frank miller

[alice wellintown]

> buncha people all frenziedly speculating on the efforts of others, and
> speculating on the speculations.  Doesn't lay one brick.  Doesn't
> prove one theorem.  Doesn't cure one disease.
> Even reading about it isn't as much fun as reading a decent thriller
> or romance...

Well, to the end Ben Franklin signed his name, Ben Franklin, Printer.
And that kinda Bostonian to Philadelphia, after he was apprenticed to
his not so nice brother and ran away, journey to the workinfg class
identity ends not in a robber barron but a media magnate. Franklin was
so much more than a media magnate, though Bloomberg, who made his
early money at Merrill, his late money on the backs of immigrants and
working class new yorkers, surely sees himself as a Franklin not a
John Jacob Astor. Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity! There wasa time when Wall
Street contracts, derrivitives, were hand written by scriveners. Even
then, as we learn from the lawyer narrator of the best short story in
the American Langauge, men like John Jacob Astor, a man who makes
today's 1% look like paupers who still hope to get into heaven
honestly, could cause a meltdown in the lives of too many people
around the not yet so inter-connected world. One could not even escape
it in the remote islands, islands Astor stripped of wood. Wll, maybe
on Typee:
There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the
ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There
were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills
payable, no debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and
shoemakers perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description;
no assault and battery attorneys, to foment discord, backing their
clients up to a quarrel, and then knocking their heads together; no
poor relations, everlastingly occupying the spare bed-chamber, and
diminishing the elbow room at the family table; no destitute widows
with their children starving on the cold charities of the world; no
beggars; no debtors' prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in
Typee; or to sum up all in one word--no Money! 'That root of all evil'
was not to be found in the valley.

But that is, as you say, good romance only.