The more I learn about financial workings, the more I understand how people feel about money. (p.239)

=

I decided, in the end, I had been taken for a ride, a view I still think is strictly correct. I wasn’t sure how many millions of dollars I had made for Salomon Brothers, but by any fair measure I deserved much more than ninety thousand dollars. By the standards of our monopoly money business, ninety grand was like being on welfare. I felt cheated, genuinely indignant. How else could I feel? I looked around me and saw people getting much more when they hadn’t generated a penny of the revenues themselves.

“You don’t get rich in this business,” said Alexander when I complained privately to him, “you only attain new levels of relative poverty.”

=

I like this part – encapsulates brilliantly the many times I faced the same situations (as Blue describes of her father)

“You kind of remind me of that boat.”

I looked at him. His face was about as cruel as a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off (and he’d had a haircut so his Panama-hat hair didn’t slant quite so low over his forehead) but his remark still made me – well, suddenly, unable to stand him. He had likened me to a diminutive vessel manned by faceless dots of brown and yellow – poorly manned at that, because in a matter of seconds (if one took into account the oiled swell curled to strike down with vengeance), the thing was about to go under and that brown smudge on the horizon, that unwitting passing ship, wasn’t coming to rescue the dots anytime soon.

It was the cause of many of Dad’s outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi. It was the grounds for many of his university colleagues going from nameless, harmless peers to individuals he referred to as anathemas and bete noires. They’d made the mistake of abridging Dad, abbreviating Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, watering Dad down, telling Dad How It Was (and getting it all wrong).

This took me a bit longer than the first book, 44 Scotland Street, partly because the characters were not as fresh to me as before.

However, I found that as I went along, it was like getting part philosophy school, part reminiscence, part opinion, part fiction – a nice combination. From the last chapter, 104. Preparing Dinner:

“… But we need to remind ourselves. We need to renew that bond between ourselves and them, our great-great-grandparents, or whatever they were. It’s what makes us a people. It’s the knowledge of what they went through, what they were, that brings us together. …

… Oh, there are plenty of people who would be quite happy to see all that disappear. What do you think globalisation is all about? Who gains if we’re all reduced to compliant consumers, all with the same tastes, all prepared to accept decisions which are made a distance, by people whom we can’t censure or control? …

… I want to live in a community with an authentic culture.

… I want to have a culture that is the product of where I am – that engages with the issues that concern me.

… And if I ever turn on a television set, which I try to avoid if at all possible, it only gets worse. All that crudity, that dumbing-down. Inane, mindless game shows. People laughing at the humiliation and anger of others. The most basic, triumphalist materialism, too.

Two of my favourite passages, partly because it sounds as though Pratchett got into my head:

(i) There were big mountains around the Hub. But the ones towering above the temple didn’t all have names, because there was (sic) simply too many of them. Only gods have enough time to name all the pebbles on a beach, but gods don’t have the patience.

Copperhead was small enough to be big enough to have a name. Lobsang awoke and saw its crooked peak, towering above the lesser local mountains, outlined against the sunrise.

Sometimes the gods have no taste at all. They allow sunrises and sunsets in ridiculous pink and blue hues that any professional artist would dismiss as the work of some enthusiastic amateur who’d never looked at a real sunset. This was one of those sunrises. It was the kind of sunrise a man rises and looks at and says, “No real sunrise could paint the sky Surgical Appliance Pink.”

Nevertheless, it was beautiful. * * But not tasteful.

(ii) A horse walked out of the darkness. Some toast racks had more flesh.

“I’ve been thinking,” said a voice. “Maybe there are things worth putting up a fight for.”

“And they are—?” said Pestilence, looking around.

“Salad-cream sandwiches. You just can’t beat them. That tang of permitted emulsifiers? Marvelous.”

“Hah! You’re Famine, then?” said the Angel of the Iron Book. It fumbled with the heavy pages again.

What, what, what is this nonsense of “salad cream”?* shouted the Auditor.

ANGER, thought Death. A POWERFULEMOTION.

“Do I like salad cream?” said a voice in the dark. A second, female voice replied:

“No dear, it gives you hives.” * If you live in a country where the tradition calls for mayonnaise, just don’t ask. Just don’t.

Not one of Gibson’s better efforts, I think. There are entire sections that seem a bit unnecessary!

Wouldn’t personally recommend this. Getting the most out of Public Enemies needs cerebral audience involvement. It’s not fast-paced, so it needs to be pulled by character development and storyline. There’s an old docu feel but modern cinematography – the shakiness can make some nauseated – wouldn’t recommend to an actionseeker. Many close-up shots so sit further from the screen. Gunfire lighting and nostalgic sound feels authentic, but that’s always a side thrill. Low wattage Depp still intense.

I’m making it a point to just read this one every morning for at least a week, to get through most of it. Don’t want to leave it to the end of the day, where I’m usually too sleepy! I really like it so far, and gels well with the other stuff that’s on my list.

I don’t normally read memoirs like these, but I found it eloquent and touching enough to finish. I like how Bayley presented these vignettes of experience with restrained sentimentality, though I would have preferred if there was less mention of his own writing.

If we have a daimon, a genius, an indwelling spirit that spurs some of us to great heights, what of those that seem to live normal, everyday lives? Can there be a call to mediocrity? Yes, says Hillman, there is a call – but not in the way that we think. We denigrate the mediocre but that is so when we generalize – for who can tell us the character of each person making up this mass of “average”, those who live without shining so brightly?

“So let’s clear away a typical mistake: identifying vocation only with a specific kind of job, rather than also with the performance in the job,” says Hillman (p.252)

Recall persons you know, who seem so average but for a particular set of values, attitudes, actions which make them really stand out. In my mind, they are those who seem particularly true to themselves. That is living to what the daimon prods – theirs is a calling not to fame, but a call to character.

Does this sound like a cop-out for the unstriving? “To be at all is to be defined by a form, a style,” but “for the soul the idea of mediocrity is meaningless… Let us not confuse a particular gift – like Menuhin’s for the violin, or Teller’s for physics, or Ford’s for mechanics – with the call. The talent is only a piece of the image…” (p.250)

While reading, I realized that the very idea of calling had in my mind formed as an antithesis to the content, measured life. Probably because those who I have known or read spoke of calling as something that for some reason opposed what they were, yet couldn’t help but obey. And often, at the cost of comfort or wellbeing. Hillman turns this on its head, saying

“Calling becomes a calling to life, rather than imagined in conflict with life. Calling to honesty rather than to success, to caring and mating, to service and struggle for the sake of living. This view offers a revision of vocation not only in the lives of women or as viewed by women; it offers another idea of calling altogether, in which life is the work.” (p. 255, emphasis mine).

Those who seem to have been doomed by a “mediocre daimon” (can there be such a thing?), or an “average” genius, he says “we are unable to estimate them at all.”

“As long as we regard people in terms of earning power or specific expertise, we do not see their character. Our lens has been ground to one average prescription that is best suited for spotting freaks.” (p.255)

Finished this in four days, couldn’t put it down and stayed up until 5am for two nights actually.

I like this because it doesn’t go overboard in describing the time (the Middle Ages), the architecture (the story centres on cathedral-building) and the people (spans generations). The storyline is fluid, and mixes politics, hope, religion, war, romance and architecture. I knew I would like it – as I generally like these kinds of books, like Foucault’s Pendulum, Name of the Rose – but I think those who haven’t an interest in period literature would still be interested.

Inside this book are characters which I loved to hate – and those that I realised, by the middle of it, had started to admire. It’s been some time since any novel I’ve read has led me to be less than ambivalent about the characters.