Entry tags:
Of "Okiesmo" and an oil boom
So, I just finished reading Funny Money, by Mark Singer, and I am embarrassed to admit that I did a thing I almost never do, which is I read half of it and then didn’t finish it for several months.
It wasn’t a bad book! It was, in fact, a pretty good book, but it appears it didn’t engage my attention quite enough to prevent me from being distracted by other things, because I am more easily distracted when I don’t entirely understand what I’m reading, and Funny Money is primarily about three things I do not understand at all: banking, oil drilling, and Oklahoma.
Funny Money tells the story of the rise and fall of the Penn Square Bank, a tiny shopping-mall bank in Oklahoma that briefly became a very big oil-and-gas loan broker, and then collapsed in a pile of bad loans and general mismanagement, and very nearly took the entire banking system with it. It is a story about a bunch of dudes doing that American thing we celebrate so much where they work themselves up from being unknown small-timers into being big tycoons through pluck and determination and hard work and dreaming big and wearing loud suits, except it’s sad because then it all implodes because actual financial systems and the geographical realities of oil drilling don’t care two figs for dreaming big and are based on facts that, if you don’t understand them, you will fuck things up.
Mark Singer tells this story well, explaining banking and oil drilling and Oklahoma to the lay reader on a need-to-know basis and pretty simply. He has a great facility for description, highlighting the awkward, plastic absurdity of America in the 80s, making the scenes vivid enough that sometimes it feels like you’re reading a novel.
Since it is not a novel, however, reality forces Mr. Singer to engage in some storytelling sins that are storytelling sins for a reason. For one, the names are often too similar, so I found it difficult to keep track of which oilman was which; they were all named Beep or Bill or Bud, and they were all pretty interesting characters (the way in real life you’d say “That guy’s, uh, quite a character”) but I got them all mixed up anyway. I should have made a chart or something. There is a similar problem with the names of all the different companies and banks, because… banks. Banks put their creativity into efforts besides naming themselves, it seems. Like how to cover up that they have no idea what they’re doing by doing a lot of it. The other main storytelling problem, for me, is that while the characters are all entertainingly wacky (in ways that scream that they should not be trusted with large amounts of money), there is nobody to root for; not a single person that I actually liked.
All that said, this book is both entertaining and informative, and provides several useful examples of the limitations of positive thinking.
It wasn’t a bad book! It was, in fact, a pretty good book, but it appears it didn’t engage my attention quite enough to prevent me from being distracted by other things, because I am more easily distracted when I don’t entirely understand what I’m reading, and Funny Money is primarily about three things I do not understand at all: banking, oil drilling, and Oklahoma.
Funny Money tells the story of the rise and fall of the Penn Square Bank, a tiny shopping-mall bank in Oklahoma that briefly became a very big oil-and-gas loan broker, and then collapsed in a pile of bad loans and general mismanagement, and very nearly took the entire banking system with it. It is a story about a bunch of dudes doing that American thing we celebrate so much where they work themselves up from being unknown small-timers into being big tycoons through pluck and determination and hard work and dreaming big and wearing loud suits, except it’s sad because then it all implodes because actual financial systems and the geographical realities of oil drilling don’t care two figs for dreaming big and are based on facts that, if you don’t understand them, you will fuck things up.
Mark Singer tells this story well, explaining banking and oil drilling and Oklahoma to the lay reader on a need-to-know basis and pretty simply. He has a great facility for description, highlighting the awkward, plastic absurdity of America in the 80s, making the scenes vivid enough that sometimes it feels like you’re reading a novel.
Since it is not a novel, however, reality forces Mr. Singer to engage in some storytelling sins that are storytelling sins for a reason. For one, the names are often too similar, so I found it difficult to keep track of which oilman was which; they were all named Beep or Bill or Bud, and they were all pretty interesting characters (the way in real life you’d say “That guy’s, uh, quite a character”) but I got them all mixed up anyway. I should have made a chart or something. There is a similar problem with the names of all the different companies and banks, because… banks. Banks put their creativity into efforts besides naming themselves, it seems. Like how to cover up that they have no idea what they’re doing by doing a lot of it. The other main storytelling problem, for me, is that while the characters are all entertainingly wacky (in ways that scream that they should not be trusted with large amounts of money), there is nobody to root for; not a single person that I actually liked.
All that said, this book is both entertaining and informative, and provides several useful examples of the limitations of positive thinking.