Treasure in an Earthen Vessel

“If we can more and more free ourselves from values other than spiritual, I believe we are going in the right direction.”  Anni Albers said that; Christopher Benfey repeats it in an extended…what’s the word?  Meditation?  Reflection?  Creation?...let’s just call it a Book for now…Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay.  I’d read a few reviews of this book before buying a copy; I don’t think I have ever seen a case where the reviewers so completely missed the point. 

To read the reviews, one would get the impression that this is one part Benfey’s family history, one part history of Black Mountain College, and one part discussion of pottery.  The reviews make it sound like it is a simple hodgepodge, a well-written hodgepodge to be sure, but nothing more than, at best, a wonderfully eclectic romp through history and art.

That description isn’t even close to what his book actually is.  The book is actually better described by the remark above made by Anni Albers (a 20^th century artist well known among those who know much about such things (and Benfey’s aunt)).  There’s an even better blurb for the book in the book itself.  A reviewer writes: “This is not a Book of Travels, properly speaking, but a series of poems, chiefly descriptive, occasioned by the Objects which the Traveler observed—It is a delicious book; & like all delicious things, you must take but a little of it at a time.”  Coleridge (yes, that Coleridge) wrote that review.  Benfey throws in the quotation in an offhand manner in a chapter about William Bartram.  Coleridge thought he was describing Bartram’s book, but I daresay that Coleridge’s description is far better used on Benfey’s book than Bartram’s. 

In the Coleridge quotation lies the real description of this book:  it is a series of poems, chiefly descriptive.  It looks like a tale of, for example, the discovery of white clay in the Carolinas or a trip to Berlin or a visit to a Japanese village known for making pottery.  But the real story here has nothing to do with the superficial.  The book is an act of taking a lump of clay, spinning it on a wheel, firing and glazing it, turning that lump into something unexpectedly beautiful.  All the stories and side notes are just so much salt, thrown into the furnace to add an interesting texture to the life being crafted, bit by bit, story by story.

So, what is going on here?  A curious book, to put it mildly.  Joyce wrote A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, a novel telling about how a poet (who is, of course, Joyce) was born.  Benfey is going Joyce one better; in this book he is not telling about how the artist was born, he is creating the artist who is none other than himself.  It reminds me of nothing so much as an old joke about baseball umpires:

First Umpire:  I call them like I see them.

Second Umpire: I call them like they are.

Third Umpire: They aren’t anything until I call them.

Traditional autobiography tries to be one of the first two umpires.  This book is the third umpire.  We are watching the author make himself here in exactly the same way we would watch a potter make a jug or a bowl or a jar.  The author is both potter and clay.  The tales of his ancestors are really just so many flicks of the wrist to add shape here or there; the historical tidbits are there to add color. 

To see it another way (which is exactly what this book does endlessly), consider an anecdote from the book.  Benfey is relating his trip to find Cherokee Clay when he finds himself talking to Jerry, the owner of the Great Smoky Mountain Fish Camp & Safari.

“As we sipped long-necked bottles of beer at Jerry’s bar, he dragged out a bucket of Cherokee pottery shards.  They were brown or gray, unglazed; whatever color they retained had come from the smoke of the kiln.  Each carried a pattern of some kind, scored with a pointed tool: zigzags in parallel or an array of tight spirals, like Van Gogh’s Starry Night.  I was fingering one gray fragment in my hand like a magical talisman. ‘Take it,’ Jerry said. “No one will ever care for it more than you do.’”

One way of looking at this book is that it is a collection of those fragments.  And at times, Benfey is encouraging us to see the isolated parts here as nothing more than interesting broken shards, like a scrap from a Van Gogh painting.  But, look again and note that parts are really just fragments when they are in others’ hands; when Benfey picks up the fragment it becomes a magical talisman.  And here again, we find the secret of the book.  It looks like a fragment to you, but Benfey is using it for another, magical, purpose. 

