The Original of Laura: reprise

The run-up to the release of The Original of Laura, not so much a novel in fragments as fragments toward a novel, raised expectations beyond anything that it could fulfill, and the reviewers aren't pleased (reminiscent of Helen Vendler's reception of Alice Quinn's effort, “Betraying Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Losing”). The state of the manuscript requires extra- rather than interpolation, a willingness to perpetrate an intentional fallacy to perpetuate the legacy.

Based on the then sketchy reports, I had speculated on Laura's origination:
I would propose as a primary source: Poe's "The Oval Portrait", a short short that takes the relation of Art to Life to an extreme (and which, as a discourse upon a discourse, welcomes extrapolation [or is it involution?] to the story itself, as well as to critical appreciation). TOOL would be an elaboration of, a doubling of, an argufying of and an answering of TOP's theme.
I'd taken the hint from Lara's Transatlantica précis (Its central female character seems to be Flora, the wife of the narrator and, most likely, the ‘original’ of Laura, who is the eponymous heroine of a novel titled My Laura. This novel is sent to the narrator and main protagonist of The Original of Laura by a painter, a rejected admirer of his wife, Flora, of whom “he did an exquisite oil a few years ago.” In My Laura, the mistress is less lucky: she is destroyed by the “I” of the book whilst “in the act of portraying her”—‘literally’, as a writer. Apparently “the portrait is a faithful one,” its features being “absolutely true to the original.” cf p121; prior post for embedding context), and would seem to be borne out by other supporting detail, such as the valet in "Legs" (pp 255-261) and, from the initial chapter, by one of Flora's fawners: Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what contemporary descriptions of intercourse so seldom convey [...] Readers are directed to that book—on a very high shelf, in a very bad light—but already existing, as magic exists, and death, and as shall exist, from now on, [...] A copy of Glist's "Glandscape" (receding ovals) adorned the wall.. The second chapter provides some elaboration, in Flora's grandfather's landscape painting being consigned to oblivion, her father's auto-photography of his obliteration; her mother's "art was not strong enough to survive the loss of good looks ...". And her husband's self-effacing technique is the central conceit of the novel-in-ovo. That said, I had expected more in the way of the play of the light ...

But the aspect that caught my attention has deeper implication. There is as usual ample intertextuality to prior art (Hubert H. Hubert being the most obvious case), but not in the hyparodic spirit of Look at the Harlequins!; the text that exists does fulfill one promise, providing a window into Nabokov's creative process (reflected in Philip Wild's annihilative strategies), from a personal standpoint; the book most drawn upon is (once again) Speak, Memory. The opening to chapter 5 thereof describes a different sort of creative destruction:
I have often noticed that after I have bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in an artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionist, and here is my desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle.
The novel within the novel, "My Laura" transfers this process to depiction of a character (based on the character Flora, who remains inviolate in the novel proper), and her husband in turn is unwritten out of existence from the inside. The writing on the wall (or in the wallpaper, another leitmotif, cf Pnin) is that which closes SM's chapter 3, in elliptical self-portraiture:
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

cloture

the decision has been taken
it will only be revisited
to recast past incident
in the light most favourable
to its consummate prescription
henceforth taken as a given
remembering that it is not
just prophesy that self-fulfills

hiatus extended

Blogging will be held in abeyance while I attend to more fundamental and pressing matters off-line.

polyfiversaries

While many more momentous anniversaries are being observed, this month marks some personal-professional milestones:
30 years ago: Back in my college days, started programming in APL, on a pre-PC IBM desktop, with 64K RAM, peripheral floppy drive, & a switch up front to choose between APL and something called 'BASIC', never used the latter, though I did become adept on the firm's Wang word processor, and they later got the IBM-PC equipped with STSC APL; it wasn't all cutting-edge technology back then, though, as my first task was to drive-and-deliver a '35 Dodge pick-up (top speed 45mph) to my new boss in Washington DC, which he had found in Oblong, IL (looks just like it sounds);
25 years ago: Began making models & apps for Merrill Lynch's Debt Strategy Group, as a consultant (later an employee), finding out that my self-taught APL was wizardly, and now I got to do it on a mainframe (IBM 370, VM/CMS) while teaching myself, then others, financial analytics;
20 years ago: Moved back to New York to stay, courtesy of Morgan Stanley's Fixed Income Research;
10 years ago: Became a financial market risk consultant at UBS, 'programmer' dropped from job description.
None of this was a matter of planning or foresight, more of contingency and serendipity.

