Financial variables are a way of accounting for what’s going on in the real world. But the real world itself starts to react to financial variables if they’re extreme enough. And it’s funny—the financial system, all the big guns that have been wheeled out by the government and the monetary authorities, have in the last couple weeks kind of stabilized what gets called the “guts” of the financial market. There is short-term credit, there is a certain degree of lending between banks, corporates are able to get their commercial paper rolled over, for the most part. So it’s functioning—in a much reduced fashion, there are surprises and shocks every day, but it hasn’t ground to a complete halt. But now you are seeing the effect on the real economy. So what’s happening? We have the largest one-month drop in payrolls in twenty-five years. You’re starting to see real job loss. You’re starting to see actual companies going out of business, or high-profile default. [...]

Some of that impact is not a direct impact of the financial markets, but it’s the hangover from the misallocation of resources, which is the same thing that’s causing problems in the financial markets. Whereas a pure impact of the financial markets is where people look at their 401(k)s and say, “Gosh, I don’t want to spend.” That’s a pure impact of financial variables causing people’s attitudes to change, changing their risk tolerance, their propensity to consume.

WHY WERE PEOPLE HELPING US? It couldn’t only have been because we were lying to them. In truth, they must have been doing it for the same reason we were doing it — because they wanted to. They were lonely people who wanted to get out of their apartments; they were skilled people whose skills were being channeled into corporate or otherwise uninteresting work. We were all in our mid- to late twenties — we had seen a bit of the world and knew we didn’t like it. We had seen others make things and knew we could make them just as well if not better. We had seen some of the people we most admired come out in favor of the invasion of Iraq, or get hoodwinked by various transparently phony cultural projects, or start writing down to some imagined audience, rather than up to the audience that actually existed (or so we believed). We did not have a clear political project (we were “leftists,” but there were many things we didn’t agree on), but we did have a clear cultural project, to try to connect our politics with our literary tastes. It’s not clear, though, that the specifics of this project were what interested other people, or us. Often it felt like simply the idea of a project — any project — was enough. It was fun and interesting and sometimes incredibly frustrating to work with these particular people. And it was interesting to try to build an independent cultural institution where one had not been before.

We moved to my next profound question: What do you know that no one else knows? My premise was that good writing depends on a kind of specialized knowledge—whether of some process, or some relationship, or some situation or event. If people would just tell us what actually happened! We would know so much; we would learn so much. Of Kafka’s commitment to telling the whole truth about himself and his life, Elias Canetti wrote: “A human being who offers himself to knowledge so completely is, under any circumstances, an incomparable stroke of luck.” We do not have to be Kafka—but we can at least tell one truth, or two, about our lives. As the editor of a literary magazine, I had read so many “stories”—fiction or nonfiction, it didn’t matter. They were made-up, and the more made-up they were, the more conventional. Where truth was left out or kept general, cliché filled the void. The mistake made over and over was to search for the “universal,” when (this is itself a cliché, maybe, but still) it was the specific stuff that readers wanted to know. But of course it’s not so easy to figure out what the specific stuff is. One’s life contains so many things; how are you to know which of these things is distinctive?

So they saved! Mark cheated, a little. They had a 4Runner, a present from his father, and Mark would drive it to the big Path-mark on Northern Boulevard. Once there, he achieved the serenity of a Zen master. The people of Queens ran around this way and that, their shopping carts like externalized stomachs. Others had coupons and carefully they held them, like counterfeiting experts, up to the items they hoped to save on, to make sure they were the ones. Mark never did. He had emptied himself of any attachment to specific foods. The only items he saw were the items already on sale. In this way he kept his calm, he tried new foods, and he saved.

They kept a budget. At the beginning of the week they gave themselves seventy dollars for food and transport. Impossible? Basically impossible, yes, but not if you never go for “drinks” at a bar, never walk into a restaurant, and never ever buy an item of clothing not at the Salvation Army on Spring Street and Lafayette. Sasha herself was perpetually amazed. “I see girls in there,” she reported, “they have three-hundred-dollar shoes, but they are looking for a jacket, a blouse, they would like to look like me.”