I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

I've measured out my life with this image I keep borrowing from Marcelo Souza too.

People who drink coffee see and hear things that aren't there, says a new study.

Well, duh. Of course they do. They're called novelists.

Anyway, here's an article in the Independent on the report, and here's an extract:

"People who consume coffee and other caffeinated products are more likely to have hallucinations, according to a study published today.

The more caffeine students had, the more likely they were to hear voices, smell things and see things that were not there, researchers at Durham University found. They suggested that increased levels of the hormone cortisol caused by caffeine could be behind the link."

Bad science is forever with us. Next time I hope they'll obey best practice, control properly for bias, and ask the students how many of them sip their cappuccino while trying to write their first novel, play, or epic poem.

T.S. Eliot put in best, in the best poem of the last century, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room."

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to sink a pot of Lavazza Rosa, and hallucinate the last chapter of Jude: Level 2.

How To Patronise Writers Properly

Homer's brain. Which is slightly bigger than mine. (This picture's pirated so thoroughly that I couldn't track down a credit. Anyone know who did it? One of Groening's peeps, I assume. Kudos to you, unknown worker ant, labouring anonymously for our pleasure in a cruel and hostile digiverse.)

I think a lot about the future of the book. So imagine! my! delight! when I stumbled on The Institute for the Future of the Book, a think tank who do nothing but think about the future of the book.  While lying in the bath, eating chocolate, and sipping a latte macchiato through a straw. I hope.

Their blog,  if:book, ponders a bunch of good stuff.

OK, I didn't really stumble on it. I got a Google Alert saying they'd mentioned my New York Times piece, and I clicked through. But once there, I stayed for ages, wandering around the site. I hugely enjoyed a tremendously thought-provoking interview with Helen De Witt (author of The Last Samurai, and Your Name Here). It couldn't have provoked my thoughts more if it'd poked them with a stick.

Best thing is to just quote a big chunk of it. Here she is on the idiotic and inefficient way the publishing industry, as currently set up, makes money for authors. (Do I agree with her? If I agreed with her any more, I'd be her):

"Well, the way it works is, you try to sell a very large number of physical objects, collecting a dollar or two off each one for the author – from people you never contact again.

I once knew a senior partner in a Wall Street firm who loved Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. He talked at length about the wonderfulness of this book, the character of the Collector, the general brilliance. He was making $1 million or so a year. Of which Andrew Wylie, Sontag's agent, had cleverly managed to garner a couple of bucks for Sontag. There was no structure in place to encourage this ardent fan to, say, sponsor Sontag's travel expenses, offer Sontag six months' writing time at his vacation home in Maine, buy Sontag a new car, who knows.

This is deeply baffling. One of the problems for a fundraiser is that it's hard to raise undedicated funds. Good fundraising copy often focuses on an individual; you excite the donor's sympathy for Precious, who walks 10km twice a day to go to school, and then the donors all want to buy books, school uniform and a bicycle for Precious. If you're not careful with the wording you could find yourself under a legal obligation to send half the take from the appeal to Precious. And you hauled in all this money and goodwill for someone donors had never heard of before, with a single page of copy. It takes five minutes to read, and you're sweating blood to draft something that will get people to spend the five minutes. Whereas.

When people read a book they typically spend a minimum of a couple of hours on it. Sometimes they read it at a single sitting; sometimes they live with it for weeks. Sometimes they forget it – but sometimes it stays in the mind for years, sometimes it saves the reader from suicide, sometimes it changes the reader's life. So it has the power to make a much stronger connection with the reader than a little read-and-toss mailshot – but the strength of this connection does not translate into extra time for the writer to write.

Writers spend a lot of time getting in each other's way. There are a few places that offer residencies – normally, disruptively, places that have a lot of other writers and artists also in residence. But there are plenty of readers like my Wall Street lawyer, people with second and third homes they never have time to visit – and even the most highpowered agents never think of encouraging those readers to give the freedom of silence to writers they admire. Agents go after big advances – which means a writer does a roadshow to buy silence somewhere down the line. It's done this way because this is the way it's done. It doesn't have to be done this way; if it were done a different way, writers would write better books in less time.

So, to revert to the role of the Internet in all this: the Internet has the power to reduce the amount of time writers have to trade for legitimacy. It has the power to change readers' relationship to writers. If a book (or a blog, or a web comic) changed your life, why not buy its author a bicycle? Or a goat? Or a bottle of wine? Why not offer its author six off-season months in your summer cottage on the Cape?

