Where have all the literati gone? I miss the beats in North Beach. I wish I could have been in Paris when Henry Miller was making the rounds with his friends and bedbugs.
I’m placing bets on the economic disaster of our times. We like to fork over the public’s money to the rich, who spend it wisely in good economic times, then look to make gambling games out of people’s lives when nobody’s buying , when no reasonably intelligent person would invest in factories and infrastructure (ah, that long gone demand side of the economy).
So the rich made gambling instruments out of mortgages to avoid the regulations in place to prevent the kinds of runs on banks we’re seeing now. And they needed players, so they let anyone with a desire for property in on their game, namely the poorer folks who didn’t think they’d ever be offered a mortgage from some eager beaver in a suit who would assure them that they could afford one and they bit.
What does it mean? A one bedroom condo in a bad neighborhood in San Francisco will cost you upwards of $600,000 or more. A studio apartment in the icky tenderloin? $1300.
A cafe in Paris? Priceless.
So there’s no place in society for the poor folks who would lead a literary movement on crackers, cheeze whiz and a back room in a whore house. And that’s a pity.
Nevertheless, Gridskipper has a map of what passes for Literary Watering Holes in Paris these days. I mean, you might wanna sell the kids and take one of those spiffy flights that costs $100 on the Internet until they add unspecified fees and a ten-ticket roll for use of le pissoir. Then you notice in the fine print that the total comes to $2600. Au Revoir orderly free markets!