#3 The Big Short

The Big Short

By Michael LewisW.W. Norton, 2010I used to know a pair of aspiring plutocrats who’d occasionally trade books about rich investors managing, through their cunning, to get even richer. “He’s a very interesting guy,” the first would say, handing over the book with a knowing squint; “… he’s doing very interesting things.” The other would nod, knowingly. Even more then these backseat investors wanted knowledge of the market, or useful tips, they wanted a sense of being in on the deal, at the table, planning the big heist with their compatriots; and The Big Short is a book made with this kind of reader in mind. I wish I still knew those guys, because I’d be curious to know how they fortified themselves to read it through. They were not bad people, unlike every single person in The Big Short, all of whom are repellent, and all of whom – most disturbingly – are still at work in the financial world.As Michael Lewis shows, perhaps intentionally, all of the traders and hedge fund managers and analysts involved in the subprime mortgage fiasco and its worldwide meltdown are possessed of a crassness, crapulence, dishonesty, and most of all a cynicism that has real power to shock; this is true even of those characters I’m forced to guess were meant to be The Good Guys (“good” because they end up profiting in the end). “The fixed income world dwarfs the equity world … The equity world is like a fucking zit compared to the bond market.” So says a bond trader, one of the many we meet in this book.“All of them were, by definition, odd,” says Lewis, who attempts to draw these ghouls as Thurber might, with their mismatched socks and endearing tics. He’s not a bad writer, but his task might have been easier to perform convincingly if the creatures in question weren’t morally repugnant. I kept wishing this book were political, I kept wishing it were a call to arms. But it’s a caper story, and that’s why it’s selling out all over.In 2007 the world economy collapsed, as we all know. As we also know, this was due to the fact that big Wall Street investment firms had been brokering deals involving the extension of home loans to people who could not possibly ever pay them off. Once those loans were on the books, Wall Street firms figured out a way to bet on and bet against them and to profit hugely regardless of what happened. This is called hedging. The trouble here (aside from the fact that such loans even existed – for which you can thank both opportunistic loan sharks and the widespread mentality of what George W. Bush dubbed The Ownership Society) is that so many bets and hedges existed there was not enough money in the world to pay every gambler when the wheel stopped. Well then why would the house (or houses) allow so many bets? Because cynical and dishonest people had created an architecture of legal language and mathematics to conceal even from themselves what was happening so that there would be no deterrent. The most informed analyst, writes Lewis, “concluded there was effectively no way for an accountant assigned to audit a giant Wall Street firm to figure out whether it was making money or losing money.” One of Lewis’s characters is a one-eyed man, and he makes the obligatory “land of the blind” pun, but the joke falls flat.Again and again, we hear comparatively honest analysts voicing admissions like, “in the bond market it was still possible to make huge sums of money from the fear, and the ignorance, of customers,” or “that’s when I decided the system was really, ‘fuck the poor.’” Subprime lenders were even making equity bets on mobile homes – and mobile homes do not appreciate in value, ever. The reader doesn’t even know what to do with this information and so just keeps reading on, numbly.Lewis does succeed in explaining things well, as below, where he describes the safety of the economy as predicated not on a stable housing market or a rising one, but an irrationally rising one:

Since 2000, people whose homes had risen in value between 1 and 5 percent were nearly four times more likely to default on their home loans than people whose homes had risen in value more than 10 percent. Millions of Americans had no ability to repay their mortgages unless their houses rose dramatically in value, which enabled them to borrow even more … [analyst Eugene Xu produced] a chart illustrating default rates in various home price scenarios: home prices up, home prices flat, home prices down. [Investor Steve] Lippmann looked at it … and looked again. The numbers shocked even him. They didn’t need to collapse; they merely needed to stop rising so fast.