Non-professionally, lit-blogging will resume once lit-reading does.

Interesting times, timing interest

Attention conservation notice: A swerve into career history, plus wonky financial (and economic) speculations.

This being a hobby-blog, mostly on literature, I've only obliquely touched upon professional concerns (which are considered somewhat sensitive in the banking biz), but being sidelined for over a year now, I guess it qualifies as a hobby for now. Per my prior post, I've been upskilling on my own, which served me well once before, ten years ago. But expertise that I acquired well prior to that may be relevant to the shape of things to come, particularly the shape of the yield curve (beyond battered).

As a model-maker for market-makers before "financial engineering" was codified, I did pioneering work on the term structure of interest rates, e.g. in '86 on the application of principal component analysis (though the meteorologist I teamed with called them empirical orthogonal functions), or in '93 on the application of tension splines, for on-the-run Treasuries (in the latter case, replacing my funky very-high-degree polynomial method based on holding forward rate acceleration constant between knots, and paired with more conventional splining to price off-the-runs real-time; the former case represents my only brush with publication, a piece in a special advertising supplement in the June '87 Scientific American called "The Science of Making Money"). While yield curve dynamics are no longer my principal interest (sorry), under the circumstances I can't help but be drawn to the topic. But this being a low graphics blog, I'll paint word-pictures instead. (When college composition required a description of a physical object, I essayed a tesseract. You've been warned.)

Basics: The yield curve plots the annualized internal rate of return for recently issued (on-the-run) government securities (as if all the coupons returned or were reinvested at the same rate) against their term to maturity. To begin with, the three widely accepted configurations are "normal" (yields monotonically increasing with term to maturity), "inverted" (decreasing likewise), and "humped" (increasing to a maximum, then declining). This last generally has an inflection point after a hump (itself often around 2 years out), as rates level off for longer maturities; the normal yield curve may or may not have an inflection point early on, usually within one year to maturity. The current yield curve, while "normal" in shape, is abnormal not only in being so low (though Japan's has long been lower), but also in that its inflection point occurs farther out (2-3 yrs). The idealized flat yield curve is not considered a stable configuration (others can explain stuff like the market price of [interest rate] risk), but an unstable equilibrium, a transition state between the others. So, why did an essentially flat curve persist through '06 to the beginning of the credit crunch in Aug'07?

The shape of the curve is often taken as a harbinger for more than just future rates: for the economic forces that drive them, and for forecasting economic conditions (see Baum's May commentary). For example, an inverted curve is supposed to signal impending recession. (Contrarywise, even for signalling future rates, the curve retained a normal shape through most of the Great Moderation.) This is not something that is much under the control or influence of government intervention. The Fed traditionally sets only the shortest term rate, and the Treasury determines how much it needs to issue at what maturities; these actions, and market anticipations thereof, filter through the term structure. Current conditions being what they are, there's been fiddling with bits of the off-the-run curve even in the midst of massive new issuance, ostensibly to prevent localized distortions from affecting the whole market, but managing the curve itself to some extent as well.

Back to that flat curve preceding the financial crisis: There was a lot of ambiguity about whether it represented a true inversion; by one oversimplified measure, the 2-10yr spread oscillated between positive and negative. But viewed as a flat curve (which was resisted since it didn't fit the paradigms), the persistence was itself an indicator of something big in the works (like a monkey-wrench): The longer that a dynamic system spends in an unstable state, the more likely it is that the departure from it will be profound. And so it was ...

Principal component analysis derives modes of movement, daily changes in yields across the curve[1], that correspond to long-time practitioners' understanding. The primary mode is a parallel shift, in which all yields move up or down the same amount across all maturities (though a tad more in the middle ranges), and explains the bulk of yield variation; the second is slope change, steepening or flattening (again more pronounced in the center of the curve); the third is a bowing (or humping) of the curve (though the related trade is called a butterfly); the rest is noise.

