Escapism and the hot summer’s books

An update and my unusual reading choices...

George Villiers Duke Of Buckingham. With acknowledgements to dewahooart.com. Bestellen Kunstreproduktionen.

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Defi vs Tradfi

A quick update on the last post, which you will recall was all about the unsustainable Ponzi scheme that is the cryptocrurrency ‘market’ - and the way in which the original ‘decentralised finance’ ambitions of Bitcoiners (DeFi) - have been captured to serve the interests of Traditional Finance (Wall Street).

Since writing that post, Wall Street has continued to swoon over Stablecoins and crypto currencies. A JP Morgan/ Coinbase partnership the FT tells us, is to facilitate crypto trading. While “US banks are shedding caution and embracing digital assets amid newfound enthusiasm for tokens.”

It is hard to ignore a sense of déjà vu.

Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times shares my view of the current Bitcoin market mania…In a discussion about the company Jane Street, with the indomitable Katie Martin Wigglesworth hones in on the subject of my last post: Strategy (once known as Micro Strategy) the “company that just buys bitcoin and that’s all that it does” as Katie notes. Wigglesworth explains:

They’re literally borrowing money to pay like the money on some of the other money they’ve borrowed earlier. Like obviously because it’s like a bitcoin buying machine built on a crappy software company that doesn’t really generate any money. They’ve borrowed all this money and they have to pay on that so they have to borrow more money to pay the early investors. And I’m not gonna say what that is normally called, but like I mean, at some point, this. The music has to stop.

The music has not stopped - yet. But watch this space…

I want to write the next post on the unaccountable power of central bankers; and my queasy support for the Trump administration’s challenge to the power of Federal Reserve technocrats.

But first, the need for distraction.

Why I chose this summer’s books

Final edits on my new book The Global Casino were submitted to the publisher at the end of July. That left me with a calm interval before the arrival of the proofs. What to do? It was to be reading that was to fully occupy me. My beloved partner has long complained about my preference for non-fiction reading choices. It stunts the imagination he argues. I should take the chance to lighten up and read fiction over the hols.

My presumption is that like me, you are psychically exhausted by Netanyahu’s murderous actions and ethnic cleansing, by the utter failure to protect Palestinians, especially children; by the British government’s clampdown on speech critical of its collusion with Israel; and by the White House’s daily ‘deadcat bounce’ briefings and by TACO social posts - written by a man who as Brad de Long notes unfairly, is a,

Dementia-Ridden Cognitively-Addled Chaos-Monkey that Caused Chaos at Alaska Summit.

Unfairly, because the disaster of the Alaska Summit was not his alone: his ministers and advisers must share the blame for the way Putin played Trump, and humiliated the United States.

I dare to hope that you too would enjoy a little diversion from all that - by dipping into the daily life of for example, J M Coetzee’s ‘Magistrate’ in Waiting for the Barbarians, Virginia Woolf’s day in the life of the bourgeois Mrs Dalloway, and Lucy Hughes-Hallet’s riveting story of the sexy, and powerful Duke of Buckingham, - ’the man who led a woman’s life’ - in the 17th century courts of the homosexual King James 1 and his son King Charles.

Old and new books…

I opted first for J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ - hardly a chance to ‘lighten up’ but a novel I had long put off reading. (I find books about South African apartheid disturbing, and ’too close to the bone’. Interpret that as you will…)

Waiting for the Barbarians (2004) is different. It’s a moving and powerful story of an old man’s growing love of ‘the other’ - the ‘enemy’ - a peaceful, colonised group designated to give meaning and purpose to the brutal regime of an evil empire. Members of the ‘outsider’ group occasionally enter our hero’s domain where he is Magistrate of a small town, but they gather mainly and peacefully beyond his territory, away in the hills. We never know who they are. They present no threat, and offer no resistance, which puzzles the ‘waiting’ empire… paralysed by fear of ’the other’. That fear it turns out, is in reality a loathing and fear of its own barbarian brutality. The old and increasingly frail hero forms a close and at times bizarre attachment to a voiceless slave employed to serve his needs. Like Herman Melville’s stubborn Bartleby who would always ‘prefer not to’ undertake the tedious duties of the scrivener, Coetzee’s ‘Magistrate’ ultimately decides that he prefers not to undertake the attacks and cruelties demanded of him by the empire.

