Pater Familias

DO I HAVE A FIXED SELF? I posted here on Colin McGinn’s proposition that Shakespeare argues that “our personality (or many personalities) is analogous to the character an actor plays on the stage.” The conclusion is that “We construct our personalities using an actor’s skills.” I can accept the view that I am always playing a part as an actor does. Indeed, I have recently come to realize that much of what I say in conversation is said for effect. But Colin McGinn also raised an additional issue. He cited Hume and Montaigne in support of the proposition that a person does not have a fixed self. Hume and Montaigne base their position on their own experience of themselves. I don’t have the same experience. I think of myself as being the same person that I was fifty years ago.

ANNALISA’S RETELLING OF “SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT.” My daughter Annalisa has retold and illustrated “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” for an audience of children aged nine to twelve. In retelling the story, she chose not to translate the word “wodwo” into a word that a child would know, but to use one of the variants of the word that preserved the mystery of the original: “With his bright sword Gawain battled bears and boars and bulls, wolves and wild men and woodwos, giants and great snakes too.”

THE WODWO AND “SIR GAWAIN THE GREEN KNIGHT” (COMMENT). What is a wodwo? The Sidestep essay refers to a poem written in about 1375: “The Wodwo, is an ancient, Middle English word taken from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” (Mary Jane speculated in a comment that a “wodwo” was like Gollum in LORD OF THE RINGS. A good guess because “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” was very important for Tolkien. His edition of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” in 1925 was enormously influential. But, according to Tom Shippey in ROOTS AND BRANCHES, it is not Gollum, but the “Woses”, the Wild Men of the Woods of Druadan Forest in the chapter “The Ride of the Rohirrim”, that derive from the “wodwos” in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”)

A MICROACCENT FROM 600 YEARS AGO. Ted Hughes not only took the title poem of his 1967 book WODWO from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but he also translated parts of “Sir Gawain” in 1997. One of the reasons that “Sir Gawain” may have appealed to Hughes—aside from the fact that it is a great, great poem—is that the poem was written in about 1375 in a localized dialect, much farther removed from standard English than is the language of THE CANTERBURY TALES. Tom Shippey (in an essay collected in ROOTS AND BRANCHES) says that “the modern descendants of the Gawain-poet’s dialect are among the least-regarded and lowest-status dialects of modern England.” I posted earlier on how a linguist was able to identify within a block the home in the Bronx where my friend Dick Weisfelder grew up. Shippey says that philologists can identify — within one hundred yards— a location for the Gawain poet, who wrote over 600 years ago.

HUGHES–STRANGE STATES OF BEING. Cadie Robertson urged me to read the translation by Ted Hughes of Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES. It’s a great book, the product of two geniuses. Hughes and Ovid are both fascinated with nonhuman states—Actaeon being changed into a deer or Callisto being changed into a bear. The Sidesteps essay that I posted on recently describes Hughes looking at the world from the point of view of a pike. And then there is his poem about the wodwo, which is told from the point of view of the wodwo. In that poem, as the essay says, “The Wodwo is uncertain of its own identity, as seen in the rhetorical questions ‘What am I?’ and ‘What am I doing here in mid-air?’” Here are three more lines from “Wodwo”:

“But what shall I be called am I the first
have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go…”

Here is a link to “Wodwo.”

MONEYBALL AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS. What does MONEYBALL have to do with the financial crisis? The connection is that Michael Lewis, the author of MONEYBALL (which describes how sabermatricians brought statistical analysis to baseball) has written a long, amusing, and scary article about some of the few people in the financial world who foresaw what would happen (link via TwoBlowhards). They not only foresaw what would happen, they made great efforts to publicize what they foresaw. And they made lots of money selling short. But, as the article explains, the short selling only fed the mania. One scary item: the process that got us here depended on the rating agencies giving certain mortgage-based securities a rating of AAA (the highest rating). To quote from the article: “[One of the short sellers called a rating agency] and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at [the rating agency] couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number.” In other words, because their model was based on history, and prices had always gone up, there was no possibility they could go down.

TED HUGHES AND SEAMUS HEANEY (COMMENT). I received a comment here from the proprietor of the Sidestep blog with kind words for Paterfamilias and a suggestion that I might find his blog interesting. I do. Sidestep is a much more ambitious blog than mine, with long essays full of insights on interesting topics. This essay on Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney seems to be representative and is of great interest for me. The essay, which has a lot of close reading of their poems, is built on the question of whether Heaney can be called an “Irish poet” and Hughes and “English poet”, and it has a number of insights about the Irish and English literary traditions. For me, however, the essay makes a finer point that echoes the themes of some recent posts: that both poets are notable for their celebrations of their localities (I posted here on how in nineteenth century France the “pays” with its own dialect, costume and customs might be as small as the area in which its church bell could be heard). The essay shows how Hughes is “influenced by specific rural landscapes, folklores and dialects”; his themes are “typical of a rural Yorkshireman.” The essay also shows how Heaney’s poems are grounded in Ireland, in localities like Inishbofin, with “turfsmoke” and “potatoes in a field on the riverbank.”

GETTING HOLD OF THE BEANS BEFORE VALUING THEM. It has been observed that some of the mistakes that were made that led to the current crisis were intellectual mistakes made by brilliant people. In fact some of the mistakes occurred because brilliant people did not notice boring problems. It was intellectually interesting to construct and value fiendishly complicated instruments. Keeping track of them was boring, the kind of thing that clerks and bean counters do. I posted some two weeks after Lehman declared bankruptcy that hedge funds were still trying to determine what their exposure to Lehman was. An article in the Financial Times for October 27 reported that now, six weeks after the bankruptcy, the man in charge of administering (cleaning up) the London-based operations of Lehman says that they are still trying to get information about what securities around the world are being held for Lehman or its clients. He says, “…[W]e don’t know for certain what is out there in terms of assets. After six weeks you would expect that we’d have that information, but we haven’t.” All this is preliminary to tracing the lending and relending of rights in these assets, which is expected to take years to resolve. I wonder whether the intellectual debate over whether to use “market prices” (”marking to market”) to value these instruments didn’t divert attention from important back office issues.

LEVERAGE–HOW BIG AN ISLAND WOULD YOU BUY? John Lanchester is an award-winning novelist who has written for the London Review of Books two of the best articles about the current financial crisis. In the October 20 issue his article puts in perspective the degree of leverage that some financial institutions have had. He writes: “The ratio of Barclays’ assets to its equity in June hit 61.3 to 1. Imagine that for a moment translated to your own finances, so that you could stretch what you actually, unequivocally own to borrow more than sixty times the amount. (I’d have an island. What about you?)” Of course, individuals are different from banks, but you can get a picture of some of the pressures that are out there if you now imagine trying to hold on to that island when even five per cent of your creditors ask for their money back. (The 61.3 ratio is not that extreme; the Samuelson article I linked to today gives a ratio of 30 to 1 as common for investment banks and hedge funds).

“THE RACE IS NOT ALWAYS TO THE SWIFT….” Here is an article about the lady who had the fastest time out of some 20,000 competitors in the Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco. In fact, it seems that her time was about ten full minutes faster than the nearest competitor. However, she was not considered for first place because she was not a member of the “elite group” which had a 20 minute head start and was timed separately. She will now be allowed a trophy. I had been thinking of the story as a comment on Damon Runyon’s rule of thumb: “The race is not always to the swift, but that’s the way to bet.”