“ What politicians fail to realise is that rising inflation expectations inevitably result in higher borrowing costs. If short-term rates are not raised, then long-dated rates will rise instead, proving far more painful and for a much longer period.
Eight Minutes
Jul 03
“
One morning in 2001, Gregg Monsees received a call from a Mr. Byron Bottoms in Waco, Texas, who told him that President and Laura Bush wanted to buy a ladder for the library at their Crawford ranch and would he please ship out some samples posthaste.
“Well, we don’t ship samples,” said Gregg Monsees. “And we made a very rare exception. But we did require a deposit.” The Bushes settled on an unfinished black walnut with powder-coated black steel fixtures, and Mrs. Bush sent a thank-you note addressed to “Messrs. Monsees.” When Morley Safer of CBS came in to inquire about a ladder for his Upper East Side home, Gregg Monsees recalled, he made a wry comment, upon hearing that the president had recently bought a ladder, as to the number of books Mr. Bush could possibly own.
“It was something like, ‘What, for his one book?’ ” Gregg Monsees said. “And then he asked me what I thought was a particularly astute question. He asked, ‘How many feet of track did he buy?’ Because the track can be an indicator of how many books a person owns.
“Well, it seemed the president had more track than Morley Safer. I guess he forgot Laura Bush used to be a librarian.”
Jun 30
“ In its unexampled directness the photograph has enjoyed, until recently, an unrivaled artlessness of communication. But now that it has undergone a rise in status, and is an object of value and speculation, the attention it receives is increasingly verbal. Words now affirm the photographic image, as photographs once confirmed reality. This seems to be the fate of all enterprises that are open to scrutiny and discussion. To the extent the photograph is a ponderable object, it will have to be pondered with words.
— Wright Morris
“ I had recently read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and heard that Carson McCullers had lived in Columbus. I could believe that. The basking Southern heat, the soft golden light, the way structures and people appeared to be saturated with the scent of a past as dense as leaf smoke, smoldering and drug-like in which everybody was a compliant victim. Walking the dusty streets I envied writers fortunate enough to come from such places, still sticky with the pollen that clung to them. It seemed to me they need only close their eyes, open their pores and inhale deeply to possess their subjects. The sorghum-like richness of Southern life was both on the surface and fermenting beneath it.
— Wright Morris, Photographs & Words
Jun 21
September 1, 1939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
— W.H. Auden
“ Most people have the idea of finding a needle in a haystack; they miss the objective of going for the haystack. I buy the haystack.
— Fayez Sarofim, Houston-based art collector and legendary investor.
Jun 19
“ Wright Morris’s inspiration in the 1940s to combine words and photographs resulted in several unique works of fiction, “photo-texts,” he called them, in which image and text stand to each other in quite unexpected ways. In The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), and God’s Country and My People, (1968) picture and word cohabitate in a manner of mutual and complex exchange. At a casual glance these works might seem similar to the juxtaposi tions of word and image in documentary texts popular at the end of the 1930s,but a more careful look and reading makes clear that in spite of some superficial resemblance in depictions of rural scenes they have little in common with works like Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) or Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor’s American Exodus (1939). They belong more properly under the heading of experimental fiction, formal experiments in the telling of stories, the construction of narratives. Moreover, each of Morris’s books ventures a different way of setting image in relation to word, either disposing them throughout an actual novel (as in The Home Place) or linking them with texts which stand as discrete memories, not stories as such but story-fragments…
— Alan Trachtenberg - Wright Morris’s “Photo-Texts” - The Yale Journal of Criticism 9: The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996) 109-119 Wright Morris’s “Photo-texts” Alan Trachtenberg
Jun 09
“ Our artists have to find poetry in train stations the way their fathers found poetry in forests and rivers.
“ To be sure, a crash in the oil market is not imminent. The danger currently comes from the other direction. The rise in oil prices aggravates the prospects for a recession. Only when a recession is well and truly in place is a decline in consumption in the developed world likely to outweigh other factors.
“ We have these big stories that we live in – nation, that’s a story. Religion, that’s a story … the truth is that in any kind of dynamic society, those stories are always changing … To an extent these stories are always being retold, and it seems to be that one of the tests of an open society is that you can do that … It’s one of the ways in which a society progresses, to continually have that conversation about the narratives inside which it lives.
— Salman Rushdie, “A Writer: Not a Martyr,” “The Weekend Interview by Emily Parker, The Wall Street Journal