Summer

My song isn't anything but a nightingale riding out a gust of northerly wind when the twelve dulcet bells toll midnight. That's what I learned from Shelley, perched desperate on her ledge the night before the working-men came and tore her house down. Even Abbey, whose hands built her namesake brick by brick, she was inconsolably deaf-mute when I tried to talk her down from the letters John had cut from her poem. Blue paint? Frank had had that in spades until the hotel lobby, where his cheap guitar had failed to win him applause. Deadly venoms coursed through all of us back then; we were sweating out the vodka of 1994, crusted around our livers from a summer spent in dark alley bars reveling in the inevitability of death. Only Hal and Erin stayed away from sickness--they'd just fallen in love and needed no intoxicants other than each other. Erin in particular could not get enough of William, ever since he sang her to sleep one humid night with the ballad of a woman by him happy, and happy but for him, had not their hap been bad. Yes, no woman is safe from heartache, though her particular illusion was that the strength of her heart was more or less equal to the power of her warrior's arms. Don't get me wrong, I had lifted a car or two in college on a dare, but those were just frat-boy tricks and her taste ran towards something more in line with disaster. Aster? Hal opened up her front door, and cold September wilted away just at once. Good for her--long darkness had never been much her style, though it seemed to suit me just fine. Did I nightwalk? Nothing that base and desperate; my skin too taut and face too pretty to endure common debasement. My illusion was that I held myself to higher standards. Shelley hated bulldozers, and Frank, why did he bring himself down to die in a place so far from home? At once in that moment, I realized that for me, nothing could ever beat counting my lover's eight golden rings at least three times a day.

Jack Escobar's Dream

When I came back from the dead, the

Only thing worth having was

One clean bite, the first real break

I'd ever known from breathless

Want to have furrows run through me

Like cold breath blown through salt.

I dreamed that in front of the angels some-

One had set a microphone;

Though my voice was thin and reedy,

Through me came the sound of ages,

And in Jack Escobar's dream,

Pauline lost herself

Down dark desert highways

And reading dense poets was less of a

Chore and more of a lightness.

Even the devil

in his thick forest of nicotine

Fireflies found the sound

Of forks and glasses in

Jack Escobar's vast hall

Strangely pleasing; and I

In turn recognized that the first choice--

Made before heat congealed into

Disparate matter--

Had been mine alone;

And Jack and I danced in the garden

Where ephemera rose and fell

Between branches of the yew.

Soon Dawn rose up (for Jack had met her with

Morning quickness);

The stars collapsed, and then I slept.

Ten Seconds of Consciousness

Here's the idea. Me and Erik are in the ASU Computer Commons joint-blogging. The game is simple:
1. Jack starts by typing out a short thought
2. Erik has ten seconds to think and type out a different thought
3. Jack has ten seconds, you get the idea
4. This goes on for two minutes.
5. Enjoy our large brains.

or : Gather, think, repeat.

--

1. Technology is eventually going to outpace our ability to control it.

2. I don't think that if we were going to have the type of technology that would be able to take the control from us, that we would not want them to have it. If I was going to have a robot overlord, I should certainly hope that the overlord would know best. That's the saying right, overlord knows best?

3.I can't help how bored I feel inside most modern buildings. I mean, there's something about all the impersonality of the way we've designed the modern world to look that I get very bored very easily. I think that that's the same way we're going to come at creating the things that are going to imprison us in our gilded, robot-run cages. Are we fucked? Probably not. But we are definitely shaping up to be not an evolutionary endpoint alone, but more like the seed of the greater intelligence we will soon create.

4. I wonder how much shapes really do influence us. I once wrote an article that had to do with the angle at which we see things. Not in the high-school sociology "writing slanted articles" bullshit way, but in the direct mathematical angular measurement way. Like, so you could calculate the cosine at which you were viewing any particular object in life. I guess that all came to me one day when I saw an ad on TV that showed a bald eagle's face looking directly into the camera. After living in America for 20+ years that marked the first time that I had ever seen a bald eagle's face straight on. I think it was decidedly more intimidating than looking at the side of the face. Angles might be more important than I previously thought- I gotta figure out which is my good side.

