Month: September 2007

Dear Prudence

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I can’t say I paid much attention to the idea of prudence, if any at all, until I read Tom Jones, back in 1967, by Henry Fielding.  I didn’t pay much attention to it then, but while I thought the book was mostly about getting laid, I was told that it “really” was about the search for Wisdom, Sophia being the name of the character pursued by Tom, and Sophia means Wisdom, in Greek I think.

But I did notice Fielding used the word Prudence a lot; indeed he writes:

Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men. They are indeed, as it were, a guard to Virtue, without which she can never be safe. It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions, are intrinsically good; you must take care they shall appear so. If your inside be never so beautiful, you must preserve a fair outside also.

Fielding makes Prudence sound like some Machiavellian duty; sure you may be good inside, but in addition, you must appear good, so be prudent.  Of course he was referring mostly to sexual matters—since the book was “really” about getting laid—so it was sort of a warning to young ladies to not only be but also appear chaste at all times.  And he does make a larger point:  prudence is the Guard to Virtue.  More than that Prudence, according to some, is the mother of all virtues.

 Prudence comes from a Latin word, or maybe it’s Greek, that means “foresight.”  That gets to the core of it.  You can’t just let your virtues guide you; certainly they are the principles that must regulate one’s actions.  But you can’t just expect to be virtuous and have everything come out A-OK.  You also have to exercise foresight.  I think the idea of Prudence may have something to do with Kant’s Practical Reason.  Because prudence is about the practice of virtue.

Prudence is not for the young and the reckless.  Or perhaps the young necessarily are reckless and they have to learn prudence by being reckless.  That’s what Fielding seems to be saying: sure, get laid, but be prudent about it.  People don’t expect children to be prudent.  Children have to get up to walk around, then they fall down and hurt themselves or stick their hands in the fire and learn to be prudent.  If children were born with prudence none of them would ever learn to walk because, getting up and walking around, is damn imprudent.

I was thinking about Prudence because I was pissed off.  We seem to live in an age of imprudence.  I am pretty sure parents don’t lecture their children on the value of Prudence.  Today we praise “risk takers.”  That’s a bunch of bull; in fact we praise imprudence.  And what we get is bankers who loan people money without doing a background check to see if they have any money at all.  And we have people going out and buying homes when they know damn well that they don’t have any money.  And just yesterday, the Fed lowered the interest rates so that there will be more money out there to be imprudent with.  Thus the idiotic, reckless, risk taking morons on Wall Street were overjoyed.

We Are Doomed: The Sequel

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The American dollar has hit a new low versus the Euro.  That means that Americans have to pay more dollars to get foreign goods or goods made in other countries.  So companies that buy foreign stuff to use in the making of pasta for example have to up their prices.  They are having a hard time.  Contrawise, companies in the USA that sell stuff over seas are having a good time since the price of US goods is dropping relative to other currencies.

But overall even though we are selling more abroad, our trade deficit is now 811 billion dollars, twice what it was in 2001.  In the last six years we have been buying foreign goods like crazy and not producing enough goods that other countries might want to buy.  It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when things were the other way around.  We were a producer nation; other nations bought far more of our stuff than we bought of their stuff.

That’s the funny thing with a service economy which we have now.  Services are not goods; they cannot be sold abroad, unless we start shipping Cox Cable Guys overseas or something to install Cable in Eastern Europe.  But there’s no sense in that.  Obviously, the guys in Eastern Europe have their own Cable Guys.

Call me a dope, but I think that if an economy is to prosper it has to have something to sell.  At one time, we made all the TVs in the world.  Now we don’t.  At one time, we made the only cars that really worked.  This last year Toyota became the number 1 car company in America.  At one time, we made clothes and shipped them to the rest of the world.  Now every piece of clothing I have is made in China.  We used to dominate the computer chip market; but as the first Bush said it doesn’t make any difference whether you sell computer chips or potato chips.  So now other countries make our computer chips and nobody is buying our potato chips.

Not only are we not producing the stuff we once did, we are also now buying like crazy, even though the price of foreign goods is going up relative to the dollar.  We are still able to spend like crazy because our banks seem willing to extend credit to anything that walks and has half a brain.  Take what is happening in real estate.  They were selling houses to people with no credit or background checks at all!  It was like, I want to buy a house, and they were going, here, buy this house and here’s the money to do it.  Hey, we will give you this special deal.  You don’t have to do anything but pay off the interest on this huge amount of money we are loaning you—for a while at least.

