He helped me understand the tragedy that happened in the judicial process and theres no way anyone can give a through understanding of what has happened. But they were explaining thhey s with the stock market and i thought, what a story. So became a book in any magazine piece. But the real thing was this young man who is part of this entire Financial System. Host we have jim frystem. Host we have jim from dubuque, iowa. Caller thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. Theres an obvious manipulation of the gold and silver market where they are following this on behalf of possibly the government. This is certainly a local market system. Guest first responses i have no idea, but the second response is theres an observation, as one who has been watching the commodities market and the Foreign Exchange market over the last five or six years, and that is that it is amazing how much manipulative activity has been going on or accusations of it. And it raises the question. Has this always been going on we didnt know about it in a horribly in the great age of manipulation or not the center of the market in the stock market or through one of those markets. And so i dont know the answer to that. But i havent addition to probably what has happened is the technology, Information Technology has greatly reduced the necessary role of wall street. Standing between buyers and sellers is not needed anymore and for the actors have been forced to wind other outlet in one of those outlets is creating complicated things and another may be mucking around the markets in ways that you shouldnt be mucking around. But i do not know the answer to those questions. Host after all the research, what is your understanding of the market . You think you understand it fully . Guest no. I understand it well enough to comp ran the story. I understand that it is held by the main character of the book. But it is complicated. And there are 150 basic different order types that can be used to submit their stock market order, a most are designed to move the price around and not to trade. And i dont know all of them, but i know it of them. I think one of them is allowed and is incredible and i could not give you an authoritative account of all the types. But i can give you a broad description of what they do and a few examples. And i can tell you that i know enough about the stock market and it needs to be simplified and clarified. It needs to be understandable and it shouldnt be a secret and it doesnt need to be the comp located. Host are you in the market . Guest yes, absolutely. My first impression, i would just take some of my money out completely just so that if this calamity happens, i dont feel like a fool for to having people telling me to watch out for it. And what i dont do is actually bother to pick stocks. I think that is a fools game and certainly for me. I just dont have it. So i try not to lose my money and im in my market two ways. Index funds and another version of this. So i buy shares of Berkshire Hathaway and i figure whatever happens, he will be positioned to explore it and he will be able to defend it. So what i really want to do is not think about it. I want to think about writing stories. So that is how i am in the market. Host bill from tucson, arizona. Please go ahead. Caller hello, my question is regarding stocks having been lifted from the new York Exchange and other exchanges. What the reaction is and the feeling that their stock prices are being manipulated by these highfrequency traders. Guest that is a great question. You look at the parties here and theres actually a dance between this as framed in the book and investors in the market. People buying and selling stock for more than a millisecond. And the predator being a highfrequency trader. But theres another part of the transaction that you never hear from and probably should hear from and the purpose of the stock market is to channel Investment Capital to people who can put it to productive uses. All of this has nothing to do that. Its a lot of financial regulation. And so how do some corporations feel . We are not always happy about the ipo. And i know i have talked to people about that kind of thing where the glitches were so obvious that they say how can it be like this. But i think that that is a constituency that needs to start to speak up and say, okay. This mucking around the market, depending on how many dollars these guys are taking up, we need this market to be stable and we need our stock rises to feel like theyre acting something. So this a long way of saying that i never actually went and interviewed Corporate Executives and my guess is that in most cases they dont know about it. And they are not that aware of it. Its not high on their list of concerns for their business. But wait it out and they will get interested. Host john in alabama. Caller i appreciate hearing what you have to say today. As well as your book. The question i have is the Federal Reserve and the u. S. Treasury, i am trying not to be political, like you said and i agree with you about that. But with all of the things and the money that is being put in by her government, how is that impacting it and then is this making it more unstable . Stimulus creates