Years of Poems and Spirits

Not sure if I am ready to write this … but just so that I won’t forgot some of the thoughts before they are lost to the dark ether.

1. Watched the Coen Brothers’ latest movie, “A Serious Man”. Not sure I really get it, but it certainly isn’t a stranger. While “The Man Who Wasn’t There” reminded me of “The Stranger”, this one feels like reading Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Or to be more precise, it is the anti-Underground Man that proves the Underground Man’s point. A Serious Man is one that does what the community and the tradition expected of him. He follows the law, trusts the authority and believes in reason. Yet absurd events follows him like air. But what are the Coen’s up against? Conformity? Isn’t that a bit too old a theme? Or Conformity with a Jewish twist?

2. Talking about the Underground Man: I didn’t know one can write a novel like that. The first part is a manifesto of some sort. It reminded me of an encounter about ten years ago. We just bought the house and decided to replace the carpet on the main floor. So I was at home in this empty space, it was a sunny afternoon and I had the whole afternoon off. Then came with this young carpet guy. He was an unusually energetic guy and very talkative. We started chatting about carpets, house, cabinets, etc. But before long the topic wandered into the Bible and his born-again experience. The whole setting just struck me as somewhat odd and funny: we were both crawling on the floor, him hammering down nails and knifing off carpet edges. In the whole time, he never stopped talking about Jesus and the Gospels! The Underground Man struck me in somewhat a similar way: since I was listening to an audio book on the bus to work, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the late evening. There was always something on my mind. Then suddenly the voice of a retired, grumpy Russian civil servant, full of anger and spite, rose up in my ear buds and condemning the tyranny of mathematics or lamenting the lack of free will.

3. My Existential anxiety, if there is such a thing, I came to realize, is that how to live with the Irrational. I am a Renaissance Man in many ways, and being a devotee of Reason perhaps defines me more than anything else. Yet that is not how the world operates, nor the history developed or the future is heading. Not long ago, having given up on the Main Street, I still hold on to the thought that Wall Street is a place where reason triumphs. Then the financial crisis hit. Now that the crisis is barely over (but before the European debt crisis fully blooms), the very people who live on mathematics everyday, whose fortune depends on cold-hearted calculation of facts, suddenly refused to recognize what happened and started to become politicians.

4. Suli wrote about Beidao. I did some Googling and was stunned to find several stories about Beijing No. 4 High during the Cultural Revolution. One of the guys died for the ideal he held true in the jungles of a forsaken land (fighting for Burmese Communist Party). His last letter to his brethren back home was an extraordinary mixture of self-denial and self-consciousness, each with the kind of clarity that can be ascribed to a martyr or an Existentialist. He seems to marvel at the fact that he’s able to face death everyday. And I marveled at the fact that this very choice of his (i.e. facing death everyday) is sustained by a faith he’s willing to test, with his own life and he knows it! Apparently, he’s never read Kierkegaard. (keywords: 张玉海，四中，缅共)

5. I also wrote to Suli about my own ambivalence toward “universality” of humanity. There is nothing specific to that thought since I don’t even know how to articulate either way. But a conversation with a lady in her mid-50s (about 10 years older than us) really changed a lot of my thinking. It is a long story about her living with her university professors parents on a bug-infested island during the Re-education Campaign. Not sure I can write everything down. But what struck me was how “humanity” takes different shapes in different places. In China, for example, people did find all kinds of ways to “process” absurdity imposed upon them. They didn’t internalize the absurdity as some assumed a docile Chinese People would under a suppressive power. Nor did they reject it. They just found ways to live with it, however ridiculous a situation they found themselves in. In so doing, they created subtle and non-subtle ways to express themselves: being creatively conforming is in itself an art of living. A some kind of “humanity”.  It is getting late now. And I am sure I will get back to this topic sooner or later. It is one of those most recent revelations.

1. The iPad-hype

I think the iPad will flop. If some recent reports on WSJ are to be believed, Apple is trying to use iPad to change the media landscape altogether, I think it is a tail-wags-dog scenario.

