STILL REELING

From the Mad Men finale.

ROUNDUP

I’ve seen a bunch of decent movies lately:  Zombieland (twice), Paranormal Activity, An Education, and the Swedish film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which won’t come out in the US until March, but was available for a special showing here in DC last weekend.  I hadn’t read the book, but the film was pretty damn good.  More than 150 mins long, but it really flew by.

Been reading very slowly.  Reread A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a formative book from my childhood that I read over and over.  I always forget the apocalyptic and pessimistic ending  –  I really wish someone would make a faithful movie adaptation of this book.   Not starring Martin Lawrence.  Also reading a book called Peace Like a River, which I chose as an experiment based solely on the title.  It’s pretty decent, maybe a little twee in spots. That’s one of the problems when your narrator is a small child who likes his family.

I’ve been doing a lot of journaling recently, not so much chronicling what I had for lunch but what Mrs. Nicholson in the 11th grade would have called “free writing.”  I sit down with my Muji notebook and just write whatever pops into my gourd for a page or so, sometimes more.  Whether or not it helps my writing, I do enjoy the process.

BUT WHO CARES, RIGHT?

Here I am back on the blog, who knows for how long?

I’ve started the painful process of revising a  longer manuscript, a novel tentatively titled A Perfect Wife.  I’ve been working on this for some time, and I was very pleased when I managed to finish a draft of it back in August.  On the advice of some book that I read sometime,  I then put the thing aside and worked on other things for several weeks — primarily a short story that just will not come together, which happens.

Picking up APW again, I’m not sure if the intervening time away from it was good or bad.   When I thought about the book, I recalled the problems that I knew existed with it.  They grew in my mind until they were like snow-capped mountains in the distance  that I knew I would have to climb someday.  But as time passed, they became higher and higher — from the Smokies to the Rockies to the Alps to the Himalayas.   At the same time, I also began to focus on how good the goddamn thing was, how it would just knock everybody over as soon as they saw it, which they couldn’t do until I got it into shape and released it into the world, a perfect butterfly.

And now that I’m reading it — ehhhhh, it’s OK, you know?  So far, the problems are mostly  in a single section, which is the part that I wrote a number of years ago as notes and which I’ve never gone back to change.  There are places where I’ve written things that don’t really make sense in light of later revisions, but that’s easily fixed.  So far, it holds up pretty well.  as far as blowing everyone away goes . . . well, we’ll just have to see about that.

So great, get to work.

UP WHEN ITS DOWN, OR, GAMBLING

This isn’t a media consumption or creation thing, exactly, but I thought I’d relate this story about what a crappy investor I am.

As background, I NEVER buy individual stocks.  I was surfing around the world of investment websites, however, and I noticed that Fannie Mae (FNM) was trading at well under a dollar a share.  On the theory that the company would either be nationalized (in which case the shareholders would lose everything, total wipeout) or eventually return to some kind of a normal trading price (over $5/share, at any rate), I thought it would be a good bet to plunk down some noncritical amount of cash on the sucker.   This has nothing to do with the underlying soundness of the company, mind you.  I’m not even sure that I understand what FNM is (some kind of public/private hybrid?) —  I know it will look bad for the government if it nationalizes it, so they will probably avoid that at all costs.

On June 8, 2009, I bought 250 shares of FNM.  It was at $.68/share on that particular day.  Why did I choose that day?  Beats the hell out of me.  It dropped like a rock for a while – it was down to $.30 at some point in the 52-week period.  Since I’ve owned it, it’s been down in the 50 cent range.  Disaster!  Today, it’s up to $1.70/share.  My calculations show me that I have an enormous  paper profit — well over 100% in under 2 months.   (The volatility of a bear market!)

But this is why it’s gambling, and why I’ll always be the guy stuck at the nickel slot machines.  I think I’m probably right about this pick, and that it  may go up some staggering amount (percentage-wise) in the next months or years.  I don’t have the money (or the stomach, if you look at it that way) to really place a serious bet on the matter, however.   But also, the amount that I was willing to bet was so small that even an enormous profit, in terms of percentages, is not worth taking.  So I’ll just let it ride. 

See, a good investor would walk away with the earnings and be happy at his good fortune (whatever the nominal amounts).   Now, however, I’ve gotten greedy AND lazy, and won’t do it. 

People who make money in the stock market are either 1) emotionless robots, 2) wild optimists who just happen to get lucky, 3) crooks, or 4) some mixture of the above.

THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931)

I recently watched this film, as a result of  — well I don’t know what.   Why do people watch things?  I was pleasantly  surprsed at how well it stands up, mostly due to James Cagney’s performance.   Check out this scene of domestic bliss with Tom (Cagney) and his girlfriend having breakfast.   

There’s a surprising sexual undercurrent in this movie — nothing graphic, of course, but strong.  Especially notable was scene in which an old prostitute helps a drunk Tom take his shoes off.  Kneeling at his feet, she looks up at him meaningfully  and says, “I want to do things for you, Tommy.”  (Later on, of course, he slaps her down for seducing him when he was drunk.)  I couldn’t find a clip of this, unfortunately.   A lot of freedom in the pre-Hays Code period, I suppose.

Also, I found it interesting that this film, which indisputably glorifies the exciting, lawless and violent life of the criminal, is bumpered at the beginning and end by lengthy text pages explaining how the film is just an “examination” of this lowlife type, showing him as an example that society has to deal with, etc.  Meanwhile, the “good” characters (idiot mother, studious brother Mike) are complete milksops next to the electric Tom.