Those look to me to be likelier ways forward than for writers to pay the rent by selling PDFs online."

That's Helen De Witt. Much more of that interview here. Send her a bicycle, a red rose, and champagne this instant.

Oh wait. There's no mechanism in place to do that. Bummer.

I've been saying this for years. We need a global patron/artist connecting tool, and the internet can do that. Look what rich people waste money on, in its absence. Hedge funds they don't understand. Overpriced condos in the hurricane corridor. Or they give it to Bernie Madoff, and he spends half on gold taps for his dog's bathroom, and gives the rest to the rich sucker he met last month, pretending it's December's "investment profits".

Far better that some of the rich give some of their spare cash to the writers they really believe in, to write. And if the writer does come up with something that's remembered long after they're both dead, what greater glory than being remembered as the patron of a great piece of art? Harriet Shaw Weaver will be remembered long after her rich contemporaries are forgotten.

So, if anyone wants to pay my rent while I finish Jude: Level 2, mail me.

Happy New Year

Back home in Berlin, and sick as a dog. My gang came down with a selection-box of diseases over the Christmas in Ireland. Returning half-conscious to Berlin - coughing and hawking our way through airports, train stations, cafés and public toilets - we spread our plagues in a mighty swathe across Europe. So if civilisation is consequently snuffed out, sorry about that.

(The Plain People of the Internet: Ah! Is that a rare reference there to the five wives and forty children he is rumoured to  have stashed away in Berlin? Make a note...)

So on a human level, I and all I love start 2009 utterly banjaxed. But as a writer (far more important, natch), my year has got off to a nice start. The New York Times has just printed a piece by me. The piece is probably funnier if you have read all of US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's official bailout statements over the past six months. (But, you know, don't. It's too high a price to pay to get a gag.)

I'll put it up on the site here, once the New York Times has had a fair run at it. But meanwhile here's their version. They even commissioned a cartoon from R. O. Blechman, which is a heck of an honour. (Blechman is seventy-eight now, and won an Emmy for his animated film of Stravinsky and Ramuz's theatre thingy, The Soldier's Tale.)

Oh, and a happy, happy, HAPPY, HAPPY New Year to you all.

(The eloquent photo above is borrowed from PawsAroundChicago.com. They give pets lifts. Oh you laugh and call it decadence, but it is only through such - not entirely necessary, yet welcome - innovations that civilization advances. I don't know the name of the photographer. A haunting picture, suffused with empathy and a deep understanding of suffering, it is possible it is a self portrait.)

Silent Night

On any clear night, over the next couple of weeks, if you go outside and listen carefully in the direction of Ireland, you should be able to hear me eating chocolate.

Meanwhile, ich wünsche dir ein frohes Fest!

Can Anyone Top Seán FitzPatrick's Record?

"Can anyone top Seán FitzPatrick's record?"

We'll get to Seán in a minute. First, for my many non-Irish readers, who trust me as their number-one source of highly biased information on the state of Irish banking...  as I predicted a while back, the Irish Government is finally going to recapitalise the Irish banks. Orwell would wet himself laughing at the language the government are using to describe this flip-flop. The Irish Government plan to pour 10,000,000,000 euro (that's not a misprint - and yes, there's only four million people in Ireland) into the black hole of Irish banking, and the Minister calls it "a demonstration of confidence in the banks."

Er, no. It's a demonstration that the government thinks the Irish banks are insolvent. Bust. Bank-rupt.

How will a government with an exploding deficit fund this? Apparently they're going to throw the national Pension Scheme down the hole. And as to terms, well, we just have to trust them. Here's the official description, from the Irish Times this Monday, if you can stomach it:

Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan is expected to meet the chiefs of AIB, Bank of Ireland, Irish Life Permanent and Anglo Irish Bank over the coming days to discuss specific proposals for an injection of new capital into the system via a new fund in which the Government will participate.

"What I'm mainly concerned about is that the banks are in a position to extend credit," the Minister for Finance said on RTÉ radio.

"That's why we want to make this gesture, a demonstration of confidence in the banks, by upping their capital to show that their buffers are so strong, they are indestructible."

The Minister said there would be "tough discussions" with banks on the details of any State injection of funds. "We'll spell out the realities as we see them to the relevant institutions."

