Tagged: Poetry

the moon on a leash

november 18

Cloudy, dark and windy.

Walking by flashlight
at six in the morning,
my circle of light on the gravel
swinging side to side,
coyote, raccoon, field mouse, sparrow,
each watching from darkness
this man with the moon on a leash.

It’s April, National Poetry Month (the sweetest or cruelest month, or maybe both, depending on one’s relationship to Chaucer and Eliot). And though poetry ought to be celebrated every month, calling out April to notice verse can’t be a bad thing.

I was reminded that it’s April by this NPR story about Maria Schneider and Dawn Upshaw collaborating on an album of settings of Ted Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks. The poem highlighted in the story, which turns a flashlight into the moon on a leash watched by wary crepuscular creatures, is just the sort of quiet magic spell that good poetry can accomplish. Later this month I’ll be camping and hiking with my Boy Scout troop, and I’m sure that this image of the moon on a leash will come back and make setting up tents in the dark a little less tedious and little more wonderful.

Evening Harvest: January 13, 2013

Somewhere to Disappear

Somewhere To Disappear, a film by Laure Flammarion & Arnaud Uyttenhove with Alec Soth

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Athair (Father) – Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

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Essay – My Backlogged Pages – John Feffer

By late Saturday afternoon, the organizers of the sale reduced the price to $1 for whatever you could fit into a bag or box. Even on my meager newspaper route savings, I could afford to splurge. I ranged far from my comfort zone of science fiction. I judged books by their covers. I stuffed any and all recommended reads into my sack.

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“Of Dolls And Murder” shows how dollhouses are used to recreate creepy crimes | Nerve.com

John Waters narrates Of Dolls and Murder, an upcoming documentary about the Nutshell Studios of Unexplained Death, which consists of crime scenes recreated in dollhouses to help police solve murders.

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The Neglected Books Page » Blog Archive » A Honeymoon Experiment, by Margaret and Stuart Chase

Their hypothesis was simple: with perserverence, they would be able to land jobs earning a decent wage and survive on solely on what they made. They gave themselves nine weeks.

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Grace by Christian Wiman

Is there not something supremely admirable, even heroic, here? To have inherited a fortune and an illness at the same time, to have fought off the latter in order to give away—perhaps by means of giving away—the former; to have transformed one’s own abstract and overwhelming unhappiness into the concrete and lasting happiness of others; to have done all this and asked for nothing in return? Depression intensifies, even as it poisons and deadens, one’s sense of self. Anyone who has experienced this, or even been around someone experiencing it, knows how excruciatingly difficult it is to make the least gesture toward the world. And here is a life of such gestures. Here is a heart that, though blighted with sadness, yet flowered in thousands of others.

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Book Review – ‘Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever – Stories,’ by Justin Taylor – Review – NYTimes.com

In 1981, Raymond Carver advanced a literary genre with “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” The movement wasn’t dirty realism or minimalism, but “vaguely titled fiction”: stories concealing their intensity and anxiety behind titles full of pronouns and ennui, signifying nothing much about their narratives.

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Telling Tails – Tim O’Brien – The Atlantic

To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.

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Sneachta – Snow

Sneachta

le Máire Nic a’Daird

Nach deas í an tuath
lena cota bog ban
ina codladh go sáimh
sa sneachta geal glan.

Snow

by Máire Nic a’Daird

How lovely is the world
with its soft white coat,
sleeping snugly
in the bright, clean snow.

It’s not the first snow of the season–we had an icy shot across the bow a couple weeks ago that left a sleety, slushy mess on the roads for a few days–but this morning’s dusting has a nicer feel to it. The weather forecast calls for cold and colder temperatures, so perhaps this dusting will stick around for a while. I need to get the studded tires on my bicycle this weekend.

“Sneachta” by Máire Nic a’Daird was the first Irish poem I learned. It was in an early Irish lesson in the basement of the Irish Well, with the late and much-missed Sean T. Kelley, and I think it was meant to demonstrate that modifiers come after the noun in Irish–”cota bog ban” is “coat soft white,” “sneachta geal glan” is “snow bright clean”. But I remembered it because it has some lovely sounds packed into a little space: those “s” sounds and “b” sounds, all the broad vowels (“a”, “o”, “u” are broad in Irish, “i” and “e” are slender, with much import all around–Irish orthography is too big a topic to tackle this morning). It sounds like a quiet, softly-dusted winter morning to me.

