by
Karen Ho
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At the end of the year that's how you tell who's doing the best job - who's made the most money for the firm. And that's also, then, how much money you will make in your bonus. And so when it's all judged on that, you get a skewed version of what life is like because then you judge everybody on how much money they make. And it's not even your fault because that's how you are judged at work every day. So a lot of it is just that you are a product of your environment. So then out in the real world [where] people aren't making that much money, then they don't really matter. They don't really count, so you can treat the guy that gives you coffee as a lesser citizen.
money as a flattening and dehumanising device
Investment banking practices both promoted a surge of predatory lending to originate the loans and created a market to buy the bonds based on them. Bolstered by rising housing prices, low interest rates, and a new worldview of "refinancing" such that predatory and unsound loans could easily be refinanced (often with hidden fees) at the end of the year or two with a higher home valuation, Wall Street investment banks rationalized their behavior. They also claimed that their ingenuity was finally breaking down barriers of race and class, which the traditional "redlining" commercial banker was unable to do with his simple, "vanilla" toolkit of conventional loans that lacked the advantage of global securitization. Again, the discourse of globalization was used: Wall Street investment bankers invoked their creation of a global market of "opportunity finance" and of extending home ownership to those left out of the global market. For example, Corey Fisher, an African American male managing director at Vanguard Investments, subtly linked Wall Street's creativity and aggressiveness with "expanding the pie." By focusing on the best way to make money, the new Wall Street challenged the elaborate and exclusionary protocols traditionally associated with elite banking, creating a new "high-yield" credit market and thus opening monetary access to anyone deserving:
Wall Street has helped to improve the efficiency of the economy, ... they have gotten rid of certain middlemen that were highly inefficient players. These inefficient middlemen were the bankers, the commercial lenders. Their pricing and the servicing that was built into that wound up extracting a cost that was exorbitant. What has been beautiful is - and this is one of the things that was good about the high-yield market - is that regardless of what your credit rating is, there is a market for you out there [...] frankly, you would not have gotten a loan from the banks [...] Nobody should be denied access to credit within reasonable means ... The cost of that capital should be a function of the earnings capacity and the cash flow capacity of the enterprise. That is the direction that we are moving in. What that does, from my standpoint, very selfishly, is it allows and other people of color and women to be able to participate in this marketplace.
genius: find reasons why the marketised approach to housing is clearly failing too serve marginalised people, then turn that into an advertisement for your even more marketised approach which has some short-term benefits but huge long-term cost
[...] I've published one slim volume of verse and some essays, but so has every other semiliterate writer in Cambridge. It's like owning a herd of cattle in my home state of Texas, publishing a book is.
[...] Do I remember Puff the Magic Dragon, he wants to know. Do I? On my fun scale, it ranks with the Nuremberg Trials. [...]
But I rounded each corner believing rescue would show up. [...]
(What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.)
when she tries to walk to a party and ends up lost
He sat behind a desk sprawled with papers, hands interleaved before him as if by a mortician. He closed the door behind me, then steered me to a chair facing his desk. I figured he'd decided against recommending me, having found the poems and essays I'd sent him in advance dim-witted. I felt oafish before him. No sooner did he sit down than he bobbed back to his feet like he'd forgotten something. He walked to my side and--with a kind of slow ceremony I did nothing to stop--lifted my T-shirt till I was staring down at my own braless chest. With his trembling and sweaty hand, he cupped first one breast, then the other, saying, By God, they're real!
Such was the interview that landed me in a school far beyond my meager qualifications.
horrifying story but so skillfully told
[...] I was seventeen, thin and malleable as coat hanger wire, and Mother was the silky shadow stitched to my feet that I nonetheless believed I could outrun. [...]
[...] There was an internal click as an actual idea of Cassirer's broke through. The sentence that had so addled me suddenly made sense [...]:
The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language.
He meant that words shaped our realities, our perceptions, giving them an authority God had for other generations. The indecipherable sentence had been circumnavigating my insides like a bluebottle fly for a week, and at last I got hold of it: words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion--not drugs, not boys. That's why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards.
from The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
[...] Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow.
Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings--sorrow, fury, joy--I had their junior counterparts--anxiety, irritation, excitement.
Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you're born to [...] Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they'll try--without letup--to break you. Where I come from, house guests have to know you've sweated over a stove, for sweat is how care is shown. At the Whitbreads', preparations are both slapdash and immaculate. You toss some melba toast on a plate next to a fragrant St. Andre triple-creme cheese, or on Christmas Eve, half a pound of caviar casually flipped into a silver urn.
It's taken me so much effort just to do as medium-shitty as I've heretofore done. Just to drop out of college, stay alive, and have my teeth taken care of.
when she first visits Walt's family