A couple of trivia notes:  There’s a scene in which Tom’s enemies shoot at him with a machine gun, barely missing him and hitting the wall over his head.  It’s extremely realistic in the film, for a good reason: the effect of the bullets hitting the wall was produced by shooting a machine gun at James Cagney.  So the story goes, the shooter was supposed to aim wide of Cagney, but instead “missed” and  shot directly at him – the star was only saved because he happened to trip and fall at the exact moment.   Cagney laughed the event off, but later was instrumental in founding the Screen Actor’s Guild, the union which would put an end to such unsafe practices.  

So we have unions to thank for film directors no longer shooting guns at their actors.  Go organized labor!

Also, the story goes that the actress in the grapefruit scene above had an unhappy ex-husband, who used to go to the movie just for that scene – and he had timed it so that he could go in, see her get a grapefruit smashed in her face, and leave.

And finally, a scene of Cagney’s total badassery, as he takes revenge on the mobsters who shot at him with said machine gun.  (The head mobster’s name is “Schemer.”  There’s another scene — in the gun shop — before the particular one I like.)

3 QUESTIONS

Just this morning, I ran across this post posing three bloggy questions that persons such as myself who operate webpages such as this  one should be asking themselves.  In the name of justice, honor, the Oxford Comma, and being cool, I shall answer them for myself.

1.  Am I consistent?  The point of this being, do I provide my readership with content at predicable intervals?  Do I have regular features that they can look forward to?  Do my readers know that, when they spend their valuable internet time-tokens on a visit to Overestimated, will they get high-quality postings of the type and tone they’ve grown to know, love, and rely upon?

Answer:  No.  Those who come to this page expecting new, trenchant, regularly posted  material — well, if you haven’t figured out that by now that it ain’t comin’, you have my pity.   

2.  Am I universal?  Rather than using my blog as a personal diary, am I addressing issues of general interest, to which a wide variety of readers can relate?

Answer: No.  Seriously, no. 

3.  Am I transparent?  Am  I getting any bloggy kickbacks for my work here?  Will a positive review (of, say, The Road To Wigan Pier) get me rewards under the table (lifetime membership in the George Orwell Appeciation Society and a free years’ supply of louse-infested tripe)?

Answer:  I am sorry to say that I receive no reward, neither monetary nor social nor emotional nor meretricious, for writing on this blog.   I would be happy to accept any of the above —  minus the tripe, of course.

Damn. I had hopeed for a perfect score.

WORSE THAN A CRIME, PART THE SECOND

Same set, same characters.  The group is telling “walked into a bar” jokes.  The host lays one on us: “A baby seal walked into a club.”

Har har.  Not my kind of joke, but I appreciate it. It’s a specialty number, obviously meant to be used when a group is working through a string of these. 

Something like one millisecond later, the host’s wife walks in the room, gets a whiff of the conversation and says, ”A baby seal walked into a club.” 

Ugh. 

Just to wash that out of the brain here’s one that my wife heard somewhere this week:  A man goes to the supermarket, and as he’s checking out the cashier girls looks up at him.   ”You must be single.”

He is taken aback.   ”What makes you say that?”

 ”Because you’re so fucking ugly.”

I SHOULD PUT SOMETHING HERE

Shouldn’t I?

FIRST INKLINGS OF FAME

Andrew Sullivan posts an email I sent him — I am the middle anonymous reader.  He edited my text, but I think it’s better for being edited.

THE RECENT UNPLEASANTNESS

I haven’t posted much lately, for which I am kind of sorry.  Here’s a short roundup of what I’ve been reading:

A Lost Lady: This was not so much bad (which I had expected) as puzzling.  The story was competently told, and it was brief, which is a virtue.  The Wikipedia entry for this book says simply that “the novel is regarded as having a robust symbolic framework.”  I take this to mean that you can use the word literally a lot when talking about it:  Mrs. Forrester was literally a fallen woman (because her husband found her after she had fallen down the side of a mountain);  sparks literally fly in a private moment between Mrs. Forrester and Mr. Ellinger (they are sparks of static electricity), after his stroke, Mr. Ellinger is literally marking time until his death (he sits watching a sundial).  This wears on you once you recognize it.

But I was puzzled by the author’s attitude towards Mrs. Forrester: a young, beautiful woman who is married to an older railroad magnate, living in a hick town.  After financial reverses and then his death, she is left penniless and stranded.  She uses her fading beauty and her wiles to manipulate some young men of the town so that she can get some money together and leave.  Later on, it is learned that she moved to Argentina and married a millionaire, living the high life until she died.  Sounds good to me.

Our point of view character, though, is totally disapproving, thinking that it’s such a shame how she ended up, etc.  How horrible that she should leave poverty on the frozen prarie and remarry a wealthy man.  I mean, what a mistake!  She did have to sleep with a couple of unpleasant types to get there, and she becomes a bit of a drunk, but so what?  Strange.

I also read  The Plague, by Albert Camus.  I don’t have a lot to say about it except that I found it riveting.  Also, the copy I got out of the library was this funny version that semeed to have has all the margins sliced off,  so that the resulting book was tall and skinny and the text ran to the very edges of the paper.   Strange.

Continuing the Trashcan Diaries, I’m reading Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brien.  I can only describe it as a “ripping good read” — it’s an extremely detailed comic book, but well done and entertaining.