Mudbound

LibraryThing is a place where you can catalog your books (a preview of ours lives in the right-hand margin), compare your library to other readers' libraries, display them on a virtual shelf, and generally take your bookishness to a new dimension. Recently, they have come into a small supply of advance copies from a handful of publishers to share with members, and so we snagged a copy of Hillary Jordan's debut, Mudbound.

Jordan's novel does evoke To Kill A Mockingbird in its themes of racism and intolerance, both of which are portrayed with an uncomfortable honesty; there isn't a single white character who doesn't speak differently about blacks when there are no blacks around to hear. The sexism is similarly evident; would-be farmer Henry feels as if he owns his wife, Laura, while he has a healthier (and more impassioned) give-and-take relationship with his land than he does with her.

The story, which centers on the collision of Laura, a nice city girl forced by a number of circumstances to start a family on a mud-bound farm, with a black sharecropping family, is narrated in first person, but from every character's perspective in turn. Think Bram Stoker's Dracula, told in a series of journal excerpts. Jordan makes an attempt to capture the individual narrators' dialects with varying success; the effect was unfortunately distracting, especially early on, although the artistic appeal of this approach is obvious. The plot itself starts thin but builds to an intense and gruesome climax. With a tougher editor, Hillary Jordan will grow into a force to be reckoned with.

Dennis Gartman's Rules of Trading

True of the Stock Market, also applicable to Dating.

1. Never, Ever, Ever, Under Any Circumstance, Add to a Losing Position... not ever, not never! Adding to losing positions is trading's carcinogen; it is trading's driving while intoxicated. It will lead to ruin. Count on it!

2. Trade Like a Wizened Mercenary Soldier: We must fight on the winning side, not on the side we may believe to be correct economically.

3. Mental Capital Trumps Real Capital: Capital comes in two types, mental and real, and the former is far more valuable than the latter. Holding losing positions costs measurable real capital, but it costs immeasurable mental capital.

4. This Is Not a Business of Buying Low and Selling High; it is, however, a business of buying high and selling higher. Strength tends to beget strength, and weakness, weakness.

5. In Bull Markets One Can Only Be Long or Neutral, and in bear markets, one can only be short or neutral. This may seem self-evident; few understand it however, and fewer still embrace it.

6. "Markets Can Remain Illogical Far Longer Than You or I Can Remain Solvent." These are Keynes' words, and illogic does often reign, despite what the academics would have us believe.

7. Buy Markets That Show the Greatest Strength; Sell Markets That Show the Greatest Weakness: Metaphorically, when bearish we need to throw rocks into the wettest paper sacks, for they break most easily. When bullish we need to sail the strongest winds, for they carry the farthest.

8. Think Like a Fundamentalist; Trade Like a Simple Technician: The fundamentals may drive a market and we need to understand them, but if the chart is not bullish, why be bullish? Be bullish when the technicals and fundamentals, as you understand them, run in tandem.

9. Trading Runs in Cycles, Some Good, Most Bad: Trade large and aggressively when trading well; trade small and ever smaller when trading poorly. In "good times," even errors turn to profits; in "bad times," the most well-researched trade will go awry. This is the nature of trading; accept it and move on.

10. Keep Your Technical Systems Simple: Complicated systems breed confusion; simplicity breeds elegance. The great traders we've known have the simplest methods of trading. There is a correlation here!

11. In Trading/Investing, An Understanding of Mass Psychology Is Often More Important Than an Understanding of Economics: Simply put, "When they are cryin', you should be buyin'! And when they are yellin', you should be sellin'!"

12. Bear Market Corrections Are More Violent and Far Swifter Than Bull Market Corrections: Why they are is still a mystery to us, but they are; we accept it as fact and we move on.

13. There Is Never Just One Cockroach: The lesson of bad news on most stocks is that more shall follow... usually hard upon and always with detrimental effect upon price, until such time as panic prevails and the weakest hands finally exit their positions.