Mr Lenihan added there was "no question" of fresh public expenditure being incurred in the recapitalisation as there were was a substantial amount of money amassed in the National Pension Reserve Fund.

He refused to be drawn on whether there would be changes in the management of the banks as part of the Government plan.

Well, changes in management are happening already. Anglo Irish Bank, whose shares have lost 95% of their value this year, lost their chairman Seán FitzPatrick today. It turns out he'd been hiding 87,000,000 euro in personal loans with his own bank. Every September for the past eight years, as Anglo Irish Bank's year-end accounts were about to be done up, he'd lob 87,000,000 over the back wall and hide it in another bank (probably Irish Nationwide Building Society, whose books aren't done up till December, but noone is saying officially). Then, once Anglo-Irish had their figures all officially audited ("Vast loans? To the Chairman? Heavens no!"), he'd lob his loans back over the wall again. So they didn't turn up on the books of either bank.

What was his quote on this matter?

"...it is clear to me, on reflection, that it was inappropriate and unacceptable from a transparency point of view."

On reflection? ON REFLECTION? He thought it was absolutely spiffing from a transparency point of view, while  for eight years he played hurling over the back fence with 87,000,000 euro, but earlier this week he finally had a spare moment to reflect (busy man), and was shocked, SHOCKED! to discover he wasn't totally transparent?

I love the way the traditional Irish cover-it-up language is being stretched to its limit by the size of the stuff it is now being asked to cover.

If this was one of my novels I'd give you an exquisitely crafted gag to finish up, that played with transparency and reflection, invisible men and vanishing money, but this is a blog and I'm knackered so that's all you get.

No, actually I'd like to end with Business Plus magazine, from November 2004. It has Seán FitzPatrick on the front cover, under the admiring headline, "Can Anybody Top Seán's Record?"

Well, Seán was the CEO of Anglo-Irish Bank from 1986-2005, then Chairman till today. He ran it right through the boom years. It's lost 95% of its value this year, and his secret loans from the bank now add up to a full third of its entire market cap.

Yes, we'll see can anyone top that in the coming year.

(Ah, he's probably a lovely man, and only wanted the 87,000,000 euro to help sick children, and hedgehogs who'd been hit by combine harvesters. And his modesty made him hide the loans. Still, though, if anyone out there can find a bigger image than this 7k gif, send it on to me and I'll put it up here...)

Free Momus Albums! I am very excited!

I have just discovered that Momus is handing out free Christmas presents, and I am very excited. (I hope you are excited too.) In the run-up to Christmas, at a rate of several songs a day, he is giving away his six Creation albums over on his splendid blog, Click Opera. He provides links to high quality MP3s of all the tracks, and is commenting on each song, giving a little description and history, before saying what he thinks of it now, looking back. I will return to this topic, but I thought I'd tip off all you Momus fans immediately (I am looking at you, Neil Farrell).

Songs from when, as he says,

"Everything was poetry and coffee bars, basically. And we all signed on."

The Poison Boyfriend is already up, and the cruel and sensual Tender Pervert went up earlier today.

I would recommend, oooh, all of Tender Pervert.

And for those of you pop children who weren't born when Momus first gently parted the cheeks of pop's dreaming form, and who desperately need a musical reference from the last five minutes to orient yourselves, let me point out that Amanda Palmer of the delicious Dresden Dolls is covering Momus's "I Want You, But I Don't Need You" on her current tour, EVEN AS I TYPE. In fact here she is...

And here's Momus himself, in a video from slightly later in his career, when Creation had money (thanks to Oasis), and he briefly had a promotional budget. Now go grab some songs, and be sure to say thankyou.

Why not the life?

I'm writing a lot lately. (More on that soon…) It's enjoyable. Tiring. But it means I'm too busy to blog the way I like to blog (in long, rambling meditations on Christ knows what). So here's someone older and wiser than me to keep you happy, or miserable. This is Jack Gilbert, from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1. He was 80 when he said this, back in 2005, and renting a room in a friend's house in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The interviewer, Sarah Fay, asked him “What, other than yourself, is the subject of your poems?”

"Those I love. Being. Living my life without being diverted into things that people so often get diverted into. Being alive is so extraordinary I don't know why people limit it to riches, pride, security–all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can't see anything from a car. It's moving too fast. People take vacations. That's their reward–the vacation. Why not the life? Vacations are second-rate. People deprive themselves of so much of their lives–until it's too late. Though I understand that often you don't have a choice."

