The Best American Poetry

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God [by Jonathan Edwards]

God holds you over the pit of hell,
as one holds a loathsome insect over the fire;
the last of the just rings the bell;

"I tell lies," said the liar,
a convict released because the question lacked an answer.
He did calisthenics after reveille. She said she had cancer,

but the beast was more in love with his desire
for her than with her beauty, and the camera was just a way to transfer
the self from the self you see when you look in the mirror.

God grew ashamed of his creation. That's what the gravestone    
told the crone. Nevertheless she wants you to stay;
she wants you to pray; and if you do, if you pray,

if the dove returns after the storm has blown,
the cage door will stay open, and you'll never walk alone,
you'll never walk alone.

Warrenn Buffett's Cadillac

From this week's Barron's (7/31/23) comes "Land of the Share Class, Home of the Braves" by Andrew Bary in which we learn that Warren Buffett is a big believer in Liberty Sirius XM (LSXMK) "with a 20% stake" and that Buffett "is said to play the Siriusly Sinatra station in his Cadillac." Sounds like a buy recommendation to us, and how pleasant to picture Buffett driving a Cadillac, not a Mercedes. It's more evidence that Warren Buffett, "the Warren Beatty of finance," means what he says when he says "don't bet against America."

Breslin and Buffett: "To thine own self be true" [by Mitch Sisskind]

I got turned on to Jimmy Breslin when I read his novel Table Money many years ago. Later, I read his biography of Damon Runyon -- a real masterpiece in my opinion. I was looking forward to his new book about Eppolito and Carracappa, the crooked NYPD homicide detectives. I didn't see how it could miss but it turned out to be a disappointment. There are, however, some interesting ideas...

Breslin says he can hardly stand to be around "legitimate" people anymore because they're so goddamned boring. Specifically he cites Warren Buffett as the "second richest and first most boring person in the world." Breslin says if he had to listen to Buffett talk for twenty minutes he would go out of his mind...

But does that mean listening to Warren Buffett can make us better poets? Is it possible, from a creative perspective, to go out of your mind "in a good way" by listening to Warren Buffett? Rimbaud prescribed "zee systematique derangement of zee senses," non? So how hard are you willing to work in order to be a great writer? How much are you willing to risk? Ask yourself those questions and then click (or don't) on the clip below. (It's only ten minutes, well under Breslin's limit.) You'll hear Warren Buffett say things like, "The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken." He's a great Polonius, plus whatever else. You'll get your money's worth! (yuk yuk!)

from the archive; first posted July 3, 2008

Breslin says he can hardly stand to be around "legitimate" people anymore because they're so goddamned boring. Specifically he cites Warren Buffett as the "second richest and first most boring person in the world." Breslin says if he had to listen to Buffett talk for twenty minutes he would go out of his mind...

But does that mean listening to Warren Buffett can make us better poets? Is it possible, from a creative perspective, to go out of your mind "in a good way" by listening to Warren Buffett? Rimbaud prescribed "zee systematique derangement of zee senses," non? So how hard are you willing to work in order to be a great writer? How much are you willing to risk? Ask yourself those questions and then click (or don't) on the clip below. (It's only ten minutes, well under Breslin's limit.) You'll hear Warren Buffett say things like, "The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken." He's a great Polonius, plus whatever else. You'll get your money's worth! (yuk yuk!)

from the archive; first posted July 3, 2008

Edgar Allan Poe endorses Return to the Gold Standard [by David Lehman]

Ed Poe, long a proponent of the Bretton Woods monetary system, has come out in favor of a new gold-exchange standard. Congressman Poe (Republican, Texas) has introduced legislation that would return the nation to a gold standard albeit in drastically revised form.

"For anyone living under a rock, the price of a troy ounce of gold is now officially in bear market territory," said Alice James Jones, who covers the sector for Cantor Fitzgerald. "What Ted Poe is proposing is a kind of bailout package in reverse for investors -- whether in bullion or in gold-mining stocks -- who are twisting in the wind." 

Under Poe’s plan, the dollar would be fixed to gold at a specified price. Say the peg is $1,300. If gold goes over that figure, the Fed sells bonds. Under that figure, the Fed would inject cash into the system by buying bonds. "An effective gold standard can be that simple," says Steve Forbes, the editor of Forbes, who has run for president on a business-friendly platform centered on a flat tax. (See "New, Poe-tent Gold Standard," Forbes, May 27, 2013, p. 15). "The Poe bill's basic operating gold-standard principle and its specifics provide plenty of grist for the mill, which is all to the good," says Forbes, which sounds like a lukewarm endorsement but he really likes the idea.

In his keynote speech at the Gold Bug convention in Jackson Hole in May, Poe said he wanted "to usher the US into a new era of fiscal propriety." He painted a grim picture of current uncertainties. "If you have ever witnessed a financial meltdown, like those afflicting Lehman in 2008 and Detroit this year, you don't need me to tell you how scary it is. I have seen a barely discernible fissure widen so rapidly that my brain reeled. I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder. There was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters, and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of my life." Poe, who writes his own speeches, delivers them without notes.

The gold standard as the anchor of U. S. currency died on August 15, 1971. President Nixon issued the directive. He felt he had little choice. The cost of the Vietnam War and the persistent U. S. trade deficit forced his hand. The dollar could no longer realistically be backed by gold bullion on the basis of $35 per ounce. "The change was announced as a temporary measure but like most such it quickly became permanent," said Cantor Scott Fitzgerald, who oversees the pension plan of the Mosaic Law and Tile Society, the nation's largest non-prophet. Fitzgerald, who quotes Keats and other greats, jokes a lot, and laughs so hard he sometimes seems on the verge of cracking up, usually makes this reporter feel like a sophomore who has wandered into a lecture for upperclassmen majoring in the dismal science. "Henceforth American money would be backed not by a metal but by the good faith of the United States government with the result that the value of the currency has fluctuated with the value of gold."

