(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

1. This winter/spring I reread Mark Helprin's "A Winter's Tale," which I first read very quickly, in half a week, four years ago. This time I read more slowly, and had a very different experience of the book. One thing that I processed very differently was something that I think I totally missed the first time around--the small, but increasingly direct references to Jackson Mead being a Mephistophelian figure. This was something that the last time around I didn't get until the very end, when it's spelled out that he and his crew throw the rainbow bridge to get back into heaven and fail. This time I noticed it earlier--about two thirds into the book there is actually a pretty explicit reference to it. The other thing was, I was struck by a resonance between Jackson Mead's narrative, and some elements from both Woland's and Pontius Pilate's stories in Master and Margarita. Both Woland and Jackson Mead travel through time with quirky companions, pursuing their own ends and causing urban chaos in the process. But the Pontius Pilate connection was even stronger. At the end of M and , when The Master sees his protagonist, he is sitting in the same place he has been sitting for two thousand years, and every night he longs for a road made out of moonlight. When The Master frees him, the mountains enclosing him shatter, and the moonlight road appears before him, and he walks away on it with his faithful dog, towards where Yeshua is waiting for him. Jackson Mead keeps building bridges for centuries, as a sort of repetition compulsion, before he realizes that he has to build a rainbow bridge made of light that would pierce the empyreum, and allow him to reverse
his fall. Something about this longing for a road literally made out of different forms of light (moonlight in one case, the rainbow spectrum in the other), that can literally bridge the characters' respective falls from grace with their desire.

2. I find the financial crisis an especially good illustration of Giddens' thesis about the "consequences of modernity," especially his ideas about trust and risk, and the two mechanisms of disembedding--the symbolic tokens (money) and the expert systems. Basically, the global financial crisis is Giddens' consequences followed through to their (hindsight 20/20) logical conclusion of FUBAR.

Comments

Re: NEVER FORGET

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

...or maybe that's what turned me off?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I'd read a review of it, and it sounded interesting, but there was something that turned me off about the review...I wish I could remember what it was...maybe the general sense of feeling like this was some L train hipster version of Homo Faber?

cause and effect

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

2. I find the financial crisis an especially good illustration of Giddens' thesis about the "consequences of modernity," especially his ideas about trust and risk, and the two mechanisms of disembedding--the symbolic tokens (money) and the expert systems. Basically, the global financial crisis is Giddens' consequences followed through to their (hindsight 20/20) logical conclusion of FUBAR.


Did you see Elizabeth Warren's appearance on The Daily
show this week? She pointed out the (what should be
painfully obvious) history of financial crises in the
u.s. (which, sadly, the often thoughtful Jon Stewart had not
already apprehended), namely, that since its founding, the
u.s. went through a series of financial crises/panics about every
15 years up to the Great Depression. A series of laws were
enacted in 1933, '34, and '35 that put an end to that cycle, up
until Reagan&his ilk acquired political power (whereupon, they
"forgot" what the adults of his parents' generation had
learned from painful experience). They began dismantling the
legal protections that had been put in place to protect the
financial system from the con-men and snake-oil salesmen's
schemes, and we promptly began to have financial crises in the
form of people like Michael Milken (junk bonds) and Charles
Keating and Neal Bush (savings&loans). With the right-wing of
the democratic party's ascension to power, this was continued
with the repeal ("reform", "modernization") of more of that
legislation passed in the 1930s. The changes not only made the
con-men's schemes legal, they also made it easier for the con-men
to hide their schemes in the dark (no regulation --> no public
exposure --> no transparency).

It is not "modernity" that led to the current situation -- it is
the opposite: the return of the ancient plague of con-men. That
they used computers and "securitization" (separating the loan
originators from the final debt holders) simply is another
instance of their using whatever tools are at hand to disguise
their schemes.