Schumpeter once wrote that the Stock market is a poor substitute for the holy grail. In other words, capitalism is more or less incapable of producing belief in itself. And yet, there are people who do believe in it. Ziad Abdelnour is one of them.
For Ziad, business is war. And what is at stake in this war is the creation and destruction of worlds.
“The lifeblood of capitalism are the entrepreneurs, the financiers who make things happen.”
The drive to make things happen is not inherited, is not taught, is not capable of being transmitted by a propaganda machine. “It has to be in your DNA” says Ziad. Because of this, the profile of Blackhawk Partners has not changed for years:
I don’t back industries. I don’t back ideas. I back people.
These people—these capitalists, the billionaires who change the world—are rebels. Only by backing rebels, can you re-create the world.
This is what Ziad’s capital does: it empowers the rebels (re-bellare) to start the war all over again .
Don’t buy anything. Don’t borrow anything. Don’t open any kind of e-trade account, or invest in any kinds of funds, or buy any kinds of currencies, or pay any kind of broker. Read this book, cover to cover. Then write a letter of praise to Peter Schiff for his clarity of thought, his easy to understand explanations of economic realities, and his ability to map out alternatives for Americans with a little bit of good sense.
In between rolling translations of Anglo-Saxon chronicles, poems, histories, M.C.D. Drout hawks 566 years of kings, pirates, popes, monks, wars, buildings and battles. But most and first of all, he hooks us with language, giving us bits of Anglo-Saxon poems, lists of Old English words (some, siton, foton), Old English websites, including kingalfred.com, where he has written a free Anglo Saxon grammar called “King Alfred’s Grammar” named after his (and soon to be yours) best and biggest hero : King Alfred; and anglosaxon.com where he serves up his recordings of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Whew!
Then he gives us, cut up into nice round 100 year sizes, the history of a “people who lived in a place full of Celtic place-names, surrounded by Roman ruins, bringing with them Germanic legends, and building Christian Churches”. Organized by the MaCGyVr principle, it is a history of 6 ages: Migration, Conversion, Golden, Viking, Reform and Fall.
Throughout, he tells us marvelous stories of the marvelous, noting what historians know, what they fight about, what they hate each other for, and how to read historical interpretations as interpretations, how to consider what makes sense, what doesn’t, and how to fall in love with the material of Anglo-Saxon history, its indeterminacy, its scarcity, its ongoing reconstruction.
In between he does stand-up:
Jefferson came up with the idea that the front of the [great] seal should have a picture of Hengist and Horsa …. and that the backside of the seal … would picture Pharoah, sitting in a chariot, as he road through the parted red sea … with the Israelites on the other side, following the pillar of fire that led them to the promised land. You know, I have to say, the eagle was probably the safe way to go here….
Within the first minute and 34 seconds you know you are going to understand this book because Denning quotes James Dyson:
“Of the world’s ten largest corporations by revenue, 9 make big, heavy things, like cars.”
This is easy to follow, sensible stuff – and just the kind of obviousness that industrial strength money market manuals pass over.
Give him time, and Denning will explain a lot of “obvious” things. For example, that you can’t automatically grow rich by buying stocks. Or that you can’t automatically stay rich by being an American. Or that just because you live in America doesn’t mean you can’t invest in anything but fictional (paper) assets. Or that a bear is called a bear because once upon a time when traders were also hunters, bear skin jobbers sold skins from bears they had not yet caught. By entering into these early futures contracts, the hunters were guaranteed a fixed price. By “selling short” they lost out on the possibility of getting a higher price for their bear skins in the future. The practice came to describe those who sold short on a stock or commodity.
In fact, within the first 13 minutes, the ‘obvious’ no longer is.
Home ownership, Denning writes in 2005, is “the new serfdom” and paints a picture of a housing bubble where no equity is built and no real ownership is achieved. Combine falling home prices with increases in monthly payments AND a flat income, writes Denning, and you get trouble. In other words, you get 2008.
Let’s just say that murders happened in the middle of other things: a cop, a lawyer, a fire investigator get up, they fight with their wives, they eat. Sometimes they think. The law is something they think about. How it came to be what it is, where it came from, when it changed. If you have a father who reads, who respects the history of things, who loves the Law, you think about what a lawyer should be, what the law should be, what an institution like the law allows human beings to be.
