Kumquat-Colored Trolleys

Cold, frost on the windshield, frozen puddles from the previous night’s storm. It will be cold all this week. The temperature is not expected to get much above freezing all day. The two miles along the river into town does not raise the ambient temperature by much. It usually goes up by at least four degrees. The water coming down from the Dakotas is also getting colder. It will freeze solid before the end of the year, before the end of this month.

Kumquat-colored trolleys ding as they trumble / Passengers under an indigo fizzle – Sylvia Plath – Collected Poems, 1981 p43

She’s down on her knees. She adopts stray animals. She takes care of a couple of snakes. The boa she says is very gentle. She is cleaning a trash dispenser, whipping clean its polished metal shine. You get all the good jobs, don’t you? She has red hair, Evangeline. It makes the time go by, she says. She says that I’m her first customer. But I wish I had your life. Come in here have coffee. Sit around all morning and read. Then do it again tomorrow. Funny how that all tell me that I live the life that they wish they could. But no one actually does but me. It’s the freedom they envy. They don’t know what a slave to habit that I am. They have to pay the bills. The pursuit of happiness through consumption is an overpowering zeitgeist . Happiness and failure are incompatible. Freedom is an admission of failure unless your first accumulate which I already have. Failure to accumulate is failure indeed. Everyone envies freedom but refuses to peruse it. You get used to it, to accumulating, and can’t quite. It becomes a habit, you can’t give up. Work, work; never enough. Turn everything into work.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling others to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid – Bertrand Russell – In Praise of Idleness, 1932

As wealth accumulates in fewer and fewer hands the global economy becomes unable to absorb world output (for more and more consumers are only able to buy less and less). Capitalist are unable to unload their surplus production, they can’t find outlets for investments to generate new profits. They turn to alternate sources to sustain their profit making – militarization (use of force), wild financial speculation, and raiding the public finance. And thus we have arrived at where we are – class warfare.

But a woman loved, who yields is till far from being a woman who loves – Maria Reiner Rilke – Ahead of All Parting: selected poetry and prose, 1995 p274

Those who trust money are also subject to its mastery

There is nothing nameable but that some man will, or undertake to, do it for pay – Herman Melville – Billy Budd, sailor p54

See yourself as a writer; carry a small notebook – something that will fit in a pocket. In the office filling in the blanks of preprinted forms, dreaming of traveling and writing novels is not enough. Maybe for a newspaper. Something about travel and tourism? No more like the things you’d find on the life style section. An office job in the big city sucks. There was a better chance of success in the smaller markets. The St Petersburg press had taken several pieces. They paid $250 for each and let you keep the copyright. Currently scribbling notes about the war. There is always a war and there is always crime and periodically office seekers campaign. Enough to pay the bar tap as long it remains modest.

Meta-bullshit and not truth, it is the norm governing most coordinated human activity under conditions of capital markets. Thus does bullshit meet and become filthy lucre, and of course, vice versa  – Mark Kingwell – Harper’s, July 2011  p21

A score need not be performed to be heard. A recipe need not be prepared to be tasted. But it takes years of practice for this to occur.

We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own – E M Cioran

Strange statistics – in the 1840 US Census, for the first time, they enumerated the incidence of mental illness – what was termed the “insane and idiots” – and among the black population a strange phenomena occurred in the data. Blacks, both free and slave, showed lower incidence rates of insanity the further south one went:  every 14^th Negro in Maine, every 28^th in New Hampshire, every 43^rd in Massachusetts, every 297^th in New Jersey, one in 1,229 in Virginia, one in 2,477 in South Carolina and one in 4,310 in Louisiana.

Pro-slavery advocates said this was because slavery was beneficial to the black race. The Negroes were obviously better off as slaves. Northern observers attributed the supposed pattern to the effect of cold weather on blacks. The newly founded American Statistical Association said it was do sampling errors – they did not have yet the concept of “margin of error” to explain it. Counties without a single negro reported insane negros. Secretary of State, John C Calhoun who was responsible for the US Census, claimed that “there are so many errors that they balance one another and led to the same conclusion as if they were all correct.” He did not act on Congress’ directive that the errors be corrected. The Census proved valuable to the rhetoric of Southern politicians.

One could argue that fevers are caused by too little aspirin – Marcia Angell – New York Review of Books, 6/23/11 p21