14. Be Patient with Winning Trades; Be Enormously Impatient with Losing Trades: The older we get, the more small losses we take each year... and our profits grow accordingly.

15. Do More of That Which Is Working and Less of That Which Is Not: This works in life as well as trading. Do the things that have been proven of merit. Add to winning trades; cut back or eliminate losing ones. If there is a "secret" to trading (and of life), this is it.

16. All Rules Are Meant To Be Broken.... but only very, very infrequently. Genius comes in knowing how truly infrequently one can do so and still prosper.

from The Big Picture

The Secret to Healthy Eating

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Isn't it possible that NH likes Clinton?

Possible explanation of Clinton's surprise victory over Obama yesterday in NH: Obama leads the polls because people indicate a preference for a black candidate over a white one when talking to the pollster, so they can seem progressive. But when they cast a ballot, they use a different standard for choosing their candidate, and so someone else wins and the black candidate, leading in the polls, gets left at the altar.

Mickey Kaus is keeping tabs on as many theories to explain the Clinton-Obama overturn as you can find. They need catchier names.

Shout Out

The Instaputz review of Liberal Fascism has made it #4 on Google, but just as important, it has forced "author" Jonah Goldberg, on his blog at NRO, to print f**kwad. Hats off to you, TS!

Synergy

Paradigm shift. Web 2.0. Buzzword, buzzword, buzzword. MBAs generally annoy us, but they do make money, and money isn't annoying when you have it. Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA, essentially an annotated reading list of management and business books, caught our eye if just to see a little of how MBA types think the game should be played. It reminded us that skimming all the way through technical writing is usually yields more than reading it linearly, so even if we only take that one idea away from it, it's already done something for us today. From Cool Tools.

Based on a True Story

Chekhov rushed home from a business trip to feed his cat. The cat, too hungry and impatient to wait for her self-sacrificing master to spoon the Fancy Feast into her dish, bites Chekhov on the hand.

Chekhov pets her. "Hungry, aren't you, girl?" he says, petting her before going to wash his wounded hand.

The bite doesn't heal and four days later, Chekhov is admitted to the hospital, where the surgeons amputate his thumb and fingers. Eight agonizing weeks of recovery later, he is finally able to grasp a cup with his claw-like thumb, and the doctors send him home. "You'll never play piano," they say, "but considering, it is a remarkable recovery."

Stepping back into the house, Chekhov finds the cat dead, having starved to death.

2007 Lists

At Fimoculous.

On the opening of a Hilton Hotel in Vietnam's capital

The brand managers of the Hilton chain evidently thought it would not induce
cognitive dissonance to open an opulent Hanoi Hilton.>

--Daniel Gross, for Slate's Moneybox.

Free books!

www.ebooktakeaway.com. That is all.

Cider, The Underrated Alcohol

Since it's fall again--The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end--it is apple season, which means cider. Sure, there is sweet, fresh cider, apple juice's rustic cousin, but we want to talk about cider, the lightly alcoholic fermented kind.*

In the UK, there is an ages old love of the stuff. Also in Normandy, where the climate doesn't allow grape-growing, so the apple is the source of the region's alcohol and the farmers take as much pride in their cider (although the French insist on calling it "cidre") as the Burgundians take in their wine. Supposedly, every American homestead had an orchard back in the day; every fall, they'd bake up a bunch of pies and make cider with the rest. The cider from 50 trees was barely enough to last the average family through the year. It was, apparently, the 19th century's Coke, and the Amish still drink it like that, to tell from Lehman's selection of cider-making hardware.

Last fall, after the woman of our dreams rejected us, we put out the flames with a truck load of cider, an exercise we rationalized as an in-depth taste test. (Sublimation, n. The refocusing of psychic energy, which in Freud's theory was finite, away from negative outlets to more positive outlets.) Magners, mass-produced in Ireland, where they drink it over ice, is our favorite. Strongbow, an English import from the same conglomerated corporate overlord, is drier but has less apple flavor; it is the most beer-like cider we know. Woodchuck, from Vermont, has the most pronounced apple taste, and their Granny Smith varietal is particularly good, although overall we find their brew too sweet. Cider Jack is perfectly serviceable for getting undergrads drunk but we can't recommend it beyond that, but you can tell that right away by the prominence of the raspberry flavored swill on their website.

