damianlawrencetheauthor

FYI

• Reading about the recent speculation from some applied mathematicians that the speed of light is not necessarily an absolute limit, it is interesting to think about what might be on the other side of that "veil" of light. Is it the true nature of the flaming sword of the cherubim--that which sets the boundary between the physical and the spiritual worlds? If so, it is in the latter in which everything is energized and "quickened" and moves infinitely faster than the speed of light. How so? Because speed is measured in terms of distance over time; but where time does not exist, and the denominator of that equation reduces to zero, the result approaches the infinite, which is the "speed of spirit", coming closer and closer to the "speed of God". http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/einsteins-math-faster-than-light-travel_n_1951272.html
• Well, it's beginning to look a lot like caucus time—and nothing goes better with a good caucus than a new poll! But rather than bore you with the same tired old politico names (you know who they are!), I thought I'd entertain you with something a little different for a change. So here it is—my snap poll of the week:
• Since it's the end of the year, I thought I would do something a little different and post a couple of my poems—one written a number of years ago, and another started several years ago and lost, then found and finished just this year. My apologies in advance to anyone who may become traumatized for life. Rosebud For a time I lost myself In your wild abandon, Never knowing whether to hold on tight Or to let you go. For a time I forgot myself In reckless bravado, Trying too hard to be what I thought I should be, Not realizing that you would know. As with a broken glass, awkward shards of light come through— I see glimpses of worlds not mine; For a moment I tried to look into those eyes so wild— Forgive me now, let me not go blind. Wings of blue, expanding with breath, Took me away on breathless flight. But still I don’t know if you soared there too, Or if my journey was wrong or right. Rosebud, where are you now?   *****   My life is a poem My life is a poem: You, the ink, and I, the page. Expectantly I await you—to draw you in, to reflect you. I wait for you to bleed into me, to spread and fill me With words so carefully chosen—words of love.   But a poem is born of pain, And pain is expectation unfulfilled. I wait and wait for words of love— For soft bleeding ink that turns white to indigo (the wisdom of the rainbow)— I wait…but gaping white remains.   I wait, but all the pens are dry; The words of love have blown away. Ashes in the winds of life, unsettled and dispersed, Rattling now like whitened bones, With empty words they prophesy:   My life is a poem, My page is blank. Of all the wishes wished and failed, A poem unwritten, its words unrhymed, Is the hollowest of all.  
• And now for something "just for fun"... Special thanks go to my friend MK in Thessaloniki for sharing this enticing little gem of a classified ad. I don't know the details of the position yet, but if you don't hear from me for a while, at least you'll know why! (And they said there were no good job openings anywhere...)
• Courtesy of award-winning photographer Anton Harfst and his lovely wife and business partner Laurien van den Hoven of Photothema - Storytelling Photography, below is a link to their website featuring photos taken by participants in the recent outdoor photography tour "In the Footsteps of the Paladins", based on my critically acclaimed novel, 'The Guardians of Time'. I had the good fortune of joining the tour group for a day-long hike through the hills and mountains of the region around Tsitzina, a key location in 'The Guardians of Time', where, according to the novel, a history-changing massacre of the local population during the Greek War of Independence takes place in 1825. The tour was wonderful, and the participants were fabulous - each one bringing various aspects of the scenery and the local colors and flavors to life through their photography. I also dabbled in a little bit of "clicking" (of the photographic kind, as opposed to the quotidian computer kind), and I think the results were not half-bad. Judge for yourself! http://www.photothema.com/index.php?option=com_phocagallery&view=category&id=34%3Ain-the-footsteps-of-the-paladins&Itemid=133&lang=en
• ECB Chief Jean-Claude Trichet, in explaining his view of a financial 'global doctrine', today cited Germany's low unemployment rate as justification for the fiscal austerity policies pursued by the EU in regard to the so-called 'peripheral' countries. According to Trichet, Germany today has lower unemployment than "before Lehman", which the central banker claimed was proof of the effectiveness of the Eurozone's unified monetary policy and of staying the course in terms of common policies aimed at price stability across the entire community. Applause from Athens was notably absent.
