Book Review: Last Night

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.