instability in the financial markets. And its trying to lower longterm Interest Rates to stimulate economic activity. And theres a panel that disagree with each other and you can see its a no one knows. And what is clearly true is that the stock market is a huge beneficiary of easy money and for some time now the Federal Reserve, in my view, it has been too much time worrying about levels of the stock market and i feel like Government Policies restrict onto the stock market level of is that its actually a goal rather than something that should just happen and it should go where it goes kind of thing. And so there is a contributing to instability and it doesnt play into it, but i would say no and i would also add that the problems that they face, ben bernanke, and when the Financial System collapsed in 2008, the decisions that they made to deal with the problem was, i think, whether it was ultimately right or wrong, i think it is a great decision and i think its probably right given the government was paralyzed and anything that happens after that is a secondary concern. I actually think ben bernanke than American Hero and i think that what that mandate is incredible and hes taking all kinds of grief and he didnt see the subprime crisis coming. But given the hand that he was dealt to play, he did what he could and i think a lot of people wouldve done the same thing. Host do you foresee a Class Action Lawsuit given what youve written . Guest thats like zero some bickering between political parties. You want people to fix the problem. Gimme a solution. Heres the problem. Lets just do this and not worry about wanting people or the names of highfrequency traders who did all this. Dont think people on national tv. Its just not necessary. The more that there is there is a less likely solution because the people who have perpetrated upon feel like they are exposed. And so lets just fix it. Host the thing that we can start looking at this problem . Guest yes, i do. The money is funneled into the process with these advantages on these exchanges are the overwhelming debate. And we will see this fog machine in ngress and what dat dave dont mean veryh or is false or whatever but there would be the argument against doing anything but my hunch is that now the problem is exposed and the way that its exposed the problems can be dealt with. The regulatory process can do the things it needs to do which isnt necessarily to introduce one new regulation. We see what happens when they introduced the wrong. The two things to people in congress who are concerned with this issue and regulators should always keep in mind is that everything should be in the direction of increasing transparency, genuine transparency not radical transparency but people will actuallthat people willactuallyg rather than if they dig through the documents. So the actual transparency being very sensitive to the incentive system because people are responding to incentives. Like answering the call of the incentives and the behavior is bad so you arent going to change the behavior unless you change the incentive. Host i was a little confused by the last chapter. Is the last chapter are you previewing your next book or a bigger better faster . Guest so its great to take a long time to finish. Riding along the fiber optic cable in chicago and new jersey to cut off the travel costs 300 million no one knows. No one was around that purpose. Its like a beast underground. I went riding along on the bike and see wireline rating on the bike there is a newly constructed chain of towers on the hills in pennsylvania over the line and the microwave towers are there because they are able to move a signal faster then the line that was put in three years ago and the mystery is who did that so i write over to the tower and see the number on the tower and i say they will figure it out created there is an interesting story about who did this and why. Its not my book but at the bottom of the story is the question do people want to know enough to go and find out how the markets work and its a challenge to the reader. Go on the internet and you can find whats going on. Host blaise is the name of the book. Up next on booktv been ma recounts the life in the 1860s that the relationship he forged with other writers known as the bohemians. This program is from the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and its about 45 minutes. I think we are ready to start. I would like to welcome you all to city lights. We are delighted to have with us ben tarnoff. This is a densely layered highly nuanced portrait of the literary scene of the late 18 hundreds. We follow the lives of mark twain, Charles Warren stoddard is the new wave of literature that would leave a permanent mark on the American Literary canon. Then the portrait beautifully captures the complexity of the relationship between the writers and it offers a valuable look at the postcivil war west coast and provides the kind of perfect medium for the development of bohemia. The bohemians is a rich history that really kind of unwind is many different threads. Both of the writers and of the city that helped to host. Ben is the author of another book to counterfeiters. Nice by Penguin Press and writing also appeared in the