• Having just returned from a very interesting few days in Moscow, after an 11 year hiatus since my last trip to Russia (maybe the subject of a future blog post), I’m back in battered Athens to headlines in the financial media and blogosphere such as “PIMCO Head Predicts Default for Greece, Others“, “Surviving Greek Government to Approve New Austerity“, and “Eurozone Will Break Every Rule in Book to Keep It Together“. So naturally, sitting here in the middle of Chaos Central, I’m tempted to throw my own hat into the ring and proffer my opinion on the subject. Warning: it hasn’t changed much these last two years. For starters, there were today’s comments from leading fixed-income asset manager PIMCO about the likelihood of a Greek default, and the notion that it would not have a material impact on the world economy (because Greece is too small a drop in the bucket to do much harm). That Greece would/will default was a foregone conclusion for me ages ago, and nothing that has happened in recent months and weeks has changed my opinion one iota. The powers-that-be have managed to slow down the train wreck, but it is still a slow-motion crash that – short of some miracle – is inevitable in the case of Greece. The larger question is what it will mean in terms of contagion to the rest of the EU and potentially world markets. So El-Erian has had his say – Greece too small a drop in the bucket to really have much of an impact on the rest of the world; and, as others in the chorus have echoed, all (or most) of the bad news is already priced into the market. But is this really true? From my vantage point here in Athens, my own suspicion is that – from a strictly economic perspective – El-Erian is right: Greece is too small a potato to really have a meaningful impact on the rest of the world’s economy. But (and it’s a pretty big but) things don’t always seem to be operating based strictly on rational economic perspectives in our times. In fact, although it may seem strange to say so given the prevailing weak economic conditions in so much of the world, I sometimes find myself wondering if the entire global economy is not operating in a massive “bubble” environment. We’re so used to talking about bubbles in individual industries, and when looked at from that narrow point of view, things don’t necessarily look so bad, even if a particular sector or country is looking over-inflated. But when the whole interconnected global economy is viewed in terms of a “hot money” bubble – where so much of how economies rise and fall is based on artificial financial gains and losses rather than real gains/losses in economic value and productivity – it doesn’t take very much for the entire system to be impacted, even by a small economy like Greece. I’m sure that a guy like El-Erian is brilliant and has access to all kinds of information and analysis that I will never have; but I also can’t help but think that sometimes people in the financial industry (and I used to be one of them) get into a sort of tunnel vision where larger currents and themes become contracted into a very limited time horizon. Maybe – hopefully – I’m wrong; but my own trading portfolio results tend to support the view that the markets do not always behave in economically rational ways. Of course, in the long run and on average they probably generally do. But the real money is never made “in the long run and on average”, and the people who are intent on making that real money do not tend to act according to long-run-average behavioral patterns. They might prefer that the rest of the world think they do, but they certainly don’t. If they did there would never be any superior (or inferior, for that matter) investment results, and the Goldmans and PIMCOs and other like-minded players of the world would never exist. So that leads back to the other question as to whether or not all the bad news is already priced in. It seems to me that what I’ve seen happening in recent times (i.e. the last year or two at least) is that when all the bad news seems to be priced into the markets already – and logically is priced in – the markets tend to buck reality and discount almost everything even further (even the fact that they’ve already discounted so much of the bad news). So at the end of the day, all the bad news is rarely already fully priced in. That’s because, when push comes to shove, the hot money isn’t waiting around for things to bottom out and recover. It’s already moved on to the next shell game, and what the market perhaps thought was 'everything already priced in' becomes another false bottom. Again, I could be wrong. Let’s hope so. As for Greece specifically, the fact that Greek Prime Minister Papandreou’s government passed a no-confidence test the other day is really immaterial. The ruling party still has an absolute majority (though barely now), so I’m not sure what kind of “confidence” vote there can really be when it is split entirely along party lines – like the situation in the US of the last several years. The point is, with or without a no-confidence vote, it will be very hard (if not impossible) for the government to generate meaningful support across party lines for the new austerity measures the EU/ECB/IMF troika is pushing for. Even if they force the measures through the parliament, they will never succeed in implementing them, because the people will simply not cooperate. Already we’ve seen the mass demonstrations, and this is not over by a long shot. Just to provide some local color, apparently over the weekend a contingent of demonstrators (I don’t know exactly how many) from Sparta arrived in Athens’ Syntagma Square on foot - that is, after walking all the way from Sparta in a three-day protest march. When you get that level of grassroots commitment going on, it’s hard to imagine people just getting tired of the whole thing, giving up and going home to quietly pay their new, draconian taxes and take their salary cuts, job losses and pension reductions with a polite wag of the head. Finally, there have been some other comments today in the financial blogs along the lines that the EU will do whatever it takes to keep the Eurozone together, with the result that even a Greek default will not break up the euro in the near term. While I tend to agree that the EU will do “whatever it takes” (because the euro was never about economics or finance, but about politics) – for example, just print its way out of the problem (or more to the point perhaps, just continue printing its way out of the problem) - I do believe that rationale has its limits. For one thing, the UK never joined the Eurozone, and therefore I wonder just how much of “whatever it takes” a UK government (let alone the populace) will stand paying for, just to keep together a currency union that it never even endorsed with its own participation? So it’s really down to Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Okay, let’s be honest – it’s really down to Germany. So when all is said and done, will Germany really do “whatever it takes” to keep the Eurozone together? I fully accept that Germany’s politicians – as well as their counterparts in Brussels, Paris, Madrid and Rome – may be willing to do “whatever it takes” to keep their political project on the rails. But how long before their electorates decide that enough is truly enough? I guess that’s the 64 trillion-dollar question, and if the recent soundings in the Finnish and other parliaments – as well as on the streets of Athens and Madrid – are to be given any credence, the answer may not be a very comforting one for those betting on a Greek default being just a slight hiccup.