It’s a gripping read, and I highly recommend it.

Next, another novel I should have read long before: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway - which celebrates its centenary this year. Written in 1925 when the trauma of the First World War still reverberated through London society, Woolf, echoing Joyce’s Ulysses, explores one day in the life of a comfortably-off middle class woman. Her day reveals how events, people and places near and far, impinge consciously or unconsciously on her feelings and those of her friends - as she walks around the city and prepares to host a party. While celebrating the life of London, its bustling streets, its shocks and surprises; its political class and its magnificent Regent’s Park - once Henry the VIII’s hunting ground - the book shines a light on the trauma of all the shell-shocked survivors of a ghastly war, wandering through the city, unseen. The book exposes the callous disregard for their suffering by both the military hierarchy and psychiatry profession of the 1920s, but also wider society - echoing Woolf’s own experience of mental breakdown. It is a book wonderfully, and perceptively written.

Next I read - more correctly devoured - 700 pages of Lucy Hughes-Hallet’s superb biography The Scapegoat - the ‘brilliant brief life’ of the Duke of Buckingham, one George Villiers, ‘the favourite’ of two English kings. Ms Hughes-Hallet defines herself as a cultural historian and as such delivers a rich array of culture throughout this diligently researched book. It is of course mainly about power, and in particular the monarch’s personal, political and economic power (and at times his loss of financial power) and provides a constant reminder that corrupt, authoritarian rule by intolerant and indebted monarchs is a recurring feature of western political and economic systems.

But there’s far more to please the reader. Attention is paid first, to the variety of religious beliefs and their sectarianism: to the variety of music, concerts, masques and dances practised in the court. We learn that George Villiers has exquisitely sculptured legs and to the King’s delight dances divinely at court masques. Then there are the clothes and costume design, the music, high art and the trade in artworks (Titian and Tintoretto); but also glorious fashion with a bejewelled Duke commanding the finest dress designers and hat makers of his time. In one scene the suited and booted favourite scatters pearls across his path as he walks towards his first meeting with King Louis of France. (Every single pearl was retrieved we are told). All this in a world of censorious Puritans, evangelical Protestants, and an unforgiving Catholic Pope. As we reach the climax of the book, the court’s obsession turns to money. Or rather the shortage of money, and how to get it….in the days before the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694.

Parliament’s struggle against the reckless and incompetent monarch that was King Charles I, who picked fights with Catholic Spain and then demanded ever more tax revenue from the Protestant parliament to finance yet another incompetent war, reminds us of this important historical fact: our predecessors fought hard to limit and even usurp the power of dictatorial, cognitively-addled and corrupt monarchs, and to establish the rule of law.

A particular hero of that struggle is one Sir Edward Coke, a distinguished jurist who helped establish the rule of law in England by challenging King Charles’s prerogative, and asserting the Petition of Rights. Coke is considered the founder of British common law and the constitution. He is much revered by conservative forces in the United States for his role in helping thirteen American colonies use the Petition of Rights to establish the rule of law there, and to limit the British King’s power to tax American citizens.

In other words, try as I may, I could not escape parallels between parliamentarians of Jacobean England fighting in the 1620s against an authoritarian monarch to establish the rule of law, while in the 2020s American Democrats are fighting Republicans hell bent on re-districting and gerrymandering constituencies in order to increase the Republican majority in Congress, and by so doing consolidate an American administration and Supreme Court actively dismembering the rule of law. Were it not that the US Supreme Court used Coke’s advice in their determination to strike down Roe vs Wade, I would have written: Edward Coke you should be alive now.

Finally as The Global Casino proofs arrive, I am enjoying a hopeful, non-fiction book by David Farrier titled: Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet. Farrier argues that

there is much we can learn from evolution’s flair for transformation, even where it bends under human influence - about issues as urgent and diverse as how to build sustainable cities, how to deal with pollution and how to address climate change.

His book lightens my spirit. It lifts my hopes for another great transformation, argued for in the final chapters of The Global Casino. It is both realistic and optimistic….and right now I cannot get enough of both those gifts.

Enjoy the remaining rambling, dog days of August - if you can.

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