Homer Nods

Woe, woe betide any foolish freshman, who, too lazy to do the work for the survey course, rents Troy so as not to have to read the Iliad.



My summary: EPIC FAIL, in so many ways.

(Spit take warning here -- Darwin and I both sat up and said, "What the flip?")

Reality Check

I'm tired of seeing pix of people's pristine houses, so here's a reality check: my kitchen after my three-year-old threw a tantrum this morning (what instigated it is still a mystery).

Note the cheerios all over the floor.

Some days you're the dinosaur; others, you're the pirate.

Hot Day at the Office

Summer has settled on Central Texas and with it one baking day after another, with the weather forecasts and nature playing a game with each other over whether the temperature will break into three digits on any given day. Thus far, the forecasters seem less bold, predicting 98 and allowing reality to jump ahead a few degrees and score three digits unannounced.

One of the few benefits of this kind of blast furnace weather is that as the temperatures rise, the acceptable length of "business casual" skirts apparently shortens. The annoyance one might feel at having to rush to a meeting in another building through 100-degree weather can be soothed by finding oneself walking some yards behind someone who has chosen, out of generosity towards all mankind, to stride leggily through her workday in four inch heels and a skirt that ventures only halfway towards her knees. Whether this loosening of business norms during the summer months actually serves to cool the wearer much I cannot say, but for the rest of us the distraction is welcome enough.

Intensive

One of the great things about having a degree in Drama is that it's excellent life prep. Learning how to analyze a scene, discover a character's motivation, and stating an objecive for a character to pursue -- these techniques translate very well to real life, in which one has oblique conversations where one must discover what the other person wants. Heck, even buying a car is a bit less painful with a bit of dramatic training under the old belt.

So I find that when (as now, prepping for my Shakespeare class) I read books on directing, they usually contain some advice that's applicable in larger settings. For example, here's a selection from Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair by Frank Hauser and Russell Reich:

23. Assume that everyone is in a permanent state of catatonic terror.
This will help you approach the impossible state of infinite patience and benevolence that actors and others expect from you.

I wish I'd had some advice like this under my belt not just for previous directing situations, but in any circumstance in which I've had to try to get a large group of people to participate or follow directions.

Not of general relevance, but something I thought was interesting (tender eyes may want to avert themselves now):

Meaning It

There is only one intensive in the English language: the word "f*ck" (or "f*cking").

Listen to the actor declaiming:

O! What a rogue and peasant slave I am!

Note how he strains to make the derogatory language real, as if he really means it. Get him to put in a few "f*ckings":

O! What a f*cking rogue and peasant f*cking slave I am!

Hear how it immediately hardens and sharpens the images, makes them more like real anger and real self-disgust rather than disguised self-pity. Not just impressive, but meant.

Should you keep these word substitutions in performance?
No.

I tried it myself with some Shakespeare, and true enough. Nothing intensifies like the F-bomb. For all you concerned parents reading: I do not intend to teach this in my Shakespeare class. Just sayin'.

Capitalism -- When People Sell Things I Don't Like

With the garden currently shooting up, I've found myself again disposed to read gardening and food related books. I finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma last week, and aside from a few gripes in regards to Michael Pollan's understanding of economics, I enjoyed it quite a bit. On the last run by the library, I picked up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. The idea of moving out onto acreage and growing much of one's own food is something that I find interesting. I enjoy gardening, I enjoy cooking gourmet food, and I think there's a cultural and psychological value to remaining in touch with the way that humans have gained food for themselves in past centuries.

However, Kingsolver is far more passionate (and less balanced) in her jeremiads against "industrial food" than Pollan, and more prone to denunciations of what "capitalism" has done to our food culture. Indeed, so much so as to crystallize for me a trend among those who denounce "capitalism" and its impact on Western Culture. Kingsolver had just reached the crescendo of a complaint in regards to large seed companies peddling hybrids and genetically modified strains, when she turned to the subject of heirloom vegetable varieties, and her joy at paging through lengthy seed catalogs full of heirloom seeds.

