Four Gates to the City

Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues—wild and free—that stopped at the city walls.

In time the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit. Some claim that the barriers do not exist, and disparage them. Although they themselves can penetrate the new walls with no effort, their spirits (which, also, they claim do not exist) cannot, and are left like orphans around the periphery.

To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through one of the new gates. They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they are tests, mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice. There once was a map, now long gone, one of the ancient charts upon which colorful animals sleep or rage. Those who saw it said that in its illuminations were figures and symbols of the gates. The east gate was that of acceptance of responsibility, the south gate that of the desire to explore, the west gate that of devotion to beauty, and the north gate that of selfless love. But they were not believed. It was said that a city with entryways like these could not exist, because it would be too wonderful. Those who decide such things decided that whoever had seen the map had only imagined it, and the entire matter was forgotten, treated as if it were a dream, and ignored. This, of course, freed it to live forever.

— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

I was fortunate to have Winter's Tale published shortly after I arrived, and while I was still finding my way around New York City. It was a good and reliable guide and map to the overwhelming engine and labyrinth that is eight million souls swarming together on the Hudson River, especially for a poor and naive immigrant from the Western wastes.

Years later, knowing how much I loved the book, my young daughter presented me the very copy I had bought in 1983 for Christmas, having scrawled "For Daddy Love" along with her and her brother's names in colored pen on its cloth cover boards.

One can have worse souvenirs, guides, and ticket stubs from the chief journey of one's life.

© 2010 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

The Amtal Rule

One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and, if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it, because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning. When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy: I don't know, But it is you who are on trial.

— A.A. Milne

One's character, and courage, are tested so many times in one's life, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, usually unannounced, and often without our even being aware of it. I wonder how many of us have failed—or passed—such a test in ignorance.

And I wonder if anyone or anything is keeping score.

© 2010 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Retainers of Fluidity

Of course, it's bad to be a criminal. Everyone knows that, and can swear that it's true. Criminals mess up the world. But they are, as well, retainers of fluidity. In fact, one might make the case that New York would not have shone without its legions of contrary devils polishing the lights of goodness with their inexplicable opposition and resistance. It might even be said that criminals are a necessary component of the balanced equation which steadily and beautifully eats up all the time that is thrown upon its steely back. They are the sugar and alcohol of a city, a red flash in the mosaic, lightning on a hot night. So was Pearly.

— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

Yeah, well, maybe not.¹

I can think of legions of pasty-faced 20-something hedge fund and proprietary traders who would love to style themselves as something as transgressive and oppositional as criminals. Most, much to their unknowing and likely never-to-be-known chagrin, are just nerdy parasites on the monetary surplus of a fat and lazy society.

Not that I'm judging, or anything.

Hahahahahahaha...

¹ After all, there is a difference between retainers of fluiditity and people who just retain fluid. Q.v. the nebbishes at Goldman Sachs.

© 2010 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Weekend Interlude

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

— Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

I knew I left that damn corkscrew somewhere.

© 2010 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Another Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

In the random, serendipitous sort of discovery one—okay: me, I admit it; perhaps you never do or have done such a stupid thing in your entire fucking life—makes while skimming about the internet like a mosquito sniffing out carbon monoxide emissions at a picnic on a summer night, your Dedicated Prosodist stumbled upon a clever little site which professes to analyze writing samples and compare them to the style of a famous writer. The site is entitled, entirely appropriately if somewhat awkwardly, “I Write Like.”

Naturally, visions of grandeur, immensely lucrative book deals, and book launch parties best described as orgiastic bacchanals danced before my eager eyes as I cut and pasted a few random paragraphs of prose from these pages into IWL’s magic box and clicked “Analyze.” Sadly, as someone or other once proclaimed about their first sexual experience, the anticipation greatly exceeded the actual event.

First to pop up was that literary barnburner and perennial stalwart atop The New York Times Teenage Girls’ Vampire and Sublimated Masturbatory Fiction Bestsellers List, H.P. Lovecraft. Who?

Well, ol’ H.P. was a primo generator of “weird fiction,” and his

guiding literary principle was what he termed “cosmicism” or “cosmic horror”, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity.

While I can acknowledge that my readers gamble with their sanity each time they read something here, and I concede that my clotted prose can often be fairly described as “weird fiction,” I am nonetheless saddened that IWL’s first approximation of my prose was to an author whose estate will have been lucky to have sold more than 25 copies of his back catalog in the past 24 months. This was not a good start toward the classic mahogany runabout I was planning to put my book royalties toward.

The next block of text I analyzed returned the far more satisfying result of Vladimir Nabokov, who at least has the advantage of titillating the adventurous and scandalizing the stuffy. But the comparison was unfair, since the prose I chose to analyze was selected from my recent panegyric to dirty old men and their lust for nubile, underannuated lolitas. Even I have to admit that is cheating.

So I collected another few paragraphs of a more general nature and plugged them into IWL’s black box. Here the result was more interesting, if no more supportive of my hopeful visions of a mailbox groaning under the weight of obscenely large royalty checks. The famous writer whose reputation IWL so cavalierly chose to permanently damage by association with Your Lowly Solipsist’s feeble emanations was none other than David Foster Wallace. Poor, sad, suicidal man.

I am not familiar with most of Mr. Wallace’s work, although I did enjoy his trenchant-graduation-speech-turned-excessively-short-publishing-event Water over the course of 15 minutes spent waiting for a pre-ordered copy of X-Men No. 3,274 to be delivered from the Classic Literature section of Barnes and Noble. I am sure his other work likewise merits the frabjous praise heaped upon it by all and sundry, but I am an important investment banker, with limited time. I’ll just wait for the Cliffs Notes version of Infinite Jest to come out.

Although, I have to admit I admire Mr. Wallace’s program and turn of phrase, if Wikipedia reports it aright:

According to Wallace, “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”

I might say the same about what I try to accomplish here, imperfectly, on a very occasional basis.

* * *

That being said, I just plugged the preceding paragraphs into IWL’s transmogrification device, and out spit H.P. Lovecraft again.

Fuckers.

© 2010 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.