the creative process, the "creation", that makes me feel like myself. Revising, by itself, leaves me feeling out of sorts. Revision is simply not as fun as pure writing. I have much more of it to do, though. As long as I can mix in this sort of blank-page writing, it will seem less like work.

What Happens When

2011-05-23T21:36:00.000-06:00

This morning, as I was leaving for work, giving everyone a kiss, my four-year-old boy was in his usual spot. My spot in the bed. Curious George on the TV. I kissed him hard on the forehead, shook his little torso with my hand, and told him to have a good day. I had turned and was headed out of the room when he spoke.

"Daddy, what happens when you wipe away kisses?"

I looked at him and smiled. "They still count," I said.

He smiled.

I go back to him, kiss him on the side of his head. Not too wet this time.

His smile grows.

Rejection Collection Catch-Up

2011-05-20T21:05:00.000-06:00

It's bad enough finding that self-addressed envelope in the mailbox, but now with electronic submissions, I get to be rejected by email too. They keep coming and coming. It means I have to find new markets and toss the stories back out into the world. And now I'll share them with you. Let you share in my rejection. Take some of the sting away.

The first of this group is from the Sewanee Review, rejecting my story "Resting" back in February. I like the third-person reference to the editor here, pretending that he read it and the lackey is only sending you the rejection slip.

Alaska Quarterly Review adds a personal touch by at least touching pen to paper and saying "many thanks" in this rejection of "This Is What He Does" from February.

Extra credit goes to the Georgia Review for using colored paper in the above rejection for "A White Farmhouse" in April.

Apparently my story "Riverside" didn't suit the needs of The Chattahoochee Review, according to this rejection sent in March of this year. But I will feel free to submit again in the future.

I wonder here if the push for me to purchase a subscription, or at least back issues, is to tell me that my story "Deeann" was in no way right for Apalachee Review.

And then the electronic ones. Fugue emailed this nice, simple rejection of "Those Afternoons" back in February.

In March, Indiana Review rejected "Coyote in the Valley" and sent this kind email.

And finally, I received this notice of rejection from Sycamore Review in April for "Mechanisms."

In some way, the electronic rejections seem more kind. You can at least imagine someone sat down, typed this out, and hit send. It might not be true, but the rejection mill is less obvious than when they come as heavily copied, hapazardly cut slips of paper stuffed back into my own envelope.

But now, I have to get myself together and package up another bunch of submissions and get them out the door. And try not to take it all personally, right?

About

2011-05-06T08:31:00.001-06:00

I am a writer.

Effectively unpublished. An MFA from Colorado State University. Working on a novel, trying to get an agent interested in another. Trying to find homes for a dozen or so short stories. Published only in my undergrad journal. Plus a piece of journalism in a trade magazine. Trying to write everyday.

I am a professional.

Doing financial planning and analysis. Analyzing results, putting together forecasts. What happened and what’s going to happen. An MBA from the University of Colorado. I read the WSJ, Business Week, Harvard Business Review. I actually care about this stuff. I am a career man, trying to do my best, trying to get ahead.

I am a father.

Three beautiful kids, a loving wife. Want to do my best by them. Offer them all I can. It’s exhausting. Time and energy consuming. Leaving time for little else.

I used to be a musician.

Not so much anymore. Played in bands. Fronted bands. Even played in coffeehouses, just me and my guitar. Not a lot of time of time for it these days. Pick up the guitar once in a while. Think of writing and recording again.

satoriworks is about all of this.

Since 2004. Blogging without focus. From writing and books to business and economics. Personal book reviews. Updates on current writing projects and the rejections slips flowing back in. And it is about doing all of this. Trying to be all of this.

Goon Squad Wins Pulitzer

2011-04-25T13:00:00.000-06:00

Last week, Jennifer Egan won the 2011 fiction Pulitzer for A Visit from the Goon Squad. Does this mean I should quit bad-mouthing her second novel Look at Me? Seriously, I didn't like it. But she has received quite a lot of praise for her novel The Keep as well as Goon Squad. The Keep is in my reading queue currently (actually, the audiobook is my exercising MP3 player, but it isn't getting a lot of use these days). So, I'd better add another one to my list.

I will definitely have to read Goon Squad, but it got me thinking about what other Pulitzer winners I have yet to read. Below is the list of fiction winners since 1990--the ones in bold I have actually read:

2010 - The Tinkers by Paul Harding
2009 - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
2008 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
2007 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2006 - March by Geraldine Brooks
2005 - Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2004 - The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2003 - Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2002 - Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2001 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
2000 - Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
1999 - The Hours by Michael Cunningham
1998 - American Pastoral by Philip Roth
1997 - Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
1996 - Independence Day by Richard Ford
1995 - The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
1994 - The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
1993 - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
1992 - A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1991 - Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
1990 - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos

Just six in the last twenty years. I'd better get reading.

Poetry Is Good For Business

2011-04-18T11:59:00.000-06:00

In Monday's Wall Street Journal, Baton Rouge Advocate columnist Danny Heitman makes the case for poetry in today's business world. He writes,

Although the brevity of Twitter and fleeting attention spans have been widely bemoaned by business professionals who are trying to get their points across, poets throughout the ages have routinely confronted the challenge of saying a lot—and saying it memorably—in small spaces. Read John Keats, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, and learn how it's done.

I remember learning the biography of Stevens as a working undergraduate and taking heart that someone could be both a poet and a professional. That the two sides could not only coexist but complement. But poetry isn't only good for teaching people to write briefly and with purpose. People need the imagery and abstraction of poetry as well. They need new ways of seeing things, of understanding the impression the world makes on them, despite all of the noise of the day's activities. A little poetry is good for everyone.

Electronic Guilt

2011-04-13T19:20:00.005-06:00

I feel so guilty. My poor neglected network. My month’s old Facebook status. Or my disturbingly irrelevant twitter update. And that aging blog, taunting me like a blank page. And then there’s the reading. Newsletters, blogs, my overloaded instapaper account. All of things I am missing. All of the things I am getting wrong. I know. Believe me, I’ve bookmarked or saved all of those articles on how to leverage a network, to build an online community. And I neglect it all.

It’s not as if not an expressive sort. I have plenty to say and think that most of it is worth being heard. It’s just that it all overwhelms. I am writing a novel, you know. While trying to get an agent for the last one and trying still to get a slew of short stories published. Oh, then there’s a career. And three children and a wife. Never mind the looming bookshelf of unread books towering behind me right now as I write this. The newspapers, the weekly and monthly magazine (Call that Print Guilt, I suppose). I might just have a few demands on my time. In all of this, it feels like there are little more than a few minutes available to dabble online.

I know I’m not alone in this. I am not the only one who fantasizes about it all going away. About being in some Montana cabin or seaside shack without the internet, out of cellphone range. Managing all of the demands on us, especially the electronic ones, will always be a challenge. Somewhere there is a way to manage all of it, or at least to feel more like it is all being managed. I see it done. I am always amazed by the people I know who are busy, kids and careers, but still manage keep up, to post the videos of their kids, to make me interested in reading their updates.

So, I ask your forgiveness. Forgive the missed birthday messages, the “likes” of the video you posted, the retweet of your link to the essay on James Salter. Forgive the silences, the disappearances. Forgive me and I will do my best to not let the guilt push me away. Though it overwhelms, I will try to be a better participant in our new electronic era.

First Draft Finished; On to Revision

2011-02-13T09:18:00.000-07:00

Two hundred pages and 40,000 words, the first draft is DONE. Actually, I call it the second draft. The first draft is handwritten in three spiral-bound notebooks. It only gets minor revisions when I type it into the computer, but that complete version is "Draft 2." Now, begins the heavy lifting.

Actually, since it was written with the notion of just getting it written, I think it would be a mistake to just dig in to chapter one. I think the first step is to read the thing as a whole so that I can evaluate its form and structure. I need to sort out what is missing, what might need to be moved around.

The novel was written out of sequence. I wrote all of one character's story before writing the other's. So, I know some work may be necessary to link up the stories properly. And 40,000 words is much too short. I know that in the quick pace of writing the first draft, I skipped some moments of high conflict. I passed over the critical scenes, using exposition instead of taking the reader there to that moment or demonstrating something only described. Many, many pages still remain to be written.

What I have, at least for the character of Darren, the male protagonist, is a quest story. Triggered by a sequence of events, he sets out on a journey. I need to evaluate thre trials he encounters along the way. Oh, he's no hero and the decisions he makes throughout should prove it. Nicole, his wife, is on a sort of quest as well, though her story is less conventional. Her arc is not linear. She is dislodged in time and part of her struggle is in trying to find a now, an identity in which to exist today. I need to make sure her dilemmas, and the scenes used to convey then, are as evident to the reader.

It is said that you should really know everything about your characters. "Take him home and sleep with him," one writing teacher instructed me. Know how he does things, know what concerns him, know him intimately. You want to be sure that you give them the depth they need to make them real to the reader. The issue I have now is in differentiating what it is I know and what I've related in the story. If I know this thing happened in her past, I must remember that the reader doesn't know it until I reveal it. And then, I need to consider when I want to withhold information until some later point in the novel.

The first phase of revision, then, will involve rereading the manuscript in total and creating an outline, complete with notes on ideas for revising each chapter. Only then can I begin thrashing my way through the words on the page.

Wanting to Read David Vann's Caribou Island

2011-02-10T07:40:00.000-07:00

It seems rare anymore that I can here an interview with an author and read a review of his book and know then that I really want to read the book. This has happened with David Vann's Caribou Island.

I heard Michael Silverblatt's interview with Vann and was extremely interested. And then the reviews kept coming. I even sat down in my local Tattered Cover and read the first chapter just last week.

The story centers on a man who is obsessed on building a house on an island in already-remote-enough Alaska. From the wife's persepctive, the novel deals with dark subject matter--one of its appeals for me--including suicide. The pain and frustration that exists in the story, the desires and obsessions, and the let-downs, all served to make my very interested in the novel.

My reading list, though, is long. And it feels like a shame to cheat on all the unread books on my shelves to bypass them and go out and buy and then read something brand new. What about all of those classics I still need to read? The recent award winners? The Franzen novel I'm trying to get through now? So many things around me are begging to be read, but it won't stop me from pushing, here, a book that sounds to me worth the time--despite everything else in the queue.

Just some of the reviews of Vann's Caribou Island:
LA Times - "Darkness and loneliness in Alaska, woven into a compulsively readable story."
Telegraph UK - "Caribou Island is as bleak as the shoreline of the brooding Skilak Lake"
Guardian UK - "at his best, Vann is a forceful, potent writer"
SF Gate - "gives us a climax as haunting and realized as any in recent fiction."
NY Times - "gets to places other novels can’t touch."
Seattle Times - "won't do much for Alaska tourism."

New Yorker - "The harsh beauty of Alaska is the star turn in Vann's disturbing novel."

And the excerpt you really should read: Browse Inside Caribou Island: A Novel

Why the Paperback Edition Can Have a Very Different Cover

2011-02-02T21:15:00.000-07:00

WSJ's Jeffery Trachtenberg looks at the new cover for the paperback edition of Brando Skyhorse's The Madonna's of Echo Park and the changes from the original hardcover edition. The reasoning for the change, in this case, is very sound. I've often wondered how in the world they have gone with covers so dramatically different than the original. Here, though, the publishers still get it wrong. The original had it's issues, but they've made the paperback even more offputting. Maybe they're hoping to capture the book club set, but they've made me less likely to pick it up.

Here are some other cases where they seemed to get it wrong.

Can you tell which one's were the original hardcover dust jackets and which covers graced the paperback?

The original black and white cover of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone was mysterious, trying to convey the bitter cold of the novel. Yet when the book went to paperback, the aesthetic was lighter, emphasizing the young female lead, complete with hanging laundry in the snow to convey they rugged domesticity. It isn't horrible, but a little light for how heavy the book is.

Alice Munro's dust jacket for the hardcover of A View From Castle Rock uses an aged portrait to convey exactly what the book is: a telling of a family history. And I don't know what exactly the publishers were thinking with the paperback cover. Nothing about the text really identifies it as as a ladies' beach read. I understand that we'll use any technique to catch the chick lit audience, but I don't know that we should go so far as to mislead readers.

I am always prepared for the cover change from hardback to paperback, and I'll always be grateful when the cover remains the same.

McCarthy's Sunset Limited Coming to HBO

2011-02-01T21:30:00.000-07:00

HBO is set to premiere a film version of Cormac McCarthy's play The Sunset Limited, staring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. I haven't read the play or seen it performed, but this trailer is enough to ensure I'm interested.

First Draft Almost Complete

2011-01-29T08:16:00.003-07:00

I'm closing in on the end of my first draft of my current novel, tentatively titled Another Blade of Grass. And it's been an interesting process. Before, I used to get stalled, especially on key scenes, by trying to get it "right". This time, the goal has just been to get it down. More important it was to me this time to get it written and then go back and fill in the gaps, straighten it out. This, of course, takes its own bit of patience. It has been necessary to accept that a just "finished" chapter is a piece of crap. Sure, the elements were there, what happens is supposed to happen, but maybe the tone or the voice is all wrong, maybe a key piece of dialogue was left out, or maybe the writing just stinks. But when the window is open to write, when I have the scheduled or stolen hour to write, I am going to do it.

Because so much remains undone, I am looking forward to revision. I am looking forward to adding that missing exchange, adding the color, the elements of setting that were left out. There are whole chapters, I believe, that need to be rewritten from top to bottom, with a blank piece of paper and the original writing as a guide.

The goal, in a way has been to make revision a more integral part of the writing process. Too often it has been a chore. When the work feels more or less "completed", changes beyond simple line edits can be difficult to do. Now, though, I know changes I want to make, know that much is left to do to make it complete. All of which makes me anticipate the next part of the process.

Barnes County Rejections

2011-01-06T07:33:00.000-07:00

An agonizing thing it is to put your hard work out into the world with the great likelihood that it will be rejected. While I've grown used to this (though it is still difficult) with my short fiction, I somehow expected something different with a novel. It is not even a novel--it's just a query letter. Maybe I could believe that it is the letter itself that failed, not the work, not the plot and characters. Of course, agents can be just as callous as literary journals. The "impersonal note" above (it's a rejection; let's not mince words) was sent to me by Barer Literary.

The rejection above came from Ellen Levine at Trident Media Group, the representative of both Daniel Woodrell and Marilynne Robinson. I thought she'd be responsive to the rural setting and the grit in the novel, but I doubt that my letter made it past some intern or assistant.

I know that my lack of a signficant publishing history hurts me. It's one thing to take on a debut novelist, but one without even some success publishing short fiction is a greater risk. I know. I don't think it's important to list the few things I had published in the college's annual lit journal when I was an undergrand. And I didn't include the one, more recent, piece of journalism published in a trade journal. I think these things are more distracting than anything.

So, I need to just buck up and send it out again.

Book Review: Too Much Happiness

2010-11-24T16:35:00.001-07:00

Too Much Happiness by Alice Murno

Alice Munro has been one of my favorite writers since first reading The Beggar Maid. There is always an ease in her style that is balanced with a dryness and a distance that spotlights the isolation of her characters. Her writing has always struck me as very mature, as writing for grown ups. There is nothing flashy in Munro’s work. What she does is almost always just exactly what is required. Just what the story deserves.

Too Much Happiness, another short story collection, does not disappoint—for the most part. It is as pleasant as you would expect of Munro, until you get to the title story. Like View from Castle Rock, “Too Much Happiness” tries to establish relationships that span generations and continents. It goes so far beyond the simple, direct relations that surround someone to the histories that preceded them. The story is disjointed, too filled with facts and information to bring the reader in, make us feel close to the characters.

While I doubt that Alice Munro would publish a book that I wouldn’t read, I wouldn’t recommend a novice to her work begin with this, her latest collection. Her books are so full of excellent work that nearly any other other book on the shelf might be better.

