The Last Girls by Lee Smith

This is a charming book by Lee Smith, who was a teacher of Haven Kimmel.

I've also read Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, set in the Appalachians and reflecting Smith's interest in and talent for rendering dialectal speech.

This novel tells the story of five women (and one husband) who decide to recreate a river raft trip, inspired by reading Twain's Huckleberry Finn, down the Mississippi that they took in college.  This permits them to reflect on the 30 or so years that have passed since then, and allows us to reflect on the diversity of their life stories which reveal some of the profound changes that have taken place in the lives of women in this country since the fifties.

The edition I read was a book club edition (I love these things) with an interview with Smith and book club discussion questions.  In her interview, Smith says that while the new freedom that women of her generation enjoyed gave women much greater freedom and enjoyment of their lives it also placed a certain kind of burden on them:  given more freedom, they were forced to make choices and accept more responsibility for their lives. They lost a certain comfort zone of polite conduct and restraint that their mothers had enjoyed and did not anticipate all of the changes that they would encounter.

Smith is the author of one of my favorite short stories, "Intensive Care," which perfectly captures the language and the changes of how we live now.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

I've finally just finished the first chapter, dealing with Steve Eisman, in Michael Lewis' The Big Short.

It's an interesting counterpoint to both Margin Call, which explicitly deals with some of the same issues as those raised by Steve Eisman (the tradition of selling in the financial markets, the contradictory ideas that gave rise to the subprime mortgage debacle, the notion that for the first time, in the securities back by subprime mortgages, you are selling something that has no or very little value), and to Steve Jobs.

At this particular moment, I'm reflecting that some of the charm of this chapter is that Steve Eisman is such an outlier himself:  someone who's abrasive and without manners.  And I'm very interested in him.  Why is it that I find Steve Eisman interesting, and Steve Jobs a fraud?  If I'm honest, I'd have to say that it's hype.  That hype is a powerful tool, and that's why we use it.  But it can have a backlash - that at the same time that it's so persuasive to so many people, there will always be some people who just won't get it, or more accurately, just won't feel it, and will first marvel and then recoil at the enthusiasm of others.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I haven't finished this book yet; in fact, I've just started the chapter called "Restoration," (a great title and absolutely the one I would have chosen for this chapter).

But at this moment I feel moved to make a comment.  I imagined that this book would help to explain why Jobs  was so admired by so many people.  So far, I wouldn't say that the book is really explaining that to me; instead, I find myself wondering why so many people around Jobs allowed themselves to be manipulated by him.

In the place in the book I'm at right now, Gil Amelio has decided to bring Jobs back into the company by buying NeXT.  The reason he did that was because he wanted Apple's software.  But I find that I'm astounded by that decision.  For one thing, I find myself feeling that he should have foreseen that Jobs would want to take over the company and that Jobs' desire to take over the company would create destructive conflict.  It would have been more efficient to simply offer Jobs the title of CEO from the outset if Amelio didn't mind Jobs taking control of Apple.  If he didn't want Jobs to take control of Apple, it seems to me that he should at least have tried to structure the deal differently.

I'm puzzled by how startling the "warts and all" view of Steve Jobs presented here is, given the reverence and real sense of loss when he died.

Trying to make sense of it all, I started to look around at reviews on the web.  Sue Halpern's piece reflects my concerns and I think her answer is correct:  We have such high regard for people who are successful in business:   http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/who-was-steve-jobs/?pagination=false

I think that Isaacson's account emphasizes event and what Jobs has to say about the events of his life and especially his business career.  I'd say that I personally feel a little whipsawed between Jobs' assessment and that of others.  At times Isaacson does address the question of why Jobs is idolized and or identified with - that is, why he's a popstar himself.  Isaacson points out that Jobs saw himself as a rebel and that this idea was the centerpiece of the "1984" ad for the Macintosh.  As I write this, I find myself wondering if my lack of identification with the concept and Jobs' persona is more remarkable than his success.