• Dateline: AthensAmidst reports that Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has struck a deal with the so-called 'troika' - the EU, ECB and the IMF - to extend the maturities of Greek sovereign debt through 2014 and to throw more money into the ailing country against a promise of increased fiscal austerity, the currency markets today confirmed their irrationality. The Eurozone's single currency, the euro, moved against the dollar in a rare technical pattern which chartists call an 'insane yoyo', before hitting recent highs against the US currency. In late trading, the euro broke through 1.4523 against the dollar.Currency strategists predict that market exuberance, over what many are calling the 'kicking of the can' further down the road on Greece's debt woes, is a temporary overreaction that cannot sustain a longer term euro rally. Economists have also warned that the Mediterranean country's economic problems are unlikely to be solved by a new bailout.In a troubling sign of the likelihood Greece's national sovereignty will be further eroded, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet yesterday called for a greater role of EU authorities in the fiscal decision-making of Eurozone countries which do not deliver on their promised spending cuts.Meanwhile, on the streets of Athens, thousands of protesters prepared for another night of demonstrations in the capital, vowing to end the external interference in the country's economy and to resist further austerity measures. One protester, who declined to give his name, said of the government:"They've been stealing for years with the help of the Europeans, and now they want us to pay for it. But we won't keep paying for their mistakes. It took only three hundred Greeks to defeat an entire army of Persians. You see how many of us there are here? Many more than three hundred."
• With all the attention the whole phenomenon of e-books has been getting lately - and to a lesser extent the phenomenon of print-on-demand (POD) self-publishing or indie publishing - I thought I would say a few words to the wise on the subject. There are lots of resources available out there in the cloud to help you work through the process of what you have to do to self-publish a book, whether POD or an e-book (which in many ways is arguably the cheaper, faster, less complicated way to go). I'm not going to repeat them, because you can Google as well as I can. As a writer trying to understand the scary, crazy, interesting (and ultimately exciting) way in which the publishing world is evolving, I've read tons of these resources and talked to lots of people - and even dabbled in some of it myself. As a result, I can tell you one thing that I have not found clearly spelled out UP FRONT for someone wanting to get their feet wet in this arena - unless I have been reading in my sleep (no, really, it happens sometimes). Are you ready? Here it goes. Did you miss it? Wait, I'll back it up and slow it down and play it for you again. You're asking a lot, you know. "I said: If you think you're going to just self-publish your book, and having done it (hey, congratulations by the way!), that's it - you can then turn the page and start working on your next masterpiece, think again." Certainly it's possible to do that. Just have at it, crank it out, and then move on. But the reality of it is, if you take that approach, the only thing moving will be you, my friend. Your book (which you probably spent the last year of your life agonizing over) will be sitting there, minding its own Ps & Qs, waiting for a little love to strains of Bob Marley singing "I don't want to wait in vain for your love..." (Did you like that? Good - that one goes out to all the literary agents out there). So what's my point? I'm waiting. Oh, right! It's not that I'm saying you shouldn't do it; but if you do it, know what you're getting yourself into. Here's the hard, cold bottom line. You're not self-publishing a book. You're starting a business. And starting a business - any kind of business - is tough. You have to be very well informed, very well organized, very motivated, and have the ability to go for very long periods of time with little sleep and very little social interaction. The fact that you've actually completed a book says that you probably have some of those qualities already. Either that or you're a total nerd. But it's very different applying those capabilities to a creative project like writing and applying them to something which - okay, I'll be generous - is "creative" (yeah, right) in a different sort of way. It's the difference between being an artist and being an entrepreneur. Some people can do both, but it sure is not easy, and you'd be better off knowing what you're up against. Here is just a short list of things to think about off the top of my head (and not necessarily in order of importance): 1) Production logistics - what I mean here is everything from figuring out how to format that e-book properly for all the formats you might want to use (.mobi for Kindle - though I've heard talk that Amazon may soon start to accept .epub formatted e-books for Kindle as well; .epub for Nook, Kobo, iTunes and everything else - except, oh yeah, .pdb for Palm; etc.), which is not as easy as you might think; to getting an ISBN for your title; to choosing the right POD vendor; to figuring out your approach to cover art (i.e. use one of the services offered by a POD vendor like CreateSpace or Lulu or any of the others); 2) Marketing and promotion - in other words, now that you've got your magnum opus in print or in electronic paper, how are you going to let the world know it's there? Who is your target market? Who are your distributors? How are you going to reach them and influence their decision to carry or not to carry your material? 