San Francisco chronicle and he worked at the court early. Its a delight and a pleasure to have him with us. Welcome ben tarnoff. [applause] thank you for the introduction and overview for coming ouall of you forcoming o. I should tell you i have a little bit of a flu so if i get four or more my voice gets foggy youll have to forgive me. Mark twain when he was here in the 1860s in San Francisco wrote a very funny sketch how to cure a cold in one of the recommended keywords was to rub mustard all over your chest so if things get to that point i might send someone out for mustard. [laughter] this is my book the bohemians and a told a story of the writers in San Francisco in the 1860s. They were mark twain, Charles Warren stoddard. Mark twain is at the center of the story and one of the things i love about the project is that it gave me access to kind of an unknown part of his life. I think when we think of mark twain we think of the man in the white suit chomping on a cigar with a white hair facade. That is the last decade with his best work behind him in his 60s and 70s. My story is in his 20s and 30s when he hasnt really learned to conceal his extreme emotions under that grandfatherly facade. He is ambitious, vindictive, angry, competitive, filled with anxiety about money and fear for the future and he is convinced he is going to end up in the poorhouse and he is surrounded by these other young writers in San Francisco who formed him and pulled him into literary maturity. San francisco was a great place to be a writer in the 1860s and there are a few reasons why. The civil war is tearing apart the rest of the country in San Francisco there is no fighting that reaches the coast into the draft is never applied west of iowa and kansas. Its also a very rich city. Its the Industrial Financial and commercial center of the west and that prosperity has a range of print publications that sustain the class of professional writers. Its also a very urban city with more than 100,000 people and he is there which makes it the biggest city west of st. Louis and its cosmopolitan. You have chinese coming europeans from different countries, some americans, mexicans, australians. The last reason San Francisco is conducive to the literary scene is its isolation. Its hard to reach San Francisco from the eastern United States and that gives a buffer to the culture but its the city to and give it its own antiu. S. Democratic ultra low spirit of it guides plane and the rest of the bohemians. So i thought i would read a little bit of the introduction and then introduce you to the four characters. The civil war began with an outburst of patriotic feeling on both sides and the belief a few battles would result in a swift victory. It ended with the death of 750,000 soldiers in the nation shaken to its core. The wise men of the early era found themselves on crisis and the great political military leaders in the past like john clinton ten and genital Winfield Scott in the previous century and into a forced retirement while the more modern minds like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant rose to the challenge. The civil war destroyed old assumptions and reworded radical new thinking and triggered the upheaval comparable to the one a century later by the vietnam war and the National Trauma that made an older generation suddenly obsolete and demanded a novelty, innovation, experimentation. The 1860s was bloody, bewildering and if you managed to survive a magnificent time to be a young american. America belongs to the young in thandthe future was in the yount place of america the far west. The pioneers were overwhelmingly young and untethered from Traditional Society they built the World Without the benefit of their parents council. If the encampments were had postadolescent access the opera opportunities unlike any that might be found in the colleges and counting houses of the east. Please children at higher layers, the vanguard of the democracy. When with men looked west he didnt see a place he saw an idea in the mystical tradition as the country itself. Thomas jefferson had been the founder to be at he end of the disciples believed that American Civilization would march towards the pacific and the continents supply of the land would be settled by human farmers who embodied the nations egalitarian spirit. Of course the reality was more complicated. The region contained land that resisted the cultivation and indians that resisted extermination but as the line of the settlement moved forward past the alleghenies and the mississippi than the rockies the jeffersonian dream of the westport empire of liberty began to look like a prophecy. Even henry david when departing for his walk felt drawn in a westerly direction. The future that lies that way to me into the earth seems more unexhausted and rich on that side. Mark twain was born in 1835 and reached his young adult hood at the best possible time as the country embarked on the most extraordinary period of change in its history. He was western by birth and raised on the missouri frontier. The outbreak first hi firsthandr west as he fled the fighting in the state for the region beyond the rockies. There he found another front here anfrontierand in a social t unlike