POETS Day! Charles Mackay of Extraordinary Popular Delusions Fame
Charles Mackay's poems are very passable replications of poetry, and he has a marvelous talent for following example. He’s a good baker.
My kid can type. I don’t mean he just knows how. He dropped into a conversation about something else that he started fiddling with a typing tutor website and “plays” the exercises between games or watching videos when he’s messing around on the computer. He’s been at it for three years. We think we keep an eye on what he does online but this was the first my wife or I heard about it, so we tested him on a random type training site, one he wasn’t familiar with.
He’s over one hundred words a minute at 99% accuracy. He’s thirteen. We’re a little terrified that he was able to spend as much time as he obviously has online without our knowing what he was up to, but damn. He won’t need a POETS Day plan. If he sticks to white collar employment, he’ll blaze throught as much by noon as his co-workers manage all day.
As for the rest of you, come up with something. Pretend a cough, remember a religious observance, whatever you have to do to get out of work and live it up on a Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
First, here’s a bit of verse.
***
One of the reasons I subscribe to The Free Press is for access to dueling articles on a subject. Here’s a guy who thinks war is bad. Here’s a guy who thinks war is good. And they’ll cross link if the two come out a few days apart.
I read the comments on both. Their paired articles seem less plagued by comment section trolls than the standard stuff, not that those are particularly afflicted when compared to the internet as a whole. I don’t think think I’ve ever been radically swayed by one of the exchanges—article or comment—but I get a few questions answered and pick up a few new questions in the process and emerge just as annoyingly opinionated but with a new array of plugged-in patina building bits of info to pester friends and family with. More than worth the $10 a month subscription price.
Recently, they ran “Niall Ferguson: OpenAI’s House of Cards,” by, get this, Niall Ferguson, and “Is AI a Bubble? Not So Fast,” by Tyler Cowen. I’m now convinced there will be a bursting in the near future, but I’m less worried about it now.
There’s tons of money being risked but it’s less financed by assuming debt than previous bubble matters were. Microsoft and Alphabet are making plenty from all the other hustles they have going and are (mostly) using that, not assumed future profit, racing towards the singularity. This isn’t the housing flop. Open AI is going the other way. It’s got $1.4 trillion to pay back, sorta. Dauntingly high number, but that’s debt they plan on taking on. There’s flexibility.
Ferguson writes that we’re making a mistake bringing up the housing market or the dotcom bubble as comps. He suggests choo-choos
“Think of today’s capital expenditures on data centers being like capital expenditures on railroads 150 years ago. And there’s the rub. Two things can be true at the same time: a) the data centers to power AI could be as economically worthwhile an investment as railroads, and b) we could still experience at least one stock market crash along the way to its general adoption.”
Cowen has the best point. It’s one that, from now on or until I forget about it in a month or so, will pop up in my mind every time I read an article about impending economic doom.
“I am not trying to tell you how to invest your money. But I do know there are strong biases toward negative news in the media. People will click on articles suggesting AI is a bubble, and so much of the media responds by producing that content, whether or not it is true. The reality is that media companies are not above-average investors, nor do they have a unique ability to spot financial trends.”
The bold and insistent italics are mine.
I’m not a student of such things, but in telling me to compare the possibly-certainly-exagerated-imminent-phantom-impedinding-coming AI crash to the railroads rather than other financial disasters, I thought about tulips.
I’m not comparing the seventeenth century Dutch tulip gambling disaster to AI, railroads, housing, dotcom, or any of the many bubbles and crashes I’m ignorant of, most even without a Free Press provided informed patina to hide behind. I thought about tulips because people lost a lot of money and never was there a financial fallout as ripe for drive-by mocking.
I had Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds on my to-read shelf for so long it’s on the shelf shelf. My dad is in the habit of writing the date and occasion somewhere in the front matter of books he gives as gifts, so I know that I’ve been meaning to get to this since my September birthday of 2013. I plead practicality.
Long books suffer on the pile. My reasoning goes that I have however many books I want to get to and only so much time before I die or a bat flies into my eyes and blinds me, so I can a) read a six hundred page book or b) knock off a couple of three-hundred pagers in the same amount of time to make room for more three-hundred pagers that will themselves cut in front of the six-hundred page brick, continuing a beautiful dance of loss and rejuvenation. Why Popular Delusions lingered, lost immediacy, and became a collectible. Until now.
There’s a chapter I knew was in there about the Dutch tulip foolishness. “The Tulipmania” wasn’t at all what I expected from the book. I expected dry delves by Mackay into the whys and some pre-discipline psychological fishing dressed up in Victoriana.
Aside from the ones on alchemy and the Crusades, all the chapters are relatively short and free standing: they can be read in any order. Despite its billing as a “landmark study of crowd psychology and mass mania,” and David J. Snieder, in his introduction, counting as among “fewer than a dozen books written more than a century ago that could be called classics of the social sciences,” it’s a simple account of what happened dressed up with a few anecdotes. It’s also a magnificent time because I get to read about people just like me in ecstatic susceptibility to something surface, dermis, and bone deep level stupid, and even thought there’s no reason to doubt I, clever reader that I am, wouldn’t be caught up in the frenzy, I wasn’t. “Look at these loons!” No psycho-babble so far, just facts, a few thoughts, and those anecdotes are fun.
