Continuing the Richard Powers binge, I just yesterday finished reading Gain, which traces the corporate history of Clare International, a giant conglomerate much akin to the ill-fated Beatrice Foods.  Remember Beatrice?  If not, you’re not alone.  The corporation only advertised its existence briefly, during the 1984 Summer Olympics, the resonances of which were particularly alarming considering it turned out that Beatrice was the parent company of everything. Then there was that pesky little series of lawsuits, and the conglomerate is no more.  (Or at least no more in that form, under that name.)

What struck me last night as I was wrapping up the book, however, was less the Beatrice connection than Powers’ depiction of the Clare response to the onset of the Great Depression:

By Independence Day, four fifths of the wealth traded on the New York Stock Exchange had vanished into the thinnest of atmospheres.  The Jazz Age took a quick refresher course in the imaginary value of equities.  Clare’s stock tracked this average drop downward with all the tenacity of a bloodhound puppy.  By summer’s end, the worth of the entire, far-flung manufacturing empire was less than the book value of the Illinois factories four years before.

Alone among the corporate brass, William Clare had seen the shape of things to come.  The careful financier knew all about bookkeeping by mass hypnotism.  Throughout the twenties, he sold off his shares in steady, disciplined lots.  By the peak, he’d gotten far more than fair market value for his portion.  When all hell broke loose, he dumped the rest of his worthless paper, enjoyed a year of ship-spotting off Nantucket, and returned to business to serve briefly on the board of Gillette just before his happy death as a traitor to his family in 1931.

Douglas [Clare] II was less hurt by the plunge in his net worth than by the reception of his monograph, The Dream of the Romanesque. Scholars laughed at the work because it was written by a businessman.  And businessmen by and large failed to read it because it appeared to be about old stones.  Douglas retired from the firm to the Greek island of Soundetos.  There, in comfortable if reduced circumstances, he took to financing his own amateur forays into classical archaeology.

Everyone else whom the company bound together went to the cleaners.  And the folks in the khaki shirts got cleaned longest and hardest of all.  All the sorters and sifters and gauge-tenders and packers and haulers who had been forced into buying company shares at a discount now watched helplessly as their precious nest eggs cracked into the national omelet.  Workers who had built their retirements for forty years came up empty-handed, the victims of the distributed pyramiding swindle of capital.  (307-308)

Bookkeeping by mass hypnotism, well-timed sell-offs, the pyramiding swindle of capital.  But hey, that was then, this is now, right?

Happy Independence Day, all.

Inspired in part by the wonderful pulchritude, and in part by my own overindulgences, I’ve undertaken a plan of (somewhat) radical detoxing.  The most significant aspect of my pretty much semi-annual attempt to achieve a less chemical existence is giving up caffeine, which has the immediate effect of making me feel as though someone is driving a railroad spike through my temporal lobe.  Not good when one is frantically trying to finish up work on a manuscript about which one is decidedly ambivalent anyway.

The good news is that, as of last night, about 7:00 pm CDT, after two days of head-splitting and general depression, the pall lifted.  Headache gone.  Not thinking entirely clearly yet, but no longer feeling quite the same urge to dash in front of a streetcar, either.

What made the difference?  Either the simple passage of time, or last night’s replay of the Buffy musical.  You decide.

Or, Smooth, part two.

After spending a day with the site, and with other sites, and after some extremely useful feedback, I’ve made a little design revision.  Things are still malleable, though, so I’m open to complaints and suggestions.

Now back to work.

Eek!  I just downloaded and installed IE 5.2 for OS X, which counts among its improvements “support for the new Quartz text smoothing feature.” And boy, do things look smooth.  I’m deeply unsure how I feel about this.  For those of you* who don’t/can’t use IE 5.2 (and good for you), here’s a screenshot of the Quartz-ed up site.

What do you think?  I’m thinking I may have to sans-serifize things or risk looking too much like a word-processed church newsletter.

*This assumes, of course, that there is someone out there.  Which there is… Right?

Entertainment Weekly recently reported on the latest shady doings from the world of la cosa nostra: Fairuza Balk, who appeared in The Sopranos‘ third-season finale as undercover FBI agent Deborah Ciccerone, tasked to approach Drea de Matteo’s Adriana La Cerva for a little girl-talk, has been replaced for season four by Lola Glaudini, formerly of NYPD Blue.

Not such big news:  the two Darrins made this kind of TV-switcheroo years ago, and Agent Ciccerone’s hardly as focal as that.

Except that David Chase et al have taken this replacement to Huxleyan lengths, reshooting Balk’s scenes with Glaudini in the role for the upcoming (August 27) season three DVD release.

Reports suggest that Balk has entered the witness protection program.  And about that, we’ll say no more.