Lancelot Links

Sunday April 11, 2010

Lancelot Links

Roger Lathbury, head of Orchises Press, whom my sister and I unintentionally screwed out of publishing J.D. Salinger's last novella, "Hapworth 16, 1924," tells his side of the story, which is a lot more fascinating than mine, in New York magazine. If there's a mistake in all of this, as Mr. Lathbury implies, it's the eight years Mr. Salinger took to consider his offer—taking him up to the digital age, where pre-pub of "Hapworth" could be more readily found on amazon.com by someone like me. Either way, it's a sad story. But that's part of what makes it a good story.
My friend Andy's friend Matt Steinglass has a good piece in The New York Times Book Review called "Reading Tim O'Brien in Hanoi." Oddly, 20 years ago, I entitled the first notebook I filled while living in Taipei, Taiwan, "Reading Dostoevsky in Tien Mu." (Tien Mu is a suburb of Taipei.) That Dostoevsky and Tien Mu have nothing to do with each other may be the first reason of many it never wound up anywhere near The New York Times Book Review.
Speaking of Andy, here's the beginning of the 15 books that most influenced him. We talked about this briefly while on the veranda of our joint hut in Phu Quoc two weeks ago. Just two weeks? A lifetime ago. I'll probably write up my list one of these days. It may be the only list that includes both Ernest Hemingway and Syd Hoff.
Via Rob Neyer, Slate contrasts the way children's books and adult books treat five great baseball players: Babe Ruth, Pete Rose, Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. It's funny stuff but, as a longtime reader of baseball biographies, both as a child and as an adult, you get the feeling it could have been funnier.
As funny, maybe, as this movie trailer. Out in August. Fingers crossed.
Or this post from Claver and Converse on the census. He encourages those red-staters who are wary of the census to give into their fears and not fill it out, since their lack of voice will only harm their states. "I want you to know how much I respect you for refusing any government assistance of any kind," he writes, "be it Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA benefits, FHA home loan, etc. More power to you because it will leave more for me in the future."
Finally, the not-so-funny: Michael J. Burry, the subject of Michael Lewis' new book, "The Big Short," responds to the oft-heard excuse from Alan Greenspan & Co. that no one saw the global financial meltdown coming by clearing his throat. Loudly. A key observation occurs halfway through. When Greenspan was grilled by Congress about financial analysts like Burry, who saw the dangers way back in 2005, he dismisses their insights as "a statistical illusion." Then he reiterates that no one at the Fed meetings mentioned anything about the dangers. Burry writes: "By Mr. Greenspan’s logic, anyone who might have foreseen the housing bubble would have been invited into the ivory tower, so if all those who were there did not hear it, then no one could have said it." Exactly. Greenspan is a poster child for the institutional voice. If you rise within a system you come to believe in that system, since you yourself have (obviously, deservedly) risen within it. More, you come to believe that anyone who doesn't rise within the system doesn't deserve to. Systems are self-protecting in this way. Would that economies were.