In Europe, rich people sometimes keep a modest apartment in a poor or marginal area of their city. They call it their “pied a terre”. Translated, this means “foot on the ground”. It is said that their purpose in maintaining these small apartments is to remind them of their roots and to keep them in touch with reality. And that’s exactly why I always keep my copy of Letters To A Young Lawyer in my briefcase. The words within, the philosophy, Harris’ love of simplicity and reverence for the law, this is my psychological pied a terre.
Quiet, patient, relentless intelligence spills over the pages of this story about a girl geek, a journalist, a news magazine devoted to the critique of corrupt Swedish institutions, and an odd assemblage of Stockholm’s thugs, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and cops. None are verbose. Men and women think. Thinking happens without talk, without sounds, without annunciation. It is sometimes signaled by cigarettes. Sometimes by a walk. Much goes unsaid, and unshared.
All the good guys use Macs. Some of them smoke. The geek uses a powerbook, the journalist a Mac ibook, the magazine editor an Airbook. The geekgirl (Salander) is skinny, occasionally violent, abnormally intelligent, obsessively private. She does not emote; she enjoys: mathematics, sex, hacking. She has lesbian girlfriends, bank accounts in the Canary Islands, lawyers in Gibraltar, and a local accountant. She buys a 2.5 million kroner flat with a view and decorates it in one day of shopping in Ikea, for a total of 97,000 kroner.
Oliver August, correspondent for the Times of London in China is learning Chinese. His teacher asks him what Oliver means. Oliver responds: ‘Since a man that works on a farm was a farmer, a man who harvested olives was an Oliver’. His teacher then couples two radicals – olive (gan) and farmer ( no ). The 26 year old reporter is thereafter laughingly referred to as Farmer.
“Nobody in their right minds called themselves a farmer. Millions are fleeing the land to become city dwellers, to partake in the industrial revolution, to become richer. When I introduced myself people guffawed to each other. A foreign farmer has come to our China… !”
Oliver August is a sieve of a China in transformation from below. We get the language, the images, the words, the emotions, the slogans, the mixture of groundlessness and lawlessness, the sense that a Chinese being can rely neither on the earth nor on the sky for his limits. “Modern China was a magic mirror: you could see whatever you wanted to see…,” writes Oliver.
The country was both free and oppressed, at once anarchic and authoritarian, totally chaotic yet highly regulated.
Lai Changxing is an emblem of this new country; hence his is the story tracked by Oliver.
But alongside the story of the legendary Lai, a rogue reminiscent of America’s 19th century captains of industry, Oliver gives us the gossip, the rumours, the news. And the only way to report this news is “to get out and report what you saw yourself,” in sideways glances, from overnight trains, from hired cars driven by monks, from the streets and the restaurants…
But still more, Oliver gives us economics, politics, philosophy. Not cut and pasted out of wikipedia but lovely, incisive, pieces of thought, fresh from the sea, still smelling of fish.
The more China modernizes the more ravenous its appetite for the past becomes….
These wealthy Chinese who finally thought it safe to return from abroad “were known as sea-turtles who had finally brought home their nest eggs…”
A myo tan low is a building that scratches the sky…
A big-faced building iDam yam zi dasha is a building that gives the owner a lot of face…
Forget Harley Street. The latest design in shrinks is a six foot 250 pound lesbian weight lifter who runs a pub with her bosomy girlfriend, and offers bed, morning after breakfast, and laundry service. This is what the 21st century male patient wants: a powerful, intuitive M.D. who can hoist him effortlessly over her shoulder, tuck him into bed without sexual threat or expectation, wash the blood off his shirt and serve up bacon and egg for breakfast.
Such a shrink, and only such a shrink can handle what the Iraq, the national health service and the Metropolitan police have brewed in ex-Lieutenant Charles Acland, now of London, hateful and harijan: untouchable.
