Echo…Echo…Echo…

I’m sure someone, somewhere, at some time has noticed this before, but I noticed it just now:

Check out The Great Gatsby, p. 10:

“What you doing, Nick?”

“I’m a bond man.”

“Who with?”

I told him.

…………………Now, dig Invisible Man, p. 194:

“What’s your name?” he said.

I told him, shouting it over the roar of the furnaces.

……..

Obviously Ellison’s use of “I told him” is more clever, since we never learn IM’s name, but I wonder if Gatsby is where he got the idea.

 

Tiger, KG/Paul Pierce, Ed Park

Three days in a row of the most magnificent entertainments: the U.S. Open playoff on Monday, the Celtics win (woo hoo!) on Tuesday, and reading Ed Park’s Personal Days on Wednesday. Park wrote a true comic masterpiece. Park’s office sketches reminded me very much of working at Routledge in 2002, but I guess Park’s genius is that it applies to life in just about any office (esp. since the industry the characters work in remains unnamed). Park’s novel ends with a long, one-sentence letter from one character to another and it reminded me in some ways of another wonderful post-script.

I really enjoyed KG’s post-game interview, as well as Slate’s informative dissection of it. A friend who I watched the game with cheerfully described the interview, as it was happening, as “the 8th level of…….*something*”, which is not quite what Levin and Swansburg at Slate are getting at, but it’s in the same galaxy.

Follow Thru

While looking at old golf stuff I found this remarkable poster for a once-lost(?) film that I must now endeavor to see.  Dig the extraordinary imdb summary:

Lora Moore, the club champion, loses a golf match to a woman from another golf club. Then Jerry Downs, a handsome golf pro, and his goofy friend, Jack Martin, show up. Lora takes him on as her golf teacher to work on her putt. She falls for him, but so do several other women. Meanwhile Angie Howard, Lora’s friend, chases after Jack. A lot of silliness ensues.

Clearly, this could be one of the most important monuments of our civilization. My only question now is, what the did ultimate authority on golf, W.C. Fields, think of it?

Maybe the “up curve” people will live in the Altamira Caves

Nick Paumgarten’s illuminating talk with Michael Novogratz on macro economic topics is worth watching, notably because Novogratz does not make supremely silly or outlandish predictions (as a lot of these macro-macro moguls tend to do) and because Paumgarten keeps it light.  A few things bothered me, notably Novogratz’s boxing metaphor vis-a-vis his trading superiority over his Asian competitors during the Asian financial crisis. OK, so the West had a leg up in dithering around with currencies. That Western triumphalism only seems to lend credence to Mahathir Mohammad’s colorful characterization, circa 1998, that the “Gnomes of Zurich” had caused the crisis. (Certainly speculation did help the crisis along, but so did overbuilding, e.g., too many golf courses in Thailand.)

 Anyway, I think Novogratz is dead on about a lot of things (and he comes across as razor-sharp smart and friendly and not as an aloof-yet-stupid-wizard), but the roots of the current crisis in the 1970s was not even mentioned, nor is Obama-endorser Paul Volcker’s responsiblity for the boom in the 80s that lead to the events of 1989 and helped to lead to what Novogratz calls “globalization 1.0” in the 90s, that some would say occured in the 1780s. Speaking of the 1780s: just as our wealth, as Novogratz notes, flows to the middle east today, in the 1780s, enormous (incalculable?) wealth flowed into Britain from India and elsewhere. Thus, Britain was able to lavish subsidies on Prussia, et al, during the Napoleonic Wars a generation later. But what did it ultimately mean? Where did most of the money really go? Was it poorly invested?

Powe, pronounced Poe, like Edgar Allen Poe – be afraid, yo!

SportsCenter this morning had a clip (not online I don’t think) of Phil Jackson pronouncing Leon Powe’s last name “Pow,” followed immediately by his touchy and annoyed apology and Powe’s lighthearted reply that he used to allow teachers to call him “Pow.” A few notes on this Powe phenomenon:

1. Dear Phil, don’t be mad because Powe scored 21 points in 14 minutes and out-muscled your big men in the paint.

2. Powe was quite exhilarating to watch.

3. The media has hyped Powe’s difficult childhood quite enough. There is something odd about the barage of coverage (by both ABC and ESPN) that I can’t quite put my finger on.

4. The refs did not call ENOUGH fouls on The Lakers. Perhaps they didn’t want to send Powe to the line a bunch more times after his already improbable visits early in the game.

Obama-Clinton?…What about Reagan-Ford?

While the horrible and preposterous idea of an Obama-Clinton ticket is stealing the spotlight from Obama’s nomination-sealing tonight, I would like to refer anyone who’s interested to this 2000 article on the 1980 Republican National Convention, and the the speculation that August that Reagan would pick Gerald Ford as his VP.