ReadySteadyBook - a literary site

Friday 27 March 2009

House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism

I review William D. Cohan's House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism over on The Book Depository:

In normal economic times the fall of Bear Stearns, founded as an equity trading house in 1923 and one of the largest global investment banks prior to its sudden collapse in March 2008, would be a major story. But, then, Lehman Brothers disintegrated, Merrill Lynch was sold for a pittance, and the world's banking system suddenly realised that virtual assets were worth virtually nothing and all but came to a standstill. After all that Bear Stearns's story didn't seem quite so exceptional or noteworthy. However, the story of this 85-year-old bank, securities trader and brokerage firm is worth hearing and is grippingly told by William D. Cohan who concentrates his attention on three wild and whacky bank bosses: Cy Lewis, Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne. The latter, Cayne, is described as having "world-champion-level bridge skills". His machismo and his gambling are emblematic of a system that from the outside seems impenetrably complicated but is, in truth, run by men of limited intelligence and unlimited avarice.

Cohan's book is subtitled How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism, but it is precisely that global, historically-situated, man-made, overturnable social system -- capitalism -- that he never defines or critiques. This is a thrilling narrative in parts but, like so many books about the credit crunch it is curiously incurious about the system that requires bankers to get up to their creative accounting in the first place. Certainly, the world financial meltdown came about because of perverse and ridiculous derivatives, collateralized debt, unrestrained mortgages and also because -- as Cohan shows clearly -- of the negligence, greed and criminality of individual bankers, but behind all of that is a social system that has always been blind to human need and based on the extraction and circulation of value. Wall Street's gamblers haven't broken that system, but they have broken the real economy where real people live and work. And when real people realise that Wall Street gamblers are merely an epiphenomenon of a system that is intrinsically inimical to their needs then it might be them and not a bunch of greedy, overpaid, blue-eyed white men who really break capitalism. For good.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, the book depository

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Tuesday 24 March 2009

Excuses, excuses!

It has been a very busy past couple of weeks up here in the windswept North, not least with me working away to bed-down and improve the content on the newly upgraded Book Depository website. And, to be honest, it's been a pretty difficult year for other more personal reasons too. Add to this the fact that the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has robbed me of all the rest of any of the free time I might have had and you can see why RSB hasn't exactly been a hive of activity of late.

But, as I know happens with many bloggers, my busyness has coincided with thoughts about where I want RSB to go, what I want to do with it, what I want it to achieve and what I want to achieve with it, or via it; what I want to explore here and what I want to write about.

I'm somewhat in agreement with Andrew Seal when he wrote this below about his own blogging blues back in February:

This blog is much more like the blogs I don't much care for: wholly dependent on what I "happen upon" in my reading, whether that's what I found on the web today or what book I picked up for vague reasons or no reason. I've been struggling with how to change that, how to add to or change this blog in ways that will make it less adventitious, short of imposing a mandatory reading list on myself or ceasing to blog about anything but a narrow subject. I want to keep a little randomness: I don't object to randomness—I just don't like the self-satisfied surrender to entropy that comes with the idea that I'll blog about whatever catches my fancy.

I used to keep RSB ticking over with links to interesting literary things that I found on the web. I'll still do that from time to time, but I've found that Twitter is a better medium for me to chuck interestng URLs out into the world (anyway, if you want great links you can't beat wood s lot). What this should mean is that when I do write something here at RSB it is of more value and consequence than simply contextualising a link or two, but that requires more time and effort... and energy. And it is energy that I feel so desperately short of right now.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, rsb

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Tuesday 24 March 2009

Paul Griffiths interview

The latest interview here on ReadySteadyBook is with Paul Griffiths author of the OuLiPo-inspired novel let me tell you:

There was a soldier at the table. Quite still. And I could see two letters on the table, where his hand lay on them. One of them must have come from his brother, the one that had gone away some months before. All this time he had his head cast down, so I could not see his eyes. I tell you it as I remember it. Do I have to say that? I did not know him from before, this soldier at the table with his head down. I do not know where he comes from. (More...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, rsb

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Wednesday 18 March 2009

Thoughts on Stephen Crane

Gabriel Josipovici enthusiastically mentioned reading Stephen Crane in last year's Books of the Year symposium here at ReadySteadyBook: "what a great writer he was! Not just The Red Badge, which is indeed one of the great books about war, up there with The Iliad and War and Peace, even though it is less than a hundred and fifty pages long, but also such short stories as The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel. In fact everything he touched he turned to gold."