A note on the images: they are taken from the first solo exhibition in Europe of the Tokyo-based artists Exonemo, hosted in the Basel gallery [plug.in]. The piano and tape recorder are part of an installation called UN-DEAD-LINK, in which Sembo Kensuke and Yae Akaiwa from Exonemo modified the computer game Half-Life2 and connected its output to a piano upstairs (and to a sewing machine, paper-shredder, music turntable, some lamps...) Each death in the game turns on a machine. The murdered mouse is taken from the Exonemo film  DanmatsuMouse...

Pigs and Poems

Below is a guest posting by the American poet James P. Lenfestey. He knows a lot about pigs, and a lot about poetry. I'd go so far as to say, he taught me everything I know about stealing pigs. Sadly, he only taught me it after I'd stolen them...

"Frankly, Julian -- that was an unconvincing pignapping -- an activity with a long and honorable list of common practices in my part of the world.  Best techniques, which you amateurishly missed: under cover of NIGHT, you dolt!  Then- cover the eyes!  Throw a sack over the entire body.  While they gently sleep, you fool!  The next step frankly may be beyond you -- no reflection on the fairly slight, if energetic, frame revealed in the video.  But you gotta PICK THAT SUCKER UP!  Perhaps your Jeeves is beefy."

Yep, Jim is a tough critic. But a good poet and editor. And I know some of you write poems - don't deny it! So I thought I'd post his invitation to submit work to an anthology he's editing. But before I do, one last word of warning from Jim:

"...Make clear to all the sausage versifiers out there that I demand and accept only very high quality verse -- no manure, this is a serious enterprise which will be turned into a serious book to be purchased with real money by serious people interested in the soul and story and the smile, as well as the body, of the pig.  And I am a vicious editor, a veritable feral boar, biting fearlessly.  Some of the best poets alive, and several dead, are already feeding at the trough.  PAYMENT IS IN PRAISE (and maybe a copy of the book)."

So here's the official invite. Pass it on to any quality pig poets of your acquaintance...

Soo-eee! -- Call for pig poems for anthology

Hey.  Got any poems about pigs?  I'm working this month on an anthology, SOME PIG, to be published in early 2009 by Red Dragonfly Press. 

Right now the anthology contains poems by Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Ruth Schwartz, David Lee, Carol Bly, Bill Holm, Martin Espada, Robert Hedin, Scott King, Jim Lenfestey.

If you have 1-3 poems you think appropriate, send to me asap.  Should any be accepted, a seriously selective process, you will receive one copy of the book as payment, and be damn happy about it,  as we do this for love -- of pigs, mankind's true friend, who take us lightly, feed us copiously, and nourish our sense of justice and its opposite.  Your other good works will of course be credited in brief bios.

Jim Lenfestey, Editor
SOME PIG, Red Dragonfly Press
***
James P. Lenfestey
TURNING 40 PRODUCTIONS
1833 Girard Ave. So.
Minneapolis, MN 55403
cell: 612-730-7435
www.coyotepoet.com

Happy People

The New York Times ran a piece on Thursday (by Roni Caryn Rabin), with an opening that spoke to my soul. Not the content - though I like the content - the way it was expressed. (Maybe it's because I'm going slowly nuts thumping my own book of poems into shape, but I'm seeing gorgeous, startling poetry everywhere lately.) Anyway, this contains what must be one of the shortest (and bluntest) second pararaphs in NYT history. Maybe it needs to be seen in the context of the whole article... maybe to fully appreciate this you need to have read a truly horrible amount of long, windy NYT prose... Now I've built it up way too much, and you'll just scratch your head and think what the heck was he talking about. Ah, I'm just going to quote it and shut up.

"Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That’s what unhappy people do."

Finance Ministers' Top 20

I've been enjoying the annual Financial Times’ guide to how Europe’s finance ministers are doing. After a great deal of number-crunching, chin-stroking, horse-trading and coin-tossing, they have come up with the unbearably exciting, grey-pinstriped, financial equivalent of a Top of the Pops / Smash Hits / Billboard Top 20. (Well, OK, top 19.) And here they are! (If you're not trembling too much with excitement to click on the link.)

As the FT says:

"Now in its third year, the FT survey benchmarks performance, to reveal who is the best performing and most respected – as well as potential future stars. The challenges this year were greater than ever...."

No kidding.