The combination of these modes of movement in proper proportion give rise to all of the yield curve shapes described above. Plus one more: just as a normal curve can be inverted, so too can a humped curve, but an inverted humped curve was not thought to occur in nature, until it did in Germany in early '94. (NB: I'm working from memory here as I no longer have data access to be more precise.) Yields reached a minimum about 3 yrs out before increasing again. This was the result of a confluence of two historic events, the work-out from the reunification of Germany that preceded it, and the absorption of the Deutschesmark into the Euro that followed. This is not the sort of state of affairs that seems likely to recur, except that the U.S. faces the prospect first of exiting its extraordinary monetary stimulus, and second, of its reserve currency status being supplanted by something like Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) of which it would be the largest component. So, perhaps four years down the road, the U.S. bond market could experience the same inverted humped curve, but with an impact on derivative markets well beyond the previous German episode.

So, what does this add up to now? Well, one more attraction to Thursday's Treasury auction of 7-year notes, that step-child among the on-the-runs ...

[1] It would be too obtuse to link it up there, but for a daily pulse on the bond market, Across the Curve is unmatched.

Other readings:

Larry Wasserman, All of Statistics & All of Nonparametric Statistics: another recommend gleaned from Cosma Shalizi (his weblog also where I picked up the attention conservation locution); among other virtues, reconciles statistical and machine-learning perspectives.

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: political history of the 60s, before I came of age.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way: I thought that this would be a departure from financial topics and here I find it's a long segue about a stockbroker's son ...

On deck: Quantitative Finance and Risk Management: A Physicist's Approach, by Jan Dash, a fellow Merrillumnus whom I once had the pleasure of working with, and, who knows, may once again.

hiatus not quietus

It's about time I reported in, prompted by the immanent snarkaeologist Mahendra Singh (whose characterization of me as occluded is rather high-flown, as I have not yet lost contact with the ground; and a tip of the copper-sieved-bateau without my capsize? but I quibble). But while he butchers Carrollian maths, I've been synchronistically having a go at a number of more improbable maths (degaussed randomness, order statistics, entropy optimization — bring in da noise, bring in da functional analysis! — also, delving more deeply into Cosma Shalizi's generously provided guidance, which I've been following for over a decade, sup[thx]) intent upon financial application (recent readings in this area: Bruner/Carr's The Panic of 1907 [speaking of the synchronistical, my parallel line of enquiry just preceded its release and the bicentennial historical reenactment], Donald MacKenzie's An Engine Not a Camera [zoom!], and Mandelbrot/Hudson's The (Mis)behavior of Markets, in which the new ingredient is Mr. Market's Bergsonian time — but hey, timing is the secret to both comedy and finance, though volatility changes meaning — anyway, all well worth the time invested), complemented by philosophical meanderings (Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Keefe & Smith's Vagueness: A Reader). Navigating this parenthetical thicket left little time for novels (and less for the internets), but family vacation last month afforded a break (in reading and merit order: van Gulik's The Phantom of the Temple [do I detect a touch of Roussel?], Yourcenar's Alexis [precociously steeped in melancholy], Aira's Ghosts [an episode in the afterlife of an architectural site], and Abish's How German Is It [primed by the short story "The English Garden" from In the Future Perfect]); another break from the maths and philosophy, Roubaud's The Loop, turned out to be a convolution of both with memory, excellent in its own right and prompting me to finally embark on À la recherche du temps perdu — and to ponder larger matters, like cosmology's missing antimatter (404 [And here time forked.]*) — what if the first broken symmetry was Time, at the instant of the Big Bang? and antimatter preferred the arrow pointing the other way? apparently consistent with Loop Quantum Gravity, and could have driven anomolies of inflation — but don't look back, something may be receding from you ...

add: 3QD reminds that past performance is functionally related to future returns.

*... The screen / In its blank broth evolved a lifelike blur, / And music welled.

Quoth nnyhaven Jill Lepore

This week's New Yorker includes a bicentennial consideration of Edgar A. Poe which pulls together many strands but leaves a few loose ends. As it happens, the opening conceit, along with the confluence over at The Book Bench of decoding Poe and Shakespeare authorship pegs what I was up to last year in "To Assume a Pleasing Shape" (also here in different format):
"[The Philosophy of Composition] is as much a contrivance as the poem itself. Here is a beautiful poem; it does everything a poem should do, is everything a poem should be. And here is a clever essay about the writing of a beautiful poem. Top that."
I tried (but constrained by remaining factual at least in detail).