Industry Optimists, an epidemic

2010-11-03T19:57:00.001-06:00

At an industry conference I recently attended in Orlando, just down the road from that magic kingdom, there were no mouse ears in sight, but with all of the optimism on the stage one would have expected to see some cartoon characters. Granted that my industry went through a healthy downturn, begun by industry-specific events and then acerbated by the global financial crisis, so maybe the outlook from here looks pretty darn good. I’m just beginning to believe that optimism in business is an epidemic.

We can’t all be as pessimistic as Nouriel Roubini, or as prescient, but it is practically a requirement for people in business, particularly people representing publicly-traded companies, to be optimistic about the future. In the eternal efforts to boost stock prices CEOs have little to say about the future that isn’t rosy. Oh, they might caution. They might even revise earnings estimates (conveniently just one week before earnings are released). But by the time they have the earnings call, it will have been forgotten. Everyone just wants to hear how great the next quarter or the next year will be. It was the CEO of a company who gave the first presentation of the conference. All smiles when revealing the last slide with the dramatic chart, with the bars going sharply up and to the right.

But it’s not just company management; it’s the analysts as well. The people who we trust to be watching things closely, churning through 10-Ks to decipher the truth, to give us an accurate view on the health of the company, and to give us guidance on whether it’s worthwhile to invest our hard-earned money in the company’s stock. The analysts share the same sickness. By the time of the earnings release, the last quarter is the past—irrelevant. Tell me about the future. It’s all about the sequential growth, the year-over-year growth. As long as things are pointing in the right direction, the analysts will forgive all errors.

This previously-mentioned CEO was responsible for a $150 million capital investment that was cancelled--$150 million sunk, but did the analysts take the CEO to task? Did the stock get downgraded for management’s poor decision making? No. In fact, the stock went up after the announcement because the future was clear and understandable. The project was poorly timed and would have cost the company plenty if continued to completion. Good for them to call it quits, but the analysts never questioned the company’s judgment for wanting to do the project in the first place.

Maybe it’s personal. I was burned going into this downturn, predicting that things would not be as bad as some of the numbers were showing. Certainly, I didn’t foresee the way that the global meltdown would put a freeze on markets. Now I’m a little reluctant to think that recovery will be swift and hardy. My own analysis of the industry also produces a chart going up and to the right, just maybe not so steeply. Things within the industry are pointing in the right direction to keep the CEOs and the analysts smiling, but externally we still have plenty of unknowns. I don’t think I’ll be putting on a pair of mouse ears anytime soon.

Book Review: Lush Life

2010-09-22T20:29:00.000-06:00

Lush Life by Richard Price

I have never been to the NY's Lower East Side, except for a quick dip into Chinatown, and I had no idea of the upheaval taking place there. No knowledge of the history and the current mix of cultures there. Richard Price, though, tells us all about it, immerses us in it, and makes us feel like we've been there. As I breezed through Lush Life, it was like an immersion course or a travelogue. I read in an interview that Price threw out 300 pages, and I'd have to say that I wouldn't mind seeing them.

Let's be clear, though. As much as I enjoyed the novel, it is no masterpiece. It is good, and the praise Price gets for his dialogue is well deserved, but the book does drag at times. Not that it slows down, but it's more like the author didn't know where it was going. Indeed, some of the plot developments later in the novel happen by chance, instead of something that was at least subconsciously expected.

Price does make an attempt, though, to get into the minds of his characters. It's just that it only goes so far. The emotions are on the surface, very evident. The complexities in them are slight.

These flaws don't take away from the enjoyment of the novel. Sometimes you need to read a novel that does just what Lush Life does.

Book Review: The Story of Lucy Gault

2010-09-13T21:02:00.004-06:00

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

The premise of William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault is compellingly tragic, and I had hoped that the overall novel would share this same sense of tragedy. When parents leave behind a child who has runaway and been injured, believing her to have been drowned, the disappear from their previous life. Their daughter is left behind to live with the servants and with the guilt of the misery she has put her parents through. Her parents also suffer with the guilt of their daughter’s death, the result of a hasty decision to leave their home because of the danger and political strife in their region of Ireland without consulting with her or helping her to understand. This state of misplaced guilt and misunderstanding, though, rules the novel. As the years then proceed, the characters are locked into this state, the parents in exile in Italy, the daughter awaiting word from them, and no one moving forward.

When change finally comes, and the widowed father returns home to find his adult daughter alive, their inability to communicate or to try to start fresh drives everyone into a state of melancholy that overtakes the remaining novel.

I am often a fan of tragedy, guilt, and melancholy, but it all takes place here without resolve. There is little progress or development. No one is awakened; there is no epiphany. These things aren’t always necessary, but the payoff for the reader comes in these sorts of changes. Even when the possibility of love enters the novel, drawn though it was with intuition and understanding, it is a dead end.

Quibble as I might with the course of events in the novel and the development of characters, what makes it all worse is the dryness of the writing. Other than the pained love of a minor character, and the growing mental illness of another, the world painted in the novel is plain and without light.

When a Novel Begins to Write Itself

2010-09-02T18:00:00.003-06:00

I thought I was writing a simple book. Straight-forward with a single point of view, taking place over a single afternoon and evening. Yet, as I brainstormed last night about what was left to happen in the novel, it became apparent that the book wants to be more than this.

The premise off which I was writing was this: When a man learns that his neighbors are having an affair, it shakes his own idea of marriage and of himself. But after last night, maybe it’s more like this: When a couple learns of cheating neighbors, their marriage is shaken, identity is questioned, and pasts haunt the present. Something like that.

The current narration is so close to the husband, Darren (though I’m reserving the right to change it; men’s names are so difficult to choose), that we can only know the wife through his eyes. Her character, though, is begging me for a chance to rebut. She is more than he thinks she is, her troubles more complex.

While Darren’s narration is extremely close, nearly stream of consciousness with plenty of questioning and jumping from one topic to another, the wife’s (Nicole) would have to be different. It would need to be as detached in a way as she is, trying to occupy herself in the domesticity of her daily life. Her past, though, pesters her and deserves some time on the page as well. Instead of flashbacks through memory (my standard way of revealing scenes from the past), whole sections taking place in the past may be more effective.

Darren’s issues are more with the present, who he’s become, his feelings of anonymity. He is waking up to his feelings of unhappiness. Part of it, obviously, has to do with his marriage. Another part comes from his not turning out as he had hoped. There is also, for him, a large issue of morality which also comes into question after learning of this affair between neighbors.

It is to be a suburban novel, with the influence of Richard Yates, John Cheever, and John Updike, but it is also about identity and existence, with the required hints of Sartre and Camus. It is not meant to skewer suburban life, or ridicule or demean suburbanites, but it should examine how one maintains, loses, or finds identity in the anonymous suburbs. It is in this line of thinking last night that I may have also settled on a title: Another Blade of Grass. It’ll work for now.

My recent reading of William Faulkner’s Light in August has opened my eyes some to what is possible in a novel. It is not necessary to get locked into anything during the writing process, not a single point of view or a particular course of action. As I sit here now, trying to do other work, the new possibilities fill my mind and the story gets richer by the moment.

Book Review: Light In August

2010-09-02T12:45:00.000-06:00

Light in August by William Faulkner

It is beginning to amaze me that we push exposure to the writing of William Faulkner through The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. My first real exposure (outside of “A Rose for Emily”, which is a topic for another discussion) came through As I Lay Dying. I found it dry and dreary, and not very illuminating--except for seeing the word slough in print repeatedly. Then came The Sound and the Fury, which I found much more vibrant and dramatic, but it didn’t get to me. Years later, on a second read, I liked it even more.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I learned to really like Faulkner, while reading If I Forget Thee Jerusalem: The Wild Palms. The sentences in that book went on and on, with texture and color. They were like winding vines, dark green and gripping. But it wasn’t just the sentences, it was also Faulkner’s tone, how he described the flood waters, how he let us see into Henry’s heart. I think I was the only one in that class to like the book.

Beginning with pregnant Lena on the road in search of her baby’s father, Light in August reminded me of the influence Faulkner has over Cormac McCarthy. I could see how Outer Dark came out of some of the elements of Light in August. Lena is dull and determined and I was disappointed that the narrative dropped her in favor of Joe Christmas and Rev. Hightower, or the other characters that appear, complete with generational back stories, and take over for a time. The character of Joe Christmas and his assumed mixed heritage made for a good mystery, despite despicable and violent he is. Rev. Hightower's story is considerably more sad and though there's no purposeful mystery, much about what makes him so maniacal and delusional remains unknown.

Though the novel wanders down tangents at times that felt like distractions, including a new character who takes over the novel's ending, it was addictive. The tone and setting invited immersion. I took every opportunity to read the book, coming close to picking it up while waiting at red lights.

Noting the influence of Faulkner on other writers I enjoy reading, tells me that I need to keep reading his work. Light in August is a Faulkner novel that cannot be missed.

Barnes County Query Letter Sent

2010-08-26T08:15:00.001-06:00

Three years after starting the novel, and a year after finishing it, I sent out the first query letter for Barnes County to an agent. As much as I know that writing is a business, and that the only way to get published is to submit, there is still so much anxiety tangled up in that process. It is not simply the business-end of an artistic process; it is the act of throwing the work out into the world for criticism and comment. Though that may be the point of writing, expression, there is always so much to worry about.

I've certainly sent my share of short story submissions (not enough, certainly), but this was my first query letter. I didn't realize just how hard it would be to distill 90,000 words into something short and coherent. Especially Barnes County with its many points of view and interwoven stories. Here, though are the central paragraphs of the query:

When Terry Stegman, a beloved female sheriff’s deputy of rural Barnes County, Missouri, is killed by a meth dealer, the men around her must find a way to go forward, to adjust, and set a new course.

Though Terry’s killer is injured and jailed, Sam Summers, a big-city transplant, friend, and fellow deputy whose feelings for Terry may have been something stronger than friendship, is on the hunt for why the killer murdered two others that day. Aging Barnes County Sheriff Bill Wallis is suffering through the break-up of his marriage, the changes taking place in the county, and the growing distance from his teenage son. Terry’s hired man and close companion after her husband’s death, Franklin Redbird quickly falls into drinking and trouble. Logan Wallis, the sheriff’s misfit son, outcast because of his public profile and rebellious appearance, meets a romantic interest, but when she winds up in trouble, he seeks a violent vengeance. A recent immigrant to the county, Harlan Lustig quickly falls in with a dangerous meth cook and, after learning the trade himself, seeks to usurp him. Their stories meet, mix, mingle, and collide among the back roads and abandoned farmhouses of the fictional Barnes County in Southern Missouri.

While there are elements in the novel of mystery and suspense, Barnes County, at 90,000 words, is a story of people in flux, how they struggle to find the right way, and how some fail at it.

While I don't know that this really gets to all of it, all of the conflict and tension, all of the psychological inquiry, I think this might get someone interested.

Dropping the envelope into the box was a relief. I'm happy to have done it and have it out there. Now comes the anxiety about how it will be received.

Book Review: The Humbling

2010-08-23T13:00:00.001-06:00

The Humbling by Philip Roth

If Simon Axler's loss of confidence in his acting ability is meant as a projection of Philip Roth's loss of confidence in his writing ability, then The Humbling should stand as an excellent example of it. The novel comes off more as a sketch of book, as if he'd written it as an outline of a more developed novel that was still to come.

This is a novel of man in crisis, and though we spend a fair number of pages in the thin book dealing directly with the subject, the book wanders into Axler's new relationship. This relationship, with the lesbian daughter of old friends, is at times cruel and superficial. Their scenes together, when not involving sex, are cursory. One scene, the parents' confrontation with the daughter, is simply told in dialogue from the daughter to Axler. Where the reader may have benefited from actually being there in what may end being a pivotal scene, Roth treats it as unimportant. And so when things change in the novel, we don't have a reason to care.

This is a disappointing novel by one of America's great novelists. Maybe Roth is writing too much these days. A book a year might be a pace that doesn't make for good novels.

Poetry Resurrection

2010-08-19T21:47:00.001-06:00

I miss poetry.

Last week, I stopped in the downtown Tattered Cover Bookstore to look at some poetry. Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency

Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
Inspired by AMC’s Mad Men to take a closer look. But standing there, reading the words, the poems jagged edges pleasing to my eye, I realized how much I miss poetry.

For the last two years, there’s been no time for poetry. Barely any time for fiction. And even before that, I’d neglected it. There was a time when I read a lot of poetry, devoured it, wrote it, read it at poetry readings, published it. I turned them into songs. I even used to send out a poem each week to a long list of email contacts. I haven’t written a new poem in probably ten years. Even in the MFA program, I stuck with the fiction writers. You kinda got the feeling you’d better not go trying to play in the poets’ sandbox.

So now, writing again after two years off in the EMBA program, I feel it might be time to reconnect with poetry. I really want to shake up my use of language, to be inspired to take chances, to not go for the obvious word choice, to seek out unique metaphor, to see things again from a poets perspective. So I pulled down from my shelves Carolyn Forché

You recognize strangers,
think you lived through destruction.
You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory.

You want to know what I know?
Your own hands are lying.
“Taking Off My Clothes”

Sylvia Plath

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.
“The Moon and the Yew Tree”

Not the poets I know well. I went to the library, checked out Theodore Roethke

Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain,
And found out all I could of all desire;
I weep for what I’m like when I’m alone
In the deep center of the voice and fire.

I know the motion of the deepest stone.
Each one’s himself, yet each one’s everyone.
“The Sententious Man”

Denise Levertov

From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom
of the well where the moon lives
“Everything that Acts Is Actual”

Li-Young Lee

And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,

I’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
“This Room and Everything in It”

We all should more poetry in our lives. At least I know I should.

Another Dissent of the FOMC Statement?

2010-08-10T07:48:00.002-06:00

With the meeting of the FOMC starting today, there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about what the Fed statement will say. I’m pretty certain that there will be no change in the target rate (with the “extended period” statement remaining), the comments about the economy will be dour (but not likely strong enough to drive the market dramatically downward), and they will reiterate that they are prepared to take whatever measures are necessary as conditions warrant. The real question for me is whether Kansas City Fed Chief Thomas Hoenig will continue to dissent. For the last year or more of Fed statements, Hoenig has insisted that the Fed should be raising the target rate in order stave off inflation or the creation of another housing bubble. The facts, though, continue to point away from his fears. In fact, many are now suggesting that there is a greater risk of deflation than inflation in the near term.

I would like to see him drop his dissent. Bernanke runs a more democratic Fed and is willing to support the differences of opinion, but a dissent now will only add to the uncertainty. Investors, not just fed-watchers, are looking for something definitive out of the FOMC. They’re not likely to get it, but a dissent now, at this inflection point, would leave them questioning the statement in its entirety. It’s not a matter of differences of opinion on how to chart the course of recovery; the concern now is slipping backwards. Saying that we need to raise rates in the face of the current economic conditions isn’t going to add any much-needed stability.

Book Review: A Gate at the Stairs

2010-08-07T21:31:00.004-06:00

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Sometimes I like a novel that spends much of its time wandering through the mind of its protagonist. A Gate at the Stairs is, in fact, very good at doing that, making simple scenes stretch long as each bit of dialogue or slight action sets the main character off on a new tangent of thought. Plot, itself, shouldn't suffer. And it does here, with surprises that arrive without set up, with dead ends and changes of pace that doom the novel.

Centered around a college student who takes a job caring for the newly adopted part-African-American baby of a flighty restaurant owner and her absent husband, the novel carries us close to the mind of Tassie Keltjin, the narrator. Tassie is from the country and out of place in the college town, not a bumpkin but naive. She makes a good narrator because everything she sees in new, and as she gets swept up in this new family we want to urge her to be careful.

Not only does the plot stumble, but Moore also seems to miss opportunities to make the story richer. There are tensions surrounding the child's race, and there is discussions around it. But just discussions. No conclusions seem to be reached, no revelation or resolve of any sort. Other, secondary story lines, suffer similar fates. Then when the main storyline is interrupted by a surprise, the story just falls apart, finally wandering to conclusion many, many pages later.

It's generally not a good sign, when I want to be done with a novel just to be done with it. That was the case here.

Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2010-07-22T07:00:00.000-06:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson

Now, I must admit that I am not the target audience for Steig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but with all of the widespread praise the mystery had been receiving, I thought it may be worth my time. Or at least it would be a fun waste of time. It was, instead, a frustrating waste of time.

It's bad hen you come in with pretty low expectations and are still let down. I tend to be annoyed with genre conventions, but that wasn't even the problem here. In fact, it probably would have been a better book if it had tried to adhere to a standard format. Instead, we get what amounts to hundreds of pages of meandering, useless back story, no plot development, and not actual progression. I say all of this without criticizing the line-level quality of the writing (it is dry and dull).

I'd like to summarize the plot, the central storyline, here, but it so convoluted that is not worth the paragraph it would take to write it. There is a mystery that involves two dozen or so family members, and a secondary mystery that sort of bookends the first mystery. Then there are another twenty characters, each with Swedish names that make them hard to distinguish from other characters (Don't miss Nora Ephron's New Yorker piece if you too struggle with this book).

Around two-hundred pages in, after being sufficiently frustrated and confused, the action begins. It is for this action that we're meant to enjoy these sorts of books, right? On a personal level, I enjoyed the concept of Mikael Blomkvist holed up in a spartan guest house in northern Sweden, tasked with chronicling a family history and attempting to solve a murder along the way. I also enjoyed the character of Lisbeth Salander, for all of her supposedly shocking characteristics, but I do think Larsson misunderstands her at times, giving her thoughts and actions (some critical) that are wholly inconsistent.

When the action gets good, when things are building to a climax, though, Larson lets some events happen so matter-of-factly that they fall flat. A couple of key moments in the novel happen without any sort of build up. Its as if the author needed something to happen, and instead of leading us to it, it just happens. When I wanted more of what the genre should have served up, the book let me down.

The action only lasts a few hundred pages, and then we return to the meandering, the other irrelevant characters, and the ancillary mystery (which, like the other, is a let down). The last hundred pages of the book were so frustrating to get through, so indulgent and self-serving. I could not help but wonder where the editor was for this book. This isn't a Stephen King book, where you pretty much let him write whatever he wants to write, slap a cover on it, and wait for the money to pour in. This is a debut novel. Sure, there had been international success before it ever appeared in the U.S., but couldn't we have pulled it into shape first?

Unless you're so inspired by the cover that you have to read this book (it was one key reason I was interested), don't. Wait for the David Fincher film. Or, better yet, see the Swedish film, which is getting good reviews. Though maybe you shouldn't believe the reviews.

Movie Review: Winter's Bone

2010-07-20T07:00:00.000-06:00

Movies based on good novels rarely seem to match whatever quality made the book so good in the first place. Winter's Bone, directed by Debra Granik, is one of those rare films that live up to the novel on which it is based. While I found myself questioning some of the plot points and the sequence of events, the movie does well by Daniel Woodrell's novel.

Set in the drug-addled Missouri Ozarks, the movie follows 17-yr-old Reed Dolly as she searches for her missing father. Busted for cooking meth, Jessup Dolly put the house, in which Ree lives with her vacant mother and two younger siblings, up against his bond. If he doesn't show up for his court date, they will lose the house and land.

The film focuses more on this mystery than the book does. (Certainly the marketing--and the hideous movie poster--try to play it up.) In the book, it seems like a lost cause from the beginning. Indeed walks into situatiopns she shouldn't and finds herself in some trouble. Played by Jennifer Lawrence, Ree is steely and hard, determined and stubborn, but the acting never lets us miss the teenager she really is.

Filmed in Missouri's Christian County, the film must have caused quite a stir when the film trucks came to town and borrowed real locations, real people's homes for filming. There some gritty squalour here that should remind us how people live in this country. There are many sides to American life, and this may be one that art film audiences may not have known actually existed.

A big winner at Sundance, Winter's Bone is an excellent, realistic movie that will probably pass largely unnoticed. And it is too bad, too. I can only hope that by the time it goes to DVD, more people will have heard how good it is.

A Solution for Job Creation

2010-07-14T13:55:00.001-06:00

I’ve just read former Intel chief Andy Grove’s article “How to Make an American Job” in the July 5-11 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek and I have to quibble. He argues that we ship jobs overseas at our own peril. Not only do we lose the jobs, we also are left out of the next round of development in that industry. To solve the problem, he states, “Long term, we need a job-centric economic theory—and job-centric political leadership—to guide our plans and actions.”

Surely, the US cannot survive on knowledge and service work alone. I would agree. Manufacturing in the US gives the country the flexibility to change and grow and to be a part of new technological revolutions. Pressing the government to get involved in this, in any way, walks us straight into dangerous territory.

Incentives provided by the government for job creation can hardly be effective. I would bet that for every dollar of incentive provided, less than fifty cents pass through in the form of wages. Probably a greater portion goes straight to corporate profits. We cannot forget that profit creation is the greater incentive for companies, coming well before job creation. Wringing the profit out of every dollar is the way things work.

Inefficiencies of government spending or tax breaks aside, other methods to encourage domestic manufacturing are dangerous. Tariffs on imported goods may protect American jobs, but often at a higher cost for American companies. They will pay higher prices on imported raw materials, higher wages, and will likely see import tariffs on their own products overseas. Duties are a bit of an arms race. As long as we have the same amount as our competitor, we are secure. An escalation by either side will be equally met by the other. Grove, though, thinks this okay. “Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.)”

What works is when American businesses seize opportunities, finding the right spots to take advantage of things. Here, Grove is onto something. He suggests the promotion of scaling, of moving a product from development and small-run manufacturing to complete large-run, full-scale production. This is a particular pinch-point in the process. US companies have had trouble relying on overseas manufacturers to take a new product to full-scale production because of the normal tweaks to design and production that are necessary. Keeping that work in the US can allow companies to be better tuned to making quick changes, refining processes, and making better products.

But instead of penalizing US companies through taxes or tariffs on overseas production, we need to help them get what they need to keep this scaling in the US: access to capital. A program of government-backed loans available to companies looking to scale up would be exactly what is needed. Let’s face it, shareholders or the bond market are probably unwilling to take this risk and help a company fund the creation of US manufacturing. Why would they when they continue to see the profits that come from displacing American workers for Chinese? Venture capital isn’t interested, as Grove points out. And banks aren’t willing to take the risk without government support. Yet, it is in the country’s interest to create jobs here and to take a little risk in the process. There is no up-front cost to the taxpayer, no taxpayer dollars going to line the pockets of greedy corporate execs or handout-seeking labor. There is market-rate interest to be made by banks and a little downside risk to the government.

The dangers of a US devoid of manufacturing jobs should be apparent. It may provide greater profits to US corporations, their executives, and the smaller base of knowledge workers, but all of their spending cannot support our service and retail sectors. Yes, maybe shipping jobs overseas and rising US unemployment can be severe enough to depress US wages to the level of those of Chinese workers, making it cost efficient to return jobs to the US. Indeed, maybe this is the intent of some. But the US thrives on a diverse workforce. We need not only manufacturing workers, we need the line managers, the division chiefs, and all the other middle managers as well. Maybe with a little government backing (not support, incentives, or protectionism) we can get them back.

Book Review: Rabbit, Run

2010-07-05T21:08:00.006-06:00

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

I feel bad for putting this book off for so long. If only someone would have told me how good it was, how sentences would jump off the page, nailing emotions, confusions, context. Not to say the book doesn't have it's faults (it does), but I do wish I'd have read this some time ago.

I had read the first few pages a half-a-dozen times, and despite the sharpness of the writing in the first few paragraphs I always chose another book to read instead. I only had to get past those first few pages, past Rabbit's pick-up basketball game and his run home, to his home and wife and dissatisfaction with both, to the drive and I was hooked.

He drives through the thickening night. The road unravels with infuriating slowness, its black wall wearilessly rising in front of his headlights no matter how they twist. The tar sucks his tires. He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids. So angry his cheeks feel parched inside his mouth and his notstrils water. He grinds his foot down as if to squash this snake of a road, and nearly loses the car on a curve, as the two right wheels fall captive to the dirt shoulder. He brings them back but keeps the speedometer needle to the right of the legal limit.

He turns off the radio; its music no longer seems a river he is riding down but instead speaks with the voice of the cities and brushes his head with slippery hands. Yet into the silence that results he refuses to let thoughts come. He doesn't want to think, he wants to fall asleep and wake up pillowed by sand. How stupid, how frigging, fucking stupid he was, not to be farther than this. At midnight, the night half gone.

I hadn't expected this. I hadn't expected the run, right in the beginning, with narration so close and free-flowing. And then Rabbit turns out to be so exhasperating and simple. Always doing what he shouldn't do, but with no real good reason for it. Sure, he had been frustrated at home, but his initial flight was on a whim. There was no reason in it, and worse, he turns around and heads back. But does he go home? No. And this is the way it goes for the length of the novel.

Where the novel runs into trouble, besides the meandering, the pick-ups and drop-offs of motivation and reason, is when suddenly we leap from Rabbit's mind to the mind of others. It tends to happen for good reason, but I find it troubling to enter another character's mind halfway through the novel after being firmly established elsewhere. Yet, when Updike does this, he lets nothing fail (another long quote follows--my apologies).

Nelson's face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, "Pilly have--Pilly--" But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief's chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles' heart seems to twist with the child's body: he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vaccuum.

"The boy's taken his truck," he tells Mrs. Springer.

"Well let him get it himself," she says. "He must learn. I can't be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they've been at it like that all afternoon."

"Billy." The boy looks up in surprise toward Eccles' male voice. "Give it back." Billy considers this new evidence and and hesitates indeterminately. "Now, please." Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate's head.

The new pain starts fresh grief in Nelson's throat, but seeing the truck on the grass beside his face chokes him. It takes him a moment to realize that the cause of his anguish is removed and another moment to rein the emotion in his body. His great dry gasps as he rounds these corners seem to heave the sheet of trimmed grass and the sunshine itself. A wasp bumping persistently against the screen dips and the aluminum chair under Eccles threatens to buckle; as if the wide world is participating in Nelson's readjustment.

The brilliance is everwhere in this novel, despite the way it bumps along at times, infuriating in its twists and the impending tragedy. You know that things must truly fall apart for Rabbit, and you know that he may learn nothing from it. And you wish he'd have kept driving south to the beach and avoided all of this.

Again, I wish I'd have read this sooner. There is so much to learn from the way Updike captures emotion, the way his close third-person narration takes you behind the scenes. You are not a witness to the thoughts of the character, but you experience what he experiences. Makes me wish I'd have really seen the brilliance in the writing workshop staple "A&P" and read more Updike sooner.

Book Review: Last Night

2010-06-27T10:09:00.005-06:00

Last Night by James Salter

Sometimes there is nothing quite as liberating as a really good short story collection. The story devoured in one sitting. The new engagement every time you open the cover. Salter's Last Night is an excellent collection. The stories are easy, casual, yet transporting. The writing is so simple and traditional, you'd think it was written in the sixties. References to cell phones and the like were a little jarring.

I also love stumbling on a story I've read before in a collection, especially a story like "Last Night" that is particularly memorable. It is definitely one of those that deserve to be anthologized and studied.

I'd read Salter's A Sport and A Pastime awhile ago and quite enjoyed it. Upon completion I promptly went to the bookstore to see what else I could find by him. I found this collection in the bargain section and picked it up without a moment's contemplation. It took me this long to get around to reading it, but I will be back to the book store looking for more Salter shortly.

Lower E-Reader Prices Make Them More Tempting

2010-06-22T07:40:00.002-06:00

I've said this before: I'm a book guy. Good old fashioned paper books, complete with the smell, the weight, the feel. Yet, as the prices for e-readers like the Nook and the Kindle come down to earth, I find them tempting. It's not that I want to toss away my library and clear my bookshelves for knick-knacks, but I like the idea of a library in a slim piece of electronic gadgetry.

I don't think of books as consumables. I don't read books and then dismiss them. I like knowing they still exist on my shelf (in a tangible, physical form) for me to reference. I know that if I want to go back to a particular story in Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, the book is there. E-readers are good for folks who might read a book once and be done with it, but I'm beginning to think that they might be good for reference too. Might not be bad, when I'm sitting down to write several pages tonight, to pull out a Kindle and reread "Car Crash While Hitchhiking." And I think they might be very good for non-fiction, for the important books that come out in hardback and make a stir but you don't necessarily need them on your bookshelf for all of eternity (I still need to get around to Nassim Taleb's Black Swan).

And what about magazines? I am definitely a magazine reader, thought I rarely seem to get through them. Wouldn't an e-reader be the best place for The New Yorker or Business Week?

So, I'm tempted.

I did put my hands on a Nook a couple of weeks ago, and I wasn't impressed. It felt clunky and the model on display at the store was stuck loading a page. The sales person had to power it off and back on to get it working again.

But then I wonder if I would be doing damage to two industries I'm fond of, publishing and bookselling. I'd rather not aid in the demise of either.

I'm not convinced that I'm buying one of these things yet, but with more reasonable pricing it is worth considering.

Book Review: Outer Dark

2010-06-15T07:15:00.003-06:00

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

Another one of McCarthy's wandering books, Outer Dark, doesn't disappoint. It is everything you'd expect from him. Rich descriptions, dialogue that sticks in your head, landscapes, fear, and of course unspeakable violence.

Living in the old, tough South, Culla Holme and his sister have a child together. Culla leaves the child in the woods, telling his sister that the child died, but instead it was found by a wandering tinker. While Culla is out hunting work, his sister sets out to hunt the tinker and her child. Culla then takes of to find his sister. Meanwhile, three true villains are terrorizing the area.

The premise itself is tough, especially for a reader with young children, but it is the wandering, the walking, unknowingly, into danger. And somehow surviving. McCarthy rarely spends any time in a character's mind, so we are left to interpret the emotional struggles through the landscapes, the hot sun, the need for food, water, and rest. I'd thought of filling this review with long excerpts of description or snippets of dialogue just to give you an example of McCarthy's skill, but I'd rather tell you instead to just read the book. It's no Suttree, but it's short and a good intro to Cormac McCarthy.

Winter's Bone, the Movie, Is Coming

2010-06-12T07:00:00.001-06:00

From the 2006 Daniel Woodrell book, Winter's Bone, one of the best new books I've read in many years, the movie adaptation is on its way to theaters after a good showing at Sundance. Adaptations always seem to disappoint in one way or another. And, from watching this trailer, I don't remember the book being quite so frightening.

Reviews: NYT, WSJ, LA Times, HuffPost

Mental Illness in Winnie-the-Pooh? Of course.

2010-06-10T07:00:00.000-06:00

Mental-health students even explore children's literature for buried psychological themes. Analysts have had a field day in the "Hundred Acre Wood" with A.A. Milne's characters. While the world of Winnie the Pooh seems innocent on the surface, "it is clear to our group of modern neuro-developmentalists that these are in fact stories of seriously troubled individuals, many of whom meet DSM-IV criteria for significant disorders," wrote Sarah E. Shea and colleagues in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2000, referring to the handbook of diagnoses.

Piglet clearly suffers from generalized anxiety disorder, the authors noted. Eeyore has chronic dysthymia (mild depression) and could benefit greatly from an antidepressant. Tigger is hyperactive, impulsive and a risk-taker.

Pooh is a bundle of comorbidities that may include cognitive impairment, as he is often described as a "bear of very little brain."

From the WSJ article, Fiction Stars, Real Problems

Book Review: The Trial

2010-06-09T07:00:00.001-06:00

The Trial by Franz Kafka

This book has been on my reading list for a long time. In fact, I've started it many times, but contemplating reading through the frustrations that I knew would ensure hardly encouraged me to continue. Restarting my pleasure reading this summer, I thought it would be a good idea to get through some of the books that I have started and, for some reason, put down. (Rabbit, Run is also on this list.)

I didn't find it nearly as frustrating as all that, though. Neither did I find it terribly compelling. Kafka is good at getting to the existential frustrations of bureaucracy and paranoia, but he's short on the sort of haunting depictions I was looking for. The Trial was more similar to Dostoevsky than to The Metamorphosis. We were part of the delusions and hubris of the protagonist, but I didn't often feel the same confusions and frustrations he seemed to experience.