Benfey ends the book with this:

“And every once in a while, a restless genius came along—a Bartram, a Wedgewood, a Coleridge—who wandered from the familiar trail, risking falls and failures, and fused the new possibilities in unexpected ways, leaving lasting art for posterity.”

Exactly so.  This book is a gigantic gamble on the future.  Will it merit rereading in a decade?  How well do the asides and stray notes cohere when one begins to take apart the book?  Or can the book even be dissected at all?  The closest parallel to this book I have ever read is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, but this book is much more crafted that Nabokov’s.  This book has an intentionality not only in the chapters themselves, but in the book as a whole.  So, I suppose I really can’t think of a comparison.

This is a book to be read in the same way one reads a book of poetry.  Nothing is stated directly, but as the ideas sift in memory, a pattern emerges.  I suspect, like all great poetry, as one reads it over and over, the picture takes on new hues.  Highly recommended for those who like to let their minds wander while reading.

Roundup at the Financial Crisis Corral

Books about the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 continue to dribble out.  (This is the sort of shocking insight which keeps people coming back to this here blog.)  I continue to assign such books to undergraduates.  (This is the sort of useless information which makes the aforementioned people think, “Why do I bother reading this blog?”)  I then proceed to write up ruminations about these books on this blog.  Every now and then I pause and think, “What about the poor Reader?”  Such concern for the Reader is, to be sure, atypical.  However, I assigned four books about the financial crisis last semester, I never got around to writing up a review of any of them, so now I am faced with spending four consecutive posts on the same topic or lumping all the reviews into one post.  Prudence dictates the latter.  The Reader can now express heartfelt thanks.

1. Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

If you are a normal person, and if you are curious about Matters Economic, this is the top choice from this list.  But, putting here is cheating a bit.  It’s not really clear that it belongs on this list.  The New Third World in the subtitle is the former first world.  There are chapters on Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and the US.  As with all of Michael Lewis’ books, it is clever, amusing, and offers some genuine insight.  It is, in short, a crowd pleaser—though it probably won’t generate a mega-movie deal (cf. Moneyball, The Blind Side).  The Iceland story was the most fascinating.  How did a tiny fishing outpost turn into the most spectacular rise and crash in the financial crisis?  This is a whole country which went all in on activities which makes the US housing bubble look like Child’s Play.  Then the whole country went bankrupt.  It’s really incredible when you think about it.  The heart of the book is a nice tour of why the European situation is hopeless.  And then, the coup de grace—if you think the US has weathered the worst crisis of your lifetime, think again.  The big problem is still looming, and nobody is paying attention.  City after city, state after state, and ultimately the federal government itself, are heading for a massive fiscal problem for which there is no easy solution.  Cities, states and the federal government all have huge (as in worthy of Gargantua and Pantagruel) pension obligations and there is literally no money to make those payments.  If these government were private operations, they would be bankrupt.  We are starting to see the beginnings of this problem.  Lewis talks to the former governor of California, moves onto San Jose (my old home town) and then to Vallejo (Vallejo!) documenting the process of bankruptcy.  Vallejo is the future.  It’s not pretty.

But, cheer up.  At least the government is on the job

2. Morgenson and Rosner, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption led to Economic Armageddon

Never mind about that cheering up bit.  This is a book all about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  The book suffers from typical journalistic sensationalism—the subtitle alone makes one cringe.  That being said, I knew that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were corrupt, but even still, I was surprised (well actually shocked) to discover just how corrupt they actually were (are?).  This is a really ugly story of a quasi-governmental organization gone terribly wrong.  And all in the name of the public good.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were set up to help poor people get mortgages so they could buy homes.  That sounds like a really nice thing to do.  Then the directors realized they could make large amounts of money and pay themselves large salaries simply by making large donations to the politicians who were ostensibly regulating them.  Houses for the poor and everyone involved got rich.  Win-win.  Well, except for the taxpayers who got to foot the bill in the end.