So a bunch of investors, who I suppose we’re intended to be rooting for, devise a shrewd way to bet against the firms that are betting on the subprime housing market (sort of) and wind up rich. How rich I can’t say, because after shutting The Big Short, numbers that end in zeros no longer feel real to me. And if a few hours of reading can have that effect on a reasonably intelligent and reasonably worldly person, I can only imagine how unreal those numbers seem to the people who push them around and tack zeros on. I don’t know how much money these people think is “a lot” or “enough” – maybe such sums don’t exist.I’ve read about bankers before and I’ve even been close friends with a few, but The Big Short showed me a world that was surprisingly dark and strange to me, and I feel more than a little sullied and unsettled by it. Everyone’s a “guy” and everyone’s on the make and everyone cusses and bitches as they lie. Lewis knows who they are and describes them well, which is to his credit, but he errs in trying to turn this world of sad and angry people into the setting of a goodtime caper story. Take the little anecdote that analyst Danny Vincent tells below. Read once, it’s fun; read for 250 pages, it’s not fun anymore:

When a Wall Street firm helped him to get into a trade that seemed perfect in every way, [Danny] asked the salesman, “I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to fuck me?”Heh-heh-heh, c’mon, we’d never do that, the trader started to say, but Danny, though perfectly polite, was insistent … And the salesman explained how he was going to fuck him. And Danny did the trade.

___John Cotter is an editor at Open Letters. His first novel, Under the Small Lights, was recently published by Miami University Press.

Read #4, Medium Raw, by Anthony Bourdain

Allen Ginsberg

The Poetry and Lifeof Allen Ginsberg:a narrative poemby Edward SandersOverlook, 2000, 2009Ed Sanders was a follower of Allen Ginsberg, and later a close friend, and he’s in a nice position to sketch what amounts to a fast-reading highlight-reel of the poet’s “blizzard fame,” The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg. Sanders has done a number of histories and biographies in verse, and this one follows their form: his crooked lines wind democratically down the center of the page (as with speed readers, who track their eyes down the center of the page alone). It makes for a fleet, often eerily contemporary story. The problems of Allen’s world are also ours:

Over his shoulder the bard heard the iron clacksof Reagan’s stern-wheel’d chariot.Reagan showed the kind of robotic persistencethat democrats often lack:He tried in ’68, ping!He tried in ’72, ping!He tried in ’76, ping!and then in 1980, he won the nomination!Carter swung to the right on domestic issuesHe refused to support Senator Edward Kennedy’shistoricHealth Care for All Americans Act

This is harder to do than it looks; Sanders is strict with himself. And after reading so many poets who demand the reader suborn and second-guess himself, I found it a pleasure to spend a few hours with an ex-beatnik, still living the dream, who wants to communicate surely and unpretentiously. Sanders makes his verse with a mind to light his subject and not his style (but style is there — that “swung” keeps the lines dancing).Ginsberg’s grandfather fled the pogroms for Newark in the 1880s, and there gave birth to the well-regarded poet Louis. Louis later married Naomi Livergant, a revolutionary and a lunatic who looms as large in her son Allen’s life as any figure, real or poetical. As Naomi moved into and out of sanatoriums, her son “The slender & nervous sixteen-year-old / took the ferry from Hoboken to Manhattan,” where he met, “young Republican Jack Kerouac,” and down “by th’ / west side docks, / they caressed one another.” Burroughs shambles onto the scene, but those mythic post-Columbia, pre-San Francisco years pass in a few pages and Ginsberg writes Howl and finds fame (“He was interested in experimenting in W.C. Williams’ / triadic line / or indented tercets / combined with Jack Kerouac’s long-breathed lines”), and by now we are only up to page 31. Though Ginsberg would continue to write interesting stuff — and though he didn’t lack for talent — the literary man becomes fast entangled with the political activist/celebrity/publicist (There he is with the Dalai Lama! Now he’s purring on John Lennon’s lap! Now he’s founding a Buddhist University! Bob Dylan’s his hero, they’re touring together!)To Ginsburg’s credit, he used his platform almost entirely for good, and he always helped his friends — getting their books published, finding them grants, cooking them dinner — and if some of the causes he embraced late in life were not thought-out, at least he was honest about what mattered, even at the end.He was lucky in Sanders’ friendship, and while this long poem is far from a definitive biography (or poetical analysis), it’s a thoughtful, fun, and admirably loving book.___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Speaking In Code