Gan do Chuid Éadaigh – Without Your Clothes

A Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all! I have to admit that this isn’t actually my favorite day of the year; downtown St. Paul, where I work, is hub of St. Pat’s festivities in the Twin Cities, and Rice Park was awash in all manner of green tchotchke and inebriated revelry. I went to the parade, of course, but just long enough to see the Brian Ború pipe band and scout for in-laws (none spotted, mission accomplished).

Instead, I celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by sitting down with some Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Here’s my attempt at translating “Gan do Chuid Éadaigh.”

Gan do Chuid Éadaigh

le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Is fearr liom tú
gan do chuid éadaigh ort,
do léine shíoda
is do charabhat,
do scáth fearthainne faoi t’ascaill
is do chulaith
trí phíosa faiseanta
le barr feabhais táilliúrachta,

do bhróga ar a mbíonn
i gcónaí snas,
do lámhainní craiceann eilite
ar do bhois,
do hata crombie
feircthe ar fhaobhar na cluaise–
ní chuireann siad aon ruainne
le do thuairisc,

mar thíos fúthu
i ngan fhios don slua
tá corp gan mhaisle, mháchail
nó míbhua
lúfaireacht ainmhí allta,
cat mór a bhíonn amuigh
san oíche
is fhágann sceimhle ina mharbhshruth.

Do ghuailne leathan fairsing
is do thaobh
chomh slim le sneachta séidte
ar an sliabh;
do dhrom, do bhásta singil
is do ghabhal
an rúta
go bhfuil barr pléisiúrtha ann.

Do chraiceann atá chomh dorcha
is slim
le síoda go mbeadhg na habhann
go ndeirtear faoi
go bhfuil suathadh fear is ban ann.

Mar sin is dá bhrí sin
is tú ag rince liom anocht
cé go mb’fhearr liom tú
gan do chuid éadaigh ort,
b’fhéidir nárbh aon díobhail duit
gléasadh anois ar an dtoirt
an ionad leath ban Éireann
a mhilleadh is a lot.

Without Your Clothes

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

I would rather see you
without your clothes on,
your silk shirt
and your necktie,
your umbrella under your arm
and your smart
three piece suit
of excellent tailoring,

your shoes
freshly polished,
your doe-skinned gloves
on your hands,
your crombie hat
cocked toward your ear–
none of these things
add up to you,

for underneath
and unknown to the world
is a body without scar, blemish,
or defect,
lithe as a wild beast,
a lion that is out
in the night
leaving terror in its wake.

Your broad shoulders
and your flank
are smooth as drifted snow
on the mountain;
your back, your slender waist,
and at your crotch
the root
of highest pleasure.

Your skin is so dark
and smooth
like silk and velvet
spun together
smelling of meadowsweet
and watermead
that can drive
both men and women mad.

And that is why
when you are dancing with me tonight
though of course I would rather
see you without your clothes on,
it would probably be best
that you cover yourself quickly
rather than drive half
the women of Ireland mad.

My translation notes: As always, I’ve tried to land somewhere between literal and interpretive. My edition of Pharaoh's Daughter has a translation by Paul Muldoon, who also did the translation for The Language Question. His translation is far more interpretive than mine, particularly in adding a rather arch tone (“your snazzy loafers/and, la-di-da,/a pair of gloves”) that I don’t quite hear in this poem.

Muldoon also, to my surprise, rendered the … er … uncomfortable-to-English readers stanza in language just on the edge of florid romance novel euphemism. “the root that is the very seat/of pleasure, the pleasure source” is how he does the lines that for me came out “and at your crotch/the root/of highest pleasure.” Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a way to render “is i do gabhal” as anything except “and at your crotch,” and I’ve got a pretty big dictionary. My trepidation was undone by Ní Dhomhnaill’s own words:

It is almost impossible to be “rude” or “vulgar” in Irish. The body, with its orifices and excretions, is not treated in a prudish manner but is accepted as “an naduir,” or “nature,” and becomes a source of repartee and laughter rather than anything to be ashamed of.