But Ms. Lepore misses a trick or two:
"If Dupin sounds uncannily familiar, that’s because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like every other author of detective fiction, not to mention the creators of a thousand TV crime shows, is incalculably in Poe’s debt. [...] All detective stories and police procedurals begin with the intellectually imperious C. Auguste Dupin: methodical, eccentric, calculating—and insulting. We, mere readers, are so many Watsons, Hastingses, and Goodwins. Poe is the only Holmes." Or, earlier on, You love Poe or you don’t, but, either way, Poe doesn’t love you. A writer more condescending to more adoring readers would be hard to find."
Not so, as I've indicated in my reading of "The Purloined Letter": Poe drops clues for the careful reader. Also, buried in comments hereabouts, I've noted many other strands of influence: Nabokov (perhaps even forthcoming?), Borges, Pynchon; OuLiPo, nouveau roman, and surrealism via Roussel via Verne; WBYeats (whose poems similarly exceeded technical requirements, though one of these days I'll have to dig up a parody starting "Hear the whisp'ring of the belles/Southern belles!"); even Eastern Europe & Russia (most markedly Kafka & Dusty, but Bulgakov has a similar tone -- how much Poe how much Gogol how much ETAHoffman I dunno).

Another lost opportunity, in a word, is 'detective'. MobyLives notes that "Poe himself seemed to realize he’d created a genre, too, and would write two more stories featuring Dupin — The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letter. One thing he can’t take credit for, though, is invention of the word 'detective.' There was no such word at the time he wrote the story. Its first appearance seems to have been around 1850 — two years after Poe’s death."
Back to Ms. Lepore:
"In February [1842], Poe wrote an unfavorable review of Dickens’s 'Barnaby Rudge,' a novel about a village idiot and his talking raven that had been published, serially, in The New-Yorker. The next month, Poe met Dickens, who was on his American tour (during which Dickens coined the phrase 'the almighty dollar')."
It happens that the OED's first cite of the noun 'detective' is in Dickens' Household Words (1850), and the first literary usage is in Bleak House (1852). And, the opening words of "The Philosophy of Composition"? 'CHARLES DICKENS, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of 'Barnaby Rudge,' says- "By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his 'Caleb Williams' backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had been done.'"
(addendum 22.4 prompted by MS raising the perennial question, and working backwards: Dickens' writing desk and reupholstered pet raven Grip share the Rare Books room of the Philly Free Library with the only copy of the poem in Poe's hand and a cheesy augmented bust of Pallas. Draw your own conclusions.)

For all that, the New Yorker piece is well worth the time, and occasioned the connecting of several bits I've put together on this here blog.

PS recent reading: Attila Bartis' Tranquility and Walter Abish's In the Future Perfect, the opening story of which ("The English Garden") presages How German Is It ...