The Trial wasn't as difficult to get through as I expected, but it doesn't even rank among the Kafka masterpieces.

The End of the Mercury Brand

2010-06-08T07:00:00.000-06:00

This morning I was driving behind a 70's era Grand Marquis, one of those huge hunks of metal that you wouldn't believe could be made in an era of gasoline shortages. But still the Mercury Grand Marquis was just a rebranded Ford LTD. In fact, I don't remember Mercury having its unique model in the modern era. So, it is understandable that it might be time for the brand to go.

I appreciate creative destruction and some serious destruction was necessary in the US auto industry.

I've never really understood the real business reasons for throwing some different chrome or taillights along with a new badge on a car and calling it something else. If the manufacturer sold all of the models under one brand, without all of the changes, the efficiencies would grow and they should be cheaper to make. Instead they make redundant models that sell at different dealers. And good luck convincing someone that they should pay more for a rebranded Ford.

So, despite the sentimental attachment we may have to brands, sometimes it is just time for them to go.

Bag Day at the Book Sale

2010-06-07T07:00:00.000-06:00

Nothing better than bag day at the book sale. Another decent, varied haul, in no particular order:

Bullet Park - John Cheever
World's End and Other Stories - Paul Theroux
Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow
The Sonnets - William Shakespeare
Stories and Prose Poems - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Big Laugh - John O'Hara
Elmer Gantry - Sinclair Lewis
Letting Go - Philip Roth
The Plague - Albert Camus
A Mercy - Toni Morrison
The Cave - Robert Penn Warren
Weight - Jeanette Winterson
Goodbye, Columbus - Philip Roth
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight - Alexandra Fuller
Miramar - Naguib Mahfouz
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The Passion - Jeanette Winterson
100 Selected Poems - e.e. cummings
America America - Ethan Canin
The Emperor's Children - Claire Messud
Peace - Richard Bausch
Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century - John Gerassi
Scenes from American Life - Edited by Joyce Carol Oates
A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean
Troubled Sleep - Jean-Paul Sartre
The Music of Chance - Paul Auster
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck Klosterman
Fool For Love and Other Plays - Sam Shepard
Dostoevsky - Edited by Rene Weller
Capital, Communism and Coexistence - John Kenneth Gailbraith and Stanislav Menshikov
The World Is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman

MBA Graduation Yesterday

2010-06-06T09:55:00.003-06:00

Well, that's it. Finally and officially done with the Executive MBA. It was a bit of a proud moment, I have to say, thinking of all the work that went into it, all of the sacrifices. And of all that I learned and experienced. And there's the people. Sure, there were a handful I didn't care for. Funny, they're also the ones I feel don't really deserve the MBA since they didn't put in nearly the work the rest of us did. But that's a selfish thought. They're not my concern.

One question asked of me yesterday was whether the MBA has changed my outlook, how I view business, capitalism. In many ways the answer is 'no.' I think I had a pretty good sense of business before, and nothing I learned changed my view of the virtues and tragic flaws of capitalism. Where the program has changed my views is in the opportunities out there. The careers, the ways to do business, the opportunities for improvement. The program has also taught me of what I am capable. The intellectual challenges, the time and project management, the reserve of energy and motivation. There was always so much to do, and more that I wanted to get done. And somehow I got most of it done, I found the energy to do what was required. We also blazed through a lot of very valuable material, things that I would have loved to study more in depth. I emerge so much smarter about some things (macroeconomics) and with interest piqued about other things (strategy).

No one has dared to but should someone ask whether it was worth it, the answer is an obvious 'yes.' Though there is no immediate, obvious financial benefit, no dramatic career change or advancement that is imminent now that the degree is in my hand (I would hardly have done it solely for these reasons), I am a better person for having done it. I am a better manager, employee, intellectual, husband, father. And now that I am finished I will have more time and energy to devote to these things.

Where Are the BP Boycotts?

2010-06-03T07:14:00.003-06:00

After the Wall Street Journal articles exposing BP's failings and the opening of a criminal probe into the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, I would expect people would be screaming for a boycott of BP. Sometimes we forget our role as consumers in driving the conduct of corporations. Much of the managment and finance talk speaks to the power of the shareholders, and this is why we've seen the sell off in BP stock. But just as the stockholders are a source of financing for BP, the customers are the source of revenue. We need to let BP know that we cannot support their lack of concern for safety and their inability to plan for disaster. The CEO can have his "life back" when he gets fired.

The Future of Books and Bookselling

2010-05-21T07:59:00.002-06:00

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article this morning on the effects of ebooks on books and bookselling, but the tone is particularly negative. The general assumption is that digital books will kill bookstores in the same way that digital music has killed music retailers. I don't think it is quite that simple.

Books are a particularly tangible thing. In music, the CD or vinyl LP was was a medium only--a way to get to the music. For books, though, what we're after is more than just the words. The book experience is key. Holding the book, flipping the pages, dog-earing, underlining, annotating, sharing, and having that physical asset on the bookshelf is all part of what makes up the book experience. I don't think this is only true for book lovers, but I will admit that for those who consume and then dispose the mass market beach read things might be different. It may be these readers who make up the target market for ebooks. The question, then, is what share of the book buying market is made up of these consumers.

Maybe I just want to hold onto the past. Maybe I just want to believe that there is a future in the physical book and bookstore. What share of the market is made up of people like me?

Dallas Fed's Fisher Says Don't Politicize the Federal Reserve

2010-01-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

Congress Is Politicizing the Fed

Richard Fisher, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, takes on the nonsense of the threats to not confirm Ben Bernanke.

"A great and powerful economy cannot create the conditions for sustainable noninflationary growth if its central bank is governed by a politicized monetary authority."

Dow and Euro-Dollar Forecasts

2010-01-23T08:19:00.001-07:00

As an assignment for the first day of a class on Financial Strategy and Valuation, we were asked to forecast what the Dow and the Euro-Dollar exchange rate would be at the end of the year. I wrote my first forecast on Wednesday and, as you will see, subsequent events forced me to revise the forecast. Below is what I wrote:

Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close on March 19, 2010 = 10,560 10,120.08

Fourth quarter earnings and forecasts for 2010 earnings will continue to be optimistic through the rest of earnings season. Companies have managed to cut costs and grow profits despite decreases in revenue. Seeing an economic recovery beginning, companies believe that they can capitalize on new, revitalized cost structures and reap generous profits on the way up. Investors and analysts are likely to believe them.

In the near-term (late-January through early-February), the Dow should continue its climb. Economic reports in February should begin to bring investors back down to Earth. U.S. GDP figures will be revised down (as they were for the third-quarter) and consumer sentiment will continue to be weighed down by jobs numbers that don’t live up to expectations. Even as companies begin to rehire in light of increasing sales and maxed-out productivity, the unemployment rate will not show improvement as those who have dropped off the rolls and stopped looking for work will start again and will be included in the unemployment numbers.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, because of the industrial components, should see the results of the recovery first, while retail and other consumer-dependant sectors will lag. The Dow has increased 2.9% from 10,428.5 to 10,725.43 at the close on January 19, 2010. The index should continue to climb in the near term and we should see a close above 11,000. After an increase of over 2.5%, the Dow should see a decrease in the neighborhood of 4% from the peak. I am projecting the DJIA will close on March 19, 2010 at 10,560.

UPDATE: After writing the above paragraphs, the Dow lost 552.45 points in three days. The sell-off demonstrates the way that unknowns can influence the market in ways that forecasts cannot predict. The announcement from China that they would look to curb lending in attempt to reduce the impact of inflation, coupled with the announcement by the Obama Administration of proposed rules that would restrict risk taking by U.S. banks, put fear into investors about the limits of recovery—despite positive earnings statements by Dow components.

A loss of more than 5% points in just a few days was not factored into my previous forecast. I cannot see the market falling too much farther within the next several days, but the mood on Wall Street has been seriously dampened. Any boost we would see from positive earnings statements, like the one this morning from GE, will be muted. The fundamentals of what I stated above should still be in play. Good earnings may stabilize the market and provide some price improvement, but economic factors will pull the market back down by the 19th of March. My revised forecast is for the Dow to close on March 19, 2010 at 10,120.08.

Euro-Dollar Exchange Rate on March 19, 2010 = $1.4445

Many counter-acting forces are currently at play in the foreign exchange market. The U.S. recovery is beginning and may soon advance at a higher rate than Europe given the risks for further turmoil, especially in places like Spain. On the other hand, our domestic recovery will be slow, possibly slower than expected. Slow U.S. GDP growth will continue to weigh on the dollar.

From the beginning of the year through January 19, the Euro-Dollar exchange rate has declined only slightly, from $1.4326 to $1.4302. These gains should be wiped away with a weakening dollar as recovery lags expectations. I am projecting a decrease of 1% in the value of the dollar against the Euro between January 20 and March 19, 2010 to $1.4445 to the Euro.

UPDATE: The Dow’s slide since the above forecast was written is not likely to have a great affect on Euro-Dollar during the next quarter. The rate should remain range-bound, despite dipping to the low end of that range this week. The Dow is more volatile than the dollar, certainly against the European currency. I do not see a reason to adjust the above forecast at this time.

Banking Rules, the Dow, Bernanke, Campaign Finance

2010-01-22T12:24:00.001-07:00

While I would like to offer some deep thoughts on the following news items, time only allows me to offer this quick bit of off-the-cuff analysis and opinion.

Proposed Banking Rules
Controlling the risks that banks can take when backed by US taxpayers, sounds much more reasonable than the more punitive fee on transactions. Goldman is the only one to really be hurt by the new rules anyway.

The Dow's Slide
The fear over how China's tightening of lending will restrict growth and slow the global recovery is understandable. Financials, though, should not have this great an impact on the broader market.

The Vote on Bernanke
A question for those thinking of voting against Bernanke: Who would you rather have at the Fed? There's no question that he didn't get everything right going into this mess, and he won't raise rates as quickly as the inflation hawks want him to. You can't punish him for Wall Street's failings, though. And I don't think you can find a better guy to see us through this mess.

Corporate Personhood
The Supreme Court's ruling yesterday that did away with McCain-Feingold restrictions on corporate and union money going to political campaigns sets, I think, a dangerous precedent. We ought to be careful about granting rights to companies and organizations that we normally reserve for individuals. Should corporations have the same free-speech privileges as you or I? If so, what other rights of individuals should they have?

Book Review: Dear American Airlines

2010-01-20T09:30:00.002-07:00

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles

I had to insert Dear American Airlines into my lengthy to-be-read list when my wife brought it home from the library. I thought I'd read the first couple of pages to get a taste for it. I'd read good reviews, so I was interested. When I got into it, though, I found it easily digestible. So digestible, in fact, that whatever was next on my list was going to have to weight.

Author Jonathan Miles's Bennie is a self-deprecating narrator with enough nastiness and scepticism to not be entirely likable, but this is no matter. We like Bennie because he's suffering, because things haven't turned out like he wanted. Bennie has more problems than being stuck waiting for the flight (the premise for the book's title is his frustration with the airline). We don't like him enough to feel bad for him, but we understand. Besides, Bennie, through the author, is witty and that makes the book good enough to keep reading.

Maybe I found the book unsurprising, sentimental, and the epiphany too epiphanic. Maybe it was a small book in a summer of big, heavier, more serious books. Maybe I just wasn't that impressed. The book is a good read, but nothing to write an airline about.

Book Review: Out Stealing Horses

2009-12-23T09:30:00.001-07:00

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

I always pay close attention to the New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year. Not every book on the last will appeal to me, but the description of Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses, and the heaps of praise it received, put it on my list immediately.

The book is not about horses; don't be misled. It is about attempting to escape the past and how it will catch up with you. A theme I enjoy. Despite the narrator's relocation to remote northern Norway, with his dog and his out of place Nissan station wagon, circumstances and coincidence lead him to relive events in his past.

I appreciated this book for many reasons. Thematically, it is something I can appreciate. I love the romantic notion of packing up your essentials and moving far away to a one room cabin and wilderness outside the window. And there is enough violence and tragedy here to please me.

It wasn't until Hamsun's name appeared in the text that I realized that I'd read another Norwegian novel just a couple of books back. Though Hunger is a classic of sorts, this book fulfills in ways that it did not. The characters are rich and shaken. And there's plenty of story here to keep you reading.

I would certainly highly recommend this book. I would put this book on a shelf with others I was proud to have read.

Book Review: The Death of Sweet Mister

2009-12-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell

Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone was one of the best books I've ever read, so I naturally picked up several of his other novels. The Death of Sweet Mister is populated with the same sort of misfits. It feels wrong to call them hillbillies, but the events of the novel fulfill some of our worst ideas of the dwellers of the backwoods and hollows of the Ozarks. Like Winter's Bone, the central character of this novel is also a juvenile, but with none of the same spunk and determination.

There is much violence and general brutality here, a world bleak and desperate, but rendered with precision. Woodrell's writing talent is certainly on display here, though the book is hardly as haunting as Winter's Bone. And though I enjoyed it, the novel has elements that are disturbing and hard to get past.

Book Review: Hunger

2009-12-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

I love confessional novels with narrators expressing their maladies, coming clean on their madness. I love novels of mad desperation, of wanderers, of those lost in a world that is too big and overwhelming. This book, though, is no Notes from Underground. This is no Season in Hell, no Maldoror.

Hamsun's narrator is poor and hungry, driven by some sort of will he cannot control to do idiotic things. And this might be okay. It could be a good place to start, but there is no advancement. There are small dilemmas that take some time to resolve, but the narrator does not change. He does not get worse. His madness and hunger do not accelerate to a point where you know something horrible is likely to happen. His undirected will doesn't even take him on any significant adventures or put him in too much danger.

This book sounded like something I would like and even coming in with that expectations, the book did not succeed. I was disappointed.

Book Review: The Easter Parade

2009-12-02T09:30:00.001-07:00

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

I read somewhere that The Easter Parade was Richard Yates's most depressing book. I doubt that it was really written like that, but I was already a fan of Revolutionary Road and his short stories, so I picked up the book and was eager to get to it. Sometimes, though, your impression of the book you're reading is impacted by the books you read immediately before that one. Coming off two good reads, I was disappointed by this one.

The Easter Parade is the story, the life story really, of two sisters. Things for them and between them never really improve. We watch the same disjointeness over decades. While we are sad to see people not live up to their potential, it diverges so little from the normal course of life that we are hardly surprised.

I enjoy Yates's more formal style. It is immediately confortable and unpretentious. It is writing like you learned in AP English. And that is a nice change from many more modern novles.

In no way did the book live up to Revolutionary Road. Here the misery was quiet, buried under complacency and compromise. So, it was depressing, yes. I just was looking for something that would strike me a little deeper.

Short Story Review: DeLillo in the New Yorker

2009-11-29T09:43:00.002-07:00

"Midnight in Dostoevsky" by Don DeLillo, in the November 30, 2009, New Yorker

Maybe it's me. I've been pretty task-driven lately. That means no real pleasure reading. This makes reading short stories a little difficult. The brevity is helpful, but without a purpose, without resolution, I'm hard-pressed to come away with anything from them.

This is the case with Don DeLillo's short story "Midnight in Dostoevsky" that appeared in the New Yorker. A sentence from the final paragraph sums it up: "I wondered what it was that had caused this thing to happen."

I really enjoyed DeLillo's White Noise, and I think that makes me more inclined to like his work. This was certainly one of the reasons I took the time to read this story. As good as the writing was, I came away disappointed.

The story follows a pair of eccentric college students in cold Midwestern town. They think they know everything, even when they know that they don't. The imagine the the life of a distracted logic professor and they make up the life of an old man they pass on the street. The central character talks to a female student who, it turns out, talks just like him and then disappears from the story. And in the end there is a bit of pointless violence that comes out of nowhere, serves no purpose and leaves us hanging.

Surely DeLillo could place any story he wants in the New Yorker. And I doubt if the editors are going to criticize much. Of course there is good writing here:

I knew where my father was--in Beijing, trying to wedge his securities firm into the Chinese century.