But, cheer up. At least Economists have figured out how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

3. A book with 15 authors, The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System

I’m not joking about the 15 authors—this book has that many listed authors.  And it isn’t a collection of essays by 15 different people—it is one book with 15 authors.  So, with 15 authors, a veritable Who’s Who of the Monetary Economics world, it must be pretty impressive, right?  Sigh.  Forget about that cheer up line in the previous paragraph.  What a tedious book.  It reads like…a committee report.  Safe, dull, over-worked recommendations based on safe, dull detail-light explanations.  That’s what happens, I suppose, when 15 people co-author a book.  Who is the audience for this book?   I have no idea.  I assigned it in Money and Banking.  The chief virtue according to my students:  it’s short.  Hardly a ringing endorsement.  If this is the state of the art in thinking about how to find our way past the financial crisis, it’s time to despair.

But, cheer up.  At least there are technical economists working on detailed technical proposals which could clear up everything.

4. Acharaya, Cooley, Richardson, Walter, eds. Regulating Wall Street: The Dodd-Frank Act and the New Architecture of Global Finance

It’s pretty funny when you see a book with four editors and think, that’s not so bad compared to a book with 15 authors.  This book is economics for economists.  Technical economists.  Eighteen chapters with detailed analyses of the problems in the financial sector and detailed suggestions on what can be done. For example, one of the chapters describes an important idea thus: “Contingent capital (often referred to as reverse contingent convertible bonds or Coco bonds) constitutes a form of uninsured debt that converts automatically into equity when certain prespecified triggers are hit….Contingent capital is designed to facilitate a transfer of losses when a firms’ equity is being depleted by converting some debt into equity, thereby ensuring that the bank still maintains a sufficient level of capitalization.”  (Acharaya, Kulkarni and Richardson authored those sentences—a mere three authors!)  That’s an example of the sort of clever ideas which are being floated these days.  And if you liked those two sentences, then this book is for you.  If you skipped them, then walk on by, but while strolling past those guys in the white lab coats:

Cheer up!  With economists working hard at solving the big problems in the big, bad world, there is every reason to be happy.

Wanna Be Just Like an Economist?

Can the history of economic thought be interesting to a normal person? 

The development of, say, Physics is quite interesting to many people.  Even Einstein got into the act and wrote a History of Physics.  (A good book, by the way—I read it years ago and enjoyed it tremendously (The Evolution of Physics by Einstein and Infeld).)  There are also many books about the history of political thought or philosophical thought.  Indeed, histories of ideas can also be quite good.

In another vein, books about economics can be very popular.  People like learning more about economics (for obvious reasons).  Freakonomics was big, really big. 

But, what happens when you combine the two?  Would anyone want to read a history of the development of thinking about economics?  The market (that noble arbitrator) would suggest not.  Until recently the best history of economic thought for the general reader was Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers.  It’s breezy.  Many economists read it once.  I doubt many non-economists ever did.

(The copy I own was the very first book I was ever given by a student.  I was in grad school, a Teaching Assistant for one of those giant lecture classes.  At the end of the semester, JoAnna handed me this book—she had read it for another class, and decided she would give me her copy.  So, while I know she’ll never read this blog post—thanks, JoAnna.  A quarter-century later, I still really appreciate it.) 

Now, along comes Sylvia Nasar, of A Beautiful Mind fame, with her latest offering:

Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.

I assigned it last semester.  Coincidentally, one of my colleagues also assigned it in his class last semester.  Students who happened to be taking both our classes were at some sort of cosmic still point.

The verdict?  I liked it.  Actually, I really liked it.  I learned all sorts of things.  But, here is the problem:  I learned nothing about, you know, economics.  Indeed, I find it hard to believe that anyone would learn anything about economics in this book.  It’s a book about economists, not economics.  If you want a quick intro to Keynes’ romantic life, it’s here.  If you want to know about Beatrice Webb's marriage, it’s here.  If you want to know about Irving Fisher’s invention of the Rolodex, it’s here.  If you want to know about the Marginal Revolution in economics, the single biggest intellectual moment in the development of economics as a discipline…well, look elsewhere.  Don't get me wrong—there are some mentions of economic theory in passing here and there, but only in passing.  There is also discussion of economic activity—the stock market crash and so on.  But about theory?  Shockingly little.  Curiously, this is exactly the problem with Heilbroner’s book.