diversionary tactics

Andrei Codrescu has performed a signal service in providing The Posthuman Dada Guide: Lenin & Tzara Play Chess (for those in NYC, events next week here), which, arbitrarily alphabetized, pulls together strands of artistic, literary and political history into a cogent gallimaufry of dada: The PhD Guide could in itself be core reading for a collage course, prompting me to pull from the shelf the MoMA Dada catalogue (despite his disdain), Tom Stoppard's Travesties (a curious frame for some excellent set pieces) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich (last stop before Finland Station, in a sealed car detached from The Red Wheel), before hurrying to complete Thomas Nashe's Lenten Stuff in season (this last, in similar spirit, being in praise of the red herring). In appreciation, I will cavil at the missed opportunities, foremost being in not exploiting the fact that the two sports most revered in dada, chess and boxing, have merged in chessboxing; also, the omission of Sophie Taeuber in discussion of puppets (or, for that matter, of the Communist conception of their usefulness) or other mannequinistic manifestations; and of the grandmasterly virtual mechanization of chess. I'll give him a pass on sliding over the online presence of Julia Butterfly, and on space limitations preventing further explication of the language crystal, but my bemusement at the extra b Codrescu inserts in kibitz, (obscuring separate etymologies with kibbutz; in chess, an annoying onlooker giving unsolicited and often misleading advice, which often turns out to be correct, thus the chess proverb The kibitzer sees all: I've long listed my occupation, here and elsewhere, as itinerant kibitzer), was tempered when off to the OED I went, to find that the word derives from Yiddish (which I knew) from German (as I would have guessed) kiebitzen, 'to flutter over card-players', in turn from kiebitz, 'lapwing', which Graves elucidated in The White Goddess:
The Greeks called the lapwing polyplagtos, 'luring on deceitfully', and had a proverbial phrase 'more beseechful than a lapwing' which they used for artful beggars. In Wales as a boy I learned to respect the lapwing for the wonderful way in which she camouflages and conceals her eggs in an open field from any casual passer-by. At first I was fooled every time by her agonized peewit, peewit, screamed from a contrary direction to the one in which her eggs lay, and sometimes when she realized I was a nest-robber, she would flap about along the ground, pretending to have a broken wing and inviting capture. But as soon as I had found one nest I could find many. The lapwing's poetic meaning is 'Disguise the Secret' and it is her extraordinary discretion which gives her claim to sanctity. According to the Koran she was the repository of King Solomon's secrets and the most intelligent of the flock of prophetic birds that attended him.
There, I'm glad that's out in the open ... (more serendipity, the very next word in OED is kiblah, the site one faces to address the Deity, the first non-Mohammedean cite being in Stonehenge ...)

In response to Scientific American's Laughing Matters, I'll reprise my older (pre-blogging) commentary:
They say laughter is the best medicine. Now science has proved that laughing is good exercise! You know what I have to say to that? HA! That’s right, HA! I’ll bet those scientists think they’re pretty funny. I can just see them, snickering in their white labcoats: “Hey, doc! How about a sports club called ‘The Laughing Fit’?” You can believe them if you want to, but I was born a skeptic, and I’ll die a skeptic. If I die.

memory playing tricks

Thursday evening, as part of the program for Oulipo in NY, Jacques Roubaud gave a reading from the translation of The Loop, branch 2 of 6 of his 20-year memoiric [re]construction with interpolations and bifurcations, under the constraints of pre-dawn composition, truthfulness of the moment, and non-revision. Here he stuck to the main story, with two excerpts (the second the last, §50; the opening, §1, is excerpted at The Brooklyn Rail, with interpolation), before commenting on the depredations of age (command of both memory and English, in the latter case not knowing where the stress falls) and taking questions from the shop-packing audience. I asked how Memory and History play off against one another from the perspective of the Present, to which he responded that he had left behind such Theoretical Concerns in abandoning the Project (first described in the first branch, Destruction) for more particular, personal recounting. He also commented upon how the first branch had been received, readers seeking to console him for it well afterwards, how the choice of Destruction for an ENS examination was subverted by a bomb scare, and the more particular reader response when what he had recalled was at variance with the facts of the matter: To get a better sense, his translator, Jeff Fort, had travelled to the childhood home described in The Loop, only to find that he'd gotten the wrong house (and that the right one had been altered beyond recognition). Roubaud remains modest about his accomplishments, not just in his novels, but also in mathematics, poetry, and scholarship ("I just read things"), but reserves his intention in putting his prose forward. (My short take on the first branch here, the casebook thereon since moved here.)

Idlewild Books, the venue for this reading, offers about 50-50 travel guides and associated literature (current and classic); I took the opportunity to pick up both The Loop (kindly signed at my request) and Best-Translated-Bookwinner Tranquility by Attila Bartis, who will be reading there next week (I don't know that I'll be able to make it; I did not attend Wednesday's New School Oulipo panel discussion, but fortunately Andrew Hultkrans did; oh, and cf AGNI). Serendipitously, my reading for the train ride to the city was Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. (Other March reading: Robert Graves' The White Goddess and Collected Poems ['61] [cf WLF], Robert Coover's Pricksongs & Descants, and Raymond Queneau's Eyeseas [Les Zioux] [trans Hurezanu & Kessler], selected poetry '21-'43.)