At the library, I devoured about a hundred pages a setting, small cramped type.

He shaves, we thought. He cuts himself and says shit. He wads up a sheet of toilet paper and holds it to his cut. Then he leans into the mirror, seeing himself clearly for the first time in years. Ilgauskas, he thinks.

I just was hoping for a little more from DeLillo in the New Yorker. But, then again, maybe it's me.

Book Review: Lust

2009-11-25T09:30:00.000-07:00

Lust by Susan Minot

The topic, very cleary, of all of these stories is relationships, or more specifically the complications of emotions involved when we get involved. Minot's characters often expect too much, even when they expect nothing, and are left feeling vacant and wasted. The eagerness with which the women in these stories would search out any sort of love is so earnest and sad. The stories, often told in first person, reminded me in the end of the stories of Anna Kavan. They are that good. Though I don't know it for sure, I would find it hard to belive that Minot didn't at some point read Kavan. The stories are brief and sharp. Languishing in the misery that appears inevitable here would be unendurable, but Minot gets us there, hits us quickly, and moves on. I read these stories in a single evening and it seemed to me to be the perfect way to digest these terrific stories.

Surefire Plot Generator

2009-11-24T20:43:00.003-07:00

"Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you'll get a plot." - Margaret Atwood

Work Mode to Writing Mode

2009-11-22T21:14:00.002-07:00

Sometimes the go-go-go gets to me.

I am eager to get ahead at work, at school, to learn everything I can, to get better. Yesterday, I was reading Harvard Business Review, CFO Magazine, Business Week, and the Wall Street Journal. All in an effort to learn what I can learn. But there in the Journal was an interview with Alice Munro.

There was a physical click in my head, a switch turned from one mode to another, and I was thinking about writing. Not just the outcome, but the process. And it made me eager to write again. To be creating. The feeling didn't argue against the other part of my life, but it was a reminder of a calling. Something inside me is deeply linked to that process of writing. Of course that part of me has been neglected. I've had the pleasure of writing papers. There is always that pleasure in stringing words together, in getting the right tone, the right emphasis. But all other forms of writing have been neglected.

So, I may be in the need of a break, but I'm also eager to get back to work.

Book Review: All the Pretty Horses

2009-11-18T09:00:00.002-07:00

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy really knows what he's doing. Disregards the rules and it all works. This is the fifth book I've read by him and I'm always amazed. And each book stands alone. This one is reminiscent of Blood Meridian and even No Country for Old Men because of the wandering over dry landscapes. But where Blood Meridan at times seemed pointless, John Grady Cole is driven. And he drives the reader on. I usually don't go for books with settings that are too unfamiliar. I will usually get lost trying to imagine things I've never seen, or I get lost because the writer assumes the reader has a basic understanding of the setting. While McCarthy uses names for plants and landscapes that I don't know, the settings are so much a part of the mood and the tone of the text that I don't feel like I've missed a thing. If anything, I'm only more inspired now to go see the places he has described.

Tragedy always seems to be around the corner in McCarthy's novels, but even though I know it is coming, I am always appropriately shocked. I don't think this novel has the same spark as Suttree, but everything in All the Pretty Horses has a purpose, is firmly grounded in a sense of justice. It may not be a justice we're familiar with, but everything feels well anchored.

Love is not a often a subject in McCarthy's novels, but here it is a key element and handled with deft and tact. No one would accuse the author of sentimentality, but the reader does not doubt that the emotions being described are not true.

Obviously, I should have read this book many ages ago. And the pleasure I had in reading the novel moves up McCarthy's other novels on my reading list.

Summer Reading Book Reviews to Come

2009-11-08T22:00:00.000-07:00

As crazy as things have been over the summer and this fall, I have managed to read a slew of books. And I promise that reviews--as brief as they're liable to be--are coming. Here is the list:

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Lust by Susan Minot
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
No One Belongs Here More than You by Miranda July
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

BNSF and Warren Buffet: Does it mean anything?

2009-11-08T09:37:00.002-07:00

After the announcement this week that Warren Buffet was going to buy out the remaining bit of Burlington Northern Santa Fe that he didn't already own seemed to spark some debate about what it should mean. I suggest that we might not want to read too much into it.

Buffet deserves a huge amount of deference because of his ability to make money, to make smart choices, to see the fundamentals of the fundamentals, but it might not always be a good idea to think that the common investor, or even an economist, should mimic his actions.

A GDP play was how most people seemed to read it this week. The idea is that as the economy cranks back up so will the fortunes of BNSF. There is truth in it. When cargo falls away to nothing there is nowhere to go but up.

An oil-price play is another way to take it. If the price of a barrel continues to climb, and as the dollar falls, fuel prices will escalate. Trucking becomes increasingly inefficient and rail begins to make a lot more sense for moving freight around this country.

The problem with both of these notions is that any advantage rail has is strictly near-term. Until there is significant investment in the rail infrastructure, until we can actually move more trains and more freight, the growth potential is limited. Expansion of the US rail lines is absolutely necessary. Passenger rail is limited by the constraints on freight rail. When they compete for the same space on the same set of tracks, we are losing some potential in both.

Unless Buffet knows something more about real infrastructure investment, the chances of making huge sums of money in his purchase of BNSF seems unlikely. He'll make some money in the recovery, and he'll make some money as the price of fuel climbs, but it is unlikely that he bought it for any of these reasons.

The two reasons Buffet gave are the more likely reasons than any of the speculative motives: he is always willing to buy more of anything he is invested in---and his father never bought him a toy train when he was a child

Comcast, NBC Deal Bad for Consumers

2009-10-02T08:11:00.001-06:00

It is not a bad idea for GE to get out of the TV business. If there a step too far in diversification, this might be it. There are other companies out there who could give NBC the attention it deserves (though, what would happen to all of those GE jokes on 30 Rock?). Comcast, though, is not the right buyer.

Cable providers, in most markets, seem to have us where they want us. If we want cable, we only have a few choices, including the satellite companies. Here in the Denver area, for instance, Comcast is it for cable. The only other option is for a dish company.

So what happens, then, when a behemoth in the cable market owns some of the best content on broadcast and cable? How much are the competing companies have to pay to get access to those channels? And how much is your cable bill going to go up?

Now, I understand the position Comcast is in. Internet viewing, including on demand, is screwing up their model. So, the NBC/Universal thing is clearly a defensive play. There are ways, though, to embrace the changes, forge new deals, and take advantage before too many standards are established. If a subscriber model works for cable, wouldn't it work for online television? It would be good if my cable subscription gave me access to all of the shows I missed during the week so I could watch them from work while I eat lunch (okay, maybe while I work, too).

Maybe this deal could be good for both GE and Comcast, but I don't think it would be good for me and you.

Dismissing Slack to Raise Inflation Fears

2009-09-27T10:02:00.002-06:00

The Wall Street Journal on Monday (yes, I am that far behind) had a lengthy article on the slack in the economy. And while the article goes in depth on various components of the economy that have room to make up before inflation could ever begin to kick in, they of course get it (purposefully) wrong.

The begin the discussion on track:
The interplay between slack and inflation is at the heart of that decision [for the Fed to raise interest rates]. Slack is important to their equation because, in theory, it should suppress wages and keep inflation down.

You can sense the skepticism there, but it continues:
But if the Fed misreads the dimensions or significance of slack, it could unleash an unwelcome bout of rising prices.

Not wrong, but you're beginning to see their thesis. And then:
The risk of inflation is significant.

Alright, back down. There is a difference between long-term and short-term here. Sure, keeping rates low after the recovery begins kicking in (like the Fed did under a different Administration) could certainly lead to inflation. I'll agree that the timing is critical, but the risk right now is not significant.

Of course, it's not just a question of rates. The liquidity in the system, will need to be absorbed as well. And budget deficits don't help. But durable goods order shrunk last month, the ISM manufacturing index barely crossed 50 into positive territory, and jobs will continue to be a problem for some time. I don't think we're in much danger right now of rising prices.

The article then injects an interesting theory:
If businesses and workers expect more inflation, the theory goes, they start demanding wage and price increases and set off the inflation they fear.

So, I'm a manufacturer, let's say, who believes that the Fed is really mucking things up and inflation is right around the corner. And, though, I haven't seen an increase in raw material prices yet, I'm going to raise prices in a struggling economy to try and recapture some of the money I think I'm going to lose in the future.

Or, I'm a union rep negotiating a new contract, when job losses are happening all around me, and I'm going to demand wage increases for men and women who are grateful to have jobs because I think that the cost of living is going to rise, at some point.

Both things would be a mistake. And, yes, I could see how those things could help stir up inflation, but the likelihood of anyone taking those risks when recovery is still uncertain is pretty low.

Though the article throws in plenty of numbers and some good quotes on the extent of slack in the economy, the purpose of the article is clearly to gin up inflation fears. Maybe it's just a supply-side issue, and the people overly concerned about inflation are just ignoring the demand side of things that becomes increasingly critical when things turn bad. Waiting too long to raise interest rates is dangerous, but raising interest rates will not lead us to recovery.

The Fed Needs to Look to the Future

2009-09-24T09:05:00.001-06:00

The FOMC statement released yesterday made it clear that, despite improvements in the economy, the Fed is not interested in raising rates or reabsorbing any of the liquidity out there. In fact, they "will continue to employ a wide range of tools to promote economic recovery and to preserve price stability."

I don't expect a change right now. Raising rates now or trying to get the Fed's balance sheet back to normal anytime soon would shock the system. Now is not the time. But we don't really read the Fed statement to read the committee's take on the current economic stituation. We are looking for some hints to the future. Apparently, the Fed is not looking far enough into the future to even hint in changes in policy. Alright, they "will gradually slow the pace of these purchases [mortgage-backed securities] in order to promote a smooth transition in markets," but this doesn't provide much guidance.
The main concern over rates is the impact on mortgage rates, and thus home purchases. If the Fed raises the target range for the federal funds rate from its current 0.0%-0.25%, the arguement goes, then mortgage rates go up and less people will buy homes. This is true, but not necessarily a bad thing. Many blame the whole housing bubble on Greenspan keeping rates low for so long, letting many people who shouldn't own homes get into them cheaply. Higher mortgage rates could slow recovery, but we face some risk in keeping rates low.

The real problem with low fed rate now, as I see it, is the effect on financial markets. With low rates, the yields that banks make on lending is also low. So, not only are banks reluctant to take on too much risk right now (for good reason), but they also don't have much financial incentive to do so. If the statement had hinted at the possiblity of raising rates even as soon as the first quarter of 2010 this would have gone a long way in getting money flowing again, inspiring banks to lend, helping businesses make the investments they should be making in this downturn.

I certainly agree with the inflation statement:
With substantial resource slack likely to continue to dampen cost pressures and with longer-term inflation expectations stable, the Committee expects that inflation will remain subdued for some time.
When prices are dropping there is little need to raise rates to slow down anything. I would have liked, and it seems like the market would have liked, a stronger hint as to when and how the Fed will reign in all of its liquidity programs and begin to inch up interest rates. It also would have helped people to believe that a real recovery is taking place.

Those Afternoons: An Excerpt

2009-09-16T09:00:00.000-06:00

The following is an excerpt from my short story "Those Afternoons":

The letter was stashed between a repair manual for the 1968-1976 Dodge Duster and another for the 1986-1987 Ford Taurus which leaned against one another on a shelf over his workbench. Harrison knew it was there as he walked out the side door of this house towards the garage. He had known it was there while he sat at the table eating grapefruit with his wife earlier that morning. He had known it was there the night before when he lay next to his wife in bed. He knew it was there since he put it there yesterday.

The letter came in the mail on Saturday. Harrison was working in his garage, sitting on a stool, trying to fix the fast idle cam on a carburetor when the mailman passed. He was glad to quit struggling with the thing and get the mail. He was in his late forties but already his hands felt blunted and shaky and looked perpetually swollen, calloused and dirty. Too much of his life had been spent underneath hoods trying to loosen rusted bolts that hid out of sight and nearly out of reach. His hands and back paid the price for that labor.

The telephone bill, the utility bill, two credit card applications, a new JC Whitney catalog and the letter. He recognized the handwriting immediately. Thirty years hadn’t changed it much since he’d first seen it, the words to “Rebel Rebel” written on the cover of a spiral notebook. But he hadn’t heard from Randy in many years. It wasn’t just the author of the letter, though, that made him hide it. It was the local return address.

Instead of walking the mail straight inside and using it as an excuse to have a Dr. Pepper and check the news from his recliner, he went back to his garage, a detached one-car unit that still had the old door that swung up flat in one piece, without the aid of an opener, the same garage where he’d worked with his father and his own son after that. He slid the letter between the soiled books without opening it.

Sunday morning he had patiently spooned bits of his grapefruit into his mouth while he looked over the classifieds, looking as he had for years for cars in need of repair that were going cheap, cars that he might turn around for a profit after a couple months’ worth of weekends spent working on them. And the whole while he could think about nothing but the letter, about what could have precipitated it, about what Randy could have to say to him now, after all this time.

Of the letter he said not a thing to his wife. She sat across from him, clipping coupons for her trip to the grocery that would follow church. Grace believed that going to church made her a better person. Not that God would look kindly on her, but the sermons and hymns served as a reminder of how to live a decent and moral life. Harrison had long ago wormed his way out of this duty, after his son, Jake, became too old for Sunday school. He was awkward in social situations and all the hand-shaking and niceties didn’t suit him. Grace seemed grateful for the ease of going alone, and Harrison was glad to have the house to himself, if only for a few hours. Usually he spent that time as he would have had she been home: in the garage.

This Is What He Does: An Excerpt

2009-09-09T09:00:00.000-06:00

The following is an excerpt for my short story "This Is What He Does":

Mitch stands in his bathrobe, staring out the living room window. Among the drooping arms of the fir trees dusk is gathering. There it is. The movement of something slipping stealthily between them in the corner of his eyes each time he blinks. The movement of some thing that his eyes will not catch.

The dusk creeps in for hours around this house, seated in a steep Colorado ravine that allows only a small respite from shadow each day, only a brief period of sunlight. Darkness grows from under the savage armed trees and slowly, nearly invisibly slides its way across the lawn until it envelopes the house.

He knows the smoke of darkness that blots out the world outside also surrounds him in the house. If he turns his eyes from their scanning of the yard, he will notice that he cannot see the wall behind him. No wood-paneled wall, no green worn couch begging to be replaced. Just a black void.

She should be home soon. Her lights will cut the darkness, stab through the trees, long shadows arcing over the grass. Unless. The drive from Denver is long, over chaotic freeways and winding foothill roads. She faces many dangers. Is it not a miracle that she makes it home everyday? A car might brake too quickly, a truck slide into her lane, her eyes wander from the road and her car be sent into the creek that chases the road leading to their house. Maybe she is there now, headlights beneath the surface of the water, a deep wound on her head. While he stands here.

The dark is breathing on the back of his neck when her headlights splash light suddenly into the room. He turns to find the kitchen, where she would enter. She cannot find him paralyzed in the living room. Reaching a hand where he cannot see, he finds the switch. In a moment of bravery, something against which he must draw his breath, steel himself, he flips the switch. He scans the room quickly for anything out of place, anything unexpected, unwanted. It is an act of daring, each door opened, each room suddenly illuminated, because he expects something. What, he doesn’t know. A monster, a dead body, maybe a burglar. Something sinister is waiting for him. Everwhere.

Joslyn enters to find Mitch at the kitchen table, seated before a glass, and she holds her breath. She cannot say a word to him yet. Still in his bathrobe, the man has not left the house today. Barely left since the day he lost his job. She’s tried not to be hostile with him, though she’s not sure why. That is most certainly what she wants, to scream in his face, to curse at him. But she doesn’t do this. No. She is reserved. She knows that her hostility towards him will find other outlets. And there is the possibility that he is not doing this on purpose. But, if he had any will, he could beat whatever paralysis he faced. To Josyln everything is a challenge, something to be sorted out, overcome, or conquered.

Nearly six months prior, on a night such as this, he had waited at the kitchen table for her to come home. He had no real explanation, stumbling over it.

