pretending...............................

      On the morning of May 11, 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried made his first television appearance.  He sat at his trading desk and talked into his computer screen to two female reporters on Bloomberg TV.  Thick black curls exploded off his head in every direction.  People who tried to describe Sam's hair would give up and call it an "afro," but it wasn't an Afro.  It was just a mess, and like everything about Sam's appearance felt less like a decision than a decision not to make a decision.  He wore what he always wore: a wrinkled T-shirt and cargo shorts.  His bare knee jack-hammered up and down at roughly four beats per second, while his eyes darted left and right and collided with his interviewers' gaze only by chance.  His general demeanor was that of a kid pretending to be interested when his parents hauled him into the living room to meet their friends.  He'd done nothing to prepare, but the questions were so easy it didn't matter.  Crypto Wunderkind, read the Bloomberg chryon, while the numbers on the left of the screen showed that, in just the past year, bitcoin's price had risen by more than 500 percent.

-Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

One of the most interesting...................

 ...........paragraphs I've read this month:

     Impressment arose in part because the age of exploration created a demand for labor at sea that could not be met through normal financial incentives.  But it also arose because of changes on land.  The shift from late feudalism to early agrarian capitalism, the great disruption that would fuel the growth of the metropolitan centers in the coming centuries, had disgorged a whole class of society—small, commons-based cottage laborers—and turned them into itinerant free agents.  By the late 1500s, the explosion of vagabonds made them public enemy number one, triggering one of the first true moral panics of the post-Gutenberg era.  Everywhere there were wanderers, whole families lost in the changing economic landscape.  Serfs once grounded in a coherent, if oppressive, feudal system found themselves flotsam on the twisting stream of early capitalism.  To everyone sitting on the banks above that stream, the change must have seemed something like the modern fantasies of zombie invasions:  you wake up one day and realize that the streets are filled with people who not only lack homes, but also suffer from some other, more existential form of homelessness—not even knowing what kind of home they should be seeking.

-Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind:  A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

Correction..............................

       He was emerged from his struggles with a large sympathy for the machinery of the universe.  With his new eyes, he could see that the secret and open blows which were being dealt about the world with such heavenly lavishness were in truth blessings.  It was a deity laying about him with the bludgeon of correction.

-Stephen Crane,  The Red Badge of Courage

Interesting paragraphs.........................

     Lucas shook his head;  he disagreed.  The disagreement was fundamental, and generally divided cops everywhere.  Some believed in underlying social order, in which messages got relayed and people kept an eye out, and bosses reigned and buttonmen were ready to take orders, and a network connected them.  And some cops believed in social chaos, in which most events occurred through accident, coincidence, stupidity, cupidity, and luck, both good and bad.  Lucas fell into the chaos camp, while Mallard and Malone believed in the underlying order.

-John Sandford, Mortal Prey

Great paragraphs...............Part One

....Friend David Kanigan is on a hot streak, again.   A teeny excerpt:

"The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening."

Great paragraphs....................... Part 2

...........The only thing that could improve this one would be for Abbey to have lived for another twenty years.   A wee excerpt:

"Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here."

Old-school..............................

     Pike studied Arturo Alvarez, and knew there was no more to say.  Artie was old-school hard despite the college degrees.  In his world, toughness wasn't judged by how well you could give a beating, but by how well you took a beating.

-Robert Crais,   The Sentry

A few notes from Corelli's Mandolin......

     Make a note, I want a salary freeze to keep inflation under control.  Increase family subsidies by fifty percent.  No I don't think the latter will cancel out the effects of the former.  Do you think I don't understand economics?  How many times do I have to explain, you dolt, that Fascist economics are immune from the cyclic disturbances of capitalism?  How dare you contradict me and say it appears that the opposite is true?  Why do you think we've been going for autarky all these years?  We've had some teething problems, that's all, you zuccone, you  sciocco, you balordo.  Send Farinacci a telegram saying that I'm sorry he's lost a hand, but what else do you expect when you go fishing with a hand grenade?  Tell the press it was because of something heroic.  We'll have an article about it in Il Regime Fascista on Monday.  Something like 'Party Boss Injured in Valiant Action Against Ethiopians'.  Which reminds me, how are the experiments with poison gas going?  The ones against the wog guerrillas?  I hope the rifiuto die slowly that's all.  Maximum agony.  Pour encourager les autres.  Shall we invade France?  How about 'Fascism Transcends Class Antagonisms'?  Is Ciano here yet?  I've been getting reports from all over the country that the mood is overwhelmingly anti-war.  I can't understand it.  Industrialists, bourgeoisie, working classes, even the Army, for God's sake.  Yes, I know there's a deputation of artists and intellectuals waiting.  What?  They're going to present me with an award?  Send them straight in.

