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A weekly letter from the founding editor of The Browser. Correspondence and criticism gratefully received and always read: robert@thebrowser.com This week: Maigret's Memoirs and other books I have been reading; David Bowie and Angie Bowie; Sam Bankman-Fried and cryptocurrencies.
BOOKS THAT that I have been reading with pleasure: The Delusions Of Certainty, by Siri Hustvedt. Reflections on the mind-body problem. The word "brilliant" is over-used, not least by me, but really, every word of this shines. By now my copy is almost all highlights. Here are some of them:
— “We are born of someone, but we do not die in pairs”
— “If mental problems are brain problems and not mind problems, why do we have psychiatrists?"
— "If my mind goes, I go. If I lose my leg, I am still here"
— "There is no thought without precedent" Less Than One (selected essays), by Joseph Brodsky. Has anybody ever been so clever and so funny? Yes, of course. James Fenton, for one, and I think of Fenton as a second Brodsky. Brodsky's essay on Anna Akhmatova is a miniature miracle. The poetic effects which Brodsky identifies in Akhmatova's work are too subtle for my mind and ear, but just to hear Brodsky describing them as a magician might describe the workings of a prize illusion is a delight in itself. Again, lots of highlights, but I have transferred the first waves of them over to The Browser Reader, so please do look in on them there. Maigret's Memoirs, by Georges Simenon. I cannot believe that I have been reading Maigret books all my adult life and yet I have only just got to this one — the capstone, the synthesis, the best of the lot. Great fun to read, and a technical tour de force. Would it were three times as long. Here is Maigret's world as seen by Maigret himself — with a mirror-image of Simenon dropped right into it. I rather feel that now if I go back and re-read the Maigret stories I will enjoy them all over again in a more knowing way. Country: The Twisted Roots Of Rock And Roll, by Nick Tosches. After discovering that the working title of this book was Living Legends And Dying Metaphors, I had no choice but to read on. Country will not be to everyone's taste, and quite often it is not to mine; I would have deleted plenty of words from the proofs given the chance. Tosches has drunk and seen the spider and he never stops talking about it. But the thing is, there is enough truth in Tosches's version of his own legend to make his constant preening at least forgivable, and this is a book that nobody else could (or would, or should) have written.
DAVID BOWIE & Angie Bowie The search for a favourite video to post on The Browser's Sunday Supplement takes me down all sorts of rabbit-holes; this past week it brought me face to face with David Bowie's performance of Paul Simon's America at the Concert For New York City in 2001, soon after 9/11. I don't have the words for the way I felt when I began to watch this little video of David Bowie singing America to the accompaniment of a musical box. Music moves me far more than books or paintings do, and this was an extreme case. I am still hearing the song in my head, and feeling the tow of a strong form of nostalgia — the sort of nostalgia for which recollection is no palliative and only the thing itself can make life right again. I have reconciled myself to the fact that it will never be the 1970s again and that I will never be twenty again — the two propositions being hard to separate. But why can can I not live in a world where it is always the 1970s and I am always twenty? If we are going to go to the trouble of having a world at all, why can it not be that one? After losing myself in America I wanted to lose myself in a book; or, more exactly, I wanted to lose myself, and a book seemed the safest option. We have art so that we may not die of truth. A Kindle search for books touching on David Bowie took me to Angie Bowie's memoir, Backstage Passes, and luckily it was free on Kindle Unlimited or I would have passed it by. I judge books by their covers, and the cover of Backstage Passes was signalling something like "ghostwritten in a fortnight from newspaper clippings". Gosh I was wrong. Backstage Passes is a good book by all of my measures: Strong authorial voice, well paced, full of incident, and with a view of the world quite unlike any view that I have encountered elsewhere. Angie Bowie gives a clear-eyed account of an embryonic talent discovering its own genius, in the course of which she shows how much of that process is contingent. Small things — this haircut, that interview, this meeting, that demo-tape — keep on going right, and keep on turning into bigger and bigger things that go right, until at some point we slip the surly bonds of Earth and we are making our own reality. There is quite a lot of sex in the book, but so there was in the life, and it is central to the narrative. I imagine that if you open Backstage Passes without any prior admiration for David Bowie, you may think that I have lost my sense of proportion. But if you do have that disposition, please do look in on this book, and do tell me whether it is as good as I claim here, or whether it just caught me in a moment of weakness.
CRYPTOCURRENCIES & Sam Bankman-Fried Thank you for a lively correspondence on Michael Lewis and Sam Bankman-Fried after last week's letter. I am particularly grateful to RH, MB, PCO, GC, SC, GW, and PG for their excellent points, with none of which I disagree. But evidently I gave the impression in my previous letter that I thought Bankman-Fried had no case to answer, and that the Effective Altruism movement was altruistic, and my apologies for not having weighed my words more carefully. To a first approximation, I sense now that people feel personally angry with Sam Bankman-Fried in much the way that I felt personally angry with many investment bankers in 2008. Had I understood this when I wrote last week's letter, I would have expressed myself differently. I do not feel anger towards Bankman-Fried on this occasion because I think that he was remarkably open about what he was doing. He was having a crazy ride on the back of cryptocurrencies while acknowledging publicly that cryptocurrencies were collective delusions; insanire emptor. And if more detail of the Bankman-Fried business model was required, he was in the habit of saying that he would bet the future of humanity on the toss of a coin, and go on betting until he lost. I know that Bankman-Fried is being charged now with lying and misleading and concocting eight sets of books; and I know that there are laws against these things which are good laws and which must be enforced; and I know that we cannot let people create havoc just because they declare that such is their intention or because they have a weird view of the world. An example must therefore be made of Bankman-Fried, to deter similar adventurers — and also to stop Bankman-Fried himself, if exonerated, from going straight back into exactly the same business, closely followed (I imagine) by the same chancers who in the current court case are categorised as his victims. As to the court case, while eight balance sheets does sound like seven too many, I find it hard to believe that any balance sheet for FTX, at any time, could have been any more than wishful thinking. I count myself a cryptocurrency sympathiser by virtue of my belief that cryptocurrencies can have some utility value. But even so, I do not think they have any intrinsic value. Any value placed upon them above zero is transactional (but not non-existent). The balance sheet of a crypto company is an attempt to put a number on how other people value the company's assets and liabilities at a halting-point in an infinitely regressive Keynesian beauty contest. I do not think that Bankman-Fried is in court primarily because he lied; I think he is in court primarily because he failed. I suspect that the whole FTX affair may (as Bankman-Fried might put it) have net positive utility, insofar as it decimates the popular credibility of cryptocurrencies and of wunderkinds while doing no great damage to anybody save for willing participants in the cryptocurrency bubble. My constructive suggestion is that cryptocurrencies be treated in law much as gambling debts and claims were treated under British law prior to the Gambling Act of 2005. Gambling contracts were not enforceable in law, but were left to the prudence of the parties who made them.
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