Is this fiscal responsibility?  How can anybody expect the American people to exercise fiscal responsibility when the banks don’t even seem to grasp the concept, of fiscal responsibility I mean.

Somebody is making money off all of this, and tell you what it ain’t Joan Blow or Joe Six-Pack.

The capitalists are crazy.

Shopping Around

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When you start talking a lot about how you wish to be disposed of, I guess you have hit one of those life phases.  

I talk fairly frequently with a woman where I work out.  If she is on one machine and I am on the one next to her we talk.  She had a friend, but 65 years of age, who died of cancer perhaps ten days ago.  He was not responding to any of the treatments, so it was best she thought that he had gone quickly.

He had a boat, so over the weekend, she, along with other friends, and members of his family went out in the boat and scattered his ashes.

I told Carol about it and she said firmly that she does not want to be scattered to the winds, but planted in the ground, though being cremated, and stuck in a bottle and stuck in the ground would be OK.  I mean she is not completely into the traditional corpse in the ground thing.

Carol has been looking for a place to put her mother who is at this very moment in the process of dying.  She had found a graveyard located near the ocean, and she got the literature from them.  1500 dollars for a little cremation plot with a view overlooking the ocean.  We started wondering: how do those cemeteries make money.  I mean this is prime ocean front property, and 1500 doesn’t seem like all that much, I mean not for a piece of property for all eternity.

I hazarded that maybe they get a lot of tax breaks for a graveyard.  I don’t know. But the upkeep really can’t be that great.  There’s not a whole lot of activity in a graveyard; it’s not like people are coming and going all that much. And I have to think having corpses planted on your property does not increase your property values.

I wonder if the smart investor is looking for an up tick in graveyard stocks.  Certainly over the next 20 years or so there’s going to be an increase in demand for graveyard property given that the supply of bodies will be rising.  

I read that the company—one of those evil companies associated with the family of Bushes— that did the clean up charged 12000 a body for bodies left behind by Katrina.  I remember reading about how the body collection had been farmed out to some company at the time.  I remember thinking now that is dirty work.  I wonder if the guy on Dirty Jobs has looked into body collection.

Anyhow I tried at the time to find out how much they were paying those guys out there in the sweltering sun to pick up the bodies.  I wrote a song about it.  But I forget the lyrics, something to do with picking up bodies at the minimum wage.  

If the capitalists could figure out a way to charge you for going to heaven, they surely would and make out like bandits too.

Lewis Black

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When rock stars start singing songs about being rock stars and comics start telling stories about being comics they cross some sort of perilous divide.  Such seems to be the case with Lewis Black.  I don’t know when I first became aware of him; three or four years ago maybe.  He’s a pretty funny guy in the social and political vein who swears a lot.  Some of the material is really solid in its own right but a good deal of the humor lies in his delivery.

He gets pissed and right there on stage looks as if he is going to suffer an apoplectic fit, this from a guy who recommends that kids distract themselves by whittling. Part of the deal—part that’s funny—is the impotence of his rage. He starts sticking out his hand with his finger out as if he is making points.  But the finger is crooked.

The last time I saw him on TV though he had started telling stories about being a comic.  Seems he had been invited to be the MC, I think it was, at some white house affair.  Now half of his bread and butter is attacking Bush and the current administration, so there he is in the white house, or some official white house place, standing right next to Chaney and Bush and he has agreed not to lambaste them.  Afterwards, his parents, whom he has invited to bask in his glory, will hardly speak to him.

So he acknowledges having made a mistake and goes on to tell the audience what a comic is.  A comic is a person who goes out into the audience with a flashlight and sneaks up behind every person who is there, and pulls down their pants, and shines the flashlight up the person’s asshole, and upon examination proclaims that the person’s asshole is shit free! 

This suggests that being a comic is pretty dirty work.  It also suggests that the purpose of comedy is to make people laugh and as they do so to feel, at least momentary, because they are in the know and can laugh at the idiots being mocked, that they have a clean conscience.  But of course Black implies, nobody really has a clean conscience.  So if we think, even momentarily, that we have clean consciences or assholes then we too are idiots. 

 We are just knowing idiots laughing at unknowing idiots.  What this means is that Black has grave doubts about the function of comedy, his role as a comic, and about the audience that he seeks to make laugh.  Maybe part of the problem is the material.  Any idiot can make jokes about Bush.  It’s almost too easy, since Bush has lowered the stupidity bar so damn far.  So people can yuck it up at Bush and feel momentarily superior to the moron and his moronic minions who are driving the country to rack and ruin.