5. Logarithms tend to make things more beautiful, whether it's natural things like flowers, human faces, or the way that chair armrests look. Marcus Aurelius, who is leaving his Roman fingerprints over pretty much everything I write and think these days, would say that the world is ruled by logos, an overriding logic of the universe that basically ensures everything continues the way it has to. Most people get irrationally pissed about that, because we generally like to assume that we have control, or at least input, into the way our lives look. I think that what we're gradually finding out is that we have less control than we imagine, but that in the end that works out for the best.

6. Sometimes I get irrationally pissed off. Usually it is about nothing more than a simple blow to my most prized possession, my ego. You were expecting me to say my penis, weren't you? That's your most prized possession. My point is that I wish that I could understand better why it is that I get angry over things like that and not over things that are important, like the economy, the homeless, or why it is that I think my penis is one of your possessions. And I just realized I am not entirely sure that is how you spell "possession."

7. I lie, not often, but from time to time. Sometimes it's to cover my ass, but lately I find that I'd rather get caught so I can learn something about why I do. I find myself holding myself to high standards these days; when somebody else is a dick, or does something stupid. When I lie or make a mistake, it's me betraying myself. I read a couple seconds ago a one-liner out of an essay I found really boring: "I lie so I do not have to trust you to believe." Maybe next time don't say something that makes me think you're dumb if you don't want to be lied at.

8. I do think of people as dumb sometimes. But, on the flip-side of that I occasionally meet someone that I think is much smarter than I am. And that is an interesting experience. I start to feel like JD (from Scrubs) in that I spend all day reminiscing about the moment that I had their fleeting approval. I suppose that goes for anyone that I view to be better than me in any category. Whether it is the "good question" approval from my neuroscience teacher, the laughs at my embarrassing story from some newly-non-strangers, or the smile from a girl that is far too cute for me. I don't think I crave acceptance like I did when I was 7, but I definitely still appreciate it when I find it.

9. 22 years old and trying to make somebody laugh makes me feel like I'm 90 centuries old, circling some metaphysical drain. That shit makes me tired, so I usually delegate the laugh-duties to Erik when he's hanging out. I'm on top of a mountain most of the time, riding a Han Shan kind of thing; sometimes people make the trek up to bring me cake and cider, but for the most part they mill around at the gift shop level (right above the base) and I'm content to let them do that. If more people made the hike there wouldn't be enough room for the campfire and cell phones would start going off and at that point, why even be on a mountain--I wish I was rich enough so Al Pacino would fly up (helicopters only) and tell me Jessica Alba's new number. I would make her some cake. Pacino would stick to water.

10. Humor is interesting to me. Often times I get into arguments (in the non-abusive way) over what is "funny." I am one of those people that happens to laugh at a lot of things. I don't think Katt Williams is funny, or Louis Black, or Carrot Top. But I do laugh at them, sometimes. I also don't think it is funny to laugh at racist jokes, or other unpalatable things- but I do that too. I will even give someone the obligatory laugh after a joke/story that I know they take a lot of joy in telling. I do this completely and totally for their benefit. (If you know me, that was a joke too.) Of course I laugh, because laughing is fun. It fun to accept that Katt Williams' jokes about living the ( shortest, ugliest, least believable) pimp life are funny. Fine, so it is actually not funny, but laughing is fun. And enjoyment is fun. And scoffing at a joke for the context is not going to hurt the joke- only you. And man, do I wish Jack had told me he knew Pacino. I just sold my helicopter to Drew Carey, and that guy is a total tool.

11. A fat guy with glasses? Once I heard somebody plinked him with a BB gun from their childhood-style treehouse--although the guy was probably in his 30s, people who shoot BB guns at celebrities are like that--and I laughed, but I didn't think it was that funny. Sometimes I find myself not laughing at things I laugh at, I don't know how to describe it. I would describe it as an internal chuckle, or a feeling that the hairs on the back of my head stand up and give the attempted joke a courteous bow. I can respect the humor or enjoy the cleverness, but it's not all the way there. It's Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. What's the point anyway. If you want funny you should watch Jon Stewart. Get out of that treehouse. In the future, less than twelve months from now, someone's going to get mauled in a zoo for trying to put socks on a tiger. I am almost certain that's true.