My favorite lines in this poem are “chomh slim le sneachta séidte/ar an sliabh;”–”smooth as drifted snow on the mountain”–for all the “sh” sounds (“slim”, “sneachta”, “séidte”, and “sliabh” all have the slender “s” sound, which is like a slightly breathier English “sh”). That “shush” sound whispers just like the snow that Ní Dhomnaill is describing.

Faoileán – Seagull

According to my site stats, I pretty regularly get visitors here looking for a translation of this poem. I’m not sure if it’s a testament to the popularity of this poem, certainly Michael Davitt‘s best-known, or to the fact that it’s part of the curriculum in Irish language classes. I tend to suspect the latter is a big part of it: the searches tend to cluster around the beginning of the school year, and originate mostly from Dublin and its suburbs.

So in the interest of both helping out some scoláirí and giving Michael Davitt a wider (though not much) audience in the English-speaking world, here’s my rendering of “Faoileán”:

Faoileán

le Michael Davitt

Thíos ar an trá,
Is an mhaidin ag pléascadh sa chuan,
Braithim an bás,
An púca im thimpeall go buan.

Féach an faoileán uaibhreach,
Mar bhrúscar ar charraig dhudh,
Cloisim amhrán uaigneach,
I saoirse na farraige.

Bhíodh sé ar snámh,
Go hard os cionn tonntracha bán’
Leath a sciatháin
Ó Bheanntraí go Dún na nGall.

Ach tháinig an bád ola seo,
Trasna na farraige,
Is lion sé an cuan gleoite seo,
Le fual lucht an airgid.

Féach an faoileán uaibhreach,
Mar bhrúscar ar charraig dhubh
Cloisim amhrán uaigneach,
I saoirse na farraige.

Seagull

by Michael Davitt

Down the beach,
with morning exploding in the harbor,
I feel death,
that constant hobgoblin companion.

I see the proud seagull,
wrecked on a black rock,
I hear its lonely song,
the freedom of the seas.

It was swimming,
high on the white waves’ crown,
spreading its wings
from Bantry to Donegal.

But then came the oil tanker,
across the seas,
and caught the tidy bay,
and pissed out its moneyed cargo.

I see the proud seagull,
wrecked on a black rock,
I hear its lonely song,
the freedom of the seas.

Ceist na Teangan – The Language Question

Recently at work, I was trying to fix a problem with the search index of a big website that launched last week: some of our PDF files weren’t being indexed, and it wasn’t clear why. As part of my troubleshooting, I put out a copy of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Oileán: I figured I’d get no false positives on “glinniúint” or “fiondruine” in scouring the index, plus I’d be able to confirm that non-English documents were indexed (there was already quite a bit of content on the site in French and Swedish). It turned out to be a surprisingly practical use for poetry.

The marketing manager for the site got wind of it through an Irish employee working in Sweden. “An obscure Irish poet,” was how this Irish ex-pat described Ní Dhomhnaill, to which I had to object: Michael Davitt is an obscure Irish poet, but not Ní Dhomhnaill. If Ní Dhomhnaill were writing in English, I opined, she’d be as well-known as Seamus Heaney. (Appeals to Seamus Heaney’s fame are apparently not the best way to make the case for one’s favorite Irish poet.) I proceeded to recite from “Oileán,” which is probably not the most work-safe of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems (though by far not the least), but I subscribe to the theory that let a local bar put a scandalous Brendan Behan quote (in Irish) on their t-shirts: those who would be offended would be unlikely to understand it, and those who could understand it would be unlikely to be offended. Ní Dhomhnaill is no longer on the site (nor are Dick Van Dyke and the dancing penguins from “Mary Poppins”), but I’m glad that she made a brief appearance anyway.

A couple years ago, I led up to St. Patrick’s Day with frequent translations of Irish poems. I had a lot of time on my hands that March, and I have (thankfully) much less now, but I thought I’d try to squeeze in a few. Since it was a Ní Dhomhnaill poem that got me thinking of this project again, here’s a short one by my favorite poet about the language that keeps her from being as famous as Seamus Heaney, first in Irish and then in my rough English translation:

Ceist na Teangan

le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Cuirim mo dhóchas ar snámh
i mbáidín teangan
faoi mar a leagfá naíonán
i gcliabhán
a bheadh fite fuaite
de dhuilleoga feilastraim
is bitiúman agus pic
bheith cuimilte lena thóin

ansan é a leagadh síos
i measc na ngiolcach
is coigeal na mhan sí
le taobh na habhann,
féachaint n’fheadraís
cá dtabharfaidh an sruth é,
féachaint, dála Mhaoise,
an bhfóirfidh iníon Fharoinn?