-Louis De Bernieres,  as excerpted from the chapter "The Duce" in Corelli's Mandolin

The more things change,.......................Part 1

      Cato's world was the Roman Republic, a state at the apex of its power, able to make foreign kings tremble with a single decree, and rotting from the inside out.  Cato's arena was the Senate, an awesome assemblage of gray-haired eminences, the symbol of Rome's republican heritage, and a body crippled by personality politics, rigged elections, ritualized bribery, and sex scandals.  Public life in the late Republic resemble a soap opera, and if we didn't find in that fact a sharp enough reflection of our own time, we could surely find familiarity in the grave challenges that threatened Rome and its Senate.   They included homegrown terrorism, a debt crisis, the management of multiple foreign wars, the fraying of conventional societal bonds and mores, and a yawning gap between rich and poor.

-Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni, Rome's Last Citizen:  The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar

Interesting paragraphs...........................................

      The Japanese government in particular is investing millions in its own studies of El Nino, and for good reason.  Japan has historically been a magnet for highly destructive Pacific typhoons, storms that, along with the earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions that bring regular ruin, have helped forge the national character traits of stoicism and mutual philanthropy.  Forecasting such traumatic occurrences would of course be a fine thing, for the national economy, for the nation's morale.  The recent accelerating ability to forecast the eruptions of volcanoes may still not have been matched by an ability to predict earthquakes.  But to balance that, a major effort is now being made in Japan to fine-tune global long-term weather forecasting, and in particular to investigate the possibilities of predicting when an El Nino - with its clustering of typhoons - is most likely to occur.


-Simon Winchester,  Pacific:  Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers

... just keeps gettin' better ......................

      Before Robert and the Professor had finished their first glass,  Lazarus walked through the back door and strapped on his hollow-bodied Silvertone guitar.  He faced the wall and began playing riffs with the volume turned low.  Most of the customers didn't notice he was there.  As he practiced, his band - all young white men - came in carrying speakers and instruments and began to set up.

      "There's my Lazarus," said the Professor.  "Notice how he's in the zone.  In that place where nothing is distracting him?  He's seventy-years-old, and he just keeps gettin' better.  He could be playin' to fifteen people or fifteen hundred, and he'd be workin' just the same because when he picks up his guitar it's spirit for him.  Its the feelin' that he's using a gift, and it comes from the inside."

      "That's the way work is supposed to be, you know," the Professor said, chuckling.  "You play what you're given.  Everybody's got somethin', and instrument, a tool."  Pausing, he leaned forward and whispered, "You use it.  That's what's it's about."

-David Mutti Clark,  Professor Brown Shoes Teaches the Blues

A fair piece of writing.............................

     He crossed the bridge at Penryn a half-hour after sunset, as dusk was closing into night, and it may be that the sharp, frosty air had a hand in the cooling of his blood.  For as he reached the river's eastern bank he slackened his breakneck pace, even as he slackened the angry galloping of his thoughts.  The memory of that oath he had sworn three months ago to Rosamund smote him like a physical blow.  It checked his purpose, and, reflecting this, his pace fell to an amble.  He shivered to think how near he had gone to wrecking all the happiness that lay ahead of him.  What was a boy's whip-lash, that  his resentment of it should set all his future life in jeopardy?  Even though men should call him a coward for submitting to it and leaving the insult unavenged, what should that matter?  Moreover, upon the body of him who did so proclaim him he could brand the lie of a charge so foolish.  Sir Oliver raised his eyes to the deep sapphire dome of heaven where an odd star was glittering frostily, and thanked God from a swelling heart that he had not overtaken Peter Godolphin whilst his madness was upon him.
-Rafael Sabatini,  The Sea-Hawk

Intellectual indigestion..............................

Rafael Sabatini sure can turn a phrase.............................

     Andre-Louis, on his side, had made the most of his opportunities.  You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind.  Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encylopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his species.  Nor can I discover that anything in his eventful life ever afterwards caused him to waiver in that opinion.

-as excerpted from Scaramouche

A fair piece of writing............................

      By nature Sir Oliver was a shrewd fellow ("cunning as twenty devils," is my Lord Henry's phrase) and he was also a man of some not inconsiderable learning.  Yet neither his natural wit nor his acquired endowments appear to have taught him that of all the gods that rule the destinies of mankind there is non more ironic an malicious than that same Dan Cupid in whose honor, at it were, he was now burning the incense of that pipe of his.  The ancients knew that innocent-seeming boy for a cruel, impish knave, and they mistrusted him.  Sir Oliver either did not know or did not heed that sound piece of ancient wisdom.  It was to be borne in upon him by grim experience, and even as his light pensive eyes smiled upon the sunshine that flooded the terrace beyond the long mullioned windows, a shadow fell athwart it which he little dreamed to be symbolic of the shadow that was even then falling across the sunshine of his life.
-Rafael Sabatini,  The Sea-Hawk

reference for Dan Cupid here

Interesting paragraphs..................................