...Heirloom seeds are of little interest to capitalism if they can't be patented or owned. They have, however, earned a cult following among people who grow or buy and eat them. Gardeners collect them like family jewels, and Whole Foods Market can't refrain from poetry in its advertisement of heirlooms....

So you see, when large agribusiness firms sell farmers seeds for field corn which are genetically modified to repel pests,
that's capitalism. But when catalog and internet businesses build a thriving niche selling heirloom vegetable seeds, and Whole Foods ad men wax poetical over $7/lb tomatoes, that's... Well, it certainly can't be capitalism, can it? Not if it's good.

In some circles, "capitalism" becomes such a scare-word that people forget what it means. Free markets and private ownership allow the satisfaction of a variety of wants: both mainstream farmers' desire for crops which are bug resistant, and organic gardeners' desire for true-breeding, non-hybrid varietals with colorful lineages; both Wal-Mart and Whole Foods.

Indeed, what doesn't allow for this kind of preference driven diversity is a centralized top-down system. For all that slow-food and local-food advocates rail against the "industrial agricultural complex", there's in fact plenty of room for buying local food from quirky, sustainable-practice farmers in our current "capitalist" system. Their real nightmare would be not capitalism, but the sort of central planning which briefly had its day in this country under FDR's New Deal, when the Schechter Brothers served jail time for the horrific sins of following strict Kosher guidelines, allowing customers to pick which poultry to buy based on what looked healthy, and giving customers a good price.

A preference driven system such as free market capitalism does leave us to suffer the pangs of seeing people buy things we think they ought not (and the changes in the culture that result therefrom), but whose of us who are in any sense in the cultural minority should hesitate to rail against capitalism, when it is free markets which allow those of us with niche-y tastes to see our needs met as well as those of the mainstream culture.

Your Wealth Makes Me Wealthy

One of the concepts in economics that people seem to have difficulty grasping at an intuitive level is how other people's income affects one's own income. Many people instinctively ascribe to the "lump theory" of money, in which one may imagine all wealth to consist of a set amount of money, like a dragon's hoard. If you capture more of it, that means that someone, somehow, has ended up with less.

In certain circumstances, this theory might describe things pretty well, but in most times and places wealth grows and shrinks with productivity. Basically, if I am able to produce more goods and services of value to othe people in the same amount of time, then my income grows.

Not only does this benefit me, it also benefits the other people near me with whom I do business -- even if their productivity has not actually increased.

So for example. It's not unusual at this time of year to have some guy come knocking on our door and offer to mow the lawn for $20-30. I always say no, partly because I take a non-monetary pride in being the sort of guy who mows his own lawn, but mostly because I don't want to pay $20-30 for something which I could easily do in 45 minutes of spare time in the evening.

Imagine, however, that I drastically increase my income, by producing goods or services that people value a great deal more than my current efforts. Now I make three times as I did before. The idea of paying $30 not to have to spend an evening mowing my lawn might sound great. Indeed, I might be willing to pay $50. So the lawn mowers would probably end up making more money, even if before going and investing their hard earned money in a 30-inch-swath self-propelled lawn mower and increasing their own productivity.

This is why one of the constants of a growing economy is that all commodities other than human labor decrease in price, while labor increases in price.

New Bishop for Austin, but who?

Amy Welborn reports that Bishop Aymond of Austin is heading back home to New Orleans. Congratulations to New Orleans, but who's next for us, I wonder?

Here's Rocco's writeup of the move.

A few weekends ago, I saw Bishop Aymond ordain on of my friends to the deaconate, one of six transitional deacons for the diocese. The next weekend, he ordained five men to the priesthood. Austin has had an upswing in vocations under Bishop Aymond, which I pray continues under his successor. I hope we can be as fortunate as Cincinnati under our new bishop.