any in the country. In 1848 of the discovery of gold in california triggered a swift people from all corners of the world. As the gateway to the gold rush San Francisco went from the drowsy backwaters of the booming global seaport mostly they were young single men and had come to stay but to get rich and get up. They had attempts and makeshift structures that made candling for the frequent fires. They built gambling saloons and brothels and they lived among the cultures of the continent often convinced them into the space of a single street. By the time he he got their San Francisco still the lord. It was urban yet unmistakably western isolated and cosmopolitan, crude yet cultured. The city create a spectacle whether on th stages or the pageantry of the streets. Its open atmosphere to the young and to anyone seeking refuge from the over civilized east. It had a sense of its history and the appetite for the ritual even as the gold rush and the miners became banks and restaurants the city slowed to a subtle rhythm and finance to the opening of the frontiers in nevada, idaho and elsewhere and went from one to the next. Citizens spend lavishly on the furnishings. They drank seven bottles of champagne for everyone in boston. After the gold rush and they got the frontier spirit of the city alive. They also sustained a thriving publishing culture. California was always crawling with scribblers. The first generation wrote the story of the gold rush themselves in letters and diaries and in the pages as soon as they arrived. The Printing Press cranked out pamphlets, periodicals and books relieving the loneliness and boredom of the frontier. By the 1860s the city spawned an extraordinary literary scene abandoned outsiders call to the bohemians. Plane joined them and shape to the entire current of his life. For the first time twain comes to San Francisco hes been living in Virginia City nevada at the time working as a journalist for the local paper called the territorial enterprise. The reason he comes west originally is to avoid the civil war because when the civil war breaks out in 1861, he is working on the mississippi as a Steamboat Pilot and it shuts down traffic. You have draft agent from the confederate sides going doortodoor pressing young men into service so you have to get out of missouri and he has appointed secretary to the territorial governor of nevada. So the two of them, sam clemens as he was now the e4 he took on the pseudonym come and his brother got him a stagecoach and went west. Then in the spring of 1863 he visits San Francisco for the first time. San francisco is the place to spend money in the west if you had it so he is coming to the city from the booming town and he is looking for a good time. What people remember the best about him aside from his red brows was a strange way of speaking like falling branches on the surface of the stream. Printers transcribed with hyphens and dashes trying to render the rhythm so complex it could have been scored as a sheet music. He elapsed into long silences and a sword in the tenor inherited from the childhood. He made people laugh while remaining imperially serious to obscure for the closest friends to decipher. It was as vast as the American West and is prone to seismic outburst. He was Samuel Clemens before he became mark twain and in the spring of 1863, he made a decision about him one step closer to the fame he craved. He boarded a stagecoach for San Francisco. The trip from Virginia City nevada to the california coast thomas more than 200 miles of terrain closely plus nights in the sierra. These discomforts didnt detour the young twain who at 27 had more interesting memories than the men twice his age. He roamed missouri with a band of confederate guerrillas and as the civil war began in earnest taking the route to the territory nevada as the westerners called it after a local indian tribe. Now they fell in love with the first and only in the troubles of the far west. West. After the sagebrush and alkali desert team by rote it was paradise to me. Its a grand jury and festivity exhilarated him and he gorged himself with abandonment. He drinks champagne in the dining room of the house with a high society modeled on the banquet hall. He toured the gardens on the outskirts of town and met a pretty girl who snubbed him when he said hello and said hello when he snubbed her. He listened and put his toes in the pacific. On the far side of the continent he felt the countrys vastness. He didnt plan to stay longer the itinerary of eating, drinking, sailing and socializing kept him too busy to bear the thought of leaving and then they he wrote his mother and sister to say that he would remain for another ten days. By early june another letter announced he was in San Francisco but switched to a fancy hotel and showed no signs of slowing his demonic pace. Im going. He offered a high toned saloons and dance halls gambling and he rarely returned home before midnight. He was never at a loss for companionship. He reckoned he knew at least a thousand of the 115,000 residents of cleveland from nevada. The citys main thorough fare were crowds and carriages under the gleaming italian facades reminded him of his hometown. Spring turned to summer and still he