“And you didn’t know this was coming?”

“No.” He looked pathetic. “Not really.”

“Restructuring?”

“That’s what they said.”

“You’ll get a good recommendation?”

“I assume.” The lights in the kitchen are bright and the windows only splash the fluorescent light back at them.

She wasn’t looking at him, staring instead at the intersection of wall and ceiling, sorting it out. “Contacts. You have contacts? Somebody you can call for other recommendations, or another job?”

“I suppose.” He obviously had not thought yet about another job.

Resting: An Excerpt

2009-09-02T09:00:00.000-06:00

The following is an excerpt of my short story "Resting":

Brookforest was a low, sprawling facility that from the sky probably looked much like a smashed spider. The complex bore the traces of twenty-plus years under the Nebraska sun and storms and the neglect that reflected that familial neglect of those interred within.

Tracy’s stomach tightened each time she approached with the same tightness she remembered from the one time she had instigated an exercise regime that left her sore and sorry for herself. Coming up on Brookforest with Les made her feel worse. Surely he would think that she had just written her mother off and put her away for others to care for the way housekeepers care for the rooms of a highway motel.

Les, for his part, seemed as eager and interested as he did in any aspect of her life. He sat in the cab of her truck, his hands clenched, one around the other, betraying a nervousness. It had been his idea to meet her mother. He said that if they were starting an honest relationship than he had better meet her mother. Tracy had wanted to explain to him that what they had was an adult relationship that was not in any traditional way “honest.” She was concerned, though, that his real goal might be to size up their future, by seeing what she was likely to become, before getting in too deep.

They were only a few weeks into this relationship and she would take her chances. It had started, out of character for her, somewhat impulsively.

Like any other day, Tracy had steered the pick-up into the rest stop, with the AC blasting and the AM radio yammering about a harvest day festival at the county fairgrounds. She spun the wheel of her truck easily into a parking spot with one hand, while the other touched the sun-warmed saddle blanket seat cover and the blue workpants covering her thigh. First stop of the day and it was already hot.

To Tracy calling them rest stops didn't fit. While some resting took place, the half-acre that hugged the side of the interstate was mostly used for the bathrooms. Linking relieving one's self with resting didn't make much sense to her. Because she was employed to maintain rest stops, Tracy was more concerned with dirty diapers dropped in the parking lot and graffiti written in the stalls than the terminology.

The two rest stops on Nebraska's I-80 where she spent her days were so alike that she could forget whether she was on the eastbound or westbound side. The line of wind-whipped trees surrounding the area, and the others dispersed among picnic areas did little to stop the heat from collecting in the concrete and radiating back to her as she started a patrol of garbage cans. Tracy leaned her arms across the sides of the plastic trash bin she pushed along, the casters chugging uncomfortably against the concrete. Her eyes went momentarily to the three tractor-trailers parked in the far lot. Outside the shelter of the air-conditioned cab of the utility pick-up she drove, she began to sweat quickly. Beads rolled down her forehead, out of the short but thick and curly hair. The heat, though, did something positive to her. Because of her stocky shape, the heat gathered in her quickly, but it didn't overwhelm her. It radiated from her inside, out through her skin, making her aware of all the parts of her body. It began in her soft belly, her sides, her thighs, warming her center. The heat made her feel alive.

Long Live the "Difficult" Novel

2009-09-01T13:03:00.003-06:00

I have read some difficult novels in my time. And I have read some page-turners. I've even read some literary page turners. But let's not think for a moment that the literary novel is dead.

Lev Grossman, in his Sunday article in the Wall Street Journal, "Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard," is under the serious misunderstanding that someone was forcing him to read hard books. He was apparently forced to shun commercialism, and he lumps us all in there, stating, "We crave such entertainments, but we despise them." This dichotomy between commercial and literary fiction has always been false. Indeed, there are the James Pattersons churning out book after book, but those books serve a purpose. And while I'm not going to like them, I don't despise them, or shame others for enjoying them. There are million shades of grey between black and white, though. Many of the book club books, books that are literary but sell like commercial fiction, are these page turners, these more accessible novels that Grossman think are just now returning.

I'm glad that Grossman's conscious has released him to read books with plot, but lets not "blame the Modernists." I agree with his assessment that "the Modernists broke the clear straight lines of causality and perception and chronological sequence, to make them look more like life as it's actually lived." And we should thank them for it, but the novel has moved on since Joyce and Woolf, and even Faulkner and Hemingway. But then he drags Cormac McCarthy into it. Neither No Country for Old Men nor The Road are anywhere close to a conventional model. I think some might call them downright hard, not to mention depressing. I don't think anyone could call McCarthy's fiction "a literature of pleasure."

"Should we still be writing difficult novels? Isn't it time we made our peace with plot?" Grossman asks. When novels are overrun by plot or simply difficult to be difficult, they fail and I'm not going to like them. The time for so-called difficult novels has not passed. There is no "revolution...from the supermarket racks." There is still place in this world for books by Denis Johnson, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Richard Ford. These are writers of books that are not driven by plot, but also not entirely commercially palatable. And I will take these books any day over something out of the mass-market factories. Call me me an "elite" if you wish, Mr. Grossman, but I'll take lyricism over simple "suspense and humor and pacing." You can have the novel that "entertains;" I'll take the one that moves me.

Barnes County: An Excerpt

2009-08-26T09:00:00.000-06:00

The following is an excerpt from the novel I finished revising last summer and will one day get around to submitting to agents.

Terry Stegman did not know that she was about to die. Her heart did pound in her chest harder than she wanted to admit. It was surely due to the speed at which her cruiser traveled the narrow gravel road, gliding just on the surface of the stones. If any animals, a thin little whitetail, a possum, a mangy dog, dared to step into the road they would die. She could not swerve for fear of her own safety. Or, if another vehicle approached from the other direction, just over the next blind hill, the outcome was certain. This danger elevated her heart rate, but it was also likely due to the images of two dead bodies that flashed in her mind.

Terry, Deputy Stegman when she donned the tan uniform, had worked for the Sheriff’s Department for more than ten years and had many occasions to see the dead. Auto accidents were common on the winding black-top highways of Barnes County, Missouri. Elderly who had died alone at home. Farm accidents, men gored by bulls. She had never been early on the scene of a double murder. A young couple, meth-addicts most likely but a young couple just the same, each shot several times and apparently beaten as well. It did not horrify her, nor did it really sadden her. She had her own experience with the sadness of death for perspective. It was the violence of it that left her feeling a little stunned. And here she was, speeding these back roads to the home of the suspect.

At least Bill was right behind her. County Sheriff for what must be twenty years, he had saved her, given her purpose after her husband’s death. He had leaned his long arms across the cattle gate and told her that her sense of justice would make her a natural.

“What makes you say that?” She was lining a trough with sweet grain.

“You want to set things right. You always knew how to keep Bob from going too far.”

“He knew how to conduct business.”

“A powerful man can lose sight of right and wrong. I expect he had some help keeping hold of how things should be done.”

On Sunday mornings Terry and Bob used to have breakfast at a place called Lou’s in the nearest town, the nearest thing that amounted to more than a dot on a map or the crossing of two state highways. It had been a time they set aside to be together, away from the responsibility of the farm, the phone calls from Bob’s lawyer or various realtors. All of that could wait.

They could have been going to church. They probably should have. Around every corner there seemed to be tucked a little white Baptist church, so many in fact that no one likely knew that there wasn’t a one that they’d set a foot in since the day they were married. Asking someone what church they went to was a common question when getting to know someone, right up there with ‘Do you think we’re gonna get some rain?’ A question by itself that irritated Terry because they’d next ask when you thought the rain’d let up. She’d usually answer the church question by saying she’d go to any church that had a preacher worth her respect. To the other question she’d say ‘eventually.’

So It Starts: The first term of the second year of the EMBA program

2009-08-22T09:06:00.004-06:00

Thursday I received my box of materials for the next term of the Executive MBA program. One of the luxuries of such a program is that they take care of the books. No waiting in lines. One day before the term starts, there's your books, a couple of binders full of syllabi, assignments, readings, Harvard cases. Of course now I know what's due for that first day of class, so I've got that hanging over me.

One of the peeves I have, after taking many, many classes, is how poorly put together the syllabi are for these classes. They need to teach these professors a class on how to prepare them, or at lease standardize them. Every term it's a big exercise to sort out what each professor means, how things are graded, what's due when, and the like. This is an executive program, full of overachievers, working full-time and trying to get the most out of this that they can. To not have the answer to every question laid out before them gets them (and me) a little anxious.

So, now it starts. The late nights, the heavy workload, the group work, the feeling that every minute should be spent doing something valuable and productive. This term it's "Interpreting the Economic Environment" which translates to Macroeconomics. I'm excited for this one, though I know it's not going to be that easy. I'm sure I'll like it more than others in my class. And the textbook is written by Paul Samuelson, so I'll have to give a lot of credit to what it says. And there's "Managing People in a Global Environment" which is really just human resources class. And the professor for the class also wrote the text for the class.

For now, grab every last second of summer, wrap up all those half-finished projects, clear the desk, and get ready to work

Beware "Grim" Retail Sales Data

2009-08-14T07:24:00.002-06:00

It's bad. But it's not that bad. The Commerce Department reported yesterday that retail sales fell 0.1% last month. The figure was a surprise to some because it follows two positive months, and the "cash for clunkers" thing along with a looming recovery were expected to lift sales more. Then when you strip sales of autos and parts, sales dropped 0.6%. This figure should not be surprising given the level of discounting retailers are doing, and the general reluctance by consumers to spend.

Though the WSJ pushes this as "grim data," it is a story about the past, not the future. Beware the negative feedback loop. If a slower sales figure makes us disbelieve a recovery is around the corner, and thus we spend less, then sales will decline again. Consumer spending and consumer confidence will some of the last figures to rise in any recovery. Unemployment will continue to go up though GDP may improve and that will be enough to make people reluctant to spend. There's enough information to say that some segments of the economy may improve quickly, but it would be foolish to bet on a quick recovery. That may be so, but let's not make things worse by getting gloomy over figures that aren't as bad as they seem.

The Meaning and Impact of Cash for Clunkers

2009-08-10T12:16:00.001-06:00

With an additional $2 billion being poured into the Cash for Clunkers program, it is easy to define the program as a success. Never mind the fact that there was no foresight into the extent of the demand that depleted the the program's funds in ten days. Even if the program is, on its face, a success, there are plenty of questions about its effect and just what the success might signify.

To me, the number of people who were willing, despite questionable economic times and mounting job losses, to purchase a new car implies a large amount of pent-up demand. People have been holding off purchases because of economic conditions, because of fear, and not necessarily because they can't afford the purchase. Indeed, they are only waiting for signs of stabilization and some strong incentives. Certainly the incentives help, but if there is this much pent-up demand for some thing as expensive as cars, then the demand for other goods is likely to be pretty high. This is a sign to me that recovery could be swift.

Some have said that all the program has done is to pull in sales that would have normally occurred in the next couple of months. And, sure, there is some of that. I think it's more likely that these are sales that should have happened over the last several months. We'll not get back to the normal pace of auto sales for some time, but there are obviously people out there who want to buy cars. With the right incentives, including lower prices, people may again start buying cars and other things like computers or appliances.

Auto dealers have reasons to be happy and sad about cash for clunkers. Without a doubt it is a good thing to have people thinking about buying cars again, even if they don't do it now. Anything that puts buyers on the lot is a good for business. Low inventories because of producer plant shut downs and bankruptcies, may cause some difficulties but it is better than having the opposite problem. It's the back lot at the dealers' that may be the issue. But even if they have the responsibility to disable and scrap these clunkers, it only makes the other used cars on their lots more valuable. They'll find reasons to complain, but the auto dealers (despite the many difficulties of the last several months) have reasons to be happy.

Auto mechanics are also complaining about the program, because people have begun trading in their cars instead of taking them in for repair. I think, though, that taking 200,000 old cars off the road is not likely to have a great impact on the total number of cars rolling into the garage.

What bothers me, as a car guy at heart, is all of the car parts that won't be reused. I've been that guy scouring scrap yards looking for a replacement alternator, radiator, or taillight. I've also known enough people who restore cars and have spent a great deal of energy searching for that elusive part. Now, I doubt that in another twenty years there will be many people looking for a particular piece of chrome on a 1992 F150 or Grand Cherokee, but for every clunker we happily remove from the road a car-ful of useful parts is wasted.

Enough with the Hiatus

2009-08-09T08:56:00.000-06:00

Seems like I the took a pretty serious break this summer. Certainly I was well overworked by the first year of the MBA program, and a break was well deserved. And then there was a baby that came right in the middle of everything. Plus I had a family reunion to organize. I did manage to read a slew of books. Those are all things worth doing and kept me very occupied so far this summer, but all the other things I intended to do remain not done.

So it's time to get back on the plan. I'll be writing about business and economics, with the personal essay and book review thrown in. The goal is to give myself strong enough deadlines so that I get something done and we don't go months--let alone weeks--without a post.

Let's see if I can live up to my own expectations.

Book Review: Ask the Dust

2009-06-12T21:24:00.003-06:00

Ask the Dust by John Fante

I took a break from reading a 600+ page collection of Cheever stories to read John Fante's Ask the Dust. I'd heard the book mentioned many times without any real idea of what it might be like, but when I settled into it, I couldn't put it down.

The novel is, in so many ways, like things I've read before. We have the poor, destitute young writer, struggling to feed himself and occupy his time when he is not writing. And, as we know, there is a lot of time spent not writing. It was reminiscent to me of a time so far in my past, so removed from my current existence, that it is hard to believe that was how I lived. There were certainly times like these for me, when I was out of work, writing a lot, and spending a lot of time just wandering. Sometimes the wandering led me to the library; when it didn't it led to trouble.

Of course, Fante's Bandini, the novel's protagonist, wanders into trouble. Not just trouble, women trouble. A waitress, no less. It is easy to fall for them. Bandini is searching for something. Fame as a writer for sure, but something else, and he is willing to follow or chase his waitress, Camila, to find it. The trouble is that she doesn't like him, and worse, he doesn't like her. Bandini is so blatantly racist and misogynist and so hostile about it, yet Fante gives s not real motivation for this. I'll believe the best. I see how others could think that the lack of justification for Bandini's actions could mean that Fante doesn't believe they require justification. That he believes these actions are acceptable. I'll have faith that Bandini's lack of experience with women and his sense of vulnerability lead him to treat Camilla, and the other women he meets, so poorly.

What you would never guess about this novel is that it takes place in the 1930's, that it was written in that era. It could easily be in the Los Angeles of the 1970's or even last year. The surroundings and circumstances would not change in any other decade. The only thing that gives it away is the discussion of marijuana as something new (that, and the use of the term"hophead").

Ask the Dust is a tremendous book. I rarely can find the time to finish a book in one day, but this book motivated me to keep reading. The book has its faults, though, that will keep it from raking too high on my list. Bandini is so self-centered, self-absorbed, subject to flourishes that add or reveal nothing, that it is hard to like him, hard to care about him. The novel, just maybe, lacked a level of depth that would have made it more profound and simply a better book. And, I liked it nonetheless.

New Standards for Executive Pay

2009-06-09T08:04:00.002-06:00

Many people will be lodging complaints about the Obama administration's meddling in the affairs of private companies by imposing controls on CEO pay at firms that have received TARP funds. I'm with those who say that the White House should not be involved in controlling how companies choose to compensate executives. Those companies who have taken TARP funds or bailout money have sacrificed their independence, though, and we should all be concerned about how the heads of these companies are being paid. Does it make sense to have a company that has essentially failed, made bad choices, giving excessive pay to the CEO who was in charge? Shouldn't their be a downside for these guys when they screw up?

The trouble with executive compensation derives from perverse incentives. My beef is with earnings per share. Barely "beating the street" is game companies continue to play. And it works. The street doesn't always care that beating current analysts' estimates might not be best in the long run. Compensating executives on continued earnings or stock growth can lead to short-cutting the company's long-term objectives. But this is only part of the problem. Compensating with stock options often leads management to, again, manage the stock price (or properly manage the street's expectations) and neglect the true well-being of the company.

