January 17

The Epicurean Dealmaker, an investment banker himself, offers an interesting take on why bankers (including the banking CEOs who appeared before Congress this week) are smart but not thoughtful. He sees them as "men of action" who have no time or inclination to ruminate:

It's just not in their genetic makeup to be reflective, introspective, or speculative in an intellectual sense. Investment bankers have almost no interest in why things are the way they are. Rather, they spend all their considerable intellectual and psychological resources on understanding how they can take advantage of the way things are.

http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2010/01/im-dancing-as-fast-as-i-can.html

This is true as far as it goes, and it is consonant with an observation in Jonathan Dee's new novel The Privileges:

In the world of finance, the most highly evolved people were the ones for whom even yesterday did not exist.

Our bad, though, as a species, for privileging these types. I'm reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald's comment in The Great Gatsby, that Tom and Daisy Buchanan, quite like our current crop of bankers, were "careless people" --

...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

-- and also reminded of someone's cheeky line that the human race were just a bunch of evolved monkeys in way over our heads. That seems to have been Fitzgerald's conclusion; it was certainly the increasingly misanthropic Mark Twain's conclusion (in late works such as The Mysterious Stranger); and I fear it is my conclusion, too.

The also gloomy Woody Allen, in Conversations with Woody Allen, opines that visitors from space wouldn't waste any time admiring our trivial artistic or intellectual achievements; they would simply be appalled by our bloody brutality. Still, those achievements do give me some personal solace, and I'll continue to concentrate on them. Otherwise I'd turn into the Daily Doomster (and there's no need, because James Howard Kunstler has that covered).

Among notables born on this date are Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, Irish statesman Douglas Hyde, First Lady Michelle Obama, novelists Anne Bronte, Nevil Shute, Ronald Firbank, Tomas Carrasquilla (Colombia), and Compton Mackenzie (Scotland), Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca, poet William Stafford, ventriloquist Shari Lewis, boxer Muhammad Ali, composers Alexander Taneyev (Russia), Jean Barraque (France), and Henk Badings (Netherlands), singer/songwriters Stephin Merritt and Steve Earle, singers Francoise Hardy and Eartha Kitt, filmmakers Mack Sennett and Lukas Moodysson, journalist Sebastian Junger, actors James Earl Jones, Jim Carrey, Betty White, and Sylvie Testud, comedian Andy Kaufman, Japanese pop musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Assamese writer and film director Jyoti Prasad Jagarwala. Recently, when teaching basic concepts of post-modernism to my senior English class, I put Andy Kaufman forward as Exhibit A, using clips from David Letterman and the infamous skit-breaking-down-into-a-fistfight from Fridays as examples of his post-modernist "slipperiness": since Kaufman declined to go out of character (and actually, with singer "Tony Clifton," multiplied the personae), it was impossible -- right up to and including his death -- to determine how "real" Kaufman was being at any given moment. He is startlingly akin to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under a bewildering variety of "heteronyms," each with an individual biography, presented as authentic personalities. He is certainly as serious and absolutely committed an artist as Pessoa.