had left. Dreading the inevitable he clung on for as long as he coded it seems like going back to prison to go back to the deserts he complained. In july he finally said farewell. Hed been away for two months. Even after he settled back on the dry side of the sierra. Over the course of the next few years he would find many reasons to be turned first to visit and then to live. Hhe was comical the quarks and hurt the feelings of not a few of its citizens in exchange San Francisco would mold him into literary maturity and inspire the evolution from the scribbler into the Great American writer from Hannibal Clemens to americas mark twain. So he continues to visit San Francisco and move there permanently in the spring of 1864. When he does he comes into contact with breast who is the leading literary figure and the two of them are going to form a very complicated and lovehate relationship that will continue in the coming years and continue beyond San Francisco. Brett hearts like to be looked at. He might be seen in a stylish over coat color in a crimson tide that set him apart from the rubble. Every folder, every fabric of the young mans outfit would be carefully arranged. A montgomery street he sorted through the human foliage by kimberly at the bluebird. If your eyes happened to meet his, he would smile. If he spoke a few words his words would be agreeable but there would be no yarn splitting. Nothing to remind one of the wild man mark twain. He preferred to be admired from afar and there was much to admire. At 26, harte has become the light of the Pacific Coast no small feat in the state where the shaggy ithe shabbiest minoro barcode and poets were pop stars declaiming versus the crowds of the public gatherings and he had powerful friends of rising reputation, wife and infant son. His evenings didnt involve drunken romps in the city variety. They center on more domestic concerns like how to keep griswold from disturbing the study or his wife into the household chores so that he might have a couple quiet hours to write. This soft spoken may have seemed like an odd choice for the west litter a spokesman. He didnt wield an ax or revolver. He ridiculed of the most cherished especially the cold of the pioneer. He hated the sentimentalists and felt that they all had an abundance. When others saw progress hes all declined. A few things escaped the touch of the subtle irreverence as his friend later observed. But he wasnt just a destroyer. He also felt disillusioned with california its because he saw the true potential. As an infinitely original civilization the singular fraternity of mexican, chinese, europeans, australians living free from the president on the far edge of the world. Here was the genuine america trumpeted by the world of possibility beyond the wildest imaginations of the high culture and possibly the seed of the new national literature. The next character im going to introduce his charles whose a very shy young man. In 1862 he publishes his first poems which is the most prestigious paper at the time. He had been on the street where the offices were. At the time you would have seen him pleasing backandforth with an envelope and the poem in his hand in a cold sweat waiting until everyone cleared off and that he finally would push the envelope through and run away after having spent hours building up the courage and sure enough it appears in the next edition of the golden era and he starts writing more and becomes connected to this bohemian scene centered on harte and others. So here is stoddard. The shop on montgomery street sold books and bibles and inside it was constantly dust not because he cared much for cleanliness but because the monotony of the notion they did easy for his mind to wander. As he sank deeper into his daydream a feather duster became a palm tree. He longed for the tropics and hed fallen in love with him eight years earlier while crossing nicaragua. He remembered the taste of the orange is and thats sprayed when they broke their skin. He remembered the birds against the relentless green of the jungle. Most of all he remembered the natives who had necklaces and briefs. One day californias most famous preacher appeared in the doorway cutting short. Celebrities have been in the shop before but never who had held to such high esteem. I was a hero worshiper he later wrote and thomas seemed to me the most heroic of them all. After a glance at the trembling, he jury scrap of newspaper from the pocket. Did you write these he asked . Stoddard said he did. He responded by reading them out loud. He had words of encouragement and invited him to visit him with more work. He also presented tickets to his upcoming series on american poetry where he would be discussing the distinguished new england poets that he read as a schoolboy. Then he vanished. I was left speechless with wonder and delight. At first glance you might have reminded him of harte both of them were delicately built and had a large expressive i not unlike he himself, but he wrote painstakingly while the pains and ship spilled down the page often eligible to spelling atrocious. Harte catch people at a distance and he held onto them for dear life. He was deeply lovable. Harte was not. What people loved best about stoddard