If one reads a history of physics, one expects to see some Physics.  If one reads a history of economic thought, then shouldn’t there be some, you know, equations or graphs or something? 

Grand Pursuit will undoubtedly live long on the assigned reading lists of classes taught by professors who like this sort of book.  If you want to read about a bunch a famous economists, this book is great—seriously, I think anyone looking for that sort of thing will find it as enthralling as I did.  Sadly, I think the set of people who fit that category is small.

And so, since this here is a review of good book I despair of convincing anyone to read, here is a good song from a great band which I also despair I will convince anyone to love.

Back From the Dead

What is the fascination with resurrecting the dead?  I finished up my reading for the semester (and I am in the process of finishing my grading for the semester—summer is nigh), and in that wonderful moment, poised between two worlds—the world of School-Year, when books are chosen to be read because I assigned them in a class, and the world of Break, when books are chosen haphazardly purely for self-edification and enjoyment—at that precise moment when I must choose how to break from the first world and enter the second, at that moment in which everything seems to hinge on how to start a summer, for reasons I cannot explain, indeed as if by some odd mystical force dragging me into the pit (and while that seems a bit melodramatic (well, while it is, in fact, melodramatic), I cannot explain this choice in any other, more rational way), I pulled from my shelf, the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft and read The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Why did I read this book?  And even more importantly, why of all the books with which I could have started my summer reading, why instead of one of the books on the list I made a month ago of books I was looking forward to reading this summer, why would I pick this book to mark the onset of summer?  I have no idea.  Some chthonic force, perhaps?  The Call of Cthulhu?  One shudders.

Was it good?  Here’s Lovecraft’s own evaluation:  “cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism.”  (Ah Wikipedia, thou art so fair.)  In fact, it was only published posthumously.  In this case, the author’s evaluation wasn’t far off the mark.  Yet, oddly, it was still worth reading as a curiosity.

The book reads like a government report, detailing the strange disappearance of the titular character.  Said character dabbled in the Black Arts, following the footsteps of his ancestor, whose story is also retold.  And so, we move from New England in 1662  to New England in 1928 (with a detour into a demonic underworld thrown in for effect) tracing out the attempts to delve into Dark Secrets.  To what end?  It’s never entirely clear, and therein lies the hanging question which opened these ruminations.

Suppose you had the power to resurrect the dead.  Would you use it?  I have a hard time imagining anyone I would wish to call back from the Dead for a chat.  Imagine sitting down to talk with a resurrected H.L. Mencken.  Why?  What in the world would I have to say to Jonathan Edwards come back from the Dead?  Perhaps I have no imagination, but what would I want to know?  “Was it really cold at Valley Forge, Mr. Washington?”  “Would you like another drink, Mr. Faulkner?”

Would I really want to pretend that dear old Ben Franklin and I were BFFs simply because we had tea one dark night when I brought him back from the dead?  Do I really care if Sacco was innocent or not?  Would my life be better if I knew whether Shakespeare thought Gertrude knew about the activities of Claudius?

So, here we have a tale about a young man who gets sucked into a dark, dark world  in pursuit of a knowledge of things which really, when one thinks about it, wouldn’t be all that interesting to know.   Maybe I am in the minority here (hardly a novelty, to be sure).  Maybe everyone else really wants to swap gossip with Mark Twain. 

Or maybe the allure of bringing back the Dead is simply the allure of having Power.  And if so, remember these wise words from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, indeed the words which elevate this book into something other than the pedestrian, the words which should be engraved over the mantle of ever home:

Doe not call up Any that you can not put downe

Tintin vs The Joker

File this in the improbable pairing department:  Tintin vs The Joker.

