Issue Seven: Correction

Annotated Table of Contents

THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION

The America our new president inherits bears an uncanny resemblance to our old enemy, the Soviet Union—right before it went under. Our country's paranoia and stubborness have secured us indifferent allies and intractable commitments. Not only is there Afghanistan—still Afghanistan—where we fight the same enemy we once created to bleed the Russians, but just to show that we can do everything twice as much, twice as well, as anybody else, we've added Iraq.

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The position of the [Jewish magazines] is that it's the fate of the Jews to think of themselves as slouchy and neurotic, however glamorous they really are; occasionally they will "luck into" a post as the head of neurology at a New York hospital. In publications that command such resources; that attract some real talent; that photograph the sufferings of maimed Israelis and Palestinians and can't figure out what to say about them, this represents a refusal to take responsibility for the talent, perseverance, and courage of the Jews. In 1969, in Portnoy's Complaint, such suburbanized forgetting and refusal of the "world of our fathers" represented confusion, exhiliration, pain, and freedom. In 2008 it's straight-up bad faith.

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In Bolaño, literature is a helpless, undignified, and not especially pleasant compulsion, like smoking. At one point you started and now you can't stop; it's become a habit and an identity. Nothing is so consistent across Bolaño's work as the suspicion that literature is chiefly bullshit, rationalizing the misery, delusions, and/or narcissism of various careerists, flakes, and losers. Yet Bolaño somehow also treats literature as his and his characters' sole excuse for existing. This basic Bolaño aporia—literature is all that matters, literature doesn't matter at all—can be a glib paradox for others. He seems to have meant it sincerely, even desperately, something one would feel without knowing the first thing about his life.

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Los Neochilenos
By Roberto Bolaño

And the only thing
Truly pleasant
That we saw in Arica
Was the sun of Arica:
A sun like a cloud of
Dust.
A sun like sand
Subtly displacing
The motionless air.
The rest: routine.
Killers and converts
Mixed in the same discussion
Of deaf-mutes,
Of idiots undone
By purgatory.
And the lawyer Vivanco
A friend of Don Luis Sanchez
Asked what kind of crap we were trying to pull
With this Neochilenos bullshit.

POLITICS

HFM I (October 2007)

HFM: And there were other people at the firm, say, at the middle of last year, who were not mortgage experts, who were saying, "I see the run-up in housing prices in some of these geographies, and I just don't really get it. I go down to Florida and see the forest of cranes, and I wonder, who's going to be in all those apartments? And I hear about all sorts of friends who are getting loans to buy apartments or houses speculatively and are lying about the fact that it's not a primary residence, and I see these commercials on TV about low-doc, no-doc mortgages, and there is no way, there is no way that this is not going to end badly."

HFM II (March 2008)

HFM: When you're talking about risk management, there's an assumption that not every asset class will be correlated. So, sure, subprime blows up but the bank's OK because prime will hold up, or there won't be a perfect correlation with leveraged loans. But what's going on is that all these credit products are performing badly at once.

n+1: Because?

David Harvey (July 2008)

DH: I don't have sufficient information to say what proportion of the people who got foreclosed upon were themselves flipping or speculating. Some of them were, in some parts of the country—in California, for example, there was quite a bit of that going on.

But in a city like Baltimore, that was not going on. It was largely a low-income, African-American population that had been pulled into the dream of home ownership and they'vebeen wiped out. And in effect if you look at cities like Cleveland or Baltimore the foreclosure wave has been like a series of financial Katrinas. I'm very familiar with Baltimore, and I have a map of the foreclosures in Baltimore, and it's clear who's being affected. A lot of it affects women, particularly single, head-of-household women--they're just being completely destroyed.

HFM III (September 2008)

HFM: And which camp you fall into isn't a matter of ideology; it's a matter of how bad you think the problem really is. Because, you know, if you had a factory, and you're like, "The factory is having problems," one of the ways of recognizing loss is [giving debt-holders control of the factory]--you're not doing anything to the factory, you're just shuffling claims. And once you're done, the factory can continue producing.

What if, though, instead you just go in and you just, like, smash all the equipment in the factory? Then you've done real damage, right? The factory doesn't work anymore.

And when you talk about financial institutions, if you say we can mark everything down to its true condition, you're saying the markdowns themselves don't cause damage to the institutions. The institution is still there, the bank is still there. There's still people that show up to work, you haven't lost all the intellectual capital. These banks continue to exist.

But there's some people who think the problem is so bad, that if you actually recognize the losses, that it's akin to smashing the equipment in the factory.

Jessica Biel's Hand: The Cinematic Quagmire
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A. S. Hamrah

For two months this summer the only movies I watched were movies about the war on terror. While other moviegoers were enjoying cinematic treats like You Don't Mess with the Zohan and The Happening, or the revival of Kobayashi's The Human Condition, or that Norwegian movie about Norwegian yuppie writers that everybody liked so much, I was immersed in the backlog of global war-on-terror movies released since 2002. The only summer blockbuster I saw was Iron Man, a war-on-terror movie and therefore allowable.