Mackay was a journalist, hopping from editorial and reporting posts in London and Glasgow. He ran around America covering the Civil War for The Times. I can’t tell if he “broke” the story, but he was the first to get anything in print about the Fenian Conspiracy. That’s how he made his living. Popular Delusions caused a ripple of interest, but it was a side project; a continuing side project. He collected stories of people behaving extraordinarily, as far as I can tell, for the rest of his career.
Snieder surprised me with this:
“During his lifetime, Mackay was best known for his poetry. His collected verse, Voices from the Crowd (1846), was popular, and some of his poems were set to music and became hits of the day.”
I found Voices from the Crowd online at The Internet Archive. It’s not very good. I suppose he satisfied a moment’s tastes without offering anything memorable. (A quick look at Billboard’s top 100 for the year I graduated highschool and I find Timmy T, Freedom Williams, and Surface; none ring a bell.) It’s filled with heart tuggings set to rigid form, the kind of ornamentation you’d expect in a circular or newspaper. That makes sense given Mackay’s occupation, but he doesn’t fit. He didn’t write to fill two column inches. I may be wrong about mid-nineteenth century graphic layout allowances, but he goes on. There’s not a short Auden-esque light lyric among them.
Here’s an excerpt because, despite near infinite twenty-first century graphic layout allowances, I don’t wanna print more.
from The Dying Mother
Charles Mackay (1814-1889)The angels call me—lo, I come!
Children, I die! I’m going home!
All pangs, save one, have pass’d away,
All griefs and sufferings of clay,
Except this lingering fond forgetfulness—
The last affection of my heart,
The pain, the grief, that we must part.
I have a shorthand for absence of flair that offends some of my friends because it slights a favorite hobby. I like to cook. I don’t like to bake. In cooking you’re tasting, adding, experimenting, throwing in a little personality. In baking, you do precisely what the directions tell you to do, become a functional arm of measurement, and console your ego pretending you add to the process by further pretending you’re an authority on the effects of local humidity.*
Mackay understands form and plugs in varied and pleasant words, but there’s no passion even in his attempts to elicit passionate empathy. His poems are very passable replications of poetry and he has a marvelous talent for following example. He’s a good baker.
from Unknown Romances
Oft have I wander’d when the first faint light
Of morning shone upon the steeple-vanes
Of sleeping London, through the silent night,
Musing on memories of joys and pains;—
And looking down long vistas of dim lanes
And shadowy streets, one after other spread
In endless coil, have thought what hopes now dead
Once bloom’d in every house, what tearful rains
Women have wept, for husband, sire, or son;
What love and sorrow ran their course in each,
And what great silent tragedies were done;—
And wish’d the dumb and secret walls had speech,
That they might whisper to me, one by one,
The sad true lessons that their walls might teach.
I’ve never seen an episode of The Crown, about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, but I came across a mention of it when looking into Mackay. Gillian Anderson, of X-Files fame, plays Margaret Thatcher, which doesn’t sound possible until you see pictures of her all gotten up and in character. There’s a scene where Anderson-as-Thatcher recites a poem from memory, and it being a popular show, the internet bloomed in reddit queries, tweets, and posts asking and answering as to what the poem was and by whom.
It was “You Have No Enemies,” a remarkably Auden length poem by Mackay not included in Voices. I don’t trust television shows and, even less so, television fan blogs but was able to verify via a Times article that Lady Thatcher’s longtime personal assistant and friend, Cynthia Crawford, kept a copy of the poem in a scrapbook. If the Iron Lady drew inspiration from Mackay’s work, it’s possible he takes his place with David Hasselhoff and the Velvet Underground among the inexplicable and unintentional footnotes in the story of the greatest freeing history’s known. Amazing.
You Have No Enemies
You have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
Must have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
You’ve been a coward in the fight.
My indifference, dislike if I’m bothered to muster, to his poetry doesn’t extend to Popular Delusions. The book is crack; episodic so you can skip around like a parlor worthy Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. Right now I’m reading the chapter about slow poisoning. The teaser from Mackay’s “Preface to the Edition of 1852”:
“It was once thought a venial offense, in very many countries of Europe, to destroy an enemy by slow poison. Persons who would have revolted at the idea of stabbing a man to the heart, drugged his potage without scruple. Ladies of gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of murder, until poisoning, under their auspices, became quite fashionable.”
It’s not murder if you do a little bit of it at a time; never imagined a homicidal parallel to bed shaking. Fantastic non-poetic output from this guy. A belated thank you, dad.
*I do, in fact, know people who put the “art” in artisan baking, people who make baguettes you can’t compliment for a full mouth, make croissants that weigh less than the butter added to the dough, and lord, the doughnuts my son, the mad typist, puts out. But I like deriding bakers because they get peevish so quickly. I have no intention of changing my way.
[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]