I recently reread the pair of Tintin stories Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon.  Tintin books are the kind of thing you settle in to read after a long day at work.  The Evil guys are dastardly and mean, Tintin is heroic and young, and Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus and Snowy and the Detectives are all there for comic effect.  Tintin gets excited when he gets to drive a cool tank on the moon and you can feel his boyish thrill.  The mean guys show up and knock Tintin out—Tintin undoubtedly had a serious problem with concussions in his old age.  Tintin is a little bit clever and a lot bit brave and saves the day with sheer determination.  Over and over, book after book, the same basic story unfolds. 

I also recently read a pair of comic books written by Brain Azzarello and illustrated by Lee Bermejo:  Luthor and Joker.  These are of much more modern vintage.  They are supervillain books—the superheroes show up, but are really the side characters in a story about the villain.  Both are good, not great, just good.  They are also quite different as befits the difference in the two villains.  It is the difference between these two villains that intrigues me. 

As any good Calvinist will tell you, at our heart, none of us are good.  But, that’s just a euphemism.  We are all totally depraved.  Yeah, I know people don’t talk like that anymore, but just a little introspection reveals that fundamentally the desires of our heart are evil.  “Darkness is a harsh term, don’t you think?/ And yet it dominates the things I seek” is how Mumford and Sons puts it.  (This is rapidly, yet unintentionally, turning into a Good Friday sermon.)  There is quite a bit of variety in our Darkness, though.  And that is where this pair of books comes in.  The test:  Are you more the Joker or Luthor?  The Joker is Chaos and Destruction; he laughs at the world and destroys it for the Pure Joy of it.  Luthor is Arrogance and Pride; he wants to mold the world in his own image.  In neither world is there a role for Good or Love.

Reading this pair of books was thus, if I am honest with myself, disturbing.  The Joker?  Well he has no appeal to me; I am happy to see the Joker fail; I feel no sympathy for him.  I suspect he is the more popular villain though; many people like the idea of smashing things.  But, Luthor?  Disturbingly, I read his tale and realize part of me is just like him.  He hates Superman, hates the idea of a force more powerful than Man, a force which would come to earth to Save us from Ourselves...Save Me from Myself…well, part of me also wants to resent that idea…it’s is so…humbling.  Cue St. Matthew’s Passion.

Now combine these two pairs of comic books.  Imagine if Tintin came up against the Joker?  Who would win?  Sadly, it doesn’t seem like much of a contest.  To beat the Joker, we need a hero much more powerful than a good, decent, heroic lad.  

…and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

The Sequel Problem

Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is a masterpiece, one of the landmark comic books which reenergized the genre.  He wrote a sequel: Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again.  I first read the sequel years ago.  My conclusion then:  it is a total mess.  Lynn Varley’s art was Garish at best, the plot was…well was there a plot?  It was all simply too much of...what?  A disaster of a book.  I figured I would never look at it again.

So, what possessed me to read it again?  I’m really not sure.  Really, I have no idea.

My conclusion this time:  It’s not nearly as bad as I originally thought.  The reason I hated it so much before was pretty obvious on a rereading.  It’s no Dark Knight Returns.  Not even close.  It isn’t even trying to be DKR.  It’s the classic sequel problem: how do you write a sequel to a masterpiece?  DKN did things in a comic book which made your jaw drop.  Indeed, you can almost infallibly tell if a Batman tale is before or after DKN.  You can see it in the movies too.  Adam West is pre-Miller; the Burton/Michael Batman is at the turning point; the Nolan/Bale Batman Begins is post-Miller. 

So, when you have written a comic book which changed a genre, how do you write a sequel?  You can either a) do another one just like it, or b) try to change the genre again.  The first route is what everyone expects, but it is really difficult to pull it off.  (Think again about the movies—the second Burton/Keaton film is not nearly as good.  (Interestingly, the second Nolan/Bale film is better than the first.  Maybe having the Joker in your movie is the key?))  Option b) is the bigger risk; you run a chance not only of not doing it well, but also of alienating everyone who liked the original.