Speaking In Codea film by Amy GrillsQuare Productions, 2009What drives, obsesses, and eventually breaks impresario David Day in the new documentary Speaking In Code is that most elusive of quarries: getting something started in Boston.The something in this case being the techno music scene. A Midwestern American art, electronic dance music has moved so deep underground in its home country you’d forget it was ever here. But Europe continues to dance to it, and it’s to Berlin and Barcilona that David and his wife, Amy Grill, economy-jet to be a part of it; and to meet and get to know the people who live around it, people who—like journalist Philip Sherbourne—move clear across the world in search of “a more complete techno lifestyle.”Electronic dance is a music of fluorescence, of squatters in abandoned buildings, clubs so dark you can’t see the DJ. It’s also a music of bright, empty mornings. Fittingly, Grill places her interview subjects off-center, counterpointed by stray graffiti or AV cables. There is an off-and-on color rhythm as schemes alternate between the pale light of northern mornings and the powdery dark of clubs.In their drive to get closer and closer to the music that defines who they are, the filmmakers go broke and split up on camera (filming David, studying him, Amy begins to see him differently; he grows apart from her as he lives more and more for the scene). Though the breakup could easily feel gimmicky or tacked-on, it ends up providing a necessary foreground to the story, which involves lots of lightly sketched characters, locations, and great stretches of time. The movie ends up being about time, too, and about growing older, making choices, seeing how they play out, then making new ones.Ironically, the music itself seemed hardly there. Maybe because we’re so inured to electronic, repetitive film scores, the background tracks tended to blend together or fade away. What we’re left with are the people who make the scene, their idiosyncrasies and tics. Surprisingly, this turns out to be enough.“What’s our plan?” director Grill asks the on-camera David Day. He squirms away: “It’s party time. I think. I don’t have a watch… so…” He rents a loft space for music gatherings, but the space is shut down. What next? A rave in Thuringia at 4am.Will electronic music ever find a home in Boston? “It’s going to take someone, somewhere, from someplace,” muses David, abstractedly. He’s facinating to watch—an ultimately appealing dreamer who hasn’t quite had the space and time to think things through—he carries the film. His passion does, his absorption. We leave the theater hoping the best for everyone involved in Speaking In Code. It speaks well for its world.___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Survey Says!

Survey Says!Nathan AustinBlack Maze Books, 2009Survey Says is a short book of white margins and large type, considering solely of answers provided on The Family Feud (in 2005 and 2008):

I soak my dishes. Bambi. Hamburger. Hamburgers. Camel. Camera. James Bond.

The answers are complete — the author says he didn’t skip any, and we’ll just have to trust him — arranged in alphabetical order by the second letter of each phrase: Sing, Singer, Lingerie, Fingernails. What emerges is something like rhyme, and it carries the sound of the long poem well. Sometimes Austin lucks into the first letter, too “A bra. Abraham Lincoln.” I didn’t notice the pattern being disrupted, though I might have missed it. I didn’t even notice the pattern itself at first because the phrase combinations can be a lot of fun. Hillary and Bill Clinton still manage to wind up next to one another (can nothing sunder their love?), pigs is preceded by nightsticks.

They brush their teeth. They buy groceries. They cash their check. They change their jobs. They change their underwear. They cheat on their spouse. They chew gum. They comb it over. They develop more hair. They don’t like to look pretty. They don’t put on their seatbelt. They don’t take care of their bedroom. They dry flowers — like dried flowers. They dye it. They eat. They fall out of love. They gargle. They go out to dinner. They go to see a Woody Allen Movie. They have kids.

Reading this, I occasionally worry about taking part in a cruel mocking of Middle-America, and middle-of-the-afternoon America. And then, I think, well why shouldn’t I have a laugh at boobs on game shows? They’re not an endangered species or anything. “I’m going to have to go with Ashley Simpson.” Yeah.And if you’re a word artist looking for non-academic and non-specialized language to manipulate, look no further than game show answers. Quite quickly, I quit reading the poem as a social critique and settled in for the flipping-channels. A nice-like rhythm develops. The voices almost never come off as individual; a single soul is trying to communicate. Stories emerge:A nice, comfortable mattress. Knives. In line. Only tell one person your secret. Enquirer. Insomnia. Insult them. Insurance.

O mercy! America’s dark heart. A mirage?

___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.