1948 is a strange time to be a Jew. For Lonzman, the hero of this tale, it is the year the Jews in Israel are driven into the sea, and get a small beachside strip of Alaska as compensation. It is the year Lonzman’s father arrives in downtown Sitka where blue kerchiefed Jewesses sing Negro spirituals with jewish lyrics that paraphrase Lincoln and Marx. It is the year Lonzman’s father plays chess “like a man with a toothache, hemhorroids, gas, and a headache whose moves are like successive pieces of terrible news for the survivor Jews who play him. The survivors populate The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, with their chess, their holy books, their rabbis, their clans, their latkes, their typical and atypical habits, their policemen, their crimes.
But I’m curious, do you really feel you’re waiting for Messiah?
It’s Messiah, what else can you do but wait?
And Palestine? When Messiah comes all the jews go back there, to the Promised Land, fur hats and all?
I hear Messiah cut a deal with the beavers…
No more fur.
Landsman and Berkot confront Schmerle, the doorkeeper of the Verbove Rebbe, whose son, Mendele, has been found heroin-dead in a seedy hotel. Schmerle
“... looks east, looks west, he checks with the mandolin man on the roof…
“There is always a man on the roof with a semi-automatic mandolin.”
We get information in clumps, tangles, bunches. There are facts, mixed up with opinions, references, foreign words, sounds and descriptions referring to where we are talking, what is going on where we are talking, the distraction-ridden machinery of a technologically frenzied environment, analogies dragged in from confused personal archives, elaborations drawing on gossip, rumours, and mother disciplines, percentages, abbreviations, brand-names, phrases in mixed tongues, side notes referencing the inaccuracies of the company we keep and the associations we accumulate.
Dialogue. Which is what McBain does. Consider Carella and Parker questioning an ex-boyfriend:
So tell us how you happened to break up?
It was the Passion. The Mel Gibson movie. I told Alicia it was Anti-semitic. She disagreed. I’m Jewish; we got into an argument.
So whose idea was it to split up?
My mother’s. I live with my mother. She said if we were going to fight already over a farkaktmovie that was just the beginning…..I hate Mel Gibson.
Thirty seconds to peel a character like an egg.
Ollie Weeks is asking Parker for advise because Ollie was kissed in the mouth by Patricia the other night after he played piano for her family. Yes, this is the fat, suspicious, comical sociopath who hates everyone equally. Except that now he has a sweet piano teacher, and a sweet girlfriend and is looking ten pounds less hateful.
Kling, meanwhile, is asking Carella for advise. About Sharon, who he loves and whom he followed and who now refuses to talk to him.
“Everybody’s always innocent, Brown said. Nobody ever did anything. Catch ‘em with the bloody hatchet in their hands they say this ain’t my hatchet this is my uncle’s hatchet…Wonder anybody’s in jail at all there’s so many innocent people around….
Brown and Kling are interviewing the head of Baldwin University’s English Department who is wearing a purple butterfly bow tie and telling Brown that “we’ve never anything like this happen before….”. Brown is wondering if his wife Caroline would go for him in a tie like that one…
Because conversations are never just about information and even information is never just about information. Because even cops hear by drifting in and out of their own conversations. Hearing from where they are being heard.
The relentless decomposition of the Oznard family has left Andrew in the position of so many young Englishmen, who had, for the first time in centuries, to feed themselves.
Young Andrew had thus determined from an early age that he was for England and more specifically, that England was for him… What he needed was a decaying English institution that would restore to him what other decaying institutions had taken away….
And what he chose was the Secret Service.
An exact and well cut commentary on the tradition of tailoring and its neo-colonial clientele.
In Cape October during the rainy season, but May is not the rainy season, you can expect a thunder storm along about 3 or 4 every afternoon… The rain when it comes mercilessly assaults the sidewalk and the streets. . . But the heat and the humidity follow as closely behind the storm as does a rapist his victim. Within minutes, you’re sweating again. This is not the rainy season, this is May, but at 3 o clock that afternoon the rain is coming down in buckets.
A fundamental law of Hemingway holds true for Ed McBain: if it is raining at the beginning of the chapter, there’s going to be sex by the end of the chapter. McBain is edgier, angrier, and New York funny, even when describing South Florida.
Did you ever go to bed with Alice?
This is now 3 o’clock in the morning. Around 3 o’clock in the morning they all ask you to start cataloging all the women you’ve ever slept with.
