First things firstFirst things first
“Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.” — Josh Billings
Author: Tetman Callis
Shooting starsShooting stars
“Ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone-dead messages like wooden rosary beads.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
The font of authenticityThe font of authenticity
“The exegetes of The Book maintain that all books aim at being authentic. That they live only a borrowed life, which at the moment of inspiration returns to its ancient source.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
When we were happy, when we were youngWhen we were happy, when we were young
There was a literary magazine called Happy. I can find no evidence it still exists as an active endeavor. When it did, it published one of my very short stories from the late 90s, called “Shelving.” That’s the story I posted this week.
SeriousSerious
“The Book is a myth in which we believe when we are young, but which we cease to take seriously as we get older.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
I beat dead horses, don’t I? But this horse isn’t dead yet.I beat dead horses, don’t I? But this horse isn’t dead yet.
“The CDOs manufactured in 2006 and 2007 were in large part a direct manifestation of their ingredients–pools of tainted assets precariously situated atop a wave of home-price appreciation. As investors became addicted to the higher yields of investment-grade CDOs, their rose-colored glasses focused on the AAA rating rather than the pool of shoddy subprime mortgages they were really buying. The rating agencies put too much faith in their formulas, conveniently forgetting that a model is only as good as its inputs. Since there was little historical data on subprime or CDO performance, especially during times of economic distress, the inputs were essentially pulled from thin air, adjusted by the underwriters to maximize their AAA allotment. ‘Diversification’ was the magic word that could justify the inclusion of anything remotely resembling a legitimate fixed-income asset, as Wall Street and the rating agencies claimed that even the lowest quality bonds would not all default at the same time.
“However, that is exactly what happened. The trillion-dollar CDO market, built atop a single assumption, crumbled to ruins when house prices did the impossible: they first stopped rising and then they fell. In the end, who was hurt worst when the CDO market crashed had less to do with what they were doing than with when they were doing it. The best predictor of banks’ write-downs was not the quality of their CDOs, but instead the amount of CDOs they issued in 2007, for very few of those CDOs would ever leave the balance sheets of their creators. The CDO market was a game of musical chairs and the winners were those who sat down early on. The losers were those that lived by the philosophy of Citigroup’s ex-CEO, Charles Prince, that, ‘as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.’ Unfortunately, certain players in the CDO market, including Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Countrywide, S&P, and Moody’s, were having too much fun to notice when the music ended, never pausing from their CDO craze for long enough to see the warning signs develop.
“Once the conveyor belt stopped, it turned out that the hot potato, which had so efficiently been passed along the chain from mortgage broker to Wall Street and beyond, had been leaving pieces of itself along the way. Once investors no longer wanted to buy CDOs, Wall Street Banks were left holding the excess of unsold CDOs and yet-to-be-securitized CDO assets. And once Wall Street CDOs no longer wanted to buy subprime mortgages, mortgage originators were left holding a huge number of mortgage loans they knew had little chance of ever being repaid. And once mortgage companies no longer wanted to originate risky mortgages, homebuyers were left holding the subprime mortgages they had planned to refinance. And once homebuyers began to default on their mortgages in mass [sic], it became clear that the credit rating agencies had made a colossal mistake, and Moody’s, Fitch, and S&P were left holding the burden of a shattered reputation in a business built on the necessity of trust.” — Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis” (emphases in the original)
Potemkin slept herePotemkin slept here
“Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.” — Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (trans. Wieniewska)
Suffer the citizensSuffer the citizens
“A prince should deliver the citizens from the sufferings brought upon themselves but should not bring suffering to the people for his own cause.” — Valmiki Ramayan, Ayodhyakanda Sarga 46
Crispy crittersCrispy critters
“There’s a difference between an old-fashioned financial panic and what had happened on Wall Street in 2008. In an old-fashioned panic, perception creates its own reality: Someone shouts ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater and the audience crushes each other to death in its rush for the exits. On Wall Street in 2008 the reality finally overwhelmed perceptions: A crowded theater burned down with a lot of people still in their seats. Every major firm on Wall Street was either bankrupt or fatally intertwined with a bankrupt system.” — Michael Lewis, The Big Short
Johnsonian refutationJohnsonian refutation
“No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.” — Samuel Johnson
Get backGet back
Just about every weekend since I started this blog four months ago I have posted a copy of one of my published stories. Posting my previously published work is at the center of what this blog is about, though I have posted and will post again pieces previously unpublished.
The other and almost-daily posts I make to the site are to keep the place from getting stagnant. They’re mostly quotes from whatever I’m reading, which are far more interesting than what I’m doing, except for the interesting parts of what I do, which I best not be writing about in public.
There are only about a half-dozen previously published stories left in my inventory. This week I’m posting the oldest, “My Friend!” This piece took over fifteen years to go from first draft to the draft that got published, in March of 2009, by Gloom Cupboard. It’s essentially a celebration of language.
I see a red moon a-risin’I see a red moon a-risin’
You know what a “blue moon” is, and if you don’t, you can look it up, but you don’t have to because I’ll tell you right here and right now–a conjunctive spatio-temporal indicator, by the way, which is both fixed and flexible in, not only the virtual world of the internet, but the virtual world of what passes as reality, which always passes quickly and rather subjectively–anyway, I’ll tell you so you don’t have to wander off and look it up and maybe never return, because, who knows? Stuff happens. The phone rings. There’s a knock on the door. The plane crashes. The child is born.