Miller clearly aimed to change the genre again in DKSA.  It fails.  Indeed, it is not terribly original at all.  The art in DKN is subdued and gritty.  It’s very well-done and it fits the tale.  The art in DKSA is loud, bright, splashy, loud, colorful, and loud.  Well, its louder than that.  Every page is a blaze of bright color.  Page after page of bright, loud colors.  It is a veritable assault on the senses.  The pictures are crudely draw.  It is a book full of Neon Cave-Paintings.

And the plot?  It is also abrasively chaotic.  Which is the point.  The story, such as it is, has Lex Luthor creating a Police State.  (Nothing original there—Luthor is always trying to create a run the world.)  Batman is an anarchist.  (Nothing original there—Frank Miller is an anarchist.)  So, we have a comic book which is a visual depiction of anarchy overthrowing order—which is a good thing in this world—fortunately for the tale, we never have to see how the whole anarchy thing works out.  We get rid of Lex Luthor, get to watch Superman, the epitome of TurthJusticeandtheAmericanWay, get beat up, and then imagine the nice world where nobody ever tells us what to do again.  And those Neon Cave Paintings?  Well, perhaps that was just Miller and Varley’s subconscious selves screaming that anarchy is going to return us all to the caves of our ancestors. 

The one theme that runs through both books is that the media is a superficial, feckless bunch.  I’m not sure why this is in both.  The media in DKSA is, of course, louder and more chaotic.  But, I suspect Miller just liked the idea of telling his tale through the lens of TV.

In the end, DKSA is not even remotely Miller’s best work.  But it isn’t the complete disaster I once thought it was.  I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone, though.

The Eye of the Beholder?

Having dismissed Mrs. Dalloway in a prior post as a book only an English Ph.D. could love (and having been chastised for said dismissal by no less than MalloryHerself), I run a serious risk in the present entry of creating the impression than I am a Literary Barbarian.  But, courage is a Virtue.  Would Odysseus shrink from battle?

As noted before, in my tutorial this Spring, everyone picked a book.  That is why I read Mrs. Dalloway.  I thought I would like it, but…alas.  Another student picked Jane Eyre.  At that suggestion my heart sank.  I had read it before.  And hated it.  So, now I have read it a second time.  I still can’t stand the book.  We talked about it yesterday in the tutorial.  Everyone else in the tutorial loved the book.  We start every tutorial with the simple question “What did you think about the book?”  Such paroxysms of joy have ne’er been heard by mortal ears.  Jane Eyre is a role model, a stunningly great example of womanhood and a daring, brave, courageous, independent woman.  I would have thought that Jane Eyre was the woman being described in the brochures for Mount Holyoke from listening to the students in the tutorial.  And all of them loved her.  Loved her.

So, here I have a problem.  Jane Eyre is a Great Book.  Lots of people have read it for pleasure and profit for many years.  Five bright, intelligent women in my tutorial love the book.  And I hate it.  Something is wrong here.

Jane has got to be the most whiny protagonist in a book ever.  I mentioned this in the tutorial.  Everyone there told me I was wrong, that she isn’t whiny at all.  I opened the book at random, read the first sentence—Jane was whining.  I thought, “Aha!”  I was told she wasn’t whining in that sentence.  I was stunned.  How could nobody else in the room notice that this sentence I choose at random was an example of being whiny?  Something is wrong here.

I then tried on Rochester—the guy is the least lovely romantic love ever.  Oddly, they all agreed. I thought “Aha!” I was then told it didn’t matter that Jane was in love with a Loser.  Jane is still amazing.  How can this be?  Something is wrong here.

And so on.  For two hours, I made the case this book is terrible and for two hours I was told that I was wrong.  Every inane, silly thing about the book simply didn’t matter.  Yes, the plot is contrived.  But Jane is still amazing.  Yes, in the end she ends up playing the servant anyway, But Jane is still amazingly independent.  Yes, she didn’t really have that hard of a life.  But her cousins were really mean to her, and Jane is really amazing.  On and on and on.

I have no idea what to make of this.  Either I am wrong and this book does have merit or the rest of humanity is wrong and it is a really idiotic book, a penny romance novel masquerading as literature.  Just to be clear:  I’d rather read Mrs. Dalloway again than this book.