Drowned Books

Griftopia

Is there a word, maybe from the German, that means both outraged and nauseated at the same time, a sort of smash-barf response that's more volatile than just throwing up in your mouth a little bit? Because that's how I feel after reading Matt Taibbi's Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, which is not, I hasten to add, a reaction to Taibbi's prose, but to his subject matter -- the financiers and politicians who are on the path to ruining our country, if not the world.

In a quick, 250 pages, Griftopia combines a solid layperson's explanation of several current financial crises with an indictment of the systems that perpetuate them. It's often funny, if you enjoy cynicism and making fun of Randians (which I do), and there's a certain informality of diction that you might expect from a Rolling Stone contributing editor. For example, here's Taibbi on Objectivism:

"To sum it all up, the Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools."

It's also often flat-out depressing, as we're reminded of the real people who have gone bankrupt, and lost jobs, homes and savings, because our government is either failing to protect us from corporate predation, or, more likely, in cahoots with the predators to bleed us dry.

The majority of the blame for the various (commodities, real estate, stock market) bubbles bursting is laid on the banksters and their cronies, but Taibbi reminds us that this is happening in part because we are allowing ourselves to be distracted by red/blue ideologues, by the (corporate-owned) media, and by our own greed: "...in a country where every Joe the Plumber has been hoodwinked into thinking he's one clogged toilet away from being rich himself, we're all invested in rigging the system for the rich."

Taibbi goes through a lot of unflattering metaphors trying to fully convey the nastiness of the situation as he sees it, but the ones he keeps returning to are all from the true crime genre. Grifters, mafiosi, crack dealers -- imagine that America is D'Angelo Barksdale. Sure, we get to be one of the protagonists of the story, but maybe not for much longer. The king stay the king.

The Forger's Spell

Pop quiz: Which of these paintings is by 17th c. Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, and which is by 20th c. Dutch forger Hans van Meegeren?

If you know the answer, you're a better art expert than just about everyone from 1937 to 1945. Or, more likely, you've heard this story before. If you haven't, or if you'd like a pretty thorough recap, try Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century (even if you imagine that probably the greatest art hoaxes of the century are the ones that we haven't discovered yet).

Dolnick begins at the end, when van Meegeren got caught for war profiteering and had to convince the Amsterdam police that he didn't actually loot those Vermeers, he forged them. Treason carried a death sentence, but forgery got him a year in jail and free drinks at the pub for fooling Goering, so van Meegeren was an enthusiastic witness against himself, even going so far as to paint a real fake Vermeer while in custody to prove his guilt. He died of heart failure before he could serve any time, but he'd made his point by then.

In order to get at the full story, Dolnick recounts, in an unhurried, somewhat meandering style, brief histories of occupied Holland, and Nazi art looting; observations on Vermeer's preeminence, and the judgment of museum and gallery curators and art experts; and entertaining anecdotes about forgers -- who they are, why they are forgers instead of artists, and the ins and outs of the process of both making the paintings and getting them sold.

On the one hand, he notes, a forged piece of art does what it's supposed to do -- hang there on the wall and look, one presumes, as pretty as it did before you knew it was a forgery; on the other, art investors rarely buy for looks -- they're in it for money, status, and a piece of history, all of which go out the window when their piece is a fake. Our views of forgers themselves are likewise ambivalent. Few of us feel sorry for the poor millionaires who get swindled, but forgers can muck up art history irrevocably, or at least make things very confusing for experts, not to mention the rest of us.

Okay, pencils down. The top painting is the forgery, van Meegeren's faux-Vermeer The Supper at Emmaus, and the second one is the authentic Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. If you've read this far, you get an A for effort no matter which one you picked.

Proofiness

I took a quick break from art history to read Charles Seife's Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception, and you should, too! This is a book that I would recommend for anyone. It's fun, it's a really quick read, and even if you already know all the math, it's convenient to have all this info in one place. Plus, it's a book about lying with statistics that doesn't quote Mark Twain, and how common is that?

In Proofiness, Seife reminds us that, while we are often led to view them as pure fact, numbers in the real world measure real things, and are thus really fallible. We can be easily fooled by numbers, either by accident or intentionally, because they lend authority to an argument. Seife takes us through the most common tactics of chronic number-abusers: juking the stats, cherry-picking data, pretending to specificity, and, when all else fails, just making stuff up. Then he uses real-world examples to show how 'proofiness' is adversely effecting our economy, our judicial system, and even basic democracy.

Seife brings passion and a sense of humour ("78 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.") to the work that make it a compelling read. He also really tries to avoid any political agenda beyond educating people so that they can make better decisions (I would argue that his title somewhat undermines his professed non-partisanship, not that I mind). It's more of a media literacy book than a math one, and as such would maybe be an especially appropriate gift for anyone you know that needs a hand with not believing everything they read (or hear, or watch on TV).