I See A Financial Transaction In Your Future

Just a sideshow mage, maybe a little too proud of his gifts considering his present station. Lodged in the little booth behind the round cloth-covered table in an obscure part of the arcade.

Here's one, you see, here's a good one now. All I ask is a quarter, the fourth part of a dollar, and for your trouble you can have a thousand dollars for it. You see? You see the attraction? A thousand dollars for a quarter: Yours! Oh, and but all you have to do is tell me what's under the hat…

You see? You see the potential of it now, the negligible loss balanced against the considerable gain? Eh? Eh?

Your wondering what might fit under the hat, whether there might be a hole in the table making room for a much larger object than you might at first suspect, whether between the tassles there you might get glimpse of whatever it might be. And it's only a quarter to guess.

And it's a secret, you see. And the mage, you understand, this is what I do, this is the thing handed down to me, for an additional quarter the mage will reply with utter truth to any question put to him by the seeker, and for a dollar answers a fifth question for free.

Time was it was a dime, and before that a penny. It was a dime when I was coming up, always a dime, but I was told about the penny I'm old but not that old, heh heh.

Yes, yes, it was always ten dollars to buy the answer from the mage, decline the chance to gain a thousand dollars with an independent guess but instead pay up and have the thing straightforwardly revealed by the simple offices of an ageless business proposition cloaked in the mysterium of initiation into the ancient ways of the mage.

Yes, yes, it's always been ten dollars to be a mage. The secret revealed, yes. It kept the number of new mages down back when guesses were a penny each, yes. Ten dollars was a lot then. Nowadays it's not so much, but nowadays who wants to be a mage? Who wants sit in a booth all day long giving true but necessarily unhelpful answers to the straggle of seekers happening by? They want their thousand dollars but they can't find it in themselves, you see? Still, a quarter here, a quarter there. It's a living.

Oh, but yes. Your ten. You've paid to join now, you'll have your secret revealed now, you're fit to use it or pass it on yourself, oh yes. All rights and privileges, just as promised.

It's my head, you see. It's my head that's under the hat.

Go on now.

The Great American Novel vs. The Death of the Novel, a progress report

Time seems to be running out for the appearance of that hopeful monster, the Great American Novel, which was a project first bruited about in the early decades of the twentieth century and never taken to heart more tenaciously than by Norman Mailer, who died recently without quite realizing his own ambitions in this regard.

I'm sure Mailer was aware that The Executioner's Song is a magnificent book, and that his own high regard for it would be shared unfailingly down the ages by those who read it. And yet in the end he felt he hadn't created the thing, the Great American Novel that every novel writer of his generation had been led to believe was out there to be had.

Well, it was always more of a goal than a destination, The Great American Novel, and it doesn't even come up much anymore, really, even in the context of some wistful plan to throw down everything and devote oneself to art. People would most likely opt for music or acting these days if it came to that. The people who make novels have their own good reasons for writing them, but I don't think many novel writers nowadays are solely motivated by a desire to make that singularly great American one that once seemed possible in the back of the mind of many, and on the tip of the lip of Mailer for most of his career.

Mailer literalized the hunt for the Great American Novel as an agon for writers with their dedicated talents jostling for its prize, competitors for the thing that just might be had, might be made by dint of the superior effort of the very best of them, just then as the era of the Death of the Novel was beginning in earnest.

The Death of the Novel has been going on for decades now and it gets more press these days than talk of the Great American Novel does. Well, of course, it's a terrible loss for all concerned, the Death of the Novel, and it's only fitting that anyone with any sensitivity at all should pause to say a few words over the corpus, which was such a fine fit art in its day, now dying off, killed by offspring, just as it assisted in its own day in the Death of Poetry. Ah, well, in all the decades since the conclusive end of the form was first discerned, many sobering words on the subject have been announced with all the niceties of thoughtfulness and remorse that the occasion requires, and many wonderful novels have been published, but mostly, it is taking so long to complete that the Death of the Novel, too, seems more likely a goal than a destination. Whether it can be reached before the Great American Novel is uttered remains an open question.

Becoming Resigned

Sat Oct 20, 5:27am
TEHRAN(AFP, via Yahoo! News)- Iran's top negotiator on its controversial nuclear programme, Ali Larijani has resigned, the state news agency IRNA reported on Saturday, quoting the Islamic republic's government spokesman.
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Elham added that Iran's meeting with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana will go ahead "as scheduled with the new head of supreme national security council," which was headed by Larijani as his official title.
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Despite several meetings during the past year, Larijani and Solana have not overcome the deadlock over Tehran's refusal to suspend its sensitive uranium enrichment activities.
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The West, led by the United States, believes that Iran's nuclear programme is cover for a drive to develop an atomic bomb, but Tehran insists it is for civilian objectives only.

If Iran wishes to transform itself now from an oil-producing economic power to an electrical-energy producing economic power by way of nuclear energy, then this is certainly the time to do it, while Iran's diminished supply of oil is still raking in huge amounts of cash that can be spent on such a far-sighted transformation.

In the years since the invasion of Iraq by the United States, the price of oil has risen from near $50 a barrel to nearer $90, lots of that profitable rise making its way into the Iranian economy. With all that money sloshing around in a system that is formally closed off in certain directions by international sanctions, things cost more in Iran over time. The cost of living there increases inexorably, and the general attitude so acutely labelled social unrest becomes intrinsic to all those increasingly unable to afford to live there at all.

If the belief on the part of the West, led by the United States, that "Iran's nuclear programme is cover for a drive to develop an atomic bomb" is a belief fueled by the incorrigible foriegn policy fantasies of the Bush Administration, then it is unlikely to be true in any meanigful sense, or, believed in one way or the other by anyone speaking for the Bush Administration on the matter, each of whom I personally suspect of having their own reasons for making any claim.



"Head of supreme national security council" is the official title of the position Mr. Larijani held until his resignation, according to the report by AFP. Perhaps there's a more acute translation of Mr. Larijani's job title; however it's said, introducing the blunt granduer of "supreme" into the mention of any arbitrary government job is not an uncommon move. Evidently this is the case in Iran, where millennia of government jobs have experienced the inflationary effect of introducing progressively more exalted terms for what was commonly called something else before, to the point where the significance of "supreme" itself, the logical end of such inflation, becomes deflated by regular use, and only the degree of utter generality expressed by the rest of the job title can lift it back up. The more general the rest of the title, the greater the degree of supremacy being claimed by its owner.

Mr. Larijani was given a portentious and succinct title, and a job he tried to resign from many times.

He mentioned on Wednesday that Vladimir Putin had floated a proposal to break the deadlock in the crisis when he spoke with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during his visit to Iran earlier in the week.

On Friday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the Fars News Agency there was no nuclear proposal.

It's not clear where President Ahmadinejad got this idea, which contadicts what Mr. Laijani said just a few days before. Perhaps he was told to say it by supreme leader Ayatollah Khomenei for some reason. Maybe Putin asked him to say it. Or maybe he just came up with it on his own.

At any rate, Mr. Lijani is out, and Mr. Solana, who is tasked with reporting back by mid-November to a consortium of nations including Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the United States on Iran's willingness to forswear its uranium enrichment program, is left with no one to dance with at the present time.