was his vulnerability and his yearning for success and failure and the pain he felt when he criticized into the pleasure he felt when praised. These are the emotional undertow of the life and he experienced them more openly than most. He concealed his insecurities with bravado and whit. This was the true source of what he would call his invincible charm. The all conquering warmth. They sold her struggles reflected in his childlike face. There would always be one part of the personality they couldnt possibly understand however to his homosexuality. Like harte he had abuse from schoolyard bullies because he looked too feminine. He had Close Relationships with certain boys for whom he felt an especially deep devotion. They rarely reciprocated the affection and as a child he came to expect even to take a kind of pleasure. He loved being in love. The love man. Yet for someone that found solace in the written word he lived in a world with no words for what he was. Gay love wasnt forbidden but was indivisible. It was never plainly discussed. The last character to introduce is ina coolbrith. By the time shes 21 she has endured a lifetime worth of tragedy. Her she was actually born in illinois and her father died when she was very young. Her uncle is joseph smith who is the founder of mormonism so she grows up in an atmosphere of violent persecution and they were not really terrorized at that point. She and her mother and her stepfather and the rest of her siblings decided to go west where she marries a man named robert was very abusive and it tries to kill her. So they go through a terrible divorce and she also gives birth to a child that dies. So this happened by the time shes 21. Its 1862 at the family decides to move to San Francisco to bury and start over after they published them in the golden era and this brings her into contact. The timing is very good because just as she is emerging in the scene theyve decided to start their own paper. It has been good so far but they need something of their own. They need their own for him and this marks a moment in the evolution of the west. Building a better paper would bring them closer together. They went from acquaintances to friends from colleagues to coconspirators in the crusade of their own. Another writer joined them. In los angeles in 1862 she taught english at the Language School from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon and then returned home to help her mother wash dishes, scribbling names into the rest of the domestic work. She had trouble sleeping at night persecuted by memories of the past. By the age of 22 she had indoor and abusive husband with the death of her infant child. She remained wary of what she called bitter verses about suffering scoring if she needed a way out. Beyond grief, beyond the burden of her work and demanded a family. In San Francisco is seen she would find friends fulfillment and a life worth living. She first met stoddard a slender delicate figure playing at the piano his fingers skipping across the keys and providing the two. This is how she remembered him some 60 years later. We were a little bit more than a boy and girl. His success had been swift. He no longer put poems in the mailbox and ran away in a cold sweat. He was now a bohemian of San Francisco spoiled by everyone because of his youth, his physical beauty, magnetic personality. It helped that he looked to the part. The poet as beautiful as shelley especially poetic word is frequent mood swings and his societies and moments of moonstruck. Like the other friendships that formed what he later called in the tribe bond took time to develop. Eventually they became like brother and sister are threatening to box his ears for silliness and acting puppyish and chloe. He would always strike others as child life confined to the sorrows and the solace of a permanent adolescence. Ina coolbrith was too mature having lived a lifetime by her early 20s. Neither would enjoy the comfort of the conventional adult hood. Both kept secrets that precluded the path and they never started families of their own but they remained close their entire life. The friendship between us was more than to meet the love of any man she once told him. In december of 1863, stoddard published her first pro amanda struck a hopeful note describing the seedling of spring growing to its fulfillment. She was emerging from her show just in time to take part from the latest literary experiment. At that iran ha the iran had beg with talk of a new periodical. We laid our Heads Together the other day charles announced in the collimator determined to start a paper created a shared a single purpose but to wage allout war on mediocrity, materialism and the middlebrow. They deplored californias intellectual conditions from its preponderance of nervous dandies and the silly girls and a taste for melodrama and moralizing. The time had come for the new kind of journal more discriminating. The iran had been a good start but the bohemians outgrew it and needed a platform of its own so the story continues and i wish i had more time to keep reading. But i thought i would stop there and open up questions. So thank you for listening. [applause] guesser . I would like i got this book a couple of weeks a