Really excited for this (Taken with instagram)
Things that lead to froth:
- Celebrity angel investors
- Pseudo-celebrity institutional investors
- “Sure thing” incubators
- A compelling narrative for why this time is different
- Ready tales of overnight success
Things that lead to bubbles:
- Hidden correlations
- Rapid deregulation
- A large, opaque, and poorly understood asset class
- Human nature
- $$$
“I can see that lack of resolution now as a young writer’s move. You find that you have talent as a novelist, you understand a lot more about the world than many other people your age do, and yet you haven’t lived enough—certainly I hadn’t—to really have something to say. Everything is still guessed at, every conclusion is provisional. And this came to be my gripe with the postmodern aversion to closure. It’s like, Grow up already! Take some responsibility for your narrative! I’m not looking for the meaning, but I am looking for a meaning, and you’re denying me a vital element of making sense of any story, which is its ending! Aversion to closure can be refreshing at certain historical moments, when ossified cultural narratives need to be challenged. But it loses its subversive bite in a culture that celebrates eternal adolescence. It becomes part of the problem.” — Franzen
“A page was enough, by then. If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.” — Franzen
“So right around the beginning of the nineties I suddenly had three male writer friends, as opposed to none. And because I was entering a period of radical doubt about the point of writing literary novels, it was an incredible blessing to talk with other people who were ambitious and thoughtful and talented, who were dedicating their lives to trying to write good books.” — Franzen
Driving over the Williamsburg bridge.
i’ve tried to take this picture so many times and NEVER BEEN ABLE TO. terry richardson can do it, of course.
“I just suddenly saw it. I suddenly made the connection between my needs as a reader and what I was doing as a writer, which I had never made before. That in fact I was not interested in punishing the reader, because I didn’t enjoy being punished myself. If I wanted the book to be read, it needed to move, and so I had to make the cuts to make it move.” — Franzen
“
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said you were writing eight hours a day.
FRANZEN
I could do ten sometimes.
INTERVIEWER
Even when things weren’t working?
FRANZEN
I didn’t have the experience of things not working. I didn’t know enough to know when something wasn’t all that good. The chapters just came clattering out.
“And people, creative, industrious people, will be able to get their products to market anywhere. And we should have a world that is vastly more wealthy because of commerce and because of diversity of culture and exchange of information. And it should truly be a golden age.” — Larry Ellison
“If you can improve the wealth in China, if you can increase the wealth in China—and what is going on in southern China right now is nothing less than a revolution, with much greater impact than the Cultural Revolution. And it will forever change that country. And China is so large; people do not realize the Chinese economy, I think, is $2.4 trillion and the Japanese economy is $2.6 million. China is about to become the second largest economy in the world. And it is growing in double digits, I think. It is just an absolutely incredible rate. They certainly have not had a political democratic revolution in China yet. But it is certain to happen. And the economic revolution that precedes it will do more to end human suffering than democratic revolution that succeeds it ever will.” — Larry Ellison in 1995