Where Gabriel goes we follow; and Richard is already on the trail:

I was struck by the fact that Crane was born November 1, 1871. That is, four months after Marcel Proust (born July 10, 1871). Younger than Proust! In my mind, where Proust feels present, his concerns relevant, Crane has always seemed locked in the dusty past -- not only were some of his writings required reading in grade school, but the subject of his most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage, is the Civil War. His association with this war is so complete, I think, that it has only served to reinforce the sense I had of him belonging to a much earlier period than he does. In truth, of course, Crane's realism was innovative in its time, and I can see now that it stands as a precursor to the writing of some of the historical Modernists, Hemingway in particular (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, gabriel josipovici

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Monday 16 March 2009

Charlotte Mandell essay on Beatrice

"[T]he curious name of the protagonist, Aue (which looks like the Latin word for hail or hello), certainly didn’t strike me immediately as German, but did seem vaguely familiar. Then memory works: Hartmann von Aue, the mediaeval German narrative poet, whose major poem, Gregorius, tells the story of brother-sister love, and their incest, from which a child is born who will go on to find himself, ignorant as Oedipus, years later in bed with his mother. This is, of course, the story that Thomas Mann renewed for our time in his late novel, The Holy Sinner. So meeting Aue’s name already makes the unconscious mind of the translator, and of the reader, stir with anticipations of incest and outrage — the very emotional core of The Kindly Ones, in fact." Charlotte Mandell writes about translating TKO over on beatrice.com.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet

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Friday 13 March 2009

April/May Bookforum online

The April/May issue of Bookforum is up online. As ever, lots of goodies.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet

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Thursday 12 March 2009

Two new Bolaños

You will probably have all seen this, but in case not I'll pass on Maud's notice: "Two additional novels and a document believed to be a sixth section of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 have been found among the late writer’s papers."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Thursday 12 March 2009

Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity

Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity, an interview conducted with Rancière by Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello from the University of Amsterdam and ASCA, translated by Gregory Elliott (via wood s lot; this being just one of the excellent essays on Rancière in Art and Research):

I try to problematise the categories that structure diagnoses of our present and debates about it. Thus, I’ve attempted to rethink democracy by refusing both its official identification with the state forms and lifestyles of rich societies and denunciation of it as a form that masks the realities of domination. Official apologists and Marxist critics basically concur in characterising democracy as a mode of government built on a society defined as a society of consumers. In opposition to this dominant view I’ve reactivated the real scandal of democracy – which is that it reveals the ultimate absence of legitimacy of any government. As the foundation of politics it asserts the equal capacity of anyone and everyone to be either governor or governed. I’ve thus been led to conceive democracy as the deployment of forms of action that activate anyone’s equality with anyone else, and not as a form of state or a kind of society. As regards aesthetics (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, philosophy

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Monday 09 March 2009

Shakespeare the mug

More Shakespeare news via the Guardian:

A team working on the site where Shakespeare learned his trade has discovered a piece of 16th-century pottery that features a face resembling that of the great man.

It was found during excavation work in Shoreditch, east London, at the site of what used to be The Theatre, lost for more than 400 years and where Shakespeare performed as an actor, as well as staging his earliest plays (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: theatre, william shakespeare

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Monday 09 March 2009

The real Shakespeare?

Via the Telegraph, "a painting that may be the only surviving portrait of William Shakespeare made in his lifetime" will be unveiled later today:

The picture, from 1610, six years before the playwright's death, has been in the possession of the Cobbe family since the early 18th century.

It was initially kept at a property in Hampshire but more recently in Hatchlands, the family house in Surrey, which is run by the National Trust.

For three centuries the family was unsure of the identity of the figure in the portrait. According to Alec Cobbe, an art restorer, at one time it had been thought to be of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Although the painting has not been proven to be the bard, it has the backing of the world's foremost expert on Shakespeare, Stanley Wells, emeritus professor of Shakespeare studies at Birmingham University and chairman of the Shakespeare Birthday Trust.

Prof Wells believes it was painted when the writer was 46 years old, six years before his death in 1616 (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: theatre, william shakespeare

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Saturday 07 March 2009

Josipovici interview

Tamar Yellin interviews Gabriel Josipovici in The Forward:

There is still hope for the novel. In a climate increasingly hostile to fiction that does not adhere to the conservative parameters set by the publishing industry, some writers continue to work according to their own lights. Gabriel Josipovici is remarkable for producing novels that belong to the modern European tradition of Kafka and Proust, yet he writes not in German or French, but in English — and, more remarkably still, out of an English setting.