Cheap laughs degrade comedy.

In any case, I am worried about Lewis.

Another First

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Another first—that I wish hadn’t happened.  But I called an accountant for the first time in my life.  Actually I didn’t get the accountant; I got her “assistant.”  I had thought accountants just worked for large firms and there was no way to get a hold of one.  But I phoned the “assistant” for the guy at Morgan Stanley (another first—the Morgan Stanley account, I mean) who set up the CDs for the Tingle Family trust and she gave me the number for an accountant.  Apparently any Joe Blow can hire an accountant.

I had to do this because as far as I could figure out from the idiot lawyers who are doing the legal paper for the TFT that if I am ever going to be able to “disburse” the funds in the trust to my brothers, I have to file an income tax form for the deceased Joan for the period of her life in this tax year, 2007, and also a tax form for income generated by the trust, though I can figure out for the life of me how I am supposed to do that since I don’t know when the trust will be dissolved and thus don’t know how long the trust will continue to generate some interest.

So I am going to see an accountant.  I wonder how one dresses to see an accountant.  Not that I care, since I will dress the same as dress wherever I go—which is a t-shirt, plus jeans, and some form of footwear.  I have the feeling that maybe the accountant will be able to show that the trust is not going to generate enough income to be taxable; if this is the case, then I may be able to send the lawyers some official documentation of that fact and his legal mumbo-jumbo with the trust will be over.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Meanwhile, the paralegal at the law office is doing a legal accounting of the monies in the trust based on information I sent him.  But then he sent an email saying that they, the lawyers, had not received paperwork—something called an Acknowledgement and something called a Receipt—from Brothers Dave and Steve.  So I called both of the guys and they said of course that they had sent in the paperwork.  Brother Dave, who knows about such things, had actually made copies of the documents he had signed and returned; and immediately faxed them off to the law office.

I don’t know what to make of a legal firm that loses paperwork like this.  This is not the first time either. I don’t know how Joan and WB found these particular incompetents.  But they have caused me no end of useless and needless anxiety due to their screw ups and in their inability to communicate with any clarity. 

But it’s all my fault I guess.  I could have had all the trust work done by a lawyer I found up here in SB, but the incompetents had set up the trust originally and had all the paper work so I figured it was best to go with them.

The next time my parents die I will make sure to hire the lawyer myself.

Leap Chair

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John came by yesterday morning without Juan to make some measurements in our big closet-someday-to-be-an-office space.  We were going to have a company called California Closets put in a couple of desktops, one at each end, and some shelving.  A woman from that company—Nicole, was her name—came by to draw up some plans; she emailed them to us and we didn’t like them because she had put a shelf right where we said there shouldn’t be a shelf, like she wasn’t  listening or something.

 

leap

 

 

We had been pretty specific about where stuff should be since I got my chair.  I am actually embarrassed about this chair.  It cost a 1000 dollars.  I don’t feel morally that anybody should pay that much for a chair.  I grew up thinking chairs were supposed to be uncomfortable.  I always sat on hard wooden chairs and went to a church with pews that had been designed for insubstantial beings, like angels or something, but not for people.

So I had to go through all sorts of ethical, moral and self concept issues to buy this chair.  I had to face the fact also that my neck is in not such hot condition.  I could live with this OK but for the fact I sometimes spend hours in front of a computer and the effort to get my eyes focused properly through my trifocals (or whatever they are) causes me to do all sorts of odd things with my neck, and these odd things in turn cause my neck to ache and to spread an ache clear down my arms.

I know from having talked with people that neck stuff can be hard to fix.  You sure don’t want anybody operating on your neck (unless you know a disk has completely collapsed or something).  So I felt ethically the right thing to do was just to endure it.  But then I thought, “Sometimes I sort of enjoy whatever it is that I am doing at the computer and my enjoyment is lessened or ruined completely sometimes by the pain going down the neck.  So if I don’t do something about my neck the little enjoyment I am able to derive from working at the computer will be lessened.”

I hate to think it.  That I have become a hedonist in my old age, but that was the idea that swayed me.  Please note though I did say I got the chair to preserve a mild enjoyment (well, not even that, maybe more like minimal satisfaction) and not anything as radical as pleasure.  So if I was moved by hedonism it was pretty mild.

