The Melodrama of the Rupee

In Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," Miss Prism tells Cecily, "you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side."

Wilde's humorous intentions notwithstanding, the rupee is now providing the world with some melodrama. As Shubha Ganesh of The Economic Times wrote last weekend,  rupee depreciation has become a pressing concern of the government there "as a weak currency is expected to impact the domestic treasury as India meets 80 percent of its energy needs with imports."

Private companies in India, notably Reliance Communications (RCOM) a huge telecomm concern, have a lot of bonds reaching maturity in 2012, many of them foreign currency convertible. As another story this week in The Economic Times noted, "the timing could hardly look any worse."

A company that has issued, say, $1 billion in FCCBs is committed to pay the rupee equivalent of $1 billion US dollars when the bonds reach maturity. That is surely a key reason why the bondholders bought that sort of bond, why they've proven so easily marketable, after all: FCCBs let the buyers hedge themselves against any melodramatic fall of the rupee at the expense of the issuer.

If a major Indian company could find itself incapable of meeting those obligations -- well, we are all familiar with the ways of corporate metaphorical dominoes these days.

Yes, Cecily, this could get a bit too sensational.

Is the Net Good for Writers

I'm feeling too lazy today to do anything more than leave you with a quote. Fortunately, a good one is available. The subject line for this entry, Is the Net Good for Writers, is the subject of a symposium over at 10ZenMonkeys, whence my quote comes.

One of the contributors, Mark Dery, gives us the following reflection, on what Oscar Wilde might be doing today. Enjoy:

Skimming reader comments on Amazon, I never cease to be amazed by the arcane expertise lurking in the crowd; somebody, somewhere, knows everything about something, no matter how mind-twistingly obscure. But this sea change — and it's an extraordinary one — is counterbalanced by the unhappy fact that off-the-shelf blogware and the comment thread make everyone a critic or, more accurately, make everyone think they're a critic, to a minus effect. We're drowning in yak, and it's getting harder and harder to hear the insightful voices through all the media cacophony. Oscar Wilde would be just another forlorn blogger out on the media asteroid belt in our day, constantly checking his SiteMeter's Average Hits Per Day and Average Visit Length.

For Reading on the Plane

Before leaving the James Joyce Centre after the theatrical production I've described, I bought some trinkets at the gift shop. Among them was a volume of Joyce's "Occasional and Critical Writings," which I thought would be a fun read on the airplane ride home if I didn't like the movie.

I don't remember what the movie was, but it was one I had seen, which left me free to crack open the book. Thus, I learned two facts about Joyce that surprised me: the unsympathetic nature of his reaction to Oscar Wilde, and the unbridled enthusiasm he expressed for Ibsen. Had I been required to guess his responses to these two contemporaries, I would likely have posited them the other way around. Ibsen's drama was revolutionary in its own way, but it seems to me to be a revolution in a quite different direction from that which Joyce was effecting in the format of the novel. And for Wilde's aestheticism, I thought, Joyce would have had something kind to say.

The piece about Ibsen here is a review of his 1899 work, "When We Dead Awaken." You can read it here: http://www.classicreader.com/booktoc.php/sid.7/bookid.1958/

Joyce spoke glowingly of Ibsen's "large insight, artistic restraint, and sympathy. He sees ... steadily and whole, as from a great height, with perfect vision and an angelic dispassionateness, with the sight of one who may look on the sun with open eyes."

The Wilde essay says that its subject has "deceived himself by thinking he was the harbinger of the good news of neo-paganism to the suffering people" when he was really just re-packaging Catholicism.

Joyce also expressed some curiosity whether the "epileptic cast of his nervous system" might be some exculpation for the crime of sodomy -- no word in the essay doubts the criminal nature thereof.

As I say, new data. There is no such sin as gluttony as regards food for thought.