Odds and Ends

It’s been a while, dear reader, since my last post and I hope you are still out there. I have an explanation and some offerings to make amends.

Thirty Years Give or Take: Finis

With encouragement and a lot of help from my friends at the UNC Law School Center for Banking and Finance, I am working on a second installment of my work life memoir, Thirty Years, Give or Take. This year’s installment will be about my attempts to regulate payday and mortgage lending. It will be a compilation and revision of posts previously published on this site together with some additions and corrections. Once completed, that will be it for my take on the Financial Crisis. It’s sobering that “my crisis” is now more than a decade behind us and has been succeeded by (depending on your definition) two or three others. As my life partner, muse and editor asked recently about the memoir, “This is it, right?” Yup.

World Cup

Once every four years, I get “World Cup fever” and this year is no exception. I know that soccer (football to purists) is not for every taste but to me it’s mesmerizing in the same way that the NBA of my youth was (think classic games of the Bob Cousey Celtics or Bill Bradley / Clyde Fraser Knicks). Finesse, ball control, movement without the ball. Like live action chess. While a lot of play this year was pretty ragged, and there were a thousand wails of unfairness (as usual), the best team won. Spain exemplified the factors I mentioned above. Beautiful play. If they had a scorer like Haaland or Mbappe, it wouldn’t have been close. But if Spain had Haaland or Mbappe, I guess it wouldn’t be Spain.

And so, the World Cup is now over, leaving me with vistas of free time. For what it’s worth, I think the US was (with a couple of exceptions) an excellent host country. FIFA’s corruption and venality, the pathetic Super Bowl-style halftime presentation and even You Know Who couldn’t mess it up. Soccer is a beautiful game and this year’s World Cup was great. BTW, in future, keep an eye on Japan, the one country on Earth that can emulate the Spanish system. This year they were knocked out by Brazil in a heartbreaker. They will be back, mark my words.

Summer Reading

When not working on the memoir or watching the World Cup, I have been reading. Here is what I found worth the time (and not):

Fiction

• Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet. A closed room murder mystery from Renaissance Italy, told through a chain of letters (Samuel Richardson call your office). It is a delight to read and instructive as well.

• Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper. Very high-class trash about the Vatican City of high-class trash: Los Angeles. Raymond Chandler meets Nathaniel West. Very well written, so a forgiveable guilty pleasure.

Nonfiction

• London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. A totally engrossing tale about truth and lies and London. Although it’s nonfiction, London Falling reads like a novel. Keefe is a master.

“Reality” (the Netherworld between Fiction and Nonfiction)

• This category I include two works about You Know Who. As is the case with much else about him, it’s hard to know where “reality” ends and “fantasy” begins.

• Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. After spending a couple of days of my life working through this book, I don’t know much more about the first year of You Know Who 2.0 than I did when I started. One or two interesting insights — for example, that both the authors and Himself think that he would not have achieved the level of “power” he now wields if he had been re-elected in 2020 — but other than that, not much that a reader of the news doesn’t know already. If you are a You Know Who obsessive who wants to know the names of each person in the room when stupid and destructive decisions were made, this book is for you; otherwise, take a pass.

• Rasputin Swims the Potomac by Ben Fountain. This surreal presentation of the campaign of an unnamed President (literally “redacted” in the text) for a third term is satire of the very darkest kind. Fountain is a terrific writer who has the rhetorical patterns of You Know Who down cold. Not for every taste, but a terrific read with a serious subtext.

Sir Sam Neill — RIP

In a previous post, I have written about Sam Neill, New Zealand’s only true movie star and a personal favorite of mine. Having survived cancer, Sir Sam has just passed away from other causes after a full if too-short life. He will be missed. May he rest in peace.

That’s all for now. Back soon.