The Language Question

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

I put my hope a-swim
in the little boat of language
as one might place an infant
in a cradle
of tightly woven
iris leaves
with bitumen and pitch
smeared on its bottom

and then lay it down
among the reeds
and cat-tails
beside the river,
watching without knowing
where the stream will carry it,
perhaps, like Moses,
into the care of a Pharaoh’s daughter?

A couple of notes:In my translation, I’ve tried to be more literal than Paul Muldoon’s that is published in the collection I own: Muldoon has earned some liberties that I dare not take. One phrase in the poem for which I wish I could find a more playful rendering is “coigeal na mban sí,” which I’ve given as cat-tails. That’s what my dictionary gave me, but the literal meaning is a little more tightly packed: “coigeal” is “distaff” (the spinning tool), and “coigeal na mban sí” would be something like “the fairy woman’s distaff” (“ban sí” comes into English as “banshee,” the keening harbinger of death; “mban” is the genitive case of “ban”). It’s a more accurate description than cat-tail, I think, and with the images of cradles and Pharaoh’s daughter, a nice feminine image.

“Fite fuaite” gave me a little trouble. “Fite” is woven, and “fuaite” is sewn, two rather different ways of making a boat. I thought about sticking with “sewn,” since that echoes the boat in “Oileán” with its tidy stitching, but I ended up at “tightly woven” because it’s how I imagine one would make a boat from iris leaves and because it echoes “fite dlúth” in “Coinleach Ghlas an Fhomhair,” which is coming up in a day or two.

I stuck with the word “bitumen” rather than “tar” even if “tar” would have been clearer: Irish has a word for “tar” already (“tarra”), and I’m sure Ní Dhohmnaill would have used it if she’d wanted just to name a sticky black substance used for waterproofing. “Bitumen” is formed from decomposing organic material (and so a kin of peat), and was used to adhere the bricks of the Tower of Babel, which has some linguistic echoes indeed.

This is the poem that gives the title to one of Ní Dhomhnaill’s better-known collections–not the “Language Question” (or “Language Issue,” as Paul Muldoon’s translation has it), but “Pharaoh’s Daughter.” It’s an interesting choice for a title, since the poem is Moses, borne on the cradle of the Irish language, into the arms of the Pharaoh’s daughter, who I suppose would be the English-speaking readers who will care for this strange foreign child.

Fare thee well, Pindeldyboz

The news arrived in my inbox this morning that Pindeldyboz, one of the pioneers of on-line fiction publishing, is shutting down after a 10 year run. Executive editor Whitney Pastorek explains:

10 years is a good solid run — centuries in internet time — and I could not be prouder of what we’ve accomplished. I know that I would literally not have my current job were it not for Pboz; I would not have many of my current friends. I also know there are lots of younger journals out there tearing it up, carrying the torch of online fiction into the future, ensuring that the written word will forever thrive beyond the boundaries of 140-character chirps. We’re basically Grandpa. It’s time to get out of the way and let the hungry kidz have it.

A decade is a century in Internet time, yet somehow Pindeldyboz stayed fresh, fun, and relevant during all that time. Along with sites like Small Spiral Notebook, Eyeshot, and storySouth, Pindeldyboz helped to set the tone for the new venue of online literary journals. They started at a time when most short fiction and poetry was published in small print journals, and they’re going out at the dawn of the e-book era. Not quite cave-painting-to-Gutenberg, but still a huge shift in how stories are published and read.

Over those years, Pindeldyboz rejected a few of my stories (very kindly and constructively: I appreciated their critiques, which helped get the stories into shape for other publishers), and ran my story Self Defense, which made the Notable list for the Million Writers Award in 2005. One of their editors, Shauna McKenna, even showed up for my reading of “Call Me Pearl” for Ballyhoo Stories. They were, like most of the online publishing world, good and dedicated people who put a huge amount of time and personal expense into a project with little worldly reward out of love for stories and words.