McBain chronicles telephone conversations, everyday speech, questions, commands, exclamations : between widows and out of town businessmen and redneck cops, truck drivers and sisters in law, white trash and nosy neighbors and nosy reporters, the way a real estate agent shows off a house… or a Cape:
Every discourse as smooth as single malt Scotch on fast ice.
If ever there was a language of L.A., a language in which each noun, common or proper, is localized, dated, and cast in a Hollywood movie, it is the language of James M. Cain. And if Cain’s L.A. had a voice, she would sound like Christine Williams. She doesn’t sing, but she could be singing; she doesn’t hawk her words, but she could be a crier of the news that books hold; she doesn’t broadcast, but she could be advertising baby food or soap; or she could be doing all of these things. In her voice vibrates the radio hysteria of the 1920s, showy, fluttery, stagy, but fundamentally sweet and pure and hopeful. Indeed, it is the voice of a big country, of big spaces, with lots of land to cross, lots of square footage. Even indoors.
And so when Cain describes L.A., he talks about Glendale. The overspill. The life just outside the borders, looking in. As if all L.A. was really outside L.A., looking in.
The bathroom that he now whistled in was a utile jewel: it was in green tile and white tile, it was as clean as an operating room, everything was in its proper place and everything worked.
And before there were California girls, there were California women. They wore aprons over dresses, slips and stockings, they walked on pumps and pinned up their hair, even at home. They decorated cakes and cooked proper dinners, from scratch. They knew how to run a household and how to save money and how to mend things that broke. They had names like Mildred. And husbands like Pierce.
I am reading, no hearing, a beautiful book where a photograph is described:
This is us when we are happy is not the message that Alice Roosevelt’s wedding delivers…and unlike Alice Roosevelt who continued to be an unrepentant thorn in her father’s side even after Teddy’s death, all the Curtis children never stopped believing “Chief” could do no wrong, never stopped believing Chief was the perfect father, even after absences of many years, never stopped seeking Chief’s approval.
The woman who gives this sharp, tenderized commentary on Edward Curtis, father, renegade husband and shadow-catcher is at the wheel of a car in L.A., stuck in traffic. She tells us about Edward with the same familiarity that she tells us about the shortcut (Fountain Avenue) she will take, the shortcut everyone takes, the shortcut each of the 30 million drivers currently sharing the road believes that they alone discovered.
He became, she tells us,
by disappearing from their daily lives, not a father but the myth of one, a myth they needed to believe in to survive. And despite his actions, despite all contrary evidence, they needed to sustain that system of belief even if it meant altering their memory, creating a false memory, a false identity of who their father really was. If Edward, the disappearing father was to play the good guy in their system of belief, then someone anyone had to play the villain because surely there was real unhappiness in their home in everything around them… and someone , never dad, no never him, someone else had to take the blame… the person who was too tired to cook dinner after working all day long, that other unromantic parent asleep at the stove in her flannel slippers, stressed out and exhausted: mom….”
And as she drives and thinks and turns her thoughts over, and over, she assembles the person of Edward Curtis, and how this photographer intersects with the structure of the family, how he poses and positions himself within the family so as to appear a certain way, to seem a certain way. This seeming was in fact his art.
It is no wonder that there is an aura of indeterminacy surrounding this shadow-catcher, an uncertainty arising from the distance he put between himself and his world, himself and his own century.
And with this distance comes a mystery, a puzzle which is reconnoitred but not entirely solved by the story we are told about a man who sets up a photography studio in Seattle just after the fire…
Reacher heard the rack of the slide twenty feet behind him. He heard it very clearly. It was exactly the kind of sound he had trained himself never to miss. To his ears, it was a complete, complex split second symphony and every component registered precisely. The scrape of alloy on alloy, its metallic resonance partially damped by a flesh palm and the ball of a thumb and the side of an index finger. .. The grateful expansion of a magazine spring, the smack of a brass cased shell socketing home the return of the slide. Those sounds took about a thirtieth of a second to reach his ears, and he spent maybe another thirtieth of a second processing them. His life and his history lacked many things: he had never known stability or normality or comfort or convention. He had never counted on anything except surprise and unpredictability and danger. He took things exactly as they came for exactly what they were….