The real problem, as I see it, is that there is little downside risk to executives. Maybe boards can argue that with enough upside, anything else is downside. We've seen enough companies fail in the last year and executives from those companies walk away with huge packages, that I'm can hardly believe that there is shared risk. A CEO's well-being should depend on the company's well-being. And not just for the current quarter. A pay scheme that allows for a measure of future performance might help align interests. It is easy to believe that some of the drastic job cuts we've seen have been out of management's need to cut costs today, to preserve today's earnings, without regard for the health of the company a year from now. Cutting mid-management professionals, those next-generation executives, will prove to have been a mistake for many companies.

We may object to a government's hand in private industry, but the Obama administration has an opportunity to set standards, essentially guidelines for boards in constructing compensation packages. If they can avoid overreach, they can establish compensation packages that are fair to CEO's and shareholders, and give boards the cover they need to reign in escalating executive pay.

Sacrificing Personal Space for Books

2009-06-08T12:06:00.000-06:00

Returning back to the library book sale on Sunday, bag day, I came away with some good finds despite crowds. You absolutely have to forego any sense of personal space to do this. The good news is that I don't think I'm competing with too many people on the books I'm looking for, and the professionals were mostly absent this time.

Two heavy bags of books, in no particular order...

Giliead - Marilynne Robinson
Brazil - John Updike
The Good Wife - Stuart O'Nan
Son of the Morning - Joyce Carol Oates
Everyman - Philip Roth
Gertude and Claudius - John Updike
The Ghost Writer - Philip Roth
Veronica - Mary Gaitskill
The Coup - John Updike
Competitive Advantage - Michael Porter
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England - Brock Clarke
Ten Days in the Hills - Jane Smiley
Haunted - Joyce Carol Oates
An Unfinished Life - Mark Spragg
The Keep - Jennifer Egan
Moo - Jane Smiley
Faithless - Joyce Carol Oates
In the Night Season - Richard Bausch
A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
The Fortress of Solitiude - Jonathan Lethem
The Story of Lucy Gault - William Trevor
The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter
Plainsong - Kent Haruf
On With the Story - John Barth
A Random Walk Down Wall Street - Burton Malkiel
The Poorhouse Fair - John Updike
Pigeon Feathers - John Updike
The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
The Nick Adams Stories - Ernest Hemingway
The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
Too Far To Go - John Updike
The Art of Reading the Novel - Philip Freund
The Quiet American - Graham Greene
Sweet Thursday - John Steinbeck
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
A Separate Peace - John Knowles
The Amityville Horror - Jan Anson

A White Farmhouse - An Excerpt

2009-06-08T09:54:00.000-06:00

"Here." Paul pulled the tiles from his tray and carefully laid them out on the board. First the C, then O, D already there from her word dread, and then the Y on the triple word score. He looked to the concrete apartment ceiling to begin adding the score in his head.

"Cody?" Ann cocked her head.

"I thought we said names were okay. You know, Buffalo Bill?"

"Or, Cody, Wyoming?"

"Ha." He shook his head. "Or like that." He paused purposefully. "Forty-two points." He was content in believing that he might win for once.

She calmly added his score then looked at her own tiles. The board was now crowded with words, leaving few options.

"Do you think much about that trip?" He had thought about withholding his question, but for the wine.

"I really try not to."

"I guess I don't think about it much. I mean, I did. Sometimes, when I get sick, I remember."

"It makes me sick to remember." She didn't look at him.

"It's really…."

"It's strange," Ann finally took her eyes off her tiles to look at Paul. "No, it’s just wrong that things like that can happen."

"If I hadn't been sick."

"If I'd have just told you to suck it up." She was not smiling.

"But you're so damn sweet. Here we are in a strange town, and I eat something bad—"

"You didn't. It was from being in the car for nine hours."

"And you decide to go out and get me something."

"I could have—I should've just stayed and listen to you moan."

"Probably so."

Paul watched Ann as she went back to studying her tiles, gently clicking them together as she struggled to form words. It was about twenty-five years ago and he didn't think of it much, but when he did a world of things came flooding back. After this time it wasn't a thing to be contemplated; it was a part of the fabric, the rebar in the concrete ceiling. Questions, or rather suspicions remained for Paul. He poured the last of their bottle of wine into their two glasses, cradled his in his two hands and leaned back in his chair, surveying the room, and thinking about how much things had changed since that summer trip. Or because of it. They now sat together at their small dining room table situated behind their couch in the large living room. Bookcases filled with books, pictures, and various artifacts of their life together lined one wall. Windows made up the wall in front of the couch, overlooking Cheesman Park and Denver's skyline. Paul had never really thought he would end up in the city. He always imagined himself moving back to the country, from where his parents had ripped him when he was a youth, transplanting him to this squalid city. Instead, he had stayed, not by force, but not by will, and lived a city life. The city is good place for a young adult, first on his own, but in the back of Paul's mind he had always held a vivid image of his future.

Tomorrow's Never There - An Excerpt

2009-06-07T09:51:00.001-06:00

The letter was stashed between a repair manual for the 1968-1976 Dodge Duster and another for the 1986-1987 Ford Taurus leaning against one another on a shelf over his workbench. Harrison knew it was there as he walked out the side door of this house towards the garage. He had known it was there while he sat at the table eating grapefruit with his wife earlier that morning. He had known it was there the night before when he lay next to his wife in bed. He knew it was there since he put it there yesterday.

The letter came in the mail on Saturday. Harrison was working in his garage, sitting on a stool, trying to fix the fast idle cam on a carburetor when the mailman passed. He was glad to quit struggling with the thing and get the mail. He was in his late forties but already his hands felt blunted and shaky and looked perpetually swollen, calloused and dirty. Too much of his life had been spent underneath hoods trying to loosen rusted bolts that hid out of sight and nearly out of reach. His hands and back paid the price for that labor.

The telephone bill, the utility bill, two credit card applications, a new JC Whitney catalog and the letter. He recognized the handwriting immediately. Thirty years hadn’t changed it much since he’d first seen it, the words to “Rebel Rebel” written on the cover of a spiral notebook. But he hadn’t heard from Randy in probably a year, and certainly had never heard from him by mail. They had probably only talked a couple of times in the last few years. It wasn’t the author of the letter, though, that made him hide it. It was the source. The return address was of a state prison.

Another book sale (darn professionals)

2009-06-06T07:14:00.006-06:00

Friday was the opening day of our county library's spring book sale (never mind that it's really summer now). I stood in a line of probably a hundred people, waiting for them to open the doors. Once inside, we all scattered to our various corners. I went to what they called "adult fiction."

Now, I like used books as much as any book lover would, but I was not pleased to realize that so many in that line were professionals, booksellers (on eBay or elsewhere) with their little hand-held scanners scanning any book that looked valuable. Not only was stepping over these people a pain, but I can't help but resent that these people are trying to capitalize on this book sale in order to resell the books and make a profit. I'm a good capitalist, too, but a book sale is for book lovers, for those looking for a good find, looking to complete a collection, looking to find new reads. If it were up to me, I'd ban those damn scanners and let make those folks scan the books with their eyes like the rest of us.

Despite this frustration, I came away with a decent haul. And I'm looking forward to going back on Sunday, when they charge by the bag.

Here's part one of the haul:
Ask the Dust - John Fante (I've seen this book come up in many discussions, so I'd better add it to my list)
White Teeth - Zadie Smith (Award winner, right?)
The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron (Another one that appears on all "the best" lists)
Delta Wedding - Eudora Welty (It's Welty and I haven't read it, so I'd better)
The Sportswriter - Richard Ford (Probably already have this one)
The Tortilla Curtain - TC Boyle (could've grabbed about a dozen TC Boyle books, so just one this time)
The Easter Parade - Richard Yates (this one's supposed to be more depressing than Revolutionary Road, so it's definitely on my list)
Like Life - Lorrie Moore (short stories by a modern master)
Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre (my other New Directions edition is so well-worn it's lost its cover)
In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway (Scribners paperback)
Ulysses - James Joyce (classic Vintage paperback)
Hunger - Knut Hamsun (another one it's hard to believe I've never read)
The Trial - Franz Kafka (the cover keeps falling off my other copy--I say that's why I haven't read it yet)
Goodbye, Columbus - Philip Roth (some day I'll have and have read the entire Roth collection)
The Human Stain - Philip Roth (add another one)
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway (another old Scribners paperback)
Winner Take Nothing - Ernest Hemingway (and again)
The Colossus - Sylvia Plath (a 1968 paperback)
Walden - Henry David Thoreau (with a handwritten inscription: Readings in Am. Lit., Denver University, Winter Qr '59)
Built to Last - James Collins and Jerry Porras (the one business book -- I don't really like Jim Collins, but this one's now a business classic)

Book Review: Catch-22

2009-04-27T20:40:00.003-06:00

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

This is a book about death. At its best and brilliant, the book is about death. Yes, it's funny at times. And there's the whole catch-22, damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't thing. But, really, it's about death. Witness the following snippet:

Man was matter [...] Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit is gone, man is garbage [...] Ripeness was all.

The narrative of Catch-22 has an oddly swirling motion. Events circle around, repeat, expand, and disappear. You wonder if maybe you've read something before, if it has been repeated, or if you are purposefully being made to be confused. One character has deja vu, the others are at best unstable. The climactic scene contained within the book's final pages actually happens, briefly, early on in the storyline. My confusion over all of this is, of course, acerbated because it took me months to read this, only getting through a few pages at a time.

The book, though, is not that good. I give it high marks because, at its core, it is a bit existential and death and violence (in dramatic and humorous forms) permeates the text. The humor was a little lost on me. I like to think that I enjoy absurdity, pure humorous absurdity. What takes place here is pointless, empty absurdity.

The writing itself, does not stand out, unless it is discussing death. In the extended quote below, the books protagonist, Yossarian is considering the way people inside a hospital were safer than those outside:

The didn't explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn't drown or get struck by lightening, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn't get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, bludgeoned to death with axes by parents or children, or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. There was none of that trick now-you-see-me-now-you-don't business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-now-I-ain't. There were no famines or floods. Children didn't suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a woosh!, accelerating at the rate of thirty-two feel per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like a paca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.

The paragraph, speeds, itself accelerating towards the vivid imagery that, again, hints at something that will reappear much later in the book.

I can knock another one of those "great books" off my list, now, but I'm happy to have read it. I sometimes found myself astounded by what I read, and at other times I wondered about the point of it all.

With whom do you "share" your home?

2009-04-23T20:55:00.003-06:00

The Wall Street Journal article this morning on the apparent suicide of Freddie Mac's CFO begins with the following statement:

Authorities recovered the body Wednesday of Freddie Mac's acting chief financial officer after an apparent suicide in the home he shared with his wife and young daughter.

Later, the article states:

Fairfax County police, responding to a 911 call at 4:48 a.m., found Mr. Kellermann's body in the basement of the home he shared with his wife, Donna, and 6-year-old daughter, Grace, in the Hunter Mill Estates subdivision in a Washington, D.C., suburb.

What is this "shared" nonsense? I've shared places with roommates; I live in this house with my family.

I know it's a sad and possible sordid story here, but this "sharing" thing really jumped out at me. It makes it sound like he was sleeping on the couch or in the guest room or something.

Going Public

2009-03-25T12:41:00.004-06:00

I am not a good friend. I am not good at staying in touch. In some ways the people of my past stay fixed in that past. They exist for me as only memories of that era. I rarely bring those people forward with me. This is one of the reasons the whole idea of Facebook, of going public, makes me a little nervous.

In some ways I think I'm afraid of worlds colliding. The man I am today doesn't necessarily jive with who I have been in the past. Maybe I'm embarrassed now of who I once was, or maybe I'm embarrassed of who I am now from the perspective of who I once was.

I am 'the man' now. I work a 9-to-5, I'm married, and I have kids. Heck, I even live in the suburbs. I'm not the rebel I once was, sure, but I'm not nearly as miserable as I used to be. In fact, I am quite happy.

There are risks in reconnecting, but it is not like I've been in hiding. I've been writing a blog for something like four years. A Google search will find me pretty quickly. Actually reaching out to people, as Facebook creatively requires, risks bringing up all of those things from the past, all of those traumas and dramas. There is a lot in my past that I'd rather not revisit, no matter how I feel about the people involved.

Who I am today, though, is a result of all that happened before. I may now be an MBA candidate, but I also have an MFA in Creative Writing. I may have a good job in corporate finance, but I also finished writing a novel (still unpublished and not even yet submitted) last summer. I may spend what little free time I have playing with my children, but I also spent years drinking too much and playing in bands. I may be happily married now, but I spent years either pining or having my heart broken by women.

I am venturing forward into a strange virtual world of social networking and at the same time I am venturing into my own past, opening up boxes that had been closed and tucked away. Maybe now, today, I can be a good friend--at least, virtually.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Damon-Garr/1590769401

Why I Don't Care about AIG: Outrage and Indifference

2009-03-22T17:11:00.003-06:00

We live in hyperbolic times. Extreme reactions are the mode of the day. Everything is the "worst." Everyone has something to be angry about. Me? I couldn't care less.

This whole AIG mess is a disappointment, but it has been since Day One. In some ways it's like watching a friend with a drinking problem get himself into trouble again. Maybe you could be upset about it the first time something similar happened, but when you find out that he's used the money you lent him to buy more booze, you should not be surprised. Or outraged.

Who should I be angry with? AIG and the poor sap the government (we) put in charge? The government officials who "didn't realize" that they had bonuses to pay out? The derivative traders who took the irrational risks in the first place and got us into this whole mess? The new administration who wasn't even in place when we wrote the company the first check? Or Chris Dodd or Barney Frank?

None of them. I can't bring myself to be mad at any of them. Maybe it's because I have other things to worry about. Maybe because I think there are more fundamental problems with our economy than AIG paying out retention bonuses with our money. I now think we should never have got involved. Though there are problems in that.

The question in my mind is How big is too big to fail? Letting Lehman Bros go under spooked the market and we haven't yet recovered (I blame Hank Paulson for this--he, ex-Goldman Sachs, seemed happy to help out his friends, but when someone he didn't like was in trouble, he said "screw 'em"). So maybe letting AIG, who is responsible for insuring a lot of the debt out there, go under would be a bad idea. And I'll definitely agree that there's moral hazard in all of this. It leads to irrational risk taking. If I keep bailing my drunk friend out of jail, when does he ever learn to shape up?

Couldn't we have said that AIG was too big? Couldn't we have forced them to sell off or just dissolve the division that had put them in this position? Why just say, here you go, here's a big check, and in exchange we'll take a stake in this mess of a company?

But we haven't learned the 'too big to fail' lesson yet. When Merrill got into trouble, we pushed Bank of America into taking them, making them bigger in the process. I understood the theory for all of the bail outs at the time, but I'm ready for a little creative destruction. We have a banking and investment system that is all screwed up. They're all tangled up and twisted around, with no one paying for the risks they've taken.

And sure I could be mad at CNBC and all the cheerleaders telling us to buy and buy, all the people saying the market was going up so things must be great, the economy is strong while out in the real world things were turning sour. The media issue is separate. There should be no mistaking that CNBC or the Wall Street Journal is on the side of business. That's your mistake if you thought otherwise.

Really, I'm disappointed. One would have thought that someone would have realized earlier that using lent money to pay huge bonuses was not a good idea. One would have thought that taking a majority stake or any large stake would have given us a seat at the table. One would have thought that the government officials and legislators would have had the best interest of all of us in mind. One would have thought that there were people around who were smart enough to figure out how to get us out of this mess. One would have thought we'd have known better to believe any of this was true. I'm disappointed--with us.

Mass. Wal-Mart customer finds teeth in wallet

2009-03-07T20:24:00.000-07:00

Mass. Wal-Mart customer finds teeth in wallet

FALMOUTH, Mass. – A customer shopping at a Wal-Mart for a wallet claims he found something that definitely didn't fit the bill: human teeth. Police say the man found 10 human teeth Saturday when he unzipped a compartment in the wallet. One tooth had a filling.
The customer turned the wallet and the teeth over to employees at the Falmouth store but left without giving his name.
Police investigating the incident told The Cape Cod Times that the teeth belong to an adult, but since there was no blood or gum tissue on the teeth, they would be unable to perform DNA tests.
A Walmart spokeswoman said the company believes it was an "isolated incident," but will investigate.

