Every now and then, I go through a curious phase. I start thinking "hey, I'm a bright kid. I understand some pretty complex things. I read the papers and a whole lot of other stuff. I'm no fool. If I just put my mind to it, I could make a little money - not a killing, but only because I'll never be that obsessed with it - playing around on the markets." Usually there's no cause to speak of behind this - just something seen or read along the way, perhaps a whim. When the mood takes hold, I start reading the financial pages more, start putting those nattering CNBC shows on in the morning and pretending I'm soaking in all sorts of useful info (I'm hard-pressed to wake up before the bell half the time), start looking at thick black books in the library about understanding the options markets....yeah, it's a fever, a dumb one at that, but one based above all on the thought that it's not merely a market, it's an intellectual challenge. Yeah, right - like Ulysses or Philip Glass.

Keynes once said that investment "is intolerably boring and over-exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct." Well, the problem is that I do have a bit of the gambling instinct. So I suppose it's a good thing that right now, I just don't have any money to dabble with, much less throw to chance. Instead I spent a few days reading David Denby's American Sucker. I thought it would be a nice bucket of cold water, and so it was.




Denby's the film critic for the New Yorker (in case you don't know); I haven't read enough of his reviews to know, but one of the Bigsoccer posters I esteem highly regards him as an insufferable pill. Perhaps he is, as a movie reviewer; if in the book's references to Veblen and Simmel and Aristotle he occasionally does topple over into the mode of whiny, neurotic New Yorker desperate to flaunt his intellectual muscles (that's what critics do anyway, right?) that's all the more appealing to a self-conscious Northeasterner with creative pretensions and intellectual biceps sore from flexing, like me. In short, it's a dramatized chronicle of Denby's life and the market during the last days of the dotcom bubble/onset of the crash, between 1999 and 2002. His marriage having just come apart, he wanted (so he rationalizes) more than anything to keep his Manhattan apartment, and so gets caught up trying to chase the boom to the tune of a million dollars. Those were good times back then; the stock market going up hundreds of points in a day, the instant financial celebrities, the whole damn thing looking like a glorious gold mine before the shafts started collapsing spectacularly. Don't believe I didn't get swept up in it too; there I was, a freshly minted graduate, cranking out ski reports on blustery January mornings outside New Haven and bouncing stock rumors off my fellow ski bums (is THAT not a sign that something was seriously off-kilter?) clicking over to my account to see that the couple hundred dollars I'd slid into a few chancers had suddenly blown up into $15,000 out of nowhere. Pumped. And. Then. Dumped. A little later I got out of all that with next to nothing - good times indeed.

Good times, New York City at the turn of the millennium, from the absolutely enervating blast of neon-lit energy that was Times Square, upon which Denby waxes poetic and through which I traversed every day to get to work in 2000 (and fucking hated after a few weeks) to 9/11, to the Subway Series. Good, distant times. As for Denby, I'm not sure just how much of a "sucker" he really could have been, compared to some others (even me, who literally lost pocket change); after all, how many regular guys had access to Henry Blodgett, Sam Waksal, the head of the SEC, and others of that ilk? (his portraits of Blodgett and Waksal make up some of the best parts of the book, by the way). Or maybe, knowing all those guys at the heart of it, these guys with power and information, and still losing the better part of a million dollars (on paper) really did make Denby the biggest sucker of them all.

Listen to Denby with Terri Gross here

A great revelation on the subject of greed? Probably not. An interesting memoir of a person and particular moment in time? Yes it is. As a creative person, as a thinking person, I take away from it the accounts of what this greed, this obsession strips from you: your physical desire, your sense of poetry, your equilibrium, your time. All that is inefficient stuff. Get rid of it to become richer. But he whose vocation (or avocation) involves imagination - be it movie criticism, a story, a song whatever - needs inefficiency sometimes. Needs to be not thinking, not even reading, certainly not cogitating or calculating or scheming or monitoring. Need to lay back and let your mind drift. But can you do that? What's it going to be - vegetation or accumulation?