This perfectly tuned register and processor of mechanical sounds is Jack Reacher, calculator and decipherer of numerical messages, auditor and predictor of probable forces of character, probable explosions of personality, probable damage to friends and country. Reacher is a ‘restless’ ex MP who left his happy gang of Special Investigators ten years ago, and has an unsettled and unsettling personality. He does not believe in carrying a spare shirt:
For those of you who have been reading or not reading Koontz lately, it may not be obvious that there are two Koontzes: the early Koontz and the late Koontz. Like the early Heidegger and the late Heidegger. The distinction should open the door to hours and hours and hours of delightful, unadulterated intelligence, humorous rumination, and lines of imaginative flight: emotional transport, sideways, to use a Koontzian term. For those of us who know who Sammy Davis Jr. and Mr. Wizard are, add hours of being-with-a-member-of-one’s-own-generation type pleasure. The ease of recognition. The Door to December is early Koontz—performed by a seasoned master: George Guidall. The first actor, in fact, hired by Recorded Books, a New York City based studio that used actors (rather than babysitters) to read books out loud.
And now to the battle of principalities. Yes, principalities. Early Koontz is political and politics is always about principalities. Consider the ex-husband that kidnaps the daughter and disappears for 5 years. Consider the mother. These are characters, but they are also theories. She is a psychiatrist specializing in child psychology, and he is a behavioral psychologist specializing in behavior modification. Their theoretical differences underpin the moral-emotional ones. One theory locks the child in a gray room, isolates it, deprives it, shocks it, plays with it and forces it to change. The other theory lacks scientific rigour, but feels better. It is the theory of the mother who tries to heal the beaten child.
And alongside the good mother is the good cop. Defiant, tenacious, competent, the cop and the mother talk the child away from the institution of evil. Talk is play, talk is confession, talk is a technique which can organize both good and bad emotions.
Someday the totalitarians will take over and they’ll pass laws so you can’t pee unless you have permission from the official federal urinary gatekeeper. Then you’ll come to me with your bladder bursting and you’ll say Luther, my God, why didn’t you warn me about these people?
In Las Vegas…
...there were hundreds of people …standing around the craps tables, people in suits and evening gowns, people in slacks and jeans conscienciously rustic cowboy types standing next to people who looked as if they had just survived an explosion in a polyester factory.”
Grass soup is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a recipe for food of last resort that my father has apparently squirrelled away somewhere. I have never actually seen this recipe but it was referred to fairly often when I was a child. Should everything else turn to shit, we could always derive sustenance from nutritious grass soup… At heart, it’s an anxious romantic fantasy that disaster and total financial ruin lurk just around the corner. But when they do come, they will have all the stark beauty and domestic fine feeling of a Dickens novel….
“Dear Chatter: To answer your question, when a Southerner looks at you with a blank smile and doesn’t answer you right away, it’s because he doesn’t trust you and he’s lookin’ you over and seein’ how much damage you can do as a human bein’...Have a nice day!”
Chatter is a kind of oral help desk published daily in Selby’s town newspaper: questions and complaints called in by local folks about Yankees and by Yankees about local folks.
Margaret Pinaldi, even tempered daughter of a militant feminist gynecologist from Buffalo, NY, transcribes the native messages with the sensitivity of an anthropologist and a degree in women’s studies. The combination of skirtiness and guile and slow, drawn out vowels describes a particular kind of Southern power with a female signature. When a Southern lady says: “Well, bless her heart!,” she means:
“she’s a bitch and I don’t like her and I’m fixing to say something awful about her. It’s like this: ‘Well, bless her heart! She’s got the fattest ass on the planet and her taste is all in her mouth but she does the best she can.’
Mothers, daughters, wives organize, decorate and manage Southern life from behind affluent decorating magazines and glasses of sweet tea.
A Yankee would call someone a fat slob. A Selbyite would say: “Now there’s a lady who likes her cheese straws and biscuits”.
Southern men can either accommodate them or be discontinued, like the dead appliances set on porches in South Selby “as if they’d been granted some (final) years in the sun after putting in all those years of work in the basement.”
