Tuesday, February 19, 2013

This, from a NYT story today about the new policy of the Justice department to, well, sorta almost seek almost sorta sometimes criminal indictments against criminal banks on leap years perhaps, under some unnamed future president:

"For one, banking regulators are likely to sound alarms about the economy. HSBC avoided charges ina money laundering case last year after concerns arose that an indictment could put the bank out of business. In the first interest rate-rigging case, prosecutors briefly considered criminal charges against an arm of Barclays, but they hesitated given the bank’s cooperation and its importance to the financial system, two people close to the case said."

For that 1500 dollars, Aaron was sentence to three life sentences in Federal prison. Of course, he could be pardoned. The Bush administration was urged to - even by the judge in Aaron's case. But it didn't. The ultra ultra ultra liberal Obama administration has... done nothing, even though the case is now pretty well known. So a bank goes scott free, laundering millions for drug dealers, and a man is going to die in prison because he is black and because he introduced two parties dealing drugs for 1500 dollars.Doesn't it make you feel all good inside, the way we are protected from evil by the American government?

ps - according to a study from Pro Publica, the racial breakdown of pardons shows that four whites are pardoned for every black - just to make you feel extra good inside about the situation in our post-racial country.

Monday, February 18, 2013

After the early success of the Concrete Garden, I’ve always
thought that Ian McEwan has gone downhill as a novelist – which seems to be a
Britishy thing of his generation. Perhaps I should say, his generation of male
alpha novelists, led by Martin Amis. In Amis’s case, there is a serious
mismatch between his sense of what is important and his sensibility, which is
at its best with what is unimportant. McEwan is another who longs to let the
pundit out of the novelist’s cage. This, at least, is the upshot of his
unintentionally funny piece in the Guardian about losing “faith” in novels (a
piece which, to be fair, has a nice homage to The Go Between, a novel I am very
fond of, appended to McEwan’s wandering and pondering beginning). And the award for fave graf goes to!

“This is when I think I will go to my grave and not read Anna
Kareninaa fifth time, or Madame
Bovary a fourth. I'm 64. If I'm lucky, I might have 20 good
reading years left. Teach me about the world! Bring me the cosmologists on the
creation of time, the annalists of the Holocaust, the philosopher who has
married into neuroscience, the mathematician who can describe the beauty of
numbers to the numbskull, the scholar of empires' rise and fall, the adepts of
the English civil war. A few widely spaced pleasures apart, what will I have or
know at the end of yet another novel beyond Henry's remorse or triumph? Will a
novelist please tell me why the Industrial Revolution began, or how the Higgs boson confers
mass on fundamental particles, or how morality evolved or what Salieri thought
of the young Schubert in his choir. If I cared just a little about Henry's
gripes, I could read a John Berryman 'Dream Song' in less than four minutes.
And with the 15 hours saved, linger over some case law (real events!), as good
a primer as any on the strangeness and savagery of the human heart.”

Left out of this highminded collection is anything so vulgar
as Kim Kardashian’s divorce, Wall Street fraudsters, newspapers stealing emails
from celebrities, fad diets, bloody murders, sex tapes, etc. – the whole gritty
panoply of lowlife, which reaches out a twitching hand and pulls the chair out
from under the whole question of how morality evolved, and asks how Justin
Timberlake thought of the young Justin Bieber on his first Youtube tape. From
the lowlife angle, the mire of banality in which the novel gambols, there is
something irresistibly funny in McEwan losing faith in Pere Goriot and Leopold
Bloom and wanting to contemplate (with
true Bloomian ardor!) the Higgs boson particle in the port and cheese golden
years.

Faith here is being used in a strange way, as a synonym for
the suspension of disbelief. But the guy who coined that phrase, Coleridge,
would point out that faith is not the suspension of disbelief, but the belief
in things unseen – and a ruler across your knuckles, McEwan. You have lost your
privilege to read James Gleick for tonight, and must copy a hundred tag lines
of Latin verse and turn it in tomorrow!

Actually, I don’t think either term characterizes the reader’s
relationship to fiction. I don’t think the experience of reading changes much
between reading case law (my God, McEwan does push the highbrow into the depth
of absurdity!) and reading Crime and Punishment. The reader looks at words and
transforms that vision into reading in both cases. Outside the reading
experience, the reader may know that the Higgs Boson particle is real (or as
real as the mathematics it is built on) and that Jack the Ripper shed actual
blood, and Raskolnikov shed none. But that knowledge does not so much change
the material out of which the experience is built as charge it differently.

However, the writer who is using the material in a different
way than the reader – for the material isn’t yet given – does have to believe
in a thing unseen – that is, the future text. At a certain point, of course,
the thing unseen can be discarded, as the text is ended. But even here, the
writer doesn’t wholly enter the reader’s zone in regard to his or her own text,
any more than you can experience another person’s face – that quasi-intentional
addition to the body’s physiognomy. There are writers who claim they never
reread what they wrote and there are people who never look at their photographs
- both are guarding a certain painful
spot in their consciousness, one that they don’t want pressed.

The reader who doesn’t like novels may well say that he or
she ( it is mostly he nowadays) prefers the real to fiction, but that is
unlikely. Usually one finds they want an affirmation of a belief without the
messy necessity of running it through the difference which characterizes human
reality. In other words, they want the social irreality you can get, as well,
in a video game – where you don’t have to worry about the monster or the enemy’s
feelings. Feelings, in this ontology, far from being the portals through which
we receive all information about the world within the world, are somehow
secondary to cold hard facts. Cold hard facts, let it be noted, are cold and
hard – feeling words. Elementary contradictions surround the urge to know
without the expertise to check. The latter, of course, leads blissfully onward
to the moral entrepreneur’s career, until one day you wake up and you find that
you have been transformed into something even more loathsome than the cockroach
that was Gregor Samsa’s fate – you’ve become an op ed writer. God save you
then.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.