I was delighted to see that Ireland's Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, didn't come last. Far from it! He came in a very respectable second last.

Young, Massive, and Hot

There is something deeply satisfying about living in a time when universe-spanning discoveries are made on a fairly regular basis, every few years, or months... or weeks... (of course, this depends on how easily you get excited). Imagine living in the Middle Ages, and twiddling your thumbs for a few hundred years, waiting for someone to rediscover that the earth moves around the sun. Boooooooring.

Even back when I was a kid (which isn't that long ago) the universe was much smaller than it is today. We had to crouch.

Anyway, I'm very excited that two teams of astronomers have (separately) just managed to take the first photographs of planets whizzing round other stars. These planets are young, massive and hot (they're the easiest ones to photograph because they're pouring out torrents of infrared. Or heat as we called it when I was a lad). Up until now, astronomers had been finding planets by indirect means (the wobble of a star as a vast planet invisibly circled it, the dimming of a star as a big invisible planet passed in front of it). These are the first direct sightings.

All the details here, in Science News.

Sarah Palin for U.S. Poet Laureate

(A note from about a week after I posted this: the guys at Prospect magazine read it, laughed a hollow laugh, and asked for a longer, slightly different version, which you can read here...)

Well, Sarah Palin is back in Alaska, and all you can hear around these parts is the lonesome wail of the broken-hearted satirists of Europe. Come back Sarah! We love you! It's OK if you think Africa's a country! We don't mind. It's not like you were running for President of Africa. Hell, there's people over here in Europe think America's a country...

At least she's still giving interviews, to sort out these terrible misconceptions, so I can still get my regular fix. In today's one, with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, "the Alaska governor explains what she would have discussed had she been more available to the press."

Which turns out to be stuff like - I know Africa is a continent! Embedded in sentences like this one:

"I don't know, because I remember the discussion about Africa, my concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue, as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska's investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars, I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen anymore."

I like the middle bit of that sentence the best. It has a kind of poetry. And she says "continent", just to bang it home that she knows it's a continent. Subtle, but brilliant.

Hell, it IS poetry. Read it again:

Africa, a poem by Sarah Palin

"And the relevance

To me

With that issue,

As we spoke

About Africa and some

Of the countries

There that were

Kind of the people

Succumbing to the dictators

And the corruption

Of some

Collapsed governments

On the

Continent,

The relevance

Was Alaska's"

As Kurtz should have said at the end of Heart of Darkness, "The relevance! The relevance!"

If Obama is serious about reaching out across the aisle; about ending the divisions between Republican and Democrat - between red states and blue states - between people who believe in evolution and people who believe in creation - between monkeys and humans - between literate and illiterate - if Barack Hussein Obama truly believes in Change - then he will appoint Sarah Palin as the United States' seventeenth, and greatest, Poet Laureate.

Election Day USA 2008

At last, it's election day in the USA. Who will win? Well, I think Obama won the election six weeks ago, on Monday 15th of September 2008 when Lehman Brothers , the hundred-and-fifty-year-old American investment bank, collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection. (And, somewhat addicted to the high-wire of public prediction by now, I'm typing this before the votes have been counted. I haven't even looked at an exit poll, if any are out yet. There's hours of voting left to go in parts of the US.) That was the event that made the collapse of not just banks but the whole deregulated financial system unstoppable.

Check out the graphs in the second half of this excellent video from John Authers of the Financial Times. (You can skip the stuff on the dollar at the start.) In the crucial states Obama needs, Obama trailed McCain until the day of the Lehman's collapse, and then bam, his line shoots up and McCain's plummets, and McCain has trailed Obama in all of them ever since.

Almost everything written about this election has been fluff. The economy will always drive politics in a democracy. Only when things are going fairly well will people bother to vote on any other issue. When the economy implodes, so do the hopes of the incumbent party. McCain actually ran a very good campaign under incredibly difficult circumstances: he stayed in the race until the entire American banking system collapsed. His problem was that he had to run as two mutually conflicting things. To get the Republican party to vote for him, campaign for him, and finance him, he needed to run as a Republican. But that's only 40% of the voters. Not enough. And President Bush was so unpopular (this week he recorded a 20% approval rating, the lowest in history, lower than Nixon in the last days of Watergate), that to win the votes of anyone else at all, McCain had to run as a crazy maverick who wasn't anything like Bush and, sure, was hardly a Republican at all, at all. And you can't be both King of the Republicans, and the Scourge of the Republicans. (Look what happened to the last guy who tried to walk that tricky line.)

