May 10

The nutty financial shenanigans of the past week have prompted some good writing, at least. Laurie Fendrich outlines the progress of capitalism down to the latest developments:

Trading kept on getting faster and faster, moving to a dizzying pace. It became nothing but a way to seize a momentary opportunity to grab a quick profit and run. Soon mousetraps and the company that produced them turned into background noise....Trading now becomes exactly like a monster. Created in the laboratory of capitalism, trading has gotten loose. It’s running around the lab, wreaking havoc on everything. It doesn’t care one bit about mousetraps or mousetrap companies or the lab in which it’s running around or even the people who created it in the first place.  

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Economists-Correct-Me-if-Im/23832/

James Howard Kunstler's conclusions are similar:

Once upon a time, the stock market was a  place where people with capital went to look for productive activity to invest in -- say, a company devoted to making soap flakes, an underpants factory. Now the market is a robot combat arena where algorithms battle for supremacy of the feedback loops.  Thursday's still-baffling fifteen-minute "crash" was an excellent demonstration of the diminishing returns of technology. People too-clever-by-half, aided greatly by computers, have now gamed the investment indexes so successfully that these markets no longer have anything to do with investment -- they're just about shaving micro-points of profit at high volumes by micro-milliseconds off mere differentials in... math! This is truly quant heaven, a place where only numbers matter and there is no correspondence to anything in the real world.

Kunstler also has this to say about the newly announced European Union "bail-out":

The question begging itself here, of course, is how Europe intends to come up with roughly a trillion in bail-out money. Sell Portugal to China? Cut Greece up into bait and catch whatever fish are left in the Mediterranean Sea? Frankly, I'm stumped. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.... All the European nations are already so hopelessly enmeshed in chains of unfulfillable counter-party obligations that the bail-out might as well be a game of musical chairs played in the Large Hadron Particle Collider, set to the tunes of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The European bail-out is, in fact, an absurdity. 

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/05/and-chicks-for-free.html

Jake Hinkson at The Night Editor dotes, as I do, on Billy Wilder's post-World War II film A Foreign Affair, featuring one of the most unlikely star collisions in history, Marlene Dietrich and Jean Arthur:

http://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/2010/05/foreign-affair-1948.html

Here is Dietrich singing the unforgettable "Black Market." Marlene's inimitable English pronunciation only adds to the experience:



Hannah Stoneham's Book Blog reviews the career of the neglected British artist Rupert Lee (1887-1959), who is garnering new attention thanks to an exhibition at Gallery 27 in London and a new book. This is a watercolor of his from World War I, Bursting Shell:

http://hannahstoneham.blogspot.com/2010/05/buried-treasure-life-and-visions-of.html

http://www.courtgallery.com/artists/Lee.html 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Lee

The Brazilian architectural photographer Bruno Cals obtains striking effects from his choice of angles. You have to orient yourself to his shots -- where are we looking from?

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37878

http://www.1500gallery.com/index.php?mode=text&section_id=68

http://www.1500gallery.com/index.php?mode=gallery&section_id=28

Lev Grossman at The Believer ponders the colonial career of Leonard Woolf. I love the fact that when then-civil servant Woolf was posted to Ceylon, he brought his dog and "the complete works of Voltaire in ninety volumes." My kind of guy! (Hat tip to 3QuarksDaily.)

http://www.believermag.com/issues/201005/?read=article_grossman

Grossman's investigation of the career of Woolf's obscure compatriot B.J. Dutton, and his discussion of the relationship between literary fantasy and literary modernism, are most enjoyable.

Michael Orthofer at The Complete Review is excited by the Czech novelist Michal Ajvaz's new The Golden Age, which sounds as if it unites fantasy and modernism:

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ceska/ajvazm2.htm 

Among notables born on this date are novelists Benito Perez Galdos (Spain), Ivan Cankar (Slovenia), Nayantara Sahgal (India), and Antonine Maillet (French Canada), science fiction novelist Olaf Stapledon, theologian Karl Barth, artist Leon Bakst, composer Milton Babbitt, film composers Dmitri Tiomkin and Max Steiner, country musician Maybelle Singer, rockers Bono and Sid Vicious, sportscaster Chris Berman, film producer David O. Selznick, film directors Anatole Litvak and Ettore Scola, film historian Jeanine Basinger, dancer/actor Fred Astaire, and actor Marie-France Pisier. You have to hand it to ESPN's Chris Berman: not only does he have an entire category of phraseology named after him -- "Bermanisms" (Bert "Be Home" Blyleven, Mike "Nova" Scioscia) -- but he is also responsible for the now immortal pick-up line "You're with me, leather," which he does not deny using, but whose notoriety clearly annoys him. The master of catch-phrases, hoist by a catch-phrase he never intended for circulation! Something karmic about that.