BLOOD SAUSAGE

Three Poems
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Frederick Seidel

Easy to deride
The way he stayed alive inside
His women with his puffed-up pride.
The pharmacy supplied
The rising truck ladder that the fire did not provide.
The toothless carnivore devoured Viagra and Finasteride
(Which is the one that shrinks the American prostate nationwide
And at a higher dosage grows hair on the bald) to stem the tide.
Not to die had been his way to hide

On Food
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Mark Greif

The most modern and elite of our eaters find that careful discrimination, taboos, and rigorous exclusions still lead down both paths without contradiction: toward the totally engineered and compressed vitamin pill; and toward the organic, sourced, inherited, unmodified "whole" food—not "made" but harvested, not altered (in this imagination) except by joyful labor. You can eat your Powerbar, product of an engineering as peculiar as any the world has known, and wash it down with unpasteurized unfiltered cider pressed by Mennonites, and on both fronts, you find it good.

Claus Peymann Buys Himself a Pair of Pants and Joins Me for Lunch
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Thomas Bernhard

PEYMANN:
So who's that

ME:
The Vice Chancellor
a Nazi

PEYMANN:
And him over there

ME:
The Defense Minister
a Nazi

PEYMANN:
And him

ME:
The Foreign Minister
an old Nazi

PEYMANN:
And him over there

ME:
The head of the General Accounting Office
an old Nazi

PEYMANN:
And him

ME:
The Editor-in-Chief of the most prestigious newspaper in Vienna
an old Nazi

PEYMANN:
And that guy there

ME:
The Editor-in-Chief of the second most prestigious newspaper in Vienna
an old Nazi

PEYMANN:
And him over there

ME:
That's the minister of Culture and Sport
an idiot a moron

HOME AND AWAY

The Family Friend
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Ceridwen Dovey

The girl had to go away for work to the coast for two months. She missed her visits to the family friend's house, and carefully selected a gift for them a day before her return: a plastic packet full of hand-picked avocados the size and shape of giant gem squashes, and a bottle of raspberry vinaigrette. On the day she arrived back, she called and asked if she could pop around that evening for dinner. There was the faintest hint of hesitation, but then the family friend warmly agreed.

Drawn and Quartered on the Internet
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Benjamin Kunkel

Yet for all the safety of his position the anonymous commenter also suffers in his own way--from anonymity. He is like the B-movie invisible man who can frighten, harass, and spy on the visible person but never be seen and recognized himself. The pain of anonymity supplies a possible explanatio for the violence of the anonymous commentariat's rage against especially that category of person—the celebrity—who can suffer every mortal pain (injury, addition, divorce, death, even bankruptcy) except for that of facelessness.

Summer in Samarkand
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Elif Batuman

Thirty kilometers of the highway from Tashkent to Samarkand passes through Kazakhstan. The moment we cleared the police checkpoint, the landscape looked completely different. Patchy, grayish fields stretched as far as the eye could see. There were no trees at all, no human figures. Here and there stood a few melancholy, skeletal horses, with drooping prehistoric heads.

Twenty minutes later, trees reappeared, leafy trees, on both sides of the road, with the trunks painted white; Uzbek police were guarding a roadblock.

"So we're back in Uzbekistan?" I asked the driver.

"Yes, this is Uzbekistan,. Trees, you see."

"They, um, don't have trees in Kazakhstan?"

He shook his head frowning. "Don't like them."

"The Kazakhs don't like... trees?"

The driver shook his head more emphatically. "No way."

Confessions of a DJ
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Jace Clayton

In 2001, I recorded a three-turntable, sixty-minute mix called Gold Teeth Thief. I put it on the internet so my friends could listen. Who else would? A few months after it went online, I got a call from a large European independent label. I'd used one of their songs on the mix. They loved it! They wanted to license the mix, assuming they could pay the various labels a fee of $1,000 per track. "That'd be fantastic," I said, "but pretty expensive. I use forty-four different songs on it. Some of those are major pop tunes, and a bunch are unlicensable bootlegs. It's be a nightmare to do legally." They insisted I send a complete track list so that their legal department could decide. Result: "Impossible. Our lawyers laughed at us."

REVIEWS

Game Theory
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Wesley Yang

The players of the Game made explicit the workings of a new sexual economy, one that was always implicit in the old, but was mediated by illusions that, it turns out, did more than merely obscure. We had disaggregated community, love, sex, and the family to allow a new protocol of maximum efficiency to establish itself. The Game players applied the logic of bourgeois productivity to slash open the myth of bourgeois romance. The mystery of romance yielded all its secrets to a method, ruthlessly deployed, which set its practitioners free from a fate that was never going to include them in its hoped-for happy endings anyway.

Swedish Detectives
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Britt Peterson

With Kjell Eriksson, however, the compunction to rescue Social Democrats from themselves becomes weaker. A member of the Swedish Communist Party, Eriksson is politically the most radical Swedish crime novelist since the team of Maj Sjowell and Per Wahloo, who had a detective say in The Laughing Policeman (1970) that "the police area necessary evil." Eriksson occasionally subtracts that "necessary." Feeling little obligation to resolve his stories in favor of the ordered state, Eriksson lets his detective plots implode.

Kickstart My Heart
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Molly Young

Any actual amount of time spent under the influence is hard to describe, because time passes very quickly. It's a euphoric drug, but also an alienating one. If I took a pill with my morning coffee, it would wear off by early evening. All of my work for the coming week would be finished, and I could take an aspirin, shower, and go to bed. Having missed the transition from day to night as well as all three meals, my dreams would be hysterical, but I always woke the next day feeling chipper and accomplished.