It has been very refreshing to have two presidential candidates that I really like and respect running for the big gig. (I wasn't impressed by the character of either candidate the last time.) It has been sad to see McCain ripped in two by the situation he put himself in. Much of the anger he expressed in that last month was probably at himself. I think he will be very glad indeed when this is over.

Obama had the easier task but, even allowing for that, he has run a stunningly good campaign. I think he'll walk this election. On water if necessary. He's not trying to win the popular vote (fat lot of good winning that did Al Gore), he's aiming to sweep the Electoral College. I think he will.

OK, that's who will win (oh, and one last prediction... Obama will do well among white voters, getting a bigger share of them than Bill Clinton got, and all that talk about the Bradley effect will turn out to have been fluff too). But who should win? I don't think novelists should have opinions, especially political opinions. It damages their work, by ruling out certain readings, and closing down ambiguities that should not be closed down. I do have private opinions and preferences, but they are private. And my books do not necessarily share my opinions. So I shall outsource my opinion to someone much older and wiser than me, the very wonderful Alan Abelson, of Barron's (Wall Street's favourite newspaper): "This election pits one candidate who should have been elected eight years ago against one who should be elected eight years hence."

There you go. Fair and balanced.

May the best man win.

Though personally, as a satirist, I would like to get in early, and officially endorse Sarah Palin's 2012 bid for the presidency. She has given so much to us, we have a duty to give something back.

I know, I know, you've already watched it fifteen times, but indulge yourself one last time...

And, above all, on this day of all days, it is your political duty, if you haven't done so already, to click on this link, and then click on everything you see when you get there, with the sound on.

Update on 2008-11-05 04:14 by Julian Gough

The super-duper New York Times interactive map is addictive and delightful. I've been enjoying making my own calls on the states, ahead of the networks and newspapers, by zooming in and trying to work out, county by county, how the tide is flowing. I'll make a call here, for the fun of it: I think Obama will just pip McCain in Indiana. As I type, McCain is only .2% ahead, and there's still a lot of votes to come from Lake County, which contains the city of Gary, which is breaking 2 to 1 for Obama. McCain is winning in the rural counties, but they have largely been counted by now.

And now I'm off to bed, it's nearly 5am in Berlin.

Update on 2008-11-05 04:36 by Julian Gough

Nah, I couldn't go to bed, it's too exciting... Florida looks like a big win for Obama. He's 2% ahead of McCain as I type, but McCain's counties are counted, the big blocks of votes still to come in are all Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward counties, (so, urban - Miami, Fort Lauderdale - and Democrat), and they are going to swing it strongly to Obama.

I really should go to bed, this election is over. Ah, it's a great shame McCain was robbed of the Republican nomination by the Rove/Bush machine in 2000. That really bent American democracy out of shape. And what consequences...

But in 2008, Obama deserves his victory. Here's the bravest and most important speech of the campaign, from either candidate. Character is destiny, and Obama has character.

Update on 2008-11-05 04:54 by Julian Gough

Yes, it's officially over. The networks have called it, and after the Kerry/Bush debacle, they ain't going to be leaping to wild conclusions. Wow. President Obama.

I'm incredibly happy. What a great day for America. What a relief for the world. (What was the global opinion poll result again? 75% of those with an opinion were for Obama?) The number of wounds that this helps to heal... holy cow.

I'm in London this weekend, for the Battle of Ideas

Almost forgot to mention... I'll be chatting about writers and cities at the Battle of Ideas in London on Saturday.

There's going to be a short film, Kolkata City of Literature, directed by Soumyak Kanti De Biswas and Tanaji Dasgupta, followed by a discussion with Professor Swapan Chakravorty, Gerry Feehily, and me.

The chat (or battle)  is called Text and the City: what is a city of literature?, and will be chaired by Tiffany Jenkins. For more on exactly what it is, where it is, and when we kick off, click here.

God Bless the U.S.A.

With only a fistful of days to go, well yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts about the US election but, you know, who cares about my thoughts on the US election. Here's a clip that doesn't contain any footage of Barack Obama, John McCain, or Sarah Palin. (OK it does contain footage of Joe Biden, but hey, perfection is for Allah.)

