Monday, April 11, 2011

National Poetry Month: Featuring Grinnell Poet Mark Baechtel


Lament

By Mark Baechtel

If I watch long enough, the pencil will give up its soul.
in this it is like any thing: it has its ways, and observation
cuts down into them, a killing knife.
What can I look at without dismembering it?
The day limps home after I’m done with it, weeping,
wanting kisses and protection; the night has a long list of grievances
it wants to lodge with someone. I am guilty; greed is a sin, 
and I walk into the room like the Golem—paper in my mouth, famished eyes
peeled permanently open—whispering “Indulge me,
Indulge me, indulge me…”

Books by Mark Baechtel
Shaping the Story: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Short Fiction
Burling 3rd floor PN3373 .B135 2004

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Mark Baechtel has been Director of Grinnell's Forensic Activities since 2006. Writing has been the focus of his professional career. He writes and publishes poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, and has worked in various capacities in journalism since his graduation  from The American University in Washington, DC. Baechtel is also a graduate of the  Iowa Writers’ Workshop  and he has taught writing at Grinnell in the English Department  and the Writing Lab. He had a two-year stint  in Alaska working as Arts Editor for the Anchorage Daily News. In addition to publishing his journalism in newspapers and magazines nationwide, Baechtel's poetry and fiction has appeared in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary, The Grinnell Review, Lip Service, Poet Lore, Sou'wester and three anthologies—Open Door: A Poet Lore Anthology, Baltimore: Poems About A City and Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees, which is forthcoming from The Backwaters Press. His book on short story writing, Shaping the Story, came out in 2003 from Longman Publishers. Baechtel recently finished a novella which was a finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom competition, and is at work now on a novel entitled Renovation.

Friday, April 1, 2011

The Big Short, A Unique Look at the Most Recent Financial Crisis

Michael Lewis. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. NY: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Submitted by Grinnell College Circulation Supervisor Nathan Clubb ’10

The massive scale of the latest financial crisis and my deep interest of both economics and finance sparked a desire to learn more about how the world’s financial markets fell so far, so quickly.  The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, examines some of the key contributors to the recent financial crisis.  Lewis dives into the lives of several individuals who saw the impending mortgage and housing crisis and were able to bet against it.  He explains how several financial giants created complex mortgage bonds, turning low grade mortgage bonds into AAA rate bonds.  He looks into the greed of those who put the entire financial system at risk in order to push their profits ever higher.  He examines several important questions.  Who actually understood the risks associated with creating “artificial securities,” which  depended on housing prices always increasing to succeed?  Why did so many in the financial industry scoff at those who saw the risks associated with these mortgage bonds and credit default swaps without looking into their own holdings?  This is a story about a major underlying cause of the recent financial crisis, the small investors who saw it coming, and their persistence and eventual perseverance despite the rejection of their findings by most of the financial industry prior to the crisis.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.
Burling 2nd Floor  HC 106.83  .L5  2010

Grinnell College Libraries possesses other works by Michael Lewis including:

Moneyball:  The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. New York : W. W. Norton, c2003
Burling 2nd Floor  GV 880 .L49 2003

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity. New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2009
Burling  2nd Floor  HB 3722 .P36 2009

Trail Fever: Spin Doctors, Rented Strangers, Thumb Wrestlers, Toe Suckers, Grizzly Bears, and Other Creatures on the Road to the White HouseNew York : Knopf, 1997
Burling 2nd Floor  E 888 .L49 1997.