The day’s Chatter is the popular subjective log of what people think in a class-conscious, gospelly mid-Georgia town. Meanwhile, the daily affairs of three women —a smart reporter, a poor, pretty, slightly scarred Kroger’s Supermarket employee, and a desperate, over-reaching, ‘old Selby’ wife—track what people say and how they behave. Cynthia Darlow piles on the twang and pulls out the drawl and turns simple sentences into terms of art. From red neck firemen, to poor white Southern good girls, to smart-ass Yankee reporters, to sensible daughters of militant feminist gynecologists, Darlow does Selby like Julia Child does sauces.
The roundabout way that most Selbyites communicate feelings and facts is not merely a matter of dialect or drawl. It is an altogether different way of being-with others. Consider, for example, the blunt, brutal directness of Margaret Pinaldi’s mother telling her daughter about her CATSCAN results:
Let me show you something.. She tapped the glass with the ball point pen… This is my left ovary… and this, this right here this white mass that looks like a supernova… this is a six cm necrotic mass with satellite lesions and I am totally, irrevocably fucked.
Finally, this is a manual for managers of feelings, a step by step guide on how to treat the truth differently, how to speak the truth, Georgia time.
When a lawyer and a cop reconstruct the life of a pretty, jolly slut they recover hundreds of small, dishonourable wrongs, shameful and unpretty. Sandra Nichols loved to fuck, and she liked men, and she married them. And then she left them, and started again.
Her children are a sad disarray of nervous and neurotic plaintiffs in Kyle v Wade, the wrongful death case they bring against Sandra’s last husband. Peter Wade, who wasn’t meant for Williams College, nor perhaps for this planet, would not stand trial for the murder of Sandra Nichols. Instead, Peter would be compelled to give these demented children all the money he will have had to give Sandra, if he’d divorced her, according to the prenuptual agreement he had signed. A pretty good hat trick for a criminal lawyer, newly versed in Chapter 229 section 2 of the Massachusetts Criminal Code and the 1972 Compensatory Wrongful Death Act.
Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find
No highway more, no track, all being blind
The way to go shall glimmer in the mind.
Though you have conquered Earth and charted Sea
And planned the courses of all Stars that be, Adventure on,
more wonders are in Thee.
Adventure on, for from the littlest clue
Has come whatever worth man ever knew;
The next to lighten all men may be you….
—John Masefield
Shute must be removed from the dusty category of oddish optimistic English writers and reclassified among the chroniclers of all things mechanical, experimental, technical and the men who invent them, perfect them, and test them. Again and again Nevil Shute describes ugly, unpopular, classless, technical men who nonetheless make wonderful things that work. In a word: engineers. Developers. Hackers. Nerds. Shutists, all. A century of nerds, bricoleurs and tinkerers and hobbyists invented buggy applications, tracked each other’s patents, and played with each other’s toys, long before we came along.
Honey is exemplary. A scientist who devises noisy contraptions tearing themselves to bits in order to study stress. A theorist who hasn’t heard of hot water boilers or mops.
Such an insignificant little man is Honey that it is almost inconceivable that he should be right about big important matters – like when planes are likely to crash. It is likewise inconceivable that such a seriously ugly man in a bad suit can make himself loved by a beautiful actress and a beautiful stewardess in the same book. But he does.
More than a little over the top, Clara Hutt is dropping her 2 boys off this morning wearing her pajama bottoms (again) and wondering (again) why all the other mothers can arrive at school with perfectly starched blouses and expertly applied makiage. Not now, Darling, I’m Paaaarking,” and again, “I AM PAAARKING,” and again “Stop it, Charlie, don’t make me want to break your legs.”
There are so many things wrong with this picture that the fact that Clara doesn’t speak to her children like the mummies in books is, well, funny. Indeed, Charlie is six and already has a “vast panoply of hideous, faintly disturbing, terms of abuse.” “You tiresome retard” he says to his brother. Or to some hapless toddler on a play date: “God! You exasperating creature! What is it? Talk for God’s sake!! God. God. Bloody God!” She is, of course, to blame she thinks, while she watches Naomi The Perfect Mother and Crossing Guard doing her pelvic floor exercises. Hup two three four and hoooooolddd.
I think Clara is darling. In perfectly bad faith for the nought generation, Clara has all the elements of a mad Greek family member. But she is English, and thanks to Jill Tanner’s drawn out vowels and enthusiastic syntax, we are happy to relocate our tragic flaws.