In January 1941 the fate of Europe and the world seemed to be sealed.  Only the deluded could still think that Germany would not win;  the stolid English "had not noticed that they had lost the game," and obstinately resisted under the bombings; but they were alone and suffered bloody losses on all fronts.  Only a voluntarily deaf and blind man could have nay doubts about the fate reserved for the Jews in a German Europe;  we had read Feuchtwanger's Oppermanns smuggled secretly in from France, and a British White Book, which arrived from Palestine and described the "Nazi atrocities";  we had only believed half of it, but that was enough.  Many refugees from Poland and France reached Italy, and we had talked with them:  they did not know the details of the slaughters that were taking place behind a monstrous curtain of silence, but each of them was a messenger, like those who run to Job to tell him, "I alone have escaped to tell you the story."
-Primo Levi,  The Periodic Table

On seizing and listening.............

      While Henry Wriston believed in careful planning, he was also an opportunist.  He regarded plans as guidelines for handling only routine matters.  "When something unusual supervenes," he later wrote, "seize the opportunity and let the plan stay on ice for a while."
      Henry Wriston was also a master of intelligence gathering.  His ever-present bowl of jelly beans, said Walter Wriston, apparently induced faculty and students to volunteer equally juicy nuggets of campus gossip.  "He always seemed to know what was going on on campus," Wriston said.  "People accused him of having a spy system.  I asked him how he knew what was going on, and he used to say, "People will tell you absolutely anything if you'll listen."

-Phillip L. Zweig,  Wriston:  Walter Wriston, Citibank, and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremacy

Stringing words together in a most interesting fashion.......................................................

I don't know James Wolcott and had never heard of James Wolcott before reading this post by Ben Casnocha.  I don't know Lena Dunham and had never heard of Lena Dunham until various intertunnel locales I visit started mentioning her recently.  Something about a book she wrote.  Anyway, Casnocha points to this Wolcott review of Dunham's book, and offers this excerpt:

Callow, grating, and glibly nattering as much of the rest of Not That Kind of Girl is, its impact is a series of glancing blows. The self-revelations and gnarly disclosures are stowed alongside the psycho-twaddle, affirmational platitudes, and show-offy candor of someone avid to be liked and accepted—on her own terms, of course, for who she is in all her flawed, bountiful faux pas glory. Can’t blame her for that. It’s what most talented exhibitionists crave and strive for beneath the light of the silvery moon and the mystic ministrations of Oprah, and Dunham’s ability to put it over is as impressive in its way as Madonna’s wire-muscled will-to-power and James Franco’s iron-butterfly dilettantism. Beneath the surface slop and ditzy tics, Dunham possesses an unimpeachable work ethic, a knowledgeable respect for senior artists (as evidenced by her friendship and collaboration with the Eloise illustrator Hilary Knight and her endorsement of the memoirs of Diana Athill), and a canny knack for converting her personal piques, plights, bellyflops, hamster-wheel OCD compulsions, and body-image issues into serial dramedy. That professional nasal drips such as Times columnist Ross Douthat interpret this as symptomatic of an entire generation’s narcissistic disorder says more about them than her. (Douthat probably would have disapproved of James Dean too, told him to stand up straight.)

Think I might be reading  more from James Wolcott.

In the absence of faith....................................

Educated Europeans look with distain on the boorishness and bumptiousness of the United States, which continues to maintain a military that actually can fight wars.  The prevalence of religious faith in America fills Europeans with revulsion, especially the enthusiastic devotion of the evangelicals, who constitute almost 30 percent of America's population.  Faith in a personal God is prima facie proof of mental defect to most educated Europeans, and so America is by definition a giant madhouse.  Yet the countries that have abandoned nationalism, religion, and ideology in favor of the milquetoast administration of daily affairs - for example, the Europeans - suffer from the most dreadful psychic symptom of all.  They fail to have children.  The triumph of secularism in Europe recalls the proverbial operation that was a success except for the death of the patient.

     There is one problem with the enlightened view:  In the absence of faith, human beings show little interest in living.  Humankind cannot bear the burden of mortality without the promise of immortality.  We know of countries destroyed by war or plague but of not a single nation that simply willed itself out of existence.  Today the majority of the industrial nations are heading toward a demographic death, and some have passed the point of no return...Rather than pave the way for universal peace, loss of faith has turned important parts of the world into a nursing home, an then a cemetery.

-Spengler, channeled by David P. Goldman, It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You:  The Great Extinctions Of The Nations

Guess work..................................

      Life is mostly guesswork.  You will usually guess more or less right, and sometimes you'll guess wrong.  When you guess wrong, don't react - love your mistakes, and don't beat yourself up.
     Hey! You thought you had enough gas in your car and you didn't, so now you're 'doing' walking.  So what.
     Just walk.
-Stuart Wilde, Weight Loss for the Mind

I first heard about James Webb..................