A week or two back, we found a lone bottle of French cider (ahem, cidre) at Trader Joe's, carbonated in the bottle champagne style, with the lees of the second fermentation still in the bottle. If we had been more patient and let the bottle stand long enough to settle the lees after getting it home, we suspect this would have been spectacular. As it was, it was intense and rustic but overshadowed by a too-strong yeastiness.

*There is also a distilled form, variously called hard cider, apple jack, or apple brandy. Calvados is a famous example. George Washington was supposedly a huge fan of Laird's, and back in his day, the standard method of distilling the stuff was to bury a cask in a snowbank for the winter, digging it up periodically to scoop out the ice on sunny days and then re-burying it. After a hard winter, the remaining liquor was 80 proof come spring. Simply magical.

Best Argument Against National Healthcare

I call the VA because I need to fax something over to their primary care office but didn't have a fax number for them. The operator connects me to the AOD, or Administrator on Duty. The AOD patches me through to the primary care offices (why the operator couldn't do that is the subject of a separate discussion). The voicemail at the primary care office says, "The Primary Care Clinic is now closed. To have your call transferred to the Primary Care Office, press 1. To repeat this message, press 2 or simply stay on the line." For giggles, I press 1. "The Primary Care Clinic is now closed. To have your call transferred to the Primary Care Office, press 1. To repeat this message..."

The Lynching of Saddam Hussein

Milosevic, Pinochet, now Saddam--2006 was a bad year for Reagan's puppet dictators. Saddam, though, was hanged because Bush thought it was really important to give the Sunnis in a Iraq a big fk-you; the others got to die of old age.

Baghdad Girl is all over the situation in Iraq, including the victory that Bush is so proud of:

The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The 'mistakes' were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible- from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaffari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional.

While the war's supporters argue over whether it has spawned a "civil war" or "sectarian violence," she's unraveled the spin:

The Americans want to withdraw from Iraq, but would like to leave behind a full-fledged civil war because it wouldn't look good if they withdraw and things actually begin to improve, would it?

And that is the essence of Bush's foreign policy--he'll make any alternative to his infantile desires look like hell. And if you have a problem with that, the US Army will make it so.

Thursday Night TV

It has been too long since we've sat in the TV's warm glowing warming glow long enough to get a deep, rich suntan from the gamma rays. A fluke Thursday night off helped to fix this, and we went straight to NBC for old time's sake. Now, we've been keeping up with The Office thanks to the magic of TiVo and Bittorrent, so the re-run last night didn't do much. Scrubs, too, seems dull in comparison to the Charlie Brown-Scrubs mash-up that made the rounds earlier this month.

But Tina Fey's show--dude! we've totally been missing the goddess's newest vehicle! forgive us, Tina, for failing you! Last night's re-run featured her in a Blind Date with Stephanie March after Alec Baldwin (whose talents are being wasted in this show; a cardboard cut-out would do just as well in his role) assumes Tina is a lesbian. Let's just pause there a moment and consider the possibilities...

Yes, yes, everyone else has seen the show. Two months ago, probably. And you have all rightly dumped on its writing. But Tina Fey. On a date with a hot blonde lesbian. This is what TV is SUPPOSED to be about, people!

Cop-Out of the Year

Time's Person of the Year is YOU?! What a steaming pile of horse shit.

Let's imagine the possible scenario at the Time editorial office that led to this, shall we?

Writer: "I fkn hate this time of year... I don't want to have to re-read a pile of fkn news articles to write up some Fkr of the Year. Can't we just recycle 'The Computer'? Or maybe 'The Internet'?"

Cover Design Artist: "Yeah, those abstract ones really get my creative juices flowing!"

