Friday, December 19, 2008

Madoff and WallStreetlization: Theme & Variations

drawing by marguerita
12/19. Yesterday was a not very cold three-days-from-winter day in New York.

was about ... one guess ... Bernie Madoff and his Made Off with Billions. The discovery is still on-going for as widely revered as he was in his world, he was unknown, or almost, to so many others ... and, it turns out, even to those who knew him. Or thought they knew him.
Madoff Mania | New York Social Diary
The revelation that Bernard Madoff — brilliant investor (or so almost everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community — was a phony has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend.
Op-Ed Columnist - The Madoff Economy - NYTimes.com
"As your father cleans his lamp to have good light, so keep clean your spirit... By prayer, Huw. And by prayer I don't mean shouting and mumbling and wallowing like a hog in religious sentiment. Prayer is only another name for good, clean, direct thinking. When you pray, think. Think well what you're saying. Make your thoughts into things that are solid. And that way your prayer will have strength. And that strength will become a part of you -– body, mind and spirit." –-Mr. Gruffydd.from How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn, a939's novel.
Note- I met the writer in Sao Paulo,Brazil ,if my memory is correct around 1964 0r 65.
His birthdate year happened to be also the same one of my father !906.

Ship of Fools (painted c. 14901500) is a painting by Hieronymus Bosch which shows prodigal humans wasting their lives by playing cards, drinking, flirting, eating, etc. instead of spending it in "useful" ways. The painting is dense in symbolism:

The painting as we see it today is a fragment of a triptych that was cut into several parts. The Ship of Fools was painted on one of the wings of the altarpiece, and is about two thirds of its original length. The bottom third of the panel belongs to Yale University Art Gallery and is exhibited under the title Allegory of Gluttony. The wing on the other side, which has more or less retained its full length, is the Death of the Miser, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The two panels together would have represented the two extremes of prodigiality and miserliness, condemning and caricaturing both.

The painting is oil on wood, measuring 58 cm x 33 cm (23" x 13"). It is on display in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.


The ship of fools is an allegory that has long been a fixture in Western literature and art. The allegory depicts a vessel populated by human inhabitants who are deranged, frivolous, or oblivious, passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly ignorant of their own direction. This concept makes up the framework of the 15th century book Ship of Fools (1494) by Sebastian Brant, which served as the inspiration for Bosch's famous painting, Ship of Fools: a ship--an entire fleet at first--sets off from Basel to the paradise of fools. In literary and artistic compositions of the 15th and 16th centuries, the cultural motif of the ship of fools also served to parody the 'ark of salvation' (as the Catholic Church was styled).

Michel Foucault, who wrote Madness and Civilization, saw in the ship of fools a symbol of the consciousness of sin and evil alive in the medieval mindset and imaginative landscapes of the Renaissance.[citation needed]

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