3) Pricing - not necessarily as easy as it looks. If you're working with an e-book platform like Amazon which requires you to ensure that nobody else beats their price in order to maintain your eligibility for the highest level of 'royalties', you are sooner or later going to have to deal with the question of how to control (or influence rather, because you just can't control it) pricing on other platforms. If you're talking about print, there are a whole raft of other considerations, depending on the capabilities of your POD vendor or distribution platform. 4) Buy milk - oh, sorry, how'd that get in there? 5) Admin - and don't think there is none. There's plenty. Everything from updating your editions, filing and controlling document versions, copyright registration and deposit requirements, and, and, and, and. The list goes on - but thankfully this blog post won't. It really is starting to sound like starting a business, isn't it? See, I told you. Anyway, it may seem a pretty daunting task when you start to think about it in its entirety, and it is. But, seriously, the better informed you are about the process from the beginning, and the more organized you are going into it - well, I was going to say "the more successful you are likely to be", but let's take a step back here and remember that your ultimate success depends on the quality of what you've written and only partly on how well you are able to flog it. But if flog it you must, you might as well do it as efficiently and with as few major surprises as possible. Your sanity depends on it. Smile. (But not too much - they might think you're crazy). And have a plan. But no question about it - plan or no plan, it's a whole lot of work. And at the end of the day, for someone whose dream is to sit down and just write, it's a whole different ball of wax. Perhaps that's why someone who has been so extremely successful at self-publishing - someone like Amanda Hocking, for example (Hi, Amanda! Thanks for reading my blog! By the way, I just did you a huge favor and sent a bunch of people over to your blog, okay? No, really, what are friends for?) - has just given up all that fun stuff (what were you thinking, girl?) and gone off and signed a...gasp...$2 million (okay, it's not like you needed the money, right?) multi-book deal with St. Martin's Press. (Oh, now that I mentioned them, I guess I have to mention my publisher too, or else, well you know...Pentelicus Press. There, is that enough?) Anyway, kudos to her. Meanwhile, the rest of us will just have to content ourselves with pathetically banging out our little blogs, procrastinating on our next great American novels, and trying hard not to smile too much. Oh, and don't forget the milk.
• Moody's downgraded Greece's sovereign debt rating to Caa1, with a negative outlook, from its recent low of B1. But apparently we shouldn't worry too much. Apparently only 50% of countries rated Caa1 default, and that within 5 years. Then again, weren't Moody's among the rating agencies who A-rated tons of mortgage-backed securities?
• I just came back from a talk given by Dr. Dani Rodrik (Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at the JFK School of Government, Harvard) at a meeting of the Harvard Business School Club of Greece. I was left with several impressions, among which were the following: (1) Dr. Rodrik very articulately concludes from his economic research that, in a situation like Greece's, historically the most successful way out has been through economic growth, NOT austerity measures. In fact, he put up a supporting chart which was extremely interesting in that it came from the IMF's own research and showed without a doubt that growth scenarios were much more successful than austerity scenarios. So it seems that even the IMF know that what they are doing is not the approach which has historically proven to be the most successful one. One has to ask the question then (in fact, someone did ask that question, but did not get a very satisfactory answer), why are they doing it? (2) He outlined all the possible ways a country could produce a growth scenario, and unfortunately it seemed that none of them were viable options for Greece. The only one that could have been a viable option, and historically the one which has had the fastest impact on a country in a liquidity crisis - currency devaluation - is being kept off the table for Greece due to a political decision. Dr. Rodrik concluded that it could be less costly in the end for the EU and for Greece if the country were to be allowed to negotiate a temporary "leave of absence" from the single currency. It would thus have the macroeconomic policy options necessary to pursue economic growth without provoking the political turmoil that would be caused by the historically less successful austerity options currently being pursued. (3) The next impression did not come so much from Dr. Rodrik but from some of the other audience members, among whom were members of parliament (though whether they were active or retired, I don't know). The impression was that they are so far out of touch with the reality on the ground among the Greek people, and so cynical in their ideas, that if they were representative of the government's thinking, there really is no way out short of a total meltdown which forces change. In fact, they reminded me of the TEPCO management in Japan during the earliest days of the Fukushima crisis, denying the existence of the problem, and then when forced to grudgingly admit the reality of the situation, engaging in all kinds of fantastically wishful thinking that it would all just go away. (4) And the last impression, which came as I left the Karatzas Auditorium of the National Bank of Greece and headed back towards Constitution Square and the metro station, was that of the thousands upon thousands of Greeks from every walk of life lining the streets, crowding themselves into Constitution Square and making their voices heard - finally.