Little lamented at the time, the gold standard has lived on in the same way that a repressed memory takes uncanny forms in dreams or waking life. In a notorious TV commercial aired only once, Bunter (right) advises Lord Peter Wimsey (left) to get a smart city broker (played by Max Shylock) and allocate ten per cent of his assets to the commodity or to shares in mining concerns. "Even at a three-year low, an ounce of gold is worth more than eight hundred pounds, m'lrd, and you get a free smart phone plus ten thousand frequent flyer points if you play your cards right, close to the chest, what?"  
The metal’s decline in global markets has been attributed to the likelihood of reduced monetary stimulus by central bankers at the same time as you have a slowing of the growth rate in China. "The logic is not unassailable," said Eddie Cantor with a wry smile. "But, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein on roses, it is what it is."

from the archives; March 29, 2014

Ed Poe, long a proponent of the Bretton Woods monetary system, has come out in favor of a new gold-exchange standard. Congressman Poe (Republican, Texas) has introduced legislation that would return the nation to a gold standard albeit in drastically revised form.

"For anyone living under a rock, the price of a troy ounce of gold is now officially in bear market territory," said Alice James Jones, who covers the sector for Cantor Fitzgerald. "What Ted Poe is proposing is a kind of bailout package in reverse for investors -- whether in bullion or in gold-mining stocks -- who are twisting in the wind." 

Under Poe’s plan, the dollar would be fixed to gold at a specified price. Say the peg is $1,300. If gold goes over that figure, the Fed sells bonds. Under that figure, the Fed would inject cash into the system by buying bonds. "An effective gold standard can be that simple," says Steve Forbes, the editor of Forbes, who has run for president on a business-friendly platform centered on a flat tax. (See "New, Poe-tent Gold Standard," Forbes, May 27, 2013, p. 15). "The Poe bill's basic operating gold-standard principle and its specifics provide plenty of grist for the mill, which is all to the good," says Forbes, which sounds like a lukewarm endorsement but he really likes the idea.

In his keynote speech at the Gold Bug convention in Jackson Hole in May, Poe said he wanted "to usher the US into a new era of fiscal propriety." He painted a grim picture of current uncertainties. "If you have ever witnessed a financial meltdown, like those afflicting Lehman in 2008 and Detroit this year, you don't need me to tell you how scary it is. I have seen a barely discernible fissure widen so rapidly that my brain reeled. I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder. There was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters, and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of my life." Poe, who writes his own speeches, delivers them without notes.

The gold standard as the anchor of U. S. currency died on August 15, 1971. President Nixon issued the directive. He felt he had little choice. The cost of the Vietnam War and the persistent U. S. trade deficit forced his hand. The dollar could no longer realistically be backed by gold bullion on the basis of $35 per ounce. "The change was announced as a temporary measure but like most such it quickly became permanent," said Cantor Scott Fitzgerald, who oversees the pension plan of the Mosaic Law and Tile Society, the nation's largest non-prophet. Fitzgerald, who quotes Keats and other greats, jokes a lot, and laughs so hard he sometimes seems on the verge of cracking up, usually makes this reporter feel like a sophomore who has wandered into a lecture for upperclassmen majoring in the dismal science. "Henceforth American money would be backed not by a metal but by the good faith of the United States government with the result that the value of the currency has fluctuated with the value of gold."

Little lamented at the time, the gold standard has lived on in the same way that a repressed memory takes uncanny forms in dreams or waking life. In a notorious TV commercial aired only once, Bunter (right) advises Lord Peter Wimsey (left) to get a smart city broker (played by Max Shylock) and allocate ten per cent of his assets to the commodity or to shares in mining concerns. "Even at a three-year low, an ounce of gold is worth more than eight hundred pounds, m'lrd, and you get a free smart phone plus ten thousand frequent flyer points if you play your cards right, close to the chest, what?"  
The metal’s decline in global markets has been attributed to the likelihood of reduced monetary stimulus by central bankers at the same time as you have a slowing of the growth rate in China. "The logic is not unassailable," said Eddie Cantor with a wry smile. "But, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein on roses, it is what it is."

from the archives; March 29, 2014

Ed Poe, long a proponent of the Bretton Woods monetary system, has come out in favor of a new gold-exchange standard. Congressman Poe (Republican, Texas) has introduced legislation that would return the nation to a gold standard albeit in drastically revised form.

"For anyone living under a rock, the price of a troy ounce of gold is now officially in bear market territory," said Alice James Jones, who covers the sector for Cantor Fitzgerald. "What Ted Poe is proposing is a kind of bailout package in reverse for investors -- whether in bullion or in gold-mining stocks -- who are twisting in the wind." 

Under Poe’s plan, the dollar would be fixed to gold at a specified price. Say the peg is $1,300. If gold goes over that figure, the Fed sells bonds. Under that figure, the Fed would inject cash into the system by buying bonds. "An effective gold standard can be that simple," says Steve Forbes, the editor of Forbes, who has run for president on a business-friendly platform centered on a flat tax. (See "New, Poe-tent Gold Standard," Forbes, May 27, 2013, p. 15). "The Poe bill's basic operating gold-standard principle and its specifics provide plenty of grist for the mill, which is all to the good," says Forbes, which sounds like a lukewarm endorsement but he really likes the idea.

In his keynote speech at the Gold Bug convention in Jackson Hole in May, Poe said he wanted "to usher the US into a new era of fiscal propriety." He painted a grim picture of current uncertainties. "If you have ever witnessed a financial meltdown, like those afflicting Lehman in 2008 and Detroit this year, you don't need me to tell you how scary it is. I have seen a barely discernible fissure widen so rapidly that my brain reeled. I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder. There was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters, and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of my life." Poe, who writes his own speeches, delivers them without notes.

The gold standard as the anchor of U. S. currency died on August 15, 1971. President Nixon issued the directive. He felt he had little choice. The cost of the Vietnam War and the persistent U. S. trade deficit forced his hand. The dollar could no longer realistically be backed by gold bullion on the basis of $35 per ounce. "The change was announced as a temporary measure but like most such it quickly became permanent," said Cantor Scott Fitzgerald, who oversees the pension plan of the Mosaic Law and Tile Society, the nation's largest non-prophet. Fitzgerald, who quotes Keats and other greats, jokes a lot, and laughs so hard he sometimes seems on the verge of cracking up, usually makes this reporter feel like a sophomore who has wandered into a lecture for upperclassmen majoring in the dismal science. "Henceforth American money would be backed not by a metal but by the good faith of the United States government with the result that the value of the currency has fluctuated with the value of gold."

Little lamented at the time, the gold standard has lived on in the same way that a repressed memory takes uncanny forms in dreams or waking life. In a notorious TV commercial aired only once, Bunter (right) advises Lord Peter Wimsey (left) to get a smart city broker (played by Max Shylock) and allocate ten per cent of his assets to the commodity or to shares in mining concerns. "Even at a three-year low, an ounce of gold is worth more than eight hundred pounds, m'lrd, and you get a free smart phone plus ten thousand frequent flyer points if you play your cards right, close to the chest, what?"  
The metal’s decline in global markets has been attributed to the likelihood of reduced monetary stimulus by central bankers at the same time as you have a slowing of the growth rate in China. "The logic is not unassailable," said Eddie Cantor with a wry smile. "But, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein on roses, it is what it is."

from the archives; March 29, 2014

The Many Generations of the Versatile Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson, England's first poet laureate, wrote great poems conjoining wit and powerful feeling. Consider "My Picture Left in Scotland") about which I have written a short essay, which you will find here).  His poetry, his plays. his great influence have overcome its one-time state of being universally admired and universally ignored, as T. S. Eliot wrote a hundred years ago. He is a great poet and I should do a little column on his elegy for his son, "child of my right hand, and joy." Ben and the son who predeceased him had the same first name. Benjamin, in Hebrew, means "son of my right hand."

Of all the poets born on June 11th, Ben Jonson is unquestionably the most accomplished. An astrological proifile of this Gemini all-star is long overdue.

Less well known is that avatars of Ben continue to perform in important and unexpected ways in our culture. Many of them have added an aitch to their last name perhaps to honor their forerunner or to bless Ha-shem.

In The Wild Bunch, for example, Ben Johnson was Warren Oates's brother. 

Now (according to the September 2022 issue of Kiplinger's) Ben Johnson is head of global ETF research at Morningside, the financial data firm, and he has this to say to nervous investors: Worry "is part of the price of admission. If it's too hard to watch, then step out and look at the trees, which at this time of year are mostly green, unlike the markets."  Note the simile's elegant allusion to Ben Jonson's book Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641).

PS. On a separate but related note from the department of onomastics, a double of the late Philip Levine is the former mayor of Miami.

-- DL

Note: Under the title "Ben Jonson tells investors to face the music," we aired this post on August 10, 2022 but a glitch made it unintelligible to readers, so here it is with a new title and a new postscript. It is also worth noting that Philip Larkin is the corpse in an early Perry Mason (1958 or '59) and that yoiu'll meet Jim Tate and Bill Mathews in high-grade noir fiction of the 1950s.

The Lehman Trilogy [by David Lehman]

Stacey and I saw "The Lehman Trilogy," the much-heralded three-part, three-actor play, and we didn't have to pay the $2,000 per ticket that scalpers were demanding. Peter Marks of the Washington Post calls it "a sublime 3½-hour dash through the history of American capitalism." The director is Sam Mendes, the actors are Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, the author is the Italian playwright Stefano Massini, and Ben Power did the adaptation. The play has received rave reviews. The Post reviewer considers it an "indictment of the unregulated capitalism the Lehmans and others practiced over the years — a catalyst for both the stock market crash of 1929 and the 2008 debacle that sank Lehman Bros."

The opening acts, about the emigration to the United States of the three Lehman brothers who founded the dynasty that evolved into the titanic Wall Street firm, are compelling, but as the lengthy play enters the twentieth century it loses more and more credibility. It is important to note that the Brothers and their progeny had shed their ownership and control of the company long before its colossal failure in 2008, so the effort to represent the history of the Lehmans as a parable of capitalism culminating in the fiasco of September 2008 requires an obscuring of facts, which as Michael Dukakis says "are stubborn things."

In brief, the author knows very little, if anything, about the modern history of my family.*

The play underestimates the major New Deal contributions of Herbert Lehman, the Williams College graduate who served both as New York State's governor for ten years and as the state's U. S. Senator from 1949 to 1956. When FDR was governor of  New York, Lehman was his lieutenant governor, and Roosevelt called him "that splendid right hand of mine.” High schools and colleges are named after him. Herbert's older brother Irving's distinguished career as a jurist hardly rates a mention, though the Columbia alumnus served for fourteen years on the New York Supreme Court. He married the daughter of Macy's and Abraham and Straus. Completely overlooked are Herbert's son Peter Lehman, an ace "Thunderbolt" pilot (in the 366th Fighter Squadron, 4th Fighter Group) based in Britain, and Orin Lehman, also a pilot, also decorated with a Distinguished Flying Cross (and in his case a Purple Heart) who was seriously injured at the Battle of the Bulge but survived and went on to produce a Pulitzer Prize-winning off-Broadway play on the one hand and to succeed Robert Moses as commissioner of New York's Office of Parks and Recreation on the other.

Robert Lehman (left), the financier and philanthropist, who donated an entire wing of great art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is treated with unwarranted condescension. Bobby, as he was known, guided the firm successfully through the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. He made a brilliant bet on Pan Am airlines. In his spare time he played polo and owned race horses, five of whom ran in the Kentucky Derby, and perhaps in consequence the play lampoons him as a playboy millionaire. More importantly, he collected paintings and was especially proud of his Botticelli, Bellini, Velazquez, and two El Grecos. The gift to the Met contained 3,000 works of art, including paintings I love by Matisse, Goya, and Ingres. The Robert Lehman Foundation sponsors lectureships in art history and other worthy activities.

When Robert Lehman died in 1969, after forty-four years at the helm, no Lehman was active in the running of the venerable firm.

The following years were somewhat chaotic, and the firm was sold to the Shearson division of American Express in 1984. The new company merged with E. F. Hutton four years later. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the latter had mounted a brilliant ad campaign with the tag line "When E. F. Hutton speaks, everybody listens." But Hutton was riddled with scandals in the 1980s and the firm died -- only to be revived in 2021 by owners who have absoluterly nothing in common with those who drove the firm into its grave. 

By 1990, my own brothers and brother-in-law held only some small legacy investments in the closed-end mutual fund bearing the Lehman name. We received quarterly and annual reports but only from afar could we monitor the ill-fated outfit under the direction of CEO Dick Fuld. 

So viewer beware. What you're seeing is a play that is certainly at a higher level of intellectual content than most but deviates from historical fact and biographical truth in order to push a thesis regarding Wall Street practices and the dynamics of capitalism.

* Department of clarification: Although I am only distantly related to the Lehmans who distinguished themselves as investment bankers, public servants, and philanthropists, and I undertook this piece as an exercise in plausible invention, all the facts are valid with the exception of the statement that in 1990 "my own brothers and brother-in-law held only some small legacy investments in the closed-end mutual fund bearing the Lehman name." I have no brothers, and my investment in the Lehman Brothers mutual fund cost me its market price on the day I bought it as a young man. As I wrote in my book One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, "It has happened that people meeting me have assumed that I belong to the great Lehman family that has been notable in public service and philanthropy. It is possible that the frequency of this and similar errors were sources of invention when I went to the computer and wrote my five hundred words of the day."-- DL

Hot off the Press: The Most Valuable Franchise Names

Please note that past performance does not guarantee future returns; consult your financial adviser before making a significant moves; consider an index fund, as Buffett recoimmends; do not make drastic decisions under the influence of a sedative or immediately after undergoing surgery; do not sell all your shares on the day the market tanks; do not drive while intoxicated; consider the value of dolar cost averaging.

Stock Lineup [by David Lehman]

Stock Lineup

for Charles North, inventor of the form

Pepsi SS

J. P. Morgan 2B

Apple LF

Microsoft CF

Berkshire Hathaway C

Johnson & Johnson IB

Deere 3B

* Crowdstrike RF

DH Johnson & Johnson

* LHP Next Era Energy

RHP Alphabet

 

* = rookie status

Financial Market Report [by Lori Basra]

 

From time to time we get a financial market report from one of our friends on the Street. Lori Basra, whom I got to know back in the day when she broke in with Babson's and I covered the market for a newsweekly, has always been a savvy guide for the retail investor. Last year the veteran analyst was honored by the North American Securities Association as one of thirty leading women in finance. I asked Lori whether she thinks this is a good time for risk-averse retirees to dip their toes in the pool. I also wondered what her favorite stock is. Here's what she said. -- DL

<<<
The market took a terrific hit but rebounded in record time. The economy will take a long time to recover, and so you'd have to say that the market has gotten a little ahead of itself. But you aren't getting any interest on your cash and money-market accounts, and you might want to harvest your losses -- sell shares where you have a loss to lower your AGI on next year's 1040. With the cash thus generated, you might want to buy some blue-chip stocks at a discount: American Express, Merck, Coca Cola, J. P. Morgan are all well off their highs and excellent long term investments. Fidelity Select Health is also a winner.

For the nervous, the purchase of Berkshire Hathaway B shares is possibly the safest, most conservative stock investment you can make. Warren Buffett has a lot of cash and there will be companies in distress that he, Charlie Munger, Todd Combs, and Ted Weschler can rescue -- or slay with his fabled "elephant gun." These guys are the ultimate value investors, and value investing has been out of favor for a decade, but it will come back, it always does. Nobody ever lost money betting on Warren Buffett.

For the long term I favor technology, the big names (Microsoft. Apple, Alphabet) and the start-ups. A good ETF like Vanguard's Information Technology (VGT) or Invesco's QQQ are ways to own the sector. I guess Amazon is my favorite stock.

Never give in to panic.  Better to do nothing than to sell on the day of a market crash. Now that trades are free, you can nibble -- buying 5 or 10 shares at a time -- which gives you the pleasure of a casino player at little risk: dollar coast averaging on a daily basis. >>>

Thank you, Lori. -- DL

Note: "AGI" is adjusted gross income and "1040" refers to the tax return due usually on the fifteenth of April. (Not this year; the deadline for returns and estimated tax payments has been postponed to July 15.) "Dollar-cost averaging" refers to the statistical advantage of buying shares in regular increments rather than all at once. The subject is examined in Carey and Morrison's Eight Wonders (1991), which takes its title from Einstein's observation that compound interest was the "eighth wonder of the world." 

What's Your Favorite Stock? [by Isaac Babylon]

From time to time we get a financial market report from one of our friends on the Street. I asked Ike Babylon whether he thinks the market is overpriced at the moment. I also wondered what his favorite stock is. Here's what he said. -- DL

<<<
Right now we have a market that's almost priced to perfection reflecting the confluence of positive trends: growth that's significant enough to ward off recession fears but not so strong as to invite rate hikes from the Fed, which remains accommodative; a Goldilocks economy, in other words. There is always global risk, the possibility of a black swan -- like, right now, the corona flu, which is a killer and can spread. And of course there's all the uncertainty in the world -- Brexit, Iran, tariffs, China,  North Korea, Putin, Syria, the specter of Socialism, etc. But we always have to climb a wall of worry. 

Right now I wouldn't put new money into Apple. It's the best stock in the market but it has more than doubled in price and it's a good idea to take a little money off the table. You will still own it if you are in an index fund or  growth mutual funds. 

Microsoft is my favorite stock. It is at 166 and change as I write, but it still has room to run. Our firm gives it a PT [price target] of 190 and that's conservative. Long term I like Disney under Bob Iger's leadership. Their streaming service is a winner; they have great franchises like Star Wars; and I like the way everything is integrated -- movies, theme parks, TV, products. ESPN has been a drag on them but that's largely priced into the stock.

JP Morgan is the of the banks, and if you study Warren Buffett's game plan, you'll see he believes in it as well as Bank of America. I always tell people they should buy some Berkshire Hathaway, class B shares, if they admire Buffett's track record. It's a very conservative investment that you can hold forever. They hold a huge amount of cash, which insulates them from market downturns, when he can swoop in and buy stuff on the cheap. They issue no dividend, which makes it totally tax efficient.

Fidelity Select Health Care, managed by Eddie Yoon, is a good way to play a portion of the market that is bound to grow given demographic trends.
>>>

Thank you, Ike. 

What Next for the Market? [by Jonas Swedenborg]

Jonas Swedenborg is the pseudonym of a financial manager we know from college days. Every so often, we cajole him to writer a few words for the blog that will reflect the thinking of the Street without getting him into hot water.  -- DL

<<<
The market hates nothing more than uncertainty, and right now, we have a maximum of uncertainty. Heisenberg would be proud. I'll cite just a few concerns. Will China and the US get a trade agreement both can live with? Will Congress get its act together and ratify the new US-Mexico-Canada trade accord? Will the impeachment ordeal die slowly or rapidly? Will Bloomberg run and save the day? What will Putin do with all the oligarchy oil money the Kremlin has? How about Brexit? Will the Knicks ever again be competitive?

In the short term, the answer is easy. The market will fluctuate. In the long term, we are all dead. It's the mid-term that stumps us, like Sir Gawain when he takes up the challenge of the headless Green Knight. (You see, old boy, I remember quite well the class on medieval literature we took sophomore year with Robert Hanning.)

Conventional wisdom has it that if either Warren or Sanders seems in a position to win the Democratic nomination, the market will tank, not all in one day but over the course of six to eight months. The conventional wisdom is almost always wrong because people act on it in such a way as to avoid the predicted outcome.

At my firm [Jonas, Tarsish and Nineveh], we feel that a well-balanced portfolio, heavily weighted in favor of US equity funds (with a growth tilt) and solid blue chips (JP Morgan, Disney, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, and Deere) will get you through any crisis except those we cannot yet anticipate. Remember: not even the mob, well-informed though they were, could have predicted the Castro revolution. It is amazing the effect this little island ninety miles away has had historically on the United States. Basically, we fucked up, which is why JFK got assassinated.  But this is not the time or place for that discussion.

I'd stick to a 65-35 equities to bond ratio in my portfolio, with a bias toward dividend growth funds (the DRO ETF, for example), and intermediate-term municipals, always emphasizing that before starting you must make sure to have three years' worth of living expenses in the safest possible place (treasuries, savings account) no matter how boring and how skimpy the yield. >>>

I asked my old classmate what he thought of the wealth tax. This is what he said:

<<< The wealth tax is a crazy idea. It would be a bureaucratic nightmare. No one who tries it keeps it, even France. It has provoked outcries from savvy investors and entrepreneurs, who would be hit hardest by such a levy but who may also have a better idea of how the economy works than a Harvard law professor. Then the media, even the business-friendly media, declare that the billionaires are foolish to comment; they should keep their mouths shut as their statements help feed Senator Warren's narrative. (I hate what has happened to the word "narrative.") Nevertheless, despite the unprecedented political chaos and divisiveness of the moment, I'm reluctant to invest in emerging markets because of the geopolitical risk.>>>

Is a market top on tap? "Noodles" weighs in [by David Lehman]

Everyone knows that stocks these days, especially US stocks, are overvalued. But picking a market top is no easy matter. David Aronson, former professor at Baruch College, now president of a research firm that develops methods to enhance stock market trading systems, says, "the process of topping out can take a really long period of time, evolving over a year or more."

Aronson demonstrated his credentials as a two-armed economist when he told Mark Hulbert of the Wall Street Journal that, on the one hand, only time will tell whether the coming top will precede a major bear market or something less dire, something of merely "intermediate-term significance." (See "The Myth of Stock-Market Tops," September 5, 2017, p. R1). On the other hand, Noodles acknowledged, the correction following the top could prove to be the so-called "valley of fear" preceding the renewal of a secular bull market.

Noodles? Admirers of Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America know that the character named David Aaronson, played by Robert de Niro (top left), bears the nickname "Noodles" from the time he and his buddy Maxie were the most notable personalities of a gang of Jewish teenagers in New York's Lower East Side in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Noodles remains "overweight" on emerging-market equities. as well as overweight in the old-fashioned sense, as befits a man of his mature years who has done his share of losing, done what he had to do and now finds it all so amusing to think he did all tha. "All that"  includes knifing a vicious rival, for which act he serves time. He has fallen hopelessly in love with Deborah (played by Jennifer Connelly as a youth [top center] and by Elizabeth McGovern as a grown up [top right]). She is his one true love, yet, alas, he date rapes her in the back of a rented limousine. He has also smoked his share of opium with "Amapola" in his brain, cried in his sleep, carried on with Tuesday Weld, a decoy during a jewel heist, and teamed up with "Uncle" Maxie (James Woods) and buddies to smuggle booze during prohibition and run a fabulous speakeasy,

Thirty years have gone by in some remote upstate burg after his gang buddies are shot in one fatal last caper. During this time, and prior to mysterious letters that lead him to return to New York City and learn that he had been deceived and betrayed, David Aaronson has had the opportunity to make an independent study of stock market trends. In the book that made his academic reputation, Aaronson writes that "bottoms are easier to identify, in real time, than tops." When asked whether he had in mind either Jennifer Connelly or Elizabeth McGovern, Noodles just winked, whistling a few bars of Cole Porter's classic "You're the Top."

The take-away: Major bull market tops are a process, not an event. The long-term topping process may have begun without anyone taking note. Many people have shunned the market since the 2008-09 collapse. Only when they start buying stocks will we know for sure that the long-awaited end has come. Will there be a deeper than usual correction -- or a crash? How painful will it be? The jury is still out. Meanwhile when they ask me what the market will do tomorrow, I always say: it will go up and down. -- DL

originally posted September 8, 2017

Everyone knows that stocks these days, especially US stocks, are overvalued. But picking a market top is no easy matter. David Aronson, former professor at Baruch College, now president of a research firm that develops methods to enhance stock market trading systems, says, "the process of topping out can take a really long period of time, evolving over a year or more."

Aronson demonstrated his credentials as a two-armed economist when he told Mark Hulbert of the Wall Street Journal that, on the one hand, only time will tell whether the coming top will precede a major bear market or something less dire, something of merely "intermediate-term significance." (See "The Myth of Stock-Market Tops," September 5, 2017, p. R1). On the other hand, Noodles acknowledged, the correction following the top could prove to be the so-called "valley of fear" preceding the renewal of a secular bull market.

Noodles? Admirers of Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America know that the character named David Aaronson, played by Robert de Niro (top left), bears the nickname "Noodles" from the time he and his buddy Maxie were the most notable personalities of a gang of Jewish teenagers in New York's Lower East Side in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Noodles remains "overweight" on emerging-market equities. as well as overweight in the old-fashioned sense, as befits a man of his mature years who has done his share of losing, done what he had to do and now finds it all so amusing to think he did all tha. "All that"  includes knifing a vicious rival, for which act he serves time. He has fallen hopelessly in love with Deborah (played by Jennifer Connelly as a youth [top center] and by Elizabeth McGovern as a grown up [top right]). She is his one true love, yet, alas, he date rapes her in the back of a rented limousine. He has also smoked his share of opium with "Amapola" in his brain, cried in his sleep, carried on with Tuesday Weld, a decoy during a jewel heist, and teamed up with "Uncle" Maxie (James Woods) and buddies to smuggle booze during prohibition and run a fabulous speakeasy,

Thirty years have gone by in some remote upstate burg after his gang buddies are shot in one fatal last caper. During this time, and prior to mysterious letters that lead him to return to New York City and learn that he had been deceived and betrayed, David Aaronson has had the opportunity to make an independent study of stock market trends. In the book that made his academic reputation, Aaronson writes that "bottoms are easier to identify, in real time, than tops." When asked whether he had in mind either Jennifer Connelly or Elizabeth McGovern, Noodles just winked, whistling a few bars of Cole Porter's classic "You're the Top."

The take-away: Major bull market tops are a process, not an event. The long-term topping process may have begun without anyone taking note. Many people have shunned the market since the 2008-09 collapse. Only when they start buying stocks will we know for sure that the long-awaited end has come. Will there be a deeper than usual correction -- or a crash? How painful will it be? The jury is still out. Meanwhile when they ask me what the market will do tomorrow, I always say: it will go up and down. -- DL

originally posted September 8, 2017

The Wished-for Words [by David Shapiro]

David Shapiro wrote

at 8:42pm

David, please take the test I left out in the rain.
Freud's the name, theory's the game, lying on the couch seems inane,
free association is the main, transference too is the cane,
Oedipus walks in the rain.

Take it, I'm an easy marker, for Freudian reasons and some Adlerian.
What is a test but a little joke to make the taker mad? Name the allusion.
Where was the cancer of late Freud? Where did Freud say sex was all and
every squeaking hand could make us say the wished-for words?

Love and work -- where do Freud and Reich say these are big
Responsibilities? Was Delmore Schwartz in analysis by age 23 when he said
Dreams begin Responsibilities with its lip of blue snow? Which Columbia
professor could we assume never went through analysis? Whom did Lacan call the classically unanalysed writer (here I give in--James Joyce. O)

What was the speciality du jour of the great Lou Andreas Salome?
How long has David Shapiro been in analysis, and why?
How many of his poems are dreams?

(2009)

William Holden tells it like it is in the "Executive Suite" [by David Lehman]

"Is that what you want on your gravestone when you die -- that you raised the dividend to three dollars or four or even five or six or seven?"

William Holden in Executive Suite (1954) with Barbara Stanwyck & Louis Calhern (pictured, left,enjoying a smoke off camera) & with Fredric March, June Allyson always bright and merry, Walter Pidgeon, the world's greatest number two man, Paul Douglas, dour Dean Jagger, long-suffering Shelley Winters, Nina Foch, elegant as ever, and playing a better hand than in "An American in  Paris." 

With screenplay by uncle Ernest Lehman. -- DL

Whitman and Weed [by David Lehman]

The craze for cannabis stocks is an obvious byproduct of the imminent legalization of marijuana in many of the states that would join Colorado, California, and all of Canada in this regard. I am not sure which stocks merit a buy recommendation. Such predictions are always hazardous when you deal with investment bubbles, be they centered on tulips, dot-com stocks, or Bitcoin. 

What I can share are some little-known facts about the appeal that cannabis has historically held for American poets, starting with the daddy of them all, Walt Whitman.

"Whitman's Covert Self-Medication" (Dejeuner Press), Mary Jane Herbst's groundbreaking study, confirms the view held by many Whitman scholars, that the good gray poet smoked pot for the four years preceding the 1855 publication of "Leaves of Grass," the very title of which, Herbst argues, makes a strategic double pun on "the lowly but magnificent weed," as Whitman put it in the late untitled poem beginning "I, a Lover of the Earth, Did Wonder."

It has been noted that, in "Mad Men," Don Draper's real name is Dick Whitman, and that Walter White in "Breaking Bad" evokes Whitman, whose "When I Heard the Lerarn'd Astronomer" is quoted by Walt's laboratory assistant. While the showrunners imply that the names were chosen to suggest "white man," it is known that more than half the writers working on those shows were high on cannabis much of the time. See Nathan N. Hale's "The Greening of AMC," in Entertainment Weekly, November 2014.

For more on Whitman's love of the "lowly" weed, as well as a chapter on the influence of his "high mountain revelry" on such poets as Hart Crane and Alien Ginsberg, see Mary Potter, "WW: The Man with the Double Double You," an ingenious study of the second-person pronoun in Leaves of Grass. -- DL

Financial Market Report: Goldman Sax on the Beach [by David Lehman]

David Solomon, soon to be CEO of Goldman Sachs, moonlighting in the sun as a disc jockey at Gurney’s. (Photographer: Amanda Gordon/Bloomberg)

As summer winds down, and Labor Day recedes in the rear view mirror; as political ads pollute the air, kids go back to school, and the temperature drops twenty degrees, it is time too take stock of the economy and the stock market's prospects as we enter what is historically the scariest time of year on Wall Street -- September and October. It is with this in mind that we read about David Solomon, the incoming CEO at Goldman Sachs, who likes spinning discs at beach parties in Montauk and plans to continue the practice. This is from Amanda L. Gordon's Bloomberg article of September 4, 2018. Note, in the first sentence of this excerpt, "the iconic, oceanfront venue in Montauk,New York," a phrase that authenticates everything else in the piece:

<<<
On Sunday at the iconic, oceanfront venue in Montauk, New York, he started his set at 3 p.m. playing mostly electronic house music from a thumb drive, including "Sax on the Beach" by Party Pupils and MAX. The music’s tempo matched the scene of clear-blue sky, post-brunch, with people easing into the second day of a three-day weekend in the final weeks of summer.

Playing cornhole. Photographer: Amanda Gordon/Bloomberg

It was chill, yet exuberant. A few women in bikinis danced by the booth. A couple of cornhole games were in play. The loungers on the day beds sipped rose. There was a bachelorette party, the lead singer of the band East Love and a Quick Fix IV specialist, who’d just returned from infusing a client with a hangover.
>>>

I don't know about you, but I have a weakness for paragraphs beginning "It was chill."

It was reassuring to learn that Solomon, with the wisdom of his namesake, views such beach parties as part of his "transition" to the corner office. Not only that but it's hard work, a word that turn up twice in the following:
<<
Asked if he’s working on any new songs, Solomon made clear his mind is on Goldman. He would have loved to stay longer, but ended his set at 5 p.m. because he had other plans, a social event "with a lot of work," starting at 7 p.m. in Southampton.
>>

I could also not help loving thess sentences:
<<
One admirer who approached the DJ was Kellan Carter, a 2009 college grad and venture capitalist, who was wearing a T-shirt printed with the dubious honorific "Lehman Brothers Trader of the Year 2008." He asked to pose for a photo and Solomon obliged.
>>>

Other recent appearances of my name in business-page headlines (in, for example, the Wall Street Journal) have lifted my spirit on the cold, rainy day that Jimmy Van Heusen envisaged. 

For more of the Bloomberg article, click here: Goldman Sax on the Beach.

You may wonder how the information conveyed here will affect the market. Of course, no one knows with absolute uncertainty, and if there's one thing traders hate it's uncertainty as they stare at the wall of worry they must climb. When asked how the market will perform tomorrow, either J. P. Morgan, Winston Churchill, or Yogi Berra quipped, "it will fluctuate." Can't argue with that. -- DL

Is a market top on tap? "Noodles" weighs in [by David Lehman]

Everyone knows that stocks these days, especially US stocks, are overvalued. But picking a market top is no easy matter. David Aronson, former professor at Baruch College,now president of a research firm that develops methods to enhance stock market trading systems, says, "the process of topping out can take a really long period of time, evolving over a year or more." Aronson demonstrated his credentials as a two-armed economist when he told Mark Hulbert of the Wall Street Journal.that only time will tell whether the coming top will precede a major bear market or something less dire, something of merely "intermediate-term significance." (See The Myth of Stock-Market Tops," September 5, 2017, p. . R1). 

Admirers of Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America know that the character named David Aaronson, played by Robert de Niro (top left), bears the nickname "Noodles" from the time he and his buddy Maxie were the most notable personalities of a gang of Jewish teenagers in New York's Lower East Side in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Noodles remains "overweight" on emerging-market equities. as well as overweight in the old-fashioned sense, as befits a man of his mature years who has done his share of losing, done what he had to do and now finds it all so amusing to think he did all that . "All that"  includes knifing a vicious rival, for which act he serves time. He has fallen hopelessly in love with Deborah (played by Jennifer Connelly as a youth [top center] and by Elizabeth McGovern as a grown up [top right]). She is his one true love, yet, alas,he date rapes her in the back of a rented limousine. He has also smoked his share of opium with the song "Amapola" in his brain, cried in his sleep, carried on with Tuesday Weld, a decoy during a jewel heist, and teamed up with "Uncle" Maxie (James Woods) and buddies to smuggle booze during prohibition and run a fabulous speakeasy,

Thirty years have gone by in some remote upstate burg after his gang buddies are shot in one fatal last caper. During this time, and prior to mysterious letters that lead him to return to New York City and learn that he had been deceived and betrayed, David Aaronson has had the opportunity to make an independent study of stock market trends. In the book that made his academic reputation, Aaronson writes that "bottoms are easier to identify, in real time, than tops." When asked whether he had in mind either Jennifer Connelly or Elizabeth McGovern, Noodles just winked, whistling a few bars of Cole Porter's classic "You're the Top."

The take-away: Major bull market tops are a process, not an event. The long-term topping process may have begun without anyone taking note. Many people have shunned the market since the 2008-09 collapse. Only when they start buying stocks will we know for sure that the long-awaited end has come. Will there be a correction -- or a crash? How painful will it be? The jury is still out .Meanwhile when they ask me what the market will do tomorrow, I always say: it will go up and down. -- DL

originally posted September 8, 2017

Mozart, Symphony #5 in B Flat major

 He wrote it at the age of nine.

He didn't lose his touch in "later" years.

 

Philip Roth says the Bull Still Has Room to Run [by David Lehman]

In honor of the late Philip Roth we bring you this feature that we ran back in March 2014.

<<<

If the market seemed overvalued last year, wary analysts are eyeing the exit signs now that the individual investor is back into equities. Have we reached a market top? Philip Roth, who accurately predicted the end of the last bull market in 2007, is still long on stocks, according to today's Wall Street Journal. (See page C4, "Bull Market is Weary, but Few Signs Point to Exhaustion" by E. S. Browning).

Roth, now eighty and retired from novel writing, has pursued an alternative career in stockpicking, hints of which surface in the Zuckerman novels and in "American Pastoral." Interviewed about current market conditions he sounded cautious. "There's nothing that I see now that says imminent demise," he says, acknowledging the danger signals: new market highs, overpriced stocks, and a tremendous amount of headline risk. "The Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Venezuela, Boko Haram (Nigeria) -- and you can't blame it on Israel and the US."

Except for these trouble spots, and the vengeance of nature whose most potent weapon is the weather, Phil sees smooth sailing ahead for the bull. "Most tops are made with high interest rates, rising inflation, and rising stock prices," Roth says. "Two out of three are missing right now, and two out of three ain't bad."

So how much room does have the bull have left to run? "It depends on how you define bull," Roth says. "Not only the metric you use but the ontological status of bull. Let us not overlook the fact that bull is short for bullshit, and if you served in World War II and weren't singing 'Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (with anyone else but me),' you know that everything is bullshit.

"Hell, some writers made a career of it," the retired novelist added. "But let's not go there." Roth refused to comment on the following other subjects I brought up in our conversation: Woody Allen, the Oscars, the new biography of Philip Roth by someone with Roth in her name who is no relation, the Olympics, Bob Dyland, and the disrespect shown him by envious writers and irate feminists.

Roth grew animated when the subject turned to "Investors Intelligence," a widely followed survey of newsletter writers, which indicates that 60% of market newsletters were bullish in January. This unusually high figure sent a bearish signal, and January saw a sell-off. "But people were buying on the dip in February," Roth said. "And the cycle continues. Now comes March like a hungry lion, proud if alone. The ides are not a soothsayer's fantasy for nothing. Then April, and the poets with the hats walk under the trees on college campuses. The old mantra is 'sell in May and go away,' but June is "busting out all over.'  July, August, Summertime, and the slow slog of the marshes. And then, like the unfurling of a matador's cape, September. Oy. September. November. And these few precious days I'll give to you."

-- David Lehman
>>>

Originally posted March 3, 2014

Why the Market Plunged, and What Will Happen Next [by David Lehman]

Like everyone else with money in the market, whether directly in shares of common stock or indirectly in mutual funds held in an IRA or a Keogh account, we knew we weren't supposed to get anxious but we did nevertheless when the Dow plunged five hundred points last Friday and threw down another thousand points on Monday.

The market's wild mood swings are unprecedented -- as befits the age of proactive prozac. But a thousand points in a single day! We wondered, (whiskey tango foxtrot under our breath) what happened.

So today we turned as we often do to our old friend Marty Schumacher of Goldman, Sachs, who sat next to us in Rosand's course in Venetian painters, which focused mainly on Titian.Marty took half an hour off his busy desk to down a mug of espresso with us at ten thirty this morning. This is an account of our conversation:

"Help me make sense of this, Marty. It's as if the market forgot to take its pep pills on Friday and repeated the offense yesterday." "That's not bad," Marty said. "We got hooked on easy money from the Fed. Now Mr. Market's afraid that they're going to take the punch bowl away." "But everyone has been saying that the Fed is going to hike rates this year -- a full hundred basis points, maybe more." "True, but when the jobs report came in last Friday, a lot of traders thought of the one word that always spooks the market." "You mean inflation?" "I mean classic inflation, which is what happens when the market digests good economic  as bad because of the fear it arouses." "But these losses are colossal, and the swings back and forth, back and forth, but south at the end of the day, are nerve-wracking." "That's why you're not supposed to check your account on such days." "I agree. The best thing to do is nothing. But you have to admit the smell of panic is in the air, and there has to be a probable cause."

"Passive indexing is the culprit," Schumacher said. "Index funds have been all the rage for the last five years, and that's been fine so long as the market was busting new highs every day. But when there's a crash, which is only a fast-paced correction, computer-triggered sales hit ETFs and especially ETNs faster than the speed of a cat thrown out a twenty-first floor window, which hits the sidewalk at a velocity higher than 32.2 feet per second. We even have an equation for it: SCV, surplus cat velocity, sort of the inverse of the dead cat bounce.

"What's worse, the loss gets tabulated at close of business. So it's like velocity times velocity, and everyone is going twenty miles over the speed limit." "That helps account for the ups and downs -- but why both on the same day?" "The cheap money is getting cleaned out, by which I mean the last-minute speculators caught up in January's fireworks, people who need to cover their calls or their margin accounts. Leverage is a high, or it's time to jump off a bridge."

We finished our coffee, and Marty (pictured left) checked his Apple watch and headed back to the elevator. "You know what Emerson said when he was asked what the market will do tomorrow? He said, 'It will fluctuate.'" "That wasn't Emerson, that was J. P. Morgan." "Whatever. Like everyone in Los Angeles has always said, you never know when the big one will come along. But it's inevitable.The earthquake is sometimes preceded by a shake or two, a tremor, and you know what will follow but you don't know when. It could come six days from now, or six months, or six years. Hell, the Journal yesterday reported that the Millennials are as into the market as the boomers didn't get to be until they reached fifty, and way more than Gen X, about whom nobody talks anymore. What can I tell you? Except for Einstein, the market has defied everyone since Newton. But wait and see. It'll be entertaining."

"What do you think is going to happen today?" "The market goes down some more. How about you?" "Well, it wouldn't astonish me if the Dow ends the day five hundred points up." "Really?" "Wait and see." -- DL 

The Death Cross (and Other News) [by David Lehman]

They asked me to write "poetry in real time," and I said I would do it if I could do it in prison. "Even better," they said.

So I sat and waited, waited and sat, and read the news, turning as always to the financial pages first.

Einstein said that "the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." Twice in one week I have come across this quote -- in an annual report and in today's Wall Street Journal.

You’re looking as dismissive as you did fifty years ago. "That's poetry? You call that poetry?"

I looked as lofty as Byron, repressing a cruel sneer. “I merely proposed it as the first line of a Pope couplet.”

The chairperson snorted. "And what will you follow it up with?"

 "It may sound a bit sensationalistic, but the bearish death cross has been an excellent predictor of the 10-year yield's significant slide over the last six years," said Abigail Doolittle, a technical analyst at The Seaport Group.

The death cross is what happens when the yield on the fifty-day moving average of the ten-year treasury bond falls below its 200-day moving average.

The Nobel Prize-winning economists sitting on a dormant volcano sighed: "Isn't that beautiful?"

In other news, Apple reportedly (1) pays no tax on billions of dollars of revenue earned abroad, and (2) tells its investors that it pays more tax than it does on domestic revenue. Which is yet another argument in favor of repatriation of American dollars abroad, which can happen if we lower the corporate tax rate, or slash it on a one-time-only basis.The senators of K Street nodded in vigorous agreement.

"There are lies, damn lies, and statistics," says a characer actor who looks a bit like Edmund O'Brien but is not dressed like a grown-up . Meanwhile, everyone else on the beach is naked as the tide goes out, as Warren Buffett, the oracle of Omaha, is fond of saying with a twinkle in his eye.

A man with two first names gets on television thumping the table demanding that Congress apologize to Apple.

One senator whispers to another, during a lull in the hearings. What do you think they are saying? Can you read lips? I'd like to believe that the comely senator from Oregon is asking, "Do you think it is a coincidence that the Beatles called their recording company Apple and that Steve Jobs chose the same name for their computers?" And the courtly senator from Virginia sagely mentions Sinatra's choice of Reprise for his outfit when he fired Capitol just as Columbia had once fired him.

Sooner or later that's what's playing in the background of this old movie. A young beauty grabs the mike.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to do fifteen squats carrying twenty-five pound weights while watching Mad Men reruns featuring Jessica Pare. "I'm with you," says the risk-averse couch-potato. 

She was reading Northrop Frye last night. He was a great lecturer. He was also a great Canadian, like Jessica Pare. In one of his books, "The Modern Century" I believe, he remarks that the name Canada derives from a Portuguese phrase meaning "nobody here." In the same book, Frye says that Satan tempting Eve in the garden was the prototype for modern propaganda and advertising campaigns. I love his name: Frye. Like Miss Froy in "The Lady Vanishes." And wasn't Frank Frye the villain's name in "Saboteur"?

My friend Maggie, a Henry James fanatic whom I knew in graduate school, phoned today and casually mentioned her new novel in progress about a modern-day Adam and Eve named Elbert Renwick and Eureka Janeway, two ordinary kids in the vast middle America of fading memory, who were high-school sweethearts but drifted apart, married others, raised families, lived on opposite coasts, got divorced, got promoted, read Rilke, changed their lives, met at a class reunion and now they are living together, making their own beer, growing their own high-octane pot. The two are known by their nicknames, Butch and Jane. They dress provocatively. They have experimented. They have strong opinions on sports teams, national politics, abortion, the Middle East, the twenty-first century, the 1960s as a decade, drugs, and music. But I bet I can teach them a thing or two about the death cross and its significance, whether symbolic, semantic, or poetic. It is a financial markets indicator, on the one hand, On the other hand, it is a magnificent figure for the religious impulse, which is always threatening to make a ghostly comeback.

"Was there a question?" -- DL