I still haven't finished the book, but I can't help feeling that a theme, intended or not, is that of failure.  The Lisa was a failure, the Macintosh had many serious problems that prevented it from being as successful as it could have been (lack of storage and lack of processing power), NeXT lost its hardware division and was headed toward bankruptcy or dissolution before it was sold to Apple.  The oft-mentioned "reality distortion field," was clearly helpful in some instances and clearly not in others.  Finally, one thing that I feel that the Macintosh episode showed was that Jobs was clearly interested in the intersection of aesthetics and technology but not as interested as he ought to be in whether and how things worked.  I can't help if he learned the lesson of Detroit auto culture from his father too well, in a sense.  In a world in which there are many brands of a product that work, essentially, equally well, brand differentiation through design, color, and features may seem like everything but it isn't.  The question of how well something meets the needs of the consumer is important, too.

Andrew Sullivan argues that Steve Jobs is important because he fuses the counterculture with what he calls the "counter-counter culture" (presumably, today's young people):

The reason he strikes such a huge chord with an entire generation lies, it seems to me, beyond his immense technical and business and design skills. It was because he became the bridge between the 1960s and the 1980s, the counter-culture and the counter-counter-culture. He was the hippie capitalist. He was the fusion of two great American forces - personal actualization and a free market. 

All I can say is that right now, I'm still not feeling it.

Reading now

I've just read/skimmed Border Crossing by Pat Barker.  This is the wonderful serendipity of having remaindered and withdrawn books around .. at some point, I find myself surprised by joy or wonder.  I couldn't really recommend this novel because reading it isn't really a good time.  It's about a very dark subject, and the very fact that the protoganist is getting divorced while the action of the novel takes place is no coincidence:  he's struggling with everything including loneliness and disappointment.  His wife moves her furniture out and now his voice is in an empty room.

But I think this book is sublime.  It's beautifully written, and is the reflection, I feel, of a novelist who is deeply thoughtful and deeply curious about the essential nature of things and how that is reflected in how we live now.  Love her.  Simply love her.  (Pat Barker is, of course, the author of the Regeneration trilogy and I highly, highly recommend Regeneration.)

I'm still reading around in Tomalin's Pepys, and I haven't made any progress on Steve Jobs and I know I won't today ..

A week or two ago I began reading True Grit by Charles Portis.  I think this is a wonderful novel.  I think Portis is a masterful realistic novelist, on the basis of the few pages I've read.  More so than almost all of the writers I've read in the past two years, he convincing paints a portrait of a real person in the first few pages.
What's real about her?  She interrupts herself in the middle of telling her tragic, life-changing story to digress and tell the story of an acquaintance that includes a brief summary of his life story and her thoughts about his interesting name.  I would never interrupt a story about my father to tell any other story -- but she would.  That feels real to me.

However, as much as I admire Portis' skill as a novelist, I'm almost certain that I will never care enough about this novel to finish it before it has to go back to the library.  Why?  I don't know .. perhaps if I didn't have to take it back to the library I would eventually finish it.

I am, of course, beginning the Big Short which I enjoy so much, I think, because Lewis' own personality comes through the pages and I find it entertaining and, because, for some reason this is the kind of book I like now.

Margin Call

I really enjoyed this movie, and the core of why it was good was the acting.  It was a wonderful cast (Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, and the story seemed so real:  it seemed like these were the perfect actors to play these roles.  Something that helped was that the story seemed "ripped from the headlines."  It seemed to be about a company like Lehman Brothers, whose failure caused a lot of losses for a lot of people - because a lot of people held the worthless securities, based on high-risk mortgages, that Lehman and many others held and sold.  The film explored the ethics - or absence thereof - of selling securities that were secured by so little of real value.

I think it's the acting that makes something like this .. that is why Downton Abbey is so successful even though the same territory has been covered before, not only in Gosford Park but in the Shooting Party and the Forsyte Saga, and, most famously, Upstairs Downstairs.

The screenwriter was also the director, and his screenplay won a nomination in the best original screenplay category in this year's Oscar nominations.

There's a scene in which Simon Baker is reading Zachary Quinto's resume, and says, a tone that is more contempt than marveling admiration, "So you're a rocket scientist."  Perfect.

This film seems especially timely in light of the Chase losses.