..............in 1978.  Not sure why, but I picked up and read a copy of his first novel, Fields of Fire.  As a matter of timing, I missed serving in our armed forces.  Born in 1952, I was seventeen when I graduated from high school, and did not turn eighteen until my second semester in college, safely possessing a II-S deferment from the draft.  By the time college was over, so was the draft.  For better or worse, having watched the Vietnam War play out on TV, I had almost no interest in volunteering for military service.  Webb's book was my real first exposure to the reality of war (my father, who spent three years overseas during the Second World War, still refused to talk about it;  no one I knew well had served in Vietnam).  Raw and gritty only begin to describe his writing.  Coming from a decorated Marine lieutenant, it just seemed real, like he knew for certain what he was talking about.  Here is a sample:

     Three artillery rounds impacted casually in the treeline.  H and Is.  Behind him, the 60-millimeter mortar sections fired five more in the vicinity of the high dike.  Then there quiet, elongated moments spent sitting under total blackness, as if he were locked in some strangely odorous, mosquito-infested closet.  So alone, so lonely like this.
     And at night like this they visited him, those old ghosts who had come alive each Sunday in his grandma's kitchen.  He had joined them.  He was one of them.  They descended from the heavens, or maybe from the hollows of his memory, and they were real.  He commiserated with them.  Sometimes they were so close he felt the swishes of their passing.  They tickled his neck.  They brushed his arms.  They ached inside his own misery.
     He stared into the blackness, dragging on his cigarette, communicating with them.  All my life I've waited for this, he mused.  Now I've joined you and your losses are a strength to me.  I ache and yet I know that Alec retched with pain on the road to Corinth.  I breathe the dust and yet I know that grandpa breathed the gas that made a hero out of Pershing.  I flinch when bullets tear the air in angry rents  and yet I know that Father, and three farmer boys at Pickett's Charge, felt a cutting edge that dropped them dead.  How can I be bitter?  You are my strength, you ghosts.
     And I have learned those things, those esoteric skills and knowledges, that mark me as one of you.  That loose-boweled piles of shit, too much shit from overeating, plopped randomly around the outer dikes of a ville, mean trouble.  Catching the aroma, seeing the groupings, watching the flies dance lazily, rejoicing in their latest fetid morsel that bends the low grass in a muddy glob like a bomb of cow dung.  Trouble.
     I can tell from the crack of a rifle shot the type of weapon fired and what direction the bullet is traveling.  I can listen to a mortar pop and know its size, how far away it is.  I know instinctively when I should prep a treeline with artillery before I move into it.  I know which draws and fields should be crossed on line, which should be assaulted, and which are safe to cross in column.  I know where to place my men when we stop and form a perimeter.  I can shoot a rifle and throw a grenade and direct air and artillery onto any target, under any circumstance.  I can dress any type of wound.  I have dressed all types of wounds, watered protruding intestines with my canteen to keep them from cracking under sunbake, patched sucking chests with plastic, tied off stumps with field-expedited tourniquets.  I can call in medevac helicopters, talk them, cajole them, dare them into any zone.
     I do these things, experience these things, repeatedly, daily.  Their terrors and miseries are so compelling, and yet so regular, that I have ascended to a high emotion that is nonetheless a crusted numbness.   I am an automaton, bent on survival, agent and prisoner of my misery.  How terribly exciting.
     And how, to what purpose, will these skills serve me when this madness ends?  What lies on the other side of all this?  It frightens me.  I haven't thought about it.  I haven't prepared for it.  I am so good and ready for these things that were my birthright.  I do not enjoy them.  I know that they have warped me.  But it will be so hard to deal with a life empty of them.
     And there were the daily sufferings.  You ghosts have known them, but who else?  I can sleep in the rain, wrapped inside my poncho, listening to the drops beat on the rubber like small explosions,  then feeling the water pour in rivulets inside my poncho, soaking me as I lie in the mud.  I can live in the dirt, sit and lie and sleep in the dirt, it is my chair and my bed, my floor and my walls, this clay.  And like all of you, I have endured diarrhea as only an animal should endure it, squatting a yard off a trail and relieving myself unceremoniously, naturally, animally.  Deprivations of food.  Festering, open sores.  Worms. Heat.  Aching crotch that nags for fulfillment, any emptying hole that will relieve it.
     Who appreciates my sufferings?  Who do I suffer for?
     The mortar fired behind him, five more rounds at the high dike, and the ghosts were gone.  Hodges stood slowly and dusted off his trousers, carrying the radio with him as he began to check the lines.
     He hoped that Snake would be awake.  He felt like shooting the shit.

-James Webb, as excerpted from Fields of Fire