The “blue moon” is the second full moon in a calendar month. This month does not have that. What it has is two new moons in one calendar month–one on or about today, the 1st of July, and one on or about the 30th. I hereby dub such a celestial occurrence a “red moon.” Pop corks, pour out, and enjoy.
Something for nothingSomething for nothing
“With stagnant wages and booming consumption, the cash-strapped American masses had a virtually unlimited demand for loans but an uncertain ability to repay them. All they had going for them, from the point of view of Wall Street financial engineers, was that their financial fates could be misconstrued as uncorrelated. By assuming that one pile of subprime mortgage loans wasn’t exposed to the same forces as another–that a subprime mortgage bond with loans heavily concentrated in Florida wasn’t very much like a subprime mortgage bond more concentrated in California–the engineers created the illusion of security.” — Michael Lewis, The Big Short
ClarityClarity
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” — Tolstoy (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)
Scribal motivationScribal motivation
“My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and absorbed me into itself. It was necessary for me, it seemed, to write the book I had been thinking much of, even if it were destined to fall dead from the press, and I had no inclination or interest to write any other.” — John Lothrop Motley (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Book II, Ch. 18)
Animals!Animals!
“Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.” — Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (trans. Wieniewska)
No disrespect intendedNo disrespect intended
“If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say, ‘Less matter, more form!’ Ah, what relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.” — Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (trans. Wieniewska)
No recourseNo recourse
“The power of destiny is incomprehensible. Its power on all beings cannot be averted.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Ayodhyakanda Sarga 22
The quality of steel in a leveraged derivativeThe quality of steel in a leveraged derivative
“Nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods.” — Robert Walpole (quoted by John Cassidy in “Enter the Dragon”)
The inheritance of the meekThe inheritance of the meek
“In this world a person with soft nature is treated with disgrace.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Ayodhyakanda Sarga 21
All arachnids are poisonousAll arachnids are poisonous
The last of the lower-case very short stories I wrote in 1995 to be published is “latrodectus, loxosceles, lycosa tarentula,” which was accepted by Denver Quarterly in 2003 and published by them in 2006. Last week, in “mama when she’s really pretty,” I was channeling a six-year-old girl. This week in “latrodectus, [etc.],” I’m channeling a seven-year-old boy.
Locusts + crops = stubbleLocusts + crops = stubble
“CDOs were flawed from the outset, used too often as a junkyard for risky and substandard assets. CDOs survived because of changes in the credit markets that produced an excess quantity of these assets and herds of investors hungry for higher yields.” — Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis”
Close your eyes and that’ll look about rightClose your eyes and that’ll look about right
“Not only did the rating agencies fail to examine the accuracy of their own prior collateral ratings, but in many cases, they also used other agency’s ratings without checking for accuracy. To correct for any shortcomings in the other agency’s rating methodology, they created the practice of ‘notching,’ whereby they would simply decrease the ratings of any collateral security that they did not rate by one notch. In other words, if Moody’s rated a CDO that was composed of collateral rated BB+ by Fitch only, Moody’s would instead use a rating of BB in their own CDO model because it was not their rating. They never went back and reanalyzed the other rating agency’s rating, conveniently assuming that decreasing it by a notch would compensate for any shortcomings in the initial risk analysis.” — Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis” (footnotes omitted; emphasis in original)
Roll them bonesRoll them bones
“The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of ‘investment’ is ‘gambling with the odds in your favor.'” — Michael Lewis, The Big Short
All the democracy money can buyAll the democracy money can buy
“I think there is something fundamentally scary about our democracy. Because I think people have a sense that the system is rigged, and it’s hard to argue that it isn’t.” — Charlie Ledley (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)
Just lay back and enjoy itJust lay back and enjoy it
“The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said, ‘This is wrong.'” — Steve Eisman (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)
Anybody we know?Anybody we know?
“A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen. How could this be?” — Michael Lewis, The Big Short
Separate but equally cluelessSeparate but equally clueless
“There are actually people who do nothing but invest in European mid-cap health care debt. I don’t think the problem is specific to finance. I think that parochialism is common to modern intellectual life. There is no attempt to integrate.” — Charlie Ledley (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)
One size fits allOne size fits all
“Our lives, the big and magnificent lives we can just barely make out beneath the mere facts of our lifestyles, are always trying to occur. But save for a few rare occasions–falling in love, the birth of a child, the death of a parent, a revelatory moment in nature–they don’t occur; the big magnificence is withdrawn. Stories rub at the facts of our lives. They give us access–if only for a few hours, if only in bed at the end of the day–to what’s beneath.” — Jonathan Safran Foer (from his foreword to the Penguin Classics edition of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (emphasis in the original))
Where we are and what we doWhere we are and what we do
“We live on the surface of our planet. Human life happens on a shell as thin, relative to the size of the earth, as an egg’s, or as thin as the paint on a wall. We have lifestyles on the surfaces of our lives: habits and culture, clothes, modes of transit, calendars, papers in wallets, ways of killing time, answers to the question ‘What do you do?’ We come home from long days of doing what we do and tuck ourselves under the thin sheets. We read stories printed on even thinner paper. Why, at the end of the day, do we read stories?” — Jonathan Safran Foer (from his foreword to the Penguin Classics edition of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories)