“[Gordon] Ramsay had given Gregory Condes, the sommelier, a twenty-seven-year-old hired from Las Vegas (“We wanted an American selling wines to Americans”), seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to get the list started, a staggering sum, but it was scarcely enough. That night, James Lloyd, one of Condes’s assistants, was serving the chef’s table, eight young men from a hedge-fund company, who ordered a thousand-dollar bottle of 1970 Latour (“Keep back a glass for us,” Ramsay whispered) and, midway through, were approaching the ten-thousand-dollar mark. (James kept Ramsay informed like someone reporting a sports score.) The next night, the chef’s table was reserved by Goldman Sachs: “budget not important,” I was told, possibly a fifty-thousand-dollar wine bill. (At Pétrus, a Ramsay restaurant in London, six bankers once spent sixty-three thousand dollars on dinner. Five of them were fired after they tried to expense it, a story that was reported in just about every paper in London. “It was a year before we saw another banker,” Ramsay said.)”

– “The Taming of the Chef”, New Yorker

“It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man’s dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don’t stop working — hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste– but he’s not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.”

– Coming Up for Air, by George Orwell

This week we talk with James Buckley, European fund manager by day, novelist by night, about his new book, Celebrate Myself, a book that ”penetrates the hallowed halls of business school academia to reveal a simmering world of unbridled lust and unchecked ambition. When tragedy strikes during a riotous evening on the town, the students’ entangled lives become irreversibly altered. Amidst the recrimination and despair surrounding unfolding events, powerful lessons are learned that could never be taught in any classroom.”

Q: First, great title. What’s the relationship between this little known “shoegazing” genre of music that the title is presumably based on, your own beliefs, and MBA-types?
A: Thanks. Shoegazing was described as “the scene that celebrates itself”, hence the title, which I thought had a great read across for MBAs and in particular, the angle I wanted to give the novel. It was also a chance to link two very disparate themes.

Q: Let’s talk about the book itself. From reading Chapter 1 online, I’m reminded of Brett Easton Ellis’ characters and the satire of Tom Wolfe. Where do you put yourself?
A: I read both authors, so that’s extremely flattering! The idea was to write a readable story that people could relate to, even if they’d not done an MBA or ever listened to a Slowdive record in their life. I wanted to end up with a fast-paced black comedy, which isn’t to be taken too seriously, but nevertheless does make some points about the huge self-importance of the business school industry.

Q: And what are those points?
A: I guess they’re found in the tone of the novel, which is very cynical, particularly towards business schools’ tendency towards pomposity. This is a work of fiction though, not a critique of the global business school marketplace. Nothing turns a reader off as quickly as an editorialising writer.

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“It was Old Filth. Great advocate, judge and–bit of a wit. Said to have invented FILTH–Failed in London Try Hong Kong. He tried Hong Kong. Modest, nice chap.”

– Old Filth, by Jane Gardham

“Patty LaRocco, who brings her Yorkie, Dylan, to business and social gatherings, acknowledges that doggie socializing has its limits. ‘A banker in a nice suit doesn’t want Dylan jumping up and down.’”

– Woman’s Best Friend, or Accessory?, New York Times

“[William Sloane] Coffin, delivering his first message as the university’s newly appointed chaplain in the autumn of 1959, told the arriving members of that year’s freshman class, ‘The Lord forbids our using our education merely to buy our way into middle-class security.’”

– Lewis Lapham, Harper’s Magazine, July 2006

“‘I was not an easy student,’ Rockefeller said, ‘and I had to apply myself diligently to prepare my lessons.’ He described himself as ‘reliable,’ but not ‘brilliant.’ Yet he exhibited a gift for business when he bought candy by the pound, divided it into small portions, and then sold it at a profit to his siblings.” (emphasis added)

– Rockefeller: A Photographic History, Financial History

“Investment banking has become a loss leader for the principal investments area …The name of the game is principal investments, including private equity.”

– Richard J. Barrett, former CSFB banker, as cited in the NYTimes

“He liked the idiom of the financial world, the evocative techno-poetry of the arcane slang. Sophisticated instruments. Mezzanine financing. Takeover vehicles … More

“The warehouse … is in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood, an area of maybe six blocks, which, if the newspapers are right, is itself about to explode, because this is where Wired makes its home, as do a handful of other magazines … not to mention countless start-up software companies, Web developers, Internet providers - and this is 1993, when this stuff is new - and this is 1993, when this stuff is new - More

The cover story of the Economist’s latest issue is all about Goldman. The article’s purported purpose: raising deep questions about Goldman’s risky business, but it ends up being worshipful, like everything written about Goldman. (The 1-page teaser is free online but the in-depth article is only available to subscribers)

Best excerpts:

“Suzanne Nora Johnson, a vice-chairman, was hired from a law firm after 150 interviews, which if not a record should be.” (on the grueling Goldman interview process)

“One management consultant recalls oferring a chief executive a detailed analysis of a firm or industry. The consultant said that his firm could do a superb job within two months. The executive said he could call Goldman in the evening and get an excellent report the next morning.”

and best of all…“The average pay-packet of its 24,000 staff last year was $524,000.” (emphasis added)

Worship on.

Shithead was the actual term used at the bank and throughout the industry. Bank officers said ’shithead’ in the same matter-of-fact way the said ‘mortgagee,’ ‘co-signer,’ or ‘debtor,’ which was the polite form of ’shithead’ since no borrower was referred to as a debtor until he defaulted. Why did bankers turn so quickly to scatology when loans went bad? Peepgas didn’t know, but that was the way they were. At the Harvard Business School, back in the 1970s, he had taken a course called Structural Ethics in Corporate Culture, in which the teacher, a Professor Pelfner, had talked about Freud’s theory of money and excrement ….”

A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe

“Obviously being a Jew was a very profitable business. Maybe I could be one when I grew up.”

– The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay

The following is a one-page excerpt from a compilation of comics about Scrooge McDuck, icon to many.

[McDuck, reading a letter from the 'Roster of the Rich'. Eyes bulging.]
“To Mr. McDuck, Congratulations! Today you passed the Maharajah of Howduyustan! You made it! You’re now the richest man in the world!”

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“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then, again, it might not.”

– Bright Lights, Big City by Jay Mcinerney