Mmmm...okay?

Cheever in the WSJ

2009-03-07T19:57:00.001-07:00

As you can tell, I read just about nothing besides the Wall Street Journal these days. Blame it on working too hard and studying too much. Trying to stay up to day takes up what little I have left. Nevertheless, I read a good article today made me want to read. I'm really read... fiction.

David Propson, editor of The Week, uses the publication of The Library of America John Cheever complete novels and collected stories and a new biography as an occasion to revisit Cheever. My own reading of Cheever has been limited, though the big Pulitzer-prize-winning short story collection sits on my shelf and on my reading list. From my suburban perch, the article makes Cheever's study of suburbia sound like something I ought to be reading.

His subjects were the hung-over train commuter, the pill-popping analysand, the indefatigable bed-hopper. Their habitat was the pretty suburban house, the swimming pool, the cocktail party and the bomb shelter -- a habitat only recently erected atop the bucolic land that Cheever adored. They purchased groceries to the strains of Muzak Mozart and ate fast food from "Smorgorama and Giganticburger stands."
...
Cheever's suburbanites aren't stuffed-shirt fogies but shallow hedonists who refuse to grow up. Marriage, far from being a repressive institution, is a sprawling and unpredictable terrain. The extramarital affairs of his male protagonists end in catastrophe, or simply end. Conformity sometimes seems to be the threat, but quite as often it's just one of two evils. People's own unruly natures endanger their happiness, just as weeds creep up the lawn. His characters sense the precariousness of the civilization they've cobbled together and cling to it all the more.

Like I said before about Lee Siegel's idea of suburbia, Cheever's is also one that is hardly recognizable today. Gone are the swimming pools and cocktails, replaced instead by beer and kiddie pools. This is middle class suburbia, sprawl, and malls, and Starbuck-ed neuroses. Today's suburbia deserves the same sort of study. And Cheever deserves another read.

The End of the Rocky Mountain News

2009-02-27T08:05:00.003-07:00

One Sunday morning, when I was probably 12 or 13 years old, my parents sent me out to buy the Sunday paper. From where we lived in suburban Aurora, Colorado, there were not a lot of options—not a lot of close options—for buying a paper. There were a couple of newspaper machines around, but other than that, your only option was 7-11.

I headed out with my 50 cents on my bike to one of two area 7-11s. The one I was headed to was probably a mile and half away from home. The benefit of this one was that it didn’t involve any major hills. The other was downhill all the way there, but coming home would have been difficult.
I spent a lot of time on my bike as a kid and I was pretty reckless. So, when I came to a stoplight, it didn’t matter much that it was red. As long as it was clear then I was going to go. At one red light I thought it was clear.

I was barely into the intersection when I was struck by a car. I wasn’t hit terribly hard, but there was in the street, myself and my bike half underneath the car, with two old ladies from inside the car standing over me. Why these two old ladies were speeding to church, I don’t know, but I knew that I was in the wrong and my first interest—before even checking for injuries—was fleeing the scene.

The wheels of the bike still turned and no bones protruded from my body, so I was out of there. At the 7-11, I checked myself out. My shoulder hurt, my knee was scraped, and I was pretty sure that I’d hit my head on something. I bought the paper anyway, and headed home maybe a little more carefully—the whole while imagining that I was suffering from broken bones I wasn’t aware of or bleeding in my head that would eventually kill me.

The paper I went out to get that morning: the Rocky Mountain News.

Today, the Rocky Mountain News has issued its last paper. Lord knows it is a hard time for newspapers, but the Rocky was competing in a two-paper town while sharing a Joint Operating Agreement with its competitor. This situation was untenable. The Rocky got the wrong end of the deal and it was probably doomed from the day it signed the agreement.

It was the paper I grew up with. The comics I knew were in the Rocky, not the Denver Post. When I looked for my first job, it was in the help wanted section of the Rocky. It had a comfortable tabloid format, instead of the cumbersome broadsheet format. I didn’t even know that the broadsheet was the standard format for newspapers until I got older.

So, now Denver becomes a one-newspaper town. A single editorial page, a single sports section. It’s a sad day for the loss of a 150-year-old institution, for the loss of choice and a variety of voices. It feels almost like getting hit by a car.

Fiction and the Economic Crisis

2009-02-22T06:44:00.003-07:00

So, we're in the middle of a deepening economic crisis, with the Dow losing 45% in the last 15 months, and with around 3 million jobs lost in the last five months. Personally, my own industry is, as an article on the industry stated yesterday, "running off a cliff." While the pain isn't hitting everyone, the economists are scared. The consensus seems to be that we might at least stop the slide downward by year's end, though the job losses will continue to mount in the meantime, making the prospect of a recovery even further in the future. Some think it may well be a decade before we get to the same level of growth we were seeing before this whole crisis hit.

Crisis is always interesting from an artistic perspective. What will the American fiction of the next few years look like? What sort of country will it describe? First, there will be a lot less of it published. With the big publishing houses shuttering divisions, and book stores struggling to keep their doors open, there will be fewer new books. These changes--this crisis--are subjects for another conversation.

The books being written now could very well describe a country in turmoil, lost in a mix of hope and pessimism. Just when things looked up, like the country might be restored and the outlook brighter, greed at every level has driven us to this precipice. And if it's not us falling over that edge, it's the 43,000 workers at GM who will lose their jobs this year, the 10,000 at Boeing. Suddenly, we look at our credit card bills in horror. What was once the normal way of operating now has proved to be incredibly reckless. Our 401(k)s? Don't even look at them. And add a few more years to your planned retirement age. And the mortgage? Even if you're making your payments, knowing that your house has lost 20% of its value makes you question the reasonableness of the purchase.

Thinking about losing your home, though, is as frightening as the prospect of losing your job. Our identities are wrapped up in these things. How lost is a person who has lost either, or both?
How would such a crisis shift his/her perspective? In what way would he overcome?

It is hard to argue against the powerful notion of the American Dream because it is so much a part of our psyche. But we know it fails at times. We know that hard work and the desire for more doesn't save us from ruin. Alternatively, it seems like the country has developed a sense of entitlement. As if we deserve good things to come our way. And if they don't, by God, someone had better step in and make things right. It's at every level. The bank who expects not to suffer when the risks they've been taking have led them to near-collapse. And it's the home buyer who bought well out of his/her price range with a questionable loan who now wants the government to step in and stop the bank from foreclosing.

All of these things are bound to manifest themselves in the fiction we read in the next few years. Maybe these novels will moralize, tells where we went wrong--as if we don't know. Maybe they will offer hope, they will show us an American Spirit that is truer and more noble than the capitalist American Dream. Or maybe they will show a state of ruin in which we will stay and in which we had damn well better find our way, or perish.

Cato protests govt spending in full-page WSJ ad

2009-02-10T07:35:00.003-07:00

I suppose it is no surprise that the Cato Institute would oppose government spending. That it would choose to protest government stimulus in a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, is a little more surprising. What is really worth noting is that they state, "Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth," and then support the statement with a long list of people who support that statement. My question for the Cato Institute: Where are all the Yale and Harvard economists on this issue?

The ad begins with a quote from the President, "There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump start the economy." Then Cato begins their ridiculous disagreement: "With all due respect,Mr.President,that is not true.

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

The undersigned include two members of the faculty of my not very prestigious undergraduate alma mater, Metropolitan State College of Denver. Not exactly A-class economists.

Let's look at their arguments. I do think that most economists would agree that the government needs to spend, if no one else will. When things seize up, as they have, the government is the only one with the purse big enough, and the responsibility to move the economy along by spending.

What led to delays in recovery from the Great Depression were attempts to balance the budget which required increased taxation. And Japan's "Lost Decade"? Government inaction was the culprit there. The belief that things would get better without intervention was the problem then, and it is the reason the US government is choosing to act as quickly as possible. Many economists will tell you that if recovery comes swift, it will be in large part because of fed action.

Now, to the belief that tax cuts cure all, we know it's not true. I'd love to shed my "tax burden" as well, but reducing taxes is not going to get us out of this hole. Tax cuts for individuals tend to be saved. How much of last year's stimulus checks actually got spent? And tax cuts for businesses are not going to encourage businesses to hire or increase output when the demand does not exist. It is estimated that every dollar of government infrastructure spending creates $1.59 in GDP growth, while tax cuts generate $1.01. And considering the lack of consumer confidence, expect most of that to be saved.

I tend to support Cato on a lot of issues because of my own libertarian leanings, but we will not find a way out of this problem by telling the government to get out of the way. My question for my Metro State economists, John Cochran and Kishore Kulkarni: What percentage of tax cuts would actually improve economic performance?

R.I.P John Updike

2009-01-28T20:27:00.002-07:00

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irisies, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.

Book Review: All Aunt Hagar's Children

2009-01-06T21:38:00.000-07:00

All Aunt Hagar's Childen by Edward P. Jones

This short story collection may have been the only thing I’ve read by Jones, but from this alone I am tempted to rank him among my favorite writers. In a way, his writing reminds me of Alice Munro. He weaves a character’s rich history with a voice that expresses a character’s isolation even among many others. He writes in a language that is comfortable to read, from sentence structure to tone. The characters themselves are rich and varied, even though they often suffer a plight that I could never understand.

I’ve often been intimidated by African-American writing, believing the experiences being described would be entirely alien to me. I’ve come to realize there’s something in the alienation of the African-American experience with which I associate. There is something in it that is similar to Céline. There something existential in all of it.

I’d read “A Rich Man” in, I think, the Best American series, and though the story didn’t necessarily linger and leave me haunted the way some stories have, I knew then that I wanted to read more. Seeing this collection along with Jones’s novel The Known World receive accolades only reinforced that I would need to read Jones. I was not disappointed. It took me a long time to get through because of other obligations, but flipping back through the stories, I’m reminded of their qualities. They are specific and gritty, fantastical and surreal, and all the time heartfelt.

One of the things linking most of the stories is Washington, DC. The city is nearly a character in the stories. It is a place where some long to go, and a place where others have come. Jones describes the city’s streets and neighborhoods, from the time where there was nothing across the Potomac in Virginia but pastures, to the near present. After reading these stories I feel like I know the city better than some of the people I know.

These are good stories. This is a good collection. I’m tempted to rank it right up there with Rock Springs.

Schumpeter and reading fiction

2009-01-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

I took time this weekend to actually read some fiction. Sure, I had other things I should have been doing. It’s just been itching in me. I see it in the way I think. I need to move beyond the tangible randomness of numbers, symbols, equations. School is taxing, zaps my mental energy, but it leaves full parts of my brain unexercised. The closest thing to what I was used to through the rest of my schooling was reading Schumpeter. When the professor passed around copied pages of an old text, I felt a warm familiarity. So many previous assignments came in this exact form. And even then the text called for re-reading, pondering, questioning. Things notable absent from my recent studies.

The question in Schumpeter is the notion of creative destruction, the idea that capitalism is a constantly changing form, ever evolving as even great companies need to be destroyed and rebuilt. He argues, like Marx, that capitalism has an inevitable end. He explained, in ways I had not yet seen, that socialism is seen as a replacement for capitalism, its natural successor. And while I see some parts of socialism as a natural evolution from strict capitalism, I now understand why capitalists fight so hard against socialism. It is the antithesis to the form they believe is best. Any move to socialism means a further erosion of capitalism and a step closer to its demise.

Schumpeter doesn’t see capitalism as inherently flawed in the same way as Marx. It just is not static. It changes, requiring the biggest and most formidable capitalist institutions to collapse in order to be rebuilt. Maybe that explains some of what is going on these days. At least reading this reminds me that I’m much more comfortable with theory than I am with calculating aggregate demand curves or with linear regression.

Hot Wheels, fate, and family

2009-01-04T20:59:00.003-07:00

One of the best things about being a parent is seeing my own children playing with the same toys I played with as a child. The day I pulled out of the closet the box of Hot Wheels cars I played with as a boy, my children sat with me as we looked at every car. There were ooohs and aaahs, and woo-woo-woo for every one that resembled an ambulance, fire truck or police car.

Looking at each car I remember the sort of characters each had, which ones my brother and I would choose as a representative of ourselves. It was while playing with these cars as a child that I thought about the person I might become. Sometimes I chose the muscle car or race car, sometimes it was the Mercedes or the tractor-trailer. Doing this I thought about whom I might become, what fate might determine for me, what choices I might make that would lead to such a fate.

To now see my children playing with the same cars, the pick-up truck that I still remember taking out of its packaging, the hot rod painted with Testors model paint, the Cadillac ambulance, it really does something to my heart. I wonder what fate they’ll imagine for themselves, and what their future will deliver.

An Unexamined 'Burb: Lee Siegel and "Revolutionary Road"

2008-12-28T20:13:00.002-07:00

I live in the suburbs. I do it for my children. I want them to live where other children live, where they can play in the front yard, on green grass, under broad leafed trees, where other children will come to play, where the schools are good, where the streets are safe.

I have, though, lived elsewhere. I have lived where drunks vomit and sleep on the curb, where fights break out in the street, where drug deals transpire below my window, where shootouts send bullets to pierce my windows.

Despite these contradictions, my detest for the suburbs continues to this day. It has its origins in my youth. I lived in the suburbs from the time I was eight until I was old enough to run from them. Primarily, I saw my own neighborhood as the embodiment of misplaced ideals. Where the uniqueness of souls was given over to the same uniformity as the tract homes. Where football games were more important to a fulfilling life than art in any form. The suburbs represented sprawl, by man's desire to pave over nature, erect strip malls, and design away the randomness of life.

Lee Siegel, in an article from this weekend's Wall Street Journal, "Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs: America's long artistic tradition of claiming spiritual death by station weekend," uses the film version of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road to minimize my detest of the suburbs as intellectual snobbery and classism. Siegel explains, "With the growth of suburban towns, the liberal American intellectual now had a concrete geography to house his acute sense of outrage."

I won't defend the film. I haven't seen it. Ironically, or maybe typically, it's not playing anywhere near me. I will, though, say that Siegel's interpretation of the novel is symptomatic of someone extremely defensive of the suburbs. Perhaps, pathologically so.

He describes the novel's "fatal deficiency":

Frank and April's total lack of talent or substance makes their ultimately thwarted attempt to leave the suburbs for Paris less the stuff of tragedy than irritating farce.

Or more succinctly, "In "Revolutionary Road," the two principal characters are brought down by lawn sprinklers and station wagons."

The Wheelers are not brought down by the suburbs. Their undoing comes from the notion that they are better than their surroundings. They are not swallowed by it and stripped of their souls. Their fatal flaw is intellectual, cultural hubris. They believed they would some day escape the soulless conformity of their surroundings for fashionable Paris salons. Never did they realize that they lacked the talent or capacity necessary.

The novel is not set on Revolutionary Road as an excuse to excoriate suburban standards. It is an examination of how one's imagination can lead to ruin. Siegel cites, and idealizes, John Cheever's suburbanism. Of his story "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," Siegel writes that "life's complexity and surprise follow you everywhere, even over the city line, across the river and into the suburban trees. You wonder why the creators of the film 'Revolutionary Road' are blind to such an obvious fact of human existence."

What Siegel fails to realize is that the suburbs where much of America lives are not like Westchester. It is not the place where the well-to-do have escaped the dangers confines of the city for tree-lined streets. The suburbs I know are those of the working and middle classes. It is where those of even meager means attempt to grasp a piece of the American dream. The suburbs are detestable for this displaced notion, not the result of some displaced envy.

The suburbs I know are not those of John Hughes movies, the Stepford Wives, or the "Real Housewives" franchise that Siegel cites. Hollywood does not hate the suburbs, not my suburbs. My suburbs remain, sadly unexamined. And Siegel's idea of the suburbs demonstrates his own regional snobbery.