Thursday, June 07, 2007

touchy subject


Being a financial analyst by occupation and a writer/reader at heart, I usually work with the substances that cannot be touched. Abstract numbers, thoughts and ideas, shuttling back and forth from computer screen to paper to words. It is work that I have to continuously interpret to others, with more words, in order to explain its value. Sometimes, it's just so refreshing to just be able to hold something in my hands and not feel obliged to say anything at all.




Tom Wolfe, in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, illustrates the simplicity and the intrinsic value of working with the tangible. Sherman McCoy is a hotshot bond salesman at one of the top investment banks in New York, but struggles to tell his daughter Campbell exactly what he does*:

"Daddy... what do you do?"
What did he do?
"Do? What do you mean, sweetheart?"
"Well, MacKenzie's daddy makes books, and he has eighty people working for him."
"Oh ho! Eighty people!" said Sherman's father, in the voice he used for small children. "My, my, my!"
Sherman could imagine what the Lion (his father) thought of Garland Reed. Garland had inherited his father's printing business and for ten years had done nothing with it but keep it alive. The "books" he "made" were printing jobs given him by the actual publishers and the products were as likely to be manuals, club rosters, corporate contracts, and annual reports as anything remotely literary. As for the eighty people-- eighty ink-stained wretches was more like it, typesetters, pressmen, and so forth. At the height of his career the Lion had had two hundred Wall Street lawyers under his whip, most of them Ivy League.
"But what do you do?" asked Campbell, now growing impatient. She wanted to get back to MacKenzie to give her report, and something impressive was clearly called for.
"Well, I deal in bonds, sweetheart. I buy them, I sell them, I --"
"What are bonds? What is deal?"
Now his mother began laughing. "You've got to do better than that, Sherman!"
"Well, honey, bonds are -- a bond is -- well, let me see, what's the best way to explain it to you."
"Explain it to me, too, Sherman," said his father. "I must have done 5000 leveraged purchase contracts, and I always fell asleep before I could figure out why anyone wanted the bonds."
"Your grandfather's only joking, honey." He shot his father a sharp look. "A bond is a way of loaning people money. Let's say you want to build a road, and it's not a little road but a big highway, like the highway we took up to Maine last summer. Or you want to build a big hospital. Well, that requires a lot of money, more money than you could ever get by just going to a bank. So what you do is, you issue what are called bonds."
"You build roads and hospitals, Daddy? That's what you do?"
Now both his father and mother started laughing. He gave them openly reproachful looks, which only made them merrier. His wife was smiling with what appeared to be a sympathetic twinkle.
"No, I don't actually build them, sweetheart. I handle the bonds, and the bonds are what make it possible-- "
"You help build them?"
"Well, in a way."
"Which ones?"
"Which ones?"
"You said roads and hospitals."
"Well, not any one specifically."
"The road to Maine?"




Later on, Sherman speaks to his wife who is an interior decorator for rich people.
"Well... atleast you're able to point to something you've done, something tangible, something clear-cut-- Even if it's for people who are shallow and vain, it's something real, something describable, something contributing to simple human satisfaction, no matter how meretricious and temporary, something you can at least explain to your children. I mean, at my company, what on earth do you tell each other you do every day?"




*This a cut excerpt from the novel. A lot of the detail has been eliminated. This is an excellent book by the way- page turner yet also an incredibly incisive social critique of New York in the eighties.
** Another notable quotable from the book: "She was thinking about the way men are in New York. Every time you go out with one, you have to sit there and listen to two or three hours of My Career first."
*** Perhaps these pictures are evidence of my only real achievements during my own New York sojourn.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

-I like thinking about how to explain what I do as a general rule of life decisions... if it sounds dumb to me I should probably not do it.

-Knice Knitting! those look pretty sweet and I see your bars are up to 100% on someof them.

-And finally, did Matt Weed change his blog address?? His hasn't been loading the last few days at the link I've been using!

M. Weed said...

No I didn't change my blog address, just my server's being finicky. Keep trying, it should load after a few refreshes. grrrrrrrrrrrr

Anonymous said...

hi linshuang! i miss you! :]

just wanted to say hi!!! & *HUG!*