12. And I laughed, because I mean come on - a tiger with socks?! That's comedy gold.

Thoughts on the financial situation

Brad DeLong just put a post up on his blog suggesting that the proposed $700 billion bailout might function as a large carry trade, in which the US Treasury would sell a number of risk-free(ish) Treasury bonds at relatively low interest rates to finance the purchase of risky assets from failing banks. Press coverage on this idea has mainly focused on the $700 billin number, which I find misleading. Reading only newspaper headlines, a person would likely assume that the situation was that the government is taking $700 billion dollars and giving it to troubled institutions to finance their day to day operations, lest they all go out of business and create a "credit crunch" where no bank will lend money because of the extreme unpredictability of the loan market. That's different from reality.

What's really happening (or is being proposed), is that the government sell off bonds (interest-bearing instruments backed by the equity of the US Government) with yields of 3-4% to invest in "toxic" assets that, due to their volatile nature, will likely yield somewhere in the area of 10% (after the massive discount of worthless securities and loans) . $700 billion is just the total amount of money that Congress is considering making available to the Treasury Secretary to make the initial asset purchase with. In the end, the government will almost certainly recoup some of that money--but there is also the possibility that, in the long run, this may be a net money maker for the government in the absolute rosiest scenarios. What is more likely to happen is a minimization of catastrophe--"losing the minimum" in poker speak--and the long-term gains of a more efficient system*. We're trading safe, low-return securities for high-risk, high-reward assets. Since most people seem to take the $700 billion as a sunk cost, hopefully we will be seeing some very pleasant surprises once all the bloodshed is done.

Or, to blockquote Brad Delong blockquoting Bloomberg:

Do the arithmetic. Suppose the government buys $700 billion worth of assets after a 50 percent haircut, holds them for four years and then sells them for 40 percent of par. That would be a capital loss of $140 billion. Meanwhile, the carry trade has earned perhaps $50 billion a year, or $200 billion over the four years -- an overall profit of $60 billion -- and lower budget deficits. Remember, there are no taxes affecting this deal.... [T]he risk to taxpayers is much less than you might think based on the congressional debate over the plan offered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson...

Like a number of others have noted, what we're facing here is completely unprecedented; before this is all over, you may see the government taking substantial, even controlling, interests in a number of Wall Street banks. I doubt it, though. Despite some in Congress grumbling that the government may not be asking for enough equity in the companies it's bailing out, I don't think Republicans will allow any systemic absorption of Wall Street by Congress. We'll see.

Side note:

In this video, shot about a year ago, Jim Cramer is screaming for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to "open the discount window" to banks--essentially to loan entities like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers liquid capital to refinance their operations. A lot of people have been tempted to proclaim Cramer a prophet--including me and Cramer himself--at this point it's spilt milk. Had we gone through with Cramer's idea of low-interest recapitalization, the "credit crunch" that we're experiencing--if we're even experiencing it; Tyler Cowen has yet to find much evidence for it--would have been staved off temporarily, though the housing bubble would still have burst. He's still a cool guy, but my "oh shit he's brilliant" moment has passed.

*This is my dangerous idea: Though nobody knows at this point how bad the market contraction will be, from the damage we've seen so far this may be a relatively painless(!!) process of correcting some systemic problems in our financial system. This weird socialist-capitalist hybridization of the US has yet to sort itself out, but in the end it may prove more market-efficient than many commentators currently forecast.

Thoughts? I truly don't know my ass from my elbow in economic anything, but this is my first reaction.

Written for a poetry class

Real GDP

Denomination is domination.

Sacajawea in her gilded cage
might be a match for Washington;
but til she’s tied up in a burlap sack
with 99 of her sisters,
she’s nothing next to Franklin’s
wry-lipped rictus.
The whole tribe a spectacle
of smooth golden edges
and heft beyond metaphor,
something real and tangible,
like long-lost artifacts of a time
when debt was a lightness
and even Providence had its burdens.

Your green-tinged want and need
to get your paper stacks in order?
Give me the sun-bright shine
of the Shoshone’s copper body,
her heavy admonition that
wages have a weight
statements cannot say
and pure numbers somehow lack.

Unlike Roman soldiers
and Venetian porters,
we put flax into our wallets,
blissfully unaware.
They knew, as we don’t:
when the arrows come down,
you can’t afford to carry;
when the boat turns over,
good fortune isn’t.