• At least the book pricing model (e.g. on par with hardcover price) won’t fly
• Having an iPod to listen to music and an iPhone to make calls is quite a different user experience from using an iPad primarily for stationary use
• Holding a Kindle is not the best feeling for my hands (after a long reading). Holding something even bigger and stiffer is out of question
• I don’t have a whole lot use for my NetBook already. The super thin MacBook Air didn’t fly either

IN short, depends on how much Apple has invested in this, not only the device will flop, it may even backfire. Love to see how this prediction pans out in a year.

2. Reading  Failure of Capitalism

Feels like reading my car’s owner’s manual – too many things are already clear to me, the interesting parts are so disparate that I can hardly piece them up into a larger narrative. Some thoughts and things learned:

Can we use the spread b/w returns from diversified assets over that from non-diversified assets to gauge whether we are in a bubble or crash?

In other words, I am still mesmerized by the transition from a stable system to an unstable one (e.g. need major correction) I don’t think I will be at peace until the transition can be modeled mathematically. Posner suggested using Chaos Theory. But I am not sure. C.T. is that random events may cause unexpected, large impact, but you can’t tell that from the “last-straw-breaks-camel-back” syndrome. For example, a large commercial real estate project failed in Houston caused commercial paper market to freeze, they seem to be unrelated, but which model do you use?

What I am looking for is a model that can describe how/when, triggered by an endogenous change, diversification suddenly fails across the board.

3. Innovation, Expectation, and Bubble

One thing I thought of, and is confirmed by Posner, is that financial bubble almost always follows a sustained burst of productivity gain, either as a result of technological innovation or factor injection. The former is easy – railroad, electricity, automobile and the Great Depression; Computer, Internet and the dot-com boom. The latter is China opening and globalization before this bubble.

This can be explained perfectly well if we consider “liquidity”, in its most general sense, as an indicator of market participant’s confidence in profitability. And it is positively correlated to credit boom and ease of financing. In other words, the bubble is the result of a heightened expectation that is gradually decoupled from real productivity growth. Naturally, crash is the result of a over-shot correction.

This may also help to explain the global glut theory forwarded by Bernanke. By the way, it is clear to me, he is the Rudy Giuliani in the financial world – the right guy at the right moment. But a so-so manager otherwise. Saw a picture of CYC with him in a ballpark. She is a fan of him, I am a fan of her but definitely not a fan of him.

4. Somehow, I find myself back to 1993: suddenly finding the computing world not so boring after all. It was quite an intense experience dealing with the WordNet stuff. But it somehow led to a deeper understanding of linguistics and knowledge. Good stuff.

Listening to Uchida’s playing Chopin’s Sonata 3/op. 58 in the background. Not aware that I set the player in the “repeat” mode, until suddenly I realized how beautiful it is.

I bought the disc after listening to it on the radio while driving. Somehow, listening to music while in motion gives me a very different sensibility. It doesn’t matter that the car or the radio is over ten years old or the road I drive on is a beat-up freeway. Nor is there anything special in the ambient scenery or smell. Somehow, music gets to me the easiest while I am driving. In the last couple of years, almost all the discs I discovered are through this way. Sometimes I stopped and listened, but it didn’t feel the same.

Flight doesn’t give me the same sensation quite yet. But there are magic moments. Once on my way to Indianapolis,  I sat at the exit row by the window all by myself.  The iPod was playing the Adagio in Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto.  As the plane started a long and soft descent, the prairie below seemed like rolling up the horizon to embrace us.  At the same time,  the setting sun and intermittent breezes created a show of golden waves with the dark-green grass outside of the window (it must be late fall by then). The music was heavenly too.

Reading the Federalist Papers recently but didn’t register any emotion or excitement. At least not enough to inspire a blog entry. Yet reading a short story about unreserved love, now I found myself quite moved. I must have mellowed with age.