Financial: "Speaking of which, we can't afford any new photography for the cover this year, so you are going to have to stick with whatever graphics you can steal from Google Images."

Public Relations: "Sales are down. The cover story needs to kiss the average moron's ass."

And so instead of you know, reporting on something, they just put a reflective piece of foil on the cover and blathered about how YOU are something else.

Warren Buffet gave something like 50 billion dollars to poor people--But hey, I gave some homeless guy a buck. Unranked FSU beat "No. 1" Duke--But I beat some half-drunk kids in a game of pool. Or look at the competition as TIME sees it: Hugo Chavez said what we've all been thinking and called a spade a spade (I've been saying it for years now, btw). The Pope was crucified for suggesting that we argue with militant Islamists rather than crusading against them. An alligator finally obliged Steve Irwin and bit his head off... Meanwhile, I've watched and re-watched all the funniest Daily Show clips about Bush, managed to not get killed in the War on Terror, and squashed a few really big roaches, which are kinda like alligators... You know, all in all, I have had a good year.

Left Behind is Left

You know those obnoxious Left Behind books? There's a whole shelf of them at Barnes and Noble, crowding out the interesting-sounding Faith/Theology/Spirituality section and encroaching on the Philosophy section, and this pulp is neither Faith nor Wisdom.

Now there is a video game based on the books--a blood-bath shoot-em-up in the style of The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto with the simple goal of converting as many heathens as possible, or, barring that, killing 'em to let God sort 'em out. The battleground for souls is none other than a photo-real simulation of New York City. Not clear yet whether this was designed as a training simulator for Islamofascist terrorists or Pat Robertson wannabes...

Since Wal-Mart has made some filthy lucre from the Left Behind books, they are trying their damnedest to cash in on the game, too. But the game has come under fire from a slew of prostesters, ranging from Christian homeschoolers who consider Left Behind required reading to plain old "won't somebody please think of the children" wailers. That's right! Christian fundamentalism is bad for family values, and the Christians only partly disagree. It's beautiful!

Teach the Controversy

The New York Times on the Holocaust Deniers Orgy in Iran:

Among those attending from the United States was the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, whose prepared remarks, published by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, asserted that the gas chambers in which millions perished did not actually exist. He said on Monday that the depiction of Jews as the “overwhelming victims of the Holocaust gave the moral high ground to the Allies as victors of the war, and allowed Jews to establish a state on the occupied land of Palestine.”

We have it on high authority that The Mississippi schools' history books will soon be edited to include this viewpoint, right alongside Creationism.

We don't mean to make light of the Holocaust, mind you. We're just saying that the same knuckle-headed thinking that makes "Christians" want to circumvent rational discussion of ideas like evolution that ought to inform our world makes "Christians" like David Duke want to circumvent rational discussion of events that ought to inform our world.

Also, we are sick, physically sick, at the idea that all Iran knows of America is George Bush and David Duke. I see why they want to nuke us.

Mayan Groups Angered by Apocalypto

According to the BBC, Central Americans who may or may not be Mayan have seen the trailer for and they aren't happy:

Activists in Guatemala - once home to a large part of the central American Mayan empire - said Apocalypto was unrealistic.

"The director is saying the Mayans are savages," said Lucio Yaxon, a human rights activist.

...

Only the film's trailer has been seen in Guatemala, but some Mayan leaders say scenes of Mayans with bone piercings sacrificing humans promote stereotypes about their culture.

"Gibson replays... an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, needed, rescue," said Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture.

If we took Gibson's movies seriously, we'd say:

1. Aren't the Maya extinct?

2. They should ask the Jews how THEY feel about Gibson.

3. Why do we have to attack every movie as racist, or sexist, or bigotted? Why don't we just make a movie about a bunch of people with no lives and no opinions, performed by actors with no distinguishing facial features and ambiguously tan skin coloring that expresses absolutely no views and ambiguously recounts a uneventful story? Would that make you happy?

But Gibson has made all that sort of discussion irrelevant all by himself.