TRP-related (by me at least)..from a review

[Michael Bailey]

then too, that aspect of grace as seeing things only as they are...
alongside deploring the abuses, enjoying what there is to enjoy...

Reef's fatality for gambling probably defuses (pun intended) some of his
potential for outward-bent destruction

both Root and Yashmeen are able
to construct "systems" for winning which, apparently, work...

Reef at at least one point reflects on how the casinos function to
redistribute some of the wealth that the monied classes have come
by with methods so ill (the fact that wealthy people pay a premium
for some things - haircuts, dinner eg - that can be had at home in
similar or greater quality, might be a similar check or balance...)

...math itself owes some of its advances, particularly in statistics,
to people's propensity for gambling

and the pervasive motif of the wheel in the book draws some of these
things in: the roulette wheel abstracts the flow of money in a similar way
to those Tibetan prayer wheels mentioned sometimes...

that is to say, as a Christianized Westerner, perhaps I tend to think
of prayer as a heartfelt emotional and personal pleading/thinking/relating/
reconciling process, and to react to "prayer wheels" as a mechanization
which seems to speed up the process into a realm where the meaning
changes into something not very "prayerlike" at all

just as the radiating spokes Merle and his daughter see among
the crops as they ride their tinker's wagon represent a slow-moving,
personally perceptible wheel of seasons and growing things and people
using and enjoying them, from which capitalism (and especially gambling)
takes an outward non-edible, not particularly enjoyable aspect (can't
eat money, can't smoke it - well I guess you could...)
and invests it with the importance that
human existence really derives from the individual experiences of
plants, forests, motion, touch, pretending that exchange of tokens has
an importance until people physically want this abstraction,
and literally can't live without it

but from a balloon-boy perspective, it isn't all bad, it's a new experience
with at least some savory possibilities...


On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 7:54 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>     The Big Short by Michael Lewis is "an indictment of shareholder driven capitalism". As soon as partnership was replaced by investor money, it became a casino.
>
> I would argue that one of the meanings of the casino (and Vegas in IV?) in AtD is captured in the above....Pynchon satirizes society for losing its human scale most.
>
>
>
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-- 
-- "the problem with the deployment of frictionless surfaces is
that they're not getting traction."