I’m sorry to see Pindeldyboz go dark, but I’m glad they’re going out with class and good humor, and I’m thankful for the work they did over the past decade. Make sure you browse their current stories and dig into the archives before they disappear; there’s a lot of great stuff to read there.

Dún – Stronghold

Dún

le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Id ghéaga daingne
ní bhfaighfidh mé bás choiche
ní thiocfaidh orm aon sceimhle,
ní líonfaidh orm anbhá.
Ní chloisfidh mé
ag gíoscán ins an oíche
fearsad na cairte fuafaire
a ghluaiseann trí pháirc an áir.

Is dún nó daingean iad
do ghéaga i mo thimpeall
do ghuailne leathana
am chosaint ar a lán.
Ag cuardach fothaine dom
ó gharbhshíon na cinniúna
tá gairdín foscaidh le fáilt
idir do dhá shlinneán.

Is sa ghairdín sin
tá beacha is ológa
ta mil ar luachair ann
is na crainn go léir faoi bhláth
i dtús an fhomhair
mar ní thagann aon gheimhridh
is gaoth an tseaca
ní luíonn air anáil.

Is lasmuigh dínn
tá críocha is ciníocha
ag bruíon is ag bunú sibhialtachta
ag puililiú ar an gclár.
Dá mbeadh ceithre creasa
na cruinne in aon chaor lasrach
dá n-imeodih an cosmos
in aon mheall craorag amháin.

Ba chuma liom, do ghéaga
a bheith im thimpeall
níorbh ann do scáth nó eagla
níorbh ann don ocras riamh.
Nuair a fhilleann tú mé
go cneasta isteach id bhaclainn
táim chomh slán sábháilte
leis an gcathair ard úd ar shliabh.

Coinnigh go daingean mé
laistigh den gciorcal draíochta
le teas do cholainne
le teasargan do chabhaile.
Do chneas lem chneas
do bhéal go dlúth lem béalaibh
ní chluinfead na madraí allta
ag uallfairt ar an má.

Ach níl in aon ní ach seal:
i gcionn leathuaire
pógfaidhh tú mé ar bharr m’éadain
is casfaidh tú orm do dhrom
is fágfar mé ar mo thaobh féin
don leaba dhúbailte
ag cuimhneamh faoi scáth do ghuailne
ná tiocfaidh orm bás riamh roimh am.

Stronghold

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

In your arms’ fortress
I will face neither eternal death
nor terror,
panic will not fill me.
I will not hear
the grinding in the night
of the war carriages’ axles
rolling through the battlefields.

You arms are a fortress
around me,
your broad shoulders
completely protecting me.
I seek my shelter
from fate’s storm
in the shaded garden ring
between your shoulder blades.

And in that garden
are bees and olives
with honey on the rushes there,
the trees in full bloom
even at the start of Autumn;
winter never comes there,
the frosty winds
never blow there.

Beyond the fortress
walls are people
struggling and building civilizations,
a mad hullabaloo.
If the four corners of the globe
were one flaming berry
if the cosmos were rolled
into one crimson ball

It wouldn’t matter to me, your limbs
still around me;
no room for shadow or fear,
no room there for hunger.
When you fold me
gently inside the bend of your arm
I am safer than
the city high on a mountain.

The fortress keeps me
within the magic circle
with the body’s heat
with the body’s deliverance
skin on skin
mouth on mouth
I will not hear the wild beasts
howling on the plain.

But nothing outlasts its time:
in a half an hour
you will kiss the top of my forehead
and turn from me on your back
in the double bed
and I will think about your shoulders’ shadow
and not that death is always approaching me.

Last month, a reader wrote to request some help with this poem; they were dissatisfied with the translation by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, which appears in Pharaoh's Daughter, and had some questions about a few of the trickier lines.

I’ve noted before that I consider Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill far beyond my translation skills, in either Irish or English, but I decided to give it a shot. I don’t think my translation is as good as Ní Chuilleanáin’s (an accomplished poet in her own right; here’s an example); it’s a bit more literal, though, which is what I think my reader was looking for in the kinds of questions in the e-mail.