And, wonky sound and all, this clip contains that strange, sideways something about the USA that makes me like the place so much. I'll warn you, if you're European - this clip is corny; it is cutesy (and the sound sucks); but get past that.

To make a clarifying statement which is not as cynical as it seems: America has the potential to be the country it thinks it is.

I have often found myself repeating W.H Auden's lines (below), from "On The Circuit", as I fly away from another astonishing, infuriating, sickening, exhilarating, inspiring encounter with America. I wonder do the candidates find themselves murmuring something similar sometimes...

"Another morning comes: I see

Dwindling below me on the plane,

The roofs of one more audience

I shall not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although

I don't remember which was which:

God bless the USA, so large,

So friendly, and so rich."

Pat Kavanagh is dead

I have just heard that Pat Kavanagh died this morning. This is really shocking news. She was my first literary agent, and
without her help I might not have been able to survive as a writer. When she signed me up as a client, I was living on less than the dole, and was very close to the end of my tether. She believed in me, she found me an audience, and when we did part it was amicably, for the best of reasons, and with regret, I think, on both sides. We had kept in loose but friendly contact, and I had been vaguely looking forward to having lunch with her in London again, some time... And now, damn, too late, too late.

She was a truly extraordinary woman, and will be hugely missed by so many people. Her husband, Julian Barnes, must feel cut in half. They were one of the great couples of our era of equality. It was an immense pleasure to see them together.

Her charisma filled the room, she was electric. This is hard to take in...

So, what happens next?

Well, like I said, blogging about seeing value in some areas of the equity markets last Friday "would have made me look fierce cute for a few hours." Markets go up a record breaking amount Monday - and back down nearly the same amount Wednesday. And the US markets give investors whiplash Thursday (way down, then way, way up in the last hour.)

I'm not going to bother talking about these immense shifts, because they are largely noise, not signal. They're the meaningless volatility you get around around major economic transition points. A huge one-day leap does not mean everything is going to be OK, and a huge drop does not necessarily mean it's the end of the world.

The Plain People of the Internet: What transition?

Well, the crisis is finally transferring from the financial economy to the real economy.

The Plain People of the Internet: What will that mean?

Some class of a recession. Less credit means less borrowing, less investing, less money, less jobs. We will save more, and spend less, because we will have to. Which will be good for us in the long term, but bloody painful in the short term. No chocolate on our biscuits for a while. And for a lot of people, no biscuits at all.

The Plain People of the Internet: Will the real economy collapse as much as the ghostly financial economy has?

Jesus, I hope not. The shadow banking system (which grew up outside the regulated banking system over the past decade), has been completely destroyed. The real economy will not be completely destroyed.

Within the financial sector, entire business models, an entire worldview, and an associated set of incredibly stupid but almost universally believed economic theories, have been annihilated. Basically, the financial sector has lost its money, its job, its house and its religion. The real economy will do much better than that. It might get quite a nasty kicking, but I am strangely optimistic about the real economy in the medium term, say the next few years. (Short term, sure, it's going to be horrible.)

The Plain People of the Internet: Will the markets fall further?

Yes. At least 20% and almost certainly much more.

The Plain People of the Internet: Will house prices fall much further?

Yes. US house prices will fall at least another 15%, and almost certainly much more, unless there is a massive government intervention in the mortgage market (on top of its recent interventions in the financial markets). The next US president will be inheriting a foreclosure catastrophe. Millions are set to lose their homes, so some major further initiatives are likely. This is a very dynamic situation, and it's hard to predict how it will turn out. The nature of the way in which mortgages were sliced, diced, packaged and sold on makes the problem very difficult to solve.

Oh, and Irish house prices will have their arse kicked much harder than that. There will be parts of the country where you'll be picking up houses for a few grand in another couple of years. I've seen ghost estates, built on spec in ridiculous places all over Ireland, that noone will ever live in.

The Plain People of the Internet: Is it the end of the world?

No. It's just going to be the big, bad recession the West should have had after the dot-com crash, but put off for years - and made much worse - with low, low interest rates and loose, loose money. (OK, if I wanted to be fair and balanced I'd mention a bunch of fascinating technical stuff about how the Chinese government stopped the country's dollar income reaching the workers, and diverted it straight back to the US instead... but that stuff gives people a headache, and needs a post of its own.)