Perhaps it is this, too, that has helped alienate him from the English realist tradition. “I take very little pleasure from the great 19th-century novels, especially the English and French varieties,” Josipovici told the Forward. I like fiction that is not anecdotal, but not whimsical or surrealist, either. I love Borges, but I also love Muriel Spark; I love Marguerite Duras when she hits it off, but I also love Thomas Bernhard and his crazy excesses. But I don’t see these as being different in kind from the poets I love — Yeats and Stevens and Eliot — and some of Auden and some of Celan. Or perhaps they are different in kind, but when I read them I simply feel — with all of them: Yes, this is it!” (More...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: gabriel josipovici

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Wednesday 04 March 2009

New novels from Josipovici

Via This Space:

Three years after the sublime Everything Passes, Carcanet has announced new fiction from Gabriel Josipovici -- "without doubt our most important writer" (Lee Rourke). August will see the publication of After & Making Mistakes; two novels in a single volume.

After "is haunted by a traumatic memory. A woman re-enters the life of a man after fifteen years -- for vengeance? for reconciliation? Or is her return only imagined?". Making Mistakes on the other hand "explores the ironies of relationships more playfully. In a reworking of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, two couples change partners -- and change again -- with the connivance of a modern Don Alfonso and his Despina."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: gabriel josipovici

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Wednesday 04 March 2009

Stewart Home on Jeff Keen

Stewart Home on the films of Jeff Keen:

The BFI have just done us proud with a box set of Jeff Keen films entitled Gazwrx, not to mention various screenings of his works - and all from brand spanking new prints! Keen was one of the earliest and best British underground film-makers. He was largely self-taught and is blessed with a beatnik sensibility that converges with the hippie scene of the later sixties but remains a distinctive strand within it. As a starting point for all this, imagine a surrealist remake of Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy (1959) set in Brighton and you’re not a million miles away from Like The Time Is Now (1961); except, of course, the comparison glosses over Jeff Keen’s singularity. Wail (1960) is probably more typical of Keen’s cinematic sensibility; a crazy mix of animation and live action footage featuring Hollywood werewolves, high art and gang violence. Using 8mm film, Keen created scratch video 20 years before anyone else had thought of it. The resultant mix and match of high art and lowbrow popular culture runs through forty years of his film work (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: film

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Wednesday 04 March 2009

Thinking about Malcolm Lowry

Nicholas Murray has been thinking about Malcolm Lowry:

This year is the centenary of the birth of the writer Malcolm Lowry, one of a host of Liverpool (well, New Brighton if you are a pedantic Scouser) writers who featured in my book about the city last year So Spirited A Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool. In the book I relate the well-known story of Lowry's going away to sea at the age of 17 and being delivered to the Liverpool dock in his father's Rolls Royce. Lowry senior was a wealthy Liverpool cotton-broker who paid his reprobate son an allowance all his life so that he never had to put up with that tiresome inconvenience that hampers the rest of us scribblers, a proper job. According to Lowry's brothers this Roller was one of his tall tales – he liked nothing better to play the role of an old sea dog even though this was his sole professional voyage – and in fact it was a more humble vehicle that pulled up at the dock gates (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Tuesday 03 March 2009

Nomadic Nomadics

Celan-translator, poet and essayist, Pierre Joris has moved his Nomadics blog. You can now found him at pierrejoris.com/blog/

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, poetry

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Tuesday 03 March 2009

James Wood's Best Books Since 1945 (circa 1994)

Mark Sarvas has been sent a PDF of an article James Wood wrote about fifteen years ago listing out what Wood then considered to be the best books since 1945. Mark has reproduced the list, amongst other reasons...

... as a corrective of its own to some of the foolishness that has cropped up around Wood of late. He certainly doesn't need me to defend him but this list should give the lie to the popular cliche of Wood as the hidebound dean of realism who thinks fiction stopped with Flaubert. The list appears in its entirety after the jump, typed up exactly as it ran (with its idiosyncrasies), but I think you'll find some surprises. Pynchon! Barthelme! DeLillo! And quite a few others. (More...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, literary criticism

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Monday 02 March 2009

Monti on Énard's Zone

François Monti discusses Mathias Énard's 517-page, one-sentence novel, Zone, in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review

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