Any translation is an interpretation; some things are harder to write in English than in Irish, and vice versa, and some things that make perfect sense in one language are pure nonsense in another. Ní Chuilleanáin’s translation of this poem is certainly more interpretive than mine, and takes some liberties that I, surely far less familiar than Ní Chuilleanáin with Irish idiom, dare not take.

This poem is a good companion piece to the other Ní Dhomhnaill poem, “Oileán”, that I’ve tried to translate. Like “Oileán,” “Dún” is a sensuous poem, but the sensuousness is undercut by some of its recurring images. “Oileán” posits love in the midst of loneliness; “Dún” places love in a bleak landscape of destruction. Safety, protection, and certainty are contrasted with images of war and tumult and wild beasts; but at the same time, the safety is represented by a fortress, a martial image that echoes the war carriages and battlefield of the first stanza.

My favorite word in this poem is “puililiú”; my dictionary sent me to “fuilibiliú”, which gave me “hullabaloo; halloo, yell.” Ní Chuilleanáin doesn’t translate this line directly–she gives “multiplying on the globe” for what the people beyond the stronghold’s charmed circle are up to–but I simply had to use it, even if it clashes a bit with the rest of the poem.

I also love the internal echoes of “le teas do cholainne / le teasargan do chabhaile.” I can’t render it very well in English. “Teas” is “heat”; “teasargan” is “deliverance” or “rescue”. Both “colainn” and “cabhail” are words for “body”; I’m sure there are subtle distinctions between them of which I’m not aware, and that further enhance that lovely balance between “teas” and “teasargan.”

“Dún” should probably be translated as “Fortress”–it appears in many Irish place names associated with ancient forts–but I like the title Ní Chuilleanáin chose because it echoes the holding arms and strong back that are the poem’s central images.

35 Across

To everyone who’s landed here today from a variety of search engines looking for “Sailor’s destination in a Yeats poem”: the answer is “Byzantium.”

Great poem, Sailing to Byzantium.

(That’s 35 across, in the November 29, 2009, Los Angeles Times Crossword.)

How did we ever solve crosswords without the Internet?

the Poetic Clearing-house Association

Henry Clews, via the Library of CongressI love this hare-brained scheme for a poetry bank, delivered generously by C. Dale Young’s Avoiding the Muse, as expounded by The Idiot (a character of John Kendrick Bangs’ invention) in Harper’s at the turn of the last century:

What I’d like to see established is a sort of Poetic Clearing-house Association. Supposing I opened up an office in Wall Street – a Bank for Poets in which all writers of verse could deposit their rhymes as they write them, and draw against them, just as they do in ordinary banks with their money.

The Poetic Clearning-house Association works a bit like a futures market cum agent, seeking to “dispose of [the deposited poem] to a magazine” to fund the poet’s withdrawals. It has a gate-keeper, “an intelligent receiving-teller to detect counterfeits” and reject poetry that isn’t up to snuff, thus keeping the deposits high in quality. (We all know how well those high-quality banking instruments have worked out in recent history…)

I’ve actually given half-serious thought to a similar idea, while floating on my back in the deep end of the pool during the boys’ swimming lessons, a sort of Slush Pile 2.0; like any such exchange, of course, it depends on the participation of buyers and sellers who agree on the value of the products in the exchange. A sonnet bubble or irrational exuberance around creative non-fiction could doom the entire affair (cf. the collapse of the memoir market after the fraudulence of the last decade), but more likely there would be vaults stuffed to overflowing with quatrains and villanelles, their value depreciating by the day.

A few years ago I published a story in the late lamented Lily Lit Review about a poet who wanted to be a banker (a sort of mirror image of T.S. Eliot, the banker who wanted to be a poet). You can read the story here, or in my collection (just two bucks in e-book format!). (Don’t search for “Lily Lit Review” on the web; the domain is in squatters’ hands.) I don’t think my poor poet would have made a very good banker; he was far more interested in wearing a suit and having an office with a credenza than in the actual banking part of the job. (Much like our contemporary bankers are much more interested in the power and prestige than in the trust and thrift that banking implies.) I suspect, though, that he would have loved to take The Idiot’s Clearing-house idea and made it into a spectacular failure.

And if one must fail, one ought to do it spectacularly.

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