The best poem about a dress I've ever read

From the Best American Poetry Blog:

To Your Pink

Your pink dress pleases me. The way it clings
to your tits, juts your throat, shows off your pits,
and coats you like a swarm of wet bee wings,
bee wings from wet pink bees. It really fits

you well, this satin dress. Where’d you get it?
Did you shed it, like a pink snake, in your sleep,
find it on the floor, decide to slip it
on this evening to make sure I’d want to peel

it off you again tonight? Where’d this pink
come from: flowers, nipples, Venus’s plate?
Or did it arise like a blush in your cheeks,
and then whelm your figure, just to desecrate

the modesty that tinted it? I doubt,
actually, your pink is that devout.

after Theophile Gautier’s "A une robe rose"

– Jason Camlot

A Meditation

"My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application--not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech--and learn them so well that words become works."
- Seneca

Marcus Aurelius was a consummate pro. His writing is always smooth, can be jaw-dropping at key moments, generally burns off the pages when I read The Meditations. I have an already-dogeared copy on my desk I grabbed from Border's last week. I heard somewhere that he is a "standing reproach to our self-indulgence", which is something I've been dealing with a lot recently. Ryan Holiday has endless praise for Greg Hays' translation, so when I decided to get it, I knew which version to pick up. Having never really given a shit about individual translators before, let me just say: jesus. I was blown away. I'd tried to read The Meditations on some shitty website for a long time, but couldn't because it was so fucking boring; but Hays' version? It's written so clearly, lucidly, that it almost feels obscene. Which it is. The Meditations were written by Aurelius for Aurelius alone; they're a notebook where he reminded himself of what's good in life and why. (Reading it is like peeking into the daily struggles of a great mind--the same concept as this blog, except extremely much better.) It's a diary of sorts, meant as a way for Marcus to reinforce his thoughts by arguing them rhetorically. If he were to find out he was listed as one of the great authors of all time, his first reaction would be, "What do you mean? I never wrote a book!"

That feeling doesn't come across in any translation except for Hays'. The others are weighed down with a thick syrup of pretentiousness, where it sounds like a Roman emperor declaiming Real Truth from on high, trumpeting righteousness into the ages. Here, see for yourself. This is the same passage, the first version from the Internet Classics Archive, the second from Hays.

ICA:

Often think of the rapidity with which things pass by and disappear, both the things which are and the things which are produced. For substance is like a river in a continual flow, and the activities of things are in constant change, and the causes work in infinite varieties; and there is hardly anything which stands still. And consider this which is near to thee, this boundless abyss of the past and of the future in which all things disappear. How then is he not a fool who is puffed up with such things or plagued about them and makes himself miserable? for they vex him only for a time, and a short time.

Hays:

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone--those that are now and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the 'what' is in constant flux, the 'why' has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us--a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.

Oh shit!! Did you feel that? Did you get some of that Aurelius??

I know I am. I'm only a short way into it, and reading it in tandem four or so other books, but there's just something about it--about simple wisdom, beautifully and repeatedly argued--that I can actually feel changing the way I look at the world. It may or may not last (and now, I know, I shouldn't care), but I tossed my smokes in the trash a couple of days ago, passed on hanging out and getting lifted with a friend of mine a few days back. I haven't had a drink in a week, and even things like junk food and Coke are beginning to lose their luster. I'm slowly turning into an ascetic.

A lazy, fuck-you kind of ascetic, but I'm getting wasted a lot less. There is so much world out there to see, so much yet undone, and it is so rewarding to be able to take myself seriously that I can't see the point in fucking around any longer.

The best part, hands down, of Aurelius is his revelation that you don't avoid doing bad shit because you're going to get caught, but because it damages your character. Even if no one sees you do it, you're still the kind of person who would do that thing. And now you have something to hide when you talk to others. You'll find yourself looking over your shoulder. When you open your mouth, you can say the right thing but you'll still be a hypocrite. And the world at large won't really mind it, hell, might even encourage it--so you'll never become greater than they are. If you do what they want, and you lie like they do, you'll very conceivably get away with it. But then shit like this happens, and all your success and money and everything else you used to make up for your stultifying lack of self turns on you, it becomes a liability whose only worth is to make the punchline funnier. It's hilarious when it doesn't happen to you.