Bear in mind, a country cannot get rich through its people selling houses to each other at ever higher prices. The ongoing collapse in house prices makes people with huge mortgages worse off. But it makes a heck of a lot of people without houses better off. Rents will go down, first-time buyers won't have to sell a kidney and bankrupt their parents to buy a dodgy flat, etc.

In fact, people, on average, are happier in a recession (as long as they don't lose their job or their house). There's a lot less status anxiety, and people appreciate what they have, rather than wishing for what they have not. And pop music always improves in recessions. So it's going to be great!

How To Invest In A Great Bear

Well, this is the post that I wrote on Friday, but didn't publish, because I hadn't time to finish it before my flight to Ireland...

"If I had invested all my money from my first novel, Juno & Juliet, in the main Irish stock index, the ISEQ General Index, back in late 2000/ early 2001 when I sold the book to the UK and US, I would now, after eight years fully invested, be down anywhere between 30% and 50%, depending on which months I'd put the money in. If I'd invested all the installments of my advances as soon as I'd got them (on signature, delivery and publication), it'd probably average out at a 40% loss, after eight years. So I'm glad I didn't listen to my Allied Irish Bank adviser. He also wanted me to plunge into tech stocks. I was a naive innocent in financial matters back then, compared to now, but I wasn't retarded. "Er, why would I invest in what is clearly a bubble at what is probably the peak?" I asked him. (I think the bubble popped about a month later). He made some noises with his mouth, ("Ah, well, er... you...um"),  but he didn't actually answer. Putting my money into the Nasdaq would have lost me up to 55%. Again, averaged out, probably a loss to date of roughly 40 to 45 %.

What did I do with my advance? I spent it on food and books and chocolate. And bought a couple of nice paintings, which I still have and which make me very happy. And lived in London for six months, and the US for a few months, and had many romantic dinners with my beloved.

However, if I had any money now, I think some value is at last, for the first time in my investing life, beginning to surface"

...Well, that's where the post ended, no full stop because I hadn't finished it. Really REALLY wish I'd posted it anyway, given that on the fecking Monday we had the biggest ever one-day points rise in the US stock indices, and quite a few others world wide.

Not that a one-day rise means anything (or a one-day fall, for that matter), but it would have made me look fierce cute for a few hours.

No, I'm not calling the bottom of the market, this market is now too nutty to call. I'm just pointing out that some stocks (and some municipal bonds, some corporate bonds, and a few other things) are now at good prices for a brave longterm investor. But the wild ride in the markets will continue for quite a while yet.

I'm typing this in Tipperary on a very slow machine, so I can't be arsed putting in all the links and a photo. I'm not even going to spellcheck it. Normal highly erratic service will be resumed from Berlin shortly...

The War Against Icelandic Bank Terror

I am extremely pleased to see that the sweeping powers of Britain's Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act - passed in 2001 to keep Britain safe from global terror - are being used to defend Britain's shores from the lethal threat of Icelandic bank accounts.

Although lawyers, the Financial Times, and other lily-livered defeatists who would capitulate in the face of Icelandic Bank Terror are less pleased:

"Lawyers said the Treasury’s unprecedented use of anti-terror powers to freeze Landsbanki’s estimated £4bn UK financial assets could create knock-on problems for other institutions with which the failed lender was doing business.

The freezing order was issued under the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act that was passed after the September 11 attacks the same year."

More news from the latest front in the global war on terror here...

We must remain vigilant. This is just the start. Iceland's sinister banking sector may have sleeper units all over the UK. We cannot show weakness. We cannot show mercy. I hereby call on Gordon Brown to authorise an SAS raid on Björk's Post Office Savings Account.

Look at her. Quite clearly planning to destroy our free markets by unleashing weapons of mass destruction. Quick, stop her! She's reaching for her piggy bank! We haven't a moment to lose.

And cancel the Oyster Cards of Sigur Rós while you're at it. You wouldn't know where they'd be going...

My Thoughts On The New, Steam-Powered, Horseless, Electronic Book!

If you’re interested in my thoughts on the future of the electronic book, I’m quoted in today’s Irish Times, towards the end of this piece by the mighty Conor Pope. (And how quaint “electronic book” will seem in a few years! It’ll read like “horseless carriage” does now…)

Sample quote from me:

"I can't see how you can control the distribution of words. Good writers could end up with huge readership but they will probably have to find new ways of earning a living from it, which is fine. Good writers were never likely to make much money. Yeats never made more than £200 a year from his writing until he won the Nobel Prize."