There’s even more to the emotional complications I went through to actually click the button on the computer that ordered that chair.  But I did it.  I admit.  And, well, if any chair is worth a 1000 dollars I guess this one is.  It’s called a Leap Chair and is made by a company called Steelcase that specializes in office furniture.  You can adjust it in like six different places maybe—up, down, backwards, forwards, the arms go up and go down and the back support can be adjusted in several ways.  This is one hell of a chair.

When John came to take the measurements he sat in it and wouldn’t get out of it.  But the thing is monstrous big.  It weighs 70 pounds.  I will probably hurt myself trying to move it around.  And once we actually saw it in the soon to be office space we realized we would have to make changes in our plans.

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Actually I got a Leap Stool, as depicted above, but in a much more sombre navy blue which will also help better to conceal the inevitable stains I will get on it. 

Second Thoughts

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On second thought, I think my theology is off re: the Book of Judas.

The book begins sort of oddly:

One day he was with his disciples in Judea, and he found them gathered together and seated in pious observance. When he [approached] his disciples, [34] gathered together and seated and offering a prayer of thanksgiving over the bread, [he] laughed.

The disciples said to [him], “Master, why are you laughing at [our] prayer of

thanksgiving? We have done what is right.”

He answered and said to them, “I am not laughing at you. <You> are not doing this because of your own will but because it is through this that your god [will be] praised.”

They said, “Master, you are […] the son of our god.”

Jesus said to them, “How do you know me? Truly [I] say to you, no generation of the people that are among you will know me.”

THE DISCIPLES BECOME ANGRY

When his disciples heard this, they started getting angry and infuriated and began

blaspheming against him in their hearts.

I say “oddly” because I just don’t recollect Jesus laughing at his disciples in the Bible that I read growing up.  In fact I don’t remember him laughing at all.  Satan is the Joker, and Christ is pretty far from being a merry prankster.

Christ at the Sermon on the Mount:  “Ladies and Germs.  Take these fishes! Please!”

Christ to Lazarus:  “Be leavened and rise!”

He just doesn’t have the material.

And odd too because I don’t remember the Disciples blasheming Him in their hearts.

But as to the theology, I argued that the Book of Judas was not about a guy named Judas but an attempt to work out a theological issue about God being all-knowing.  I think that was wrong.  I think it has to do more with the issue of pre-destination.  Christ laughs because the disciples are all swollen up with the idea that they are praying; when in fact it’s God’s voice working through them.  Or as the Reverend Roper of the Ora, ARP said, God laid it all down in every detail at the foundations of the world before the Beginning of Time.

Torches of Freedom

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Sister in Law Teresa went to see the Dead Sea Scrolls that were passing through San Diego and found them fascinating.  This got me to thinking about all the new things archeologists are turning up using new imaging techniques.  Parchment was hard to come by and sometimes people would scrape off what was written on a piece of parchment and then write something new.  Now they have methods to see what was previously written.

I don’t think this was true of the Book of Judas.  But I started thinking that probably writing the Book of Judas was no small matter.  First you had to have the parchment and then you had to be able to write. I wonder how many people were literate in those days. 

But somebody must have felt some sort of commitment to writing the Book of Judas.  First I thought maybe Judas had some relative who was pissed off about the bad things that were being said about him and that this relative wanted to set straight things straight and clear his relative’s name.  But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because a person was not going to reach much of a mass audience with one piece of parchment.

Back then writing a book was sort of like sending a message in a bottle.  You wrote it and maybe someday, somebody, somewhere would find it and read it.  No publisher was going to pick it up and advertise like:  Exclusive!  Book of Judas!  The Real Story!  The Record Set Straight.  The author of the Book of Judas was not going to appear on talk shows and tell people why he or she had written it.

So I took a quick look at the Book, and it’s not really about a guy named Judas at all.  Rather, Judas is a sort of symbol that is part of a larger more theological issue that runs something like:  if Jesus was the son of God, wouldn’t he have known everything that was going to happen and if so how did Judas sneak up on him and betray him like that. So the Book really was an attempt to do some reasoning on a tricky issue.

The Book says that Jesus told Judas to betray him and that in asking Judas to perform this task Jesus was showing Judas a signal honor.  You, Judas, are worthy enough to betray me.  So Judas did it.  And in a way, he was a hero for doing it, since his good name was pretty well screwed for all eternity.

So that settles the theological issue.  Jesus did know what Judas was going to do since they ask him to do it.   Indeed, God was speaking through Judas.

The downside though is that Jesus comes off seeming like one hell of a PR man.  Reminds me of Edward Bernais.  The tobacco companies ask him back in the 1920’s to figure out how to sell cigarettes to women (because there was a social taboo against women smoking).  The suffragettes were having a parade and Bernais hired a group of socialites to march along and at one moment they all lit up together.  Bernais had press on hand and told the socialites to call cigarettes torches of freedom or independence.  It was all a set up but the event appeared in papers all over the country as real; consequently the sale of cigarettes to women soared.

Of course, Bernais was not crucified, though maybe he should have been.

Under the Porch

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About that tomato concoction WB used to eat with black-eyed peas, a reliable source adds: 

the tomato, sugar and black pepper black eye pea accompaniment of which you speak is actually a rather delectable side dish properly called "stewed tomatoes".  It’s actually a great "gravy" not only for any kind of peas or beans, but is also quite tasty on biscuits (which should first be covered with freshly stewed corn – a whole different story altogether)or rice or mashed potatoes or loaf bread (as opposed to "corn bread), or even boiled okra – yum . Of course, you can always just eat stewed tomatoes with a spoon right out of a bowl – that is, if the bowl isn’t already filled with warm cornbread, black pepper, and sweet milk (as opposed to "butter" milk).

I do not remember having eaten cornbread with sweet milk from a bowl but I do occasionally have a hankering for stewed tomatoes warmed up and straight from the can.

super8 

I didn’t know but Brother Steve reports that he is also lactose intolerant and had to give up on cheese.

My niece Savannah, who just turned 13, had her hair cut last week for the first time in her life.

Brother Dave and Sister-in-Law Teresa went off for four days in their motor home to Dos Picos, a park not far from San Diego.

Carol went to visit some good friends in Dallas, who just moved there a few months back, and to do some networking at Dance Departments in colleges there.  She left last Wednesday, I think it was and was to return last night (Sunday) but freaky thunderstorms delayed planes and she has had to stay over another day.  She got a cheap rate from the airlines for a Super 8 not ten minutes from the airport near a part of Dallas called the Grapevine, an historic district, not bad to hand out.

She is booked to fly back to SB this evening.  But who knows, the reports are for more thunderstorms.  God I hate flying.

I think “sweet milk” is condensed milk that comes in a can.

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That’s the Super 8 near Grapevine in Dallas.  Though it might be a Super 8 anywhere. 

Under the House

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I have been reading around more in Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  It’s a pretty odd book, as I said, about the time he and the photographer Walker Evans stayed a month or so visiting off and on three sharecropper families (all white) in Hale County, Alabama in 1936.  Oddly, while there are people in the book—the members of these families—Agree spends a lot of time describing the objects that surrounded them, and not much at all of their actions, or feelings or attitudes.

 princealbert

There’s a whole section on overalls for example, what they look like, when they are new and when they are old and what they feel like when you wear them especially when it’s hot and you don’t wear a shirt under them.  And their shoes which the men sometimes slit open along the sides to get some air to their feet.  He also describes their houses.  There’s a good bit about what can be found under one of their porches.

There in the chilly and small dust which is beneath porches, the subtle funnels of doodlebugs whose teasing, of a broomstraw, is one of the patient absorptions of kneeling childhood, and there, in that dust and the damper dust and the dirt, dead twigs of living, swept from the urgent tree, signs, and relics: bent nails, withered and knobbed with rust; a bone button, its two eyes torn to one; the pierced back of an alarm clock, greasy to the touch; a torn fragment of pictured print; an emptied and flattened twenty-gauge shotgun shell, its metal green, let­tering still visible; the white tin eyelet of a summer shoe; and thinly scattered, the desiccated and the still soft excrement of hens, who stroll and dab and stand, shimmying, stabbing at their lice, and stroll out again into the sun as vacantly as they departed it.

Well, that brings back some memories since I diddled with those doodlebugs myself in the dust under Grandma Tingle’s backporch.  And as I recollect too it was a wonder to drag your fingers though the fine dust since you never knew what you might come up with: like a bottle cap maybe or a nail or bolt or something.

Once recently visiting back there, I took a Prince Albert can out from under the side of Grandma Tingle’s place as a keepsake.

Honestly, though, I don’t remember the chickens strolling under Grandma’s house.