They Are Pronounced ‘Overhauls’

They keep predicting a big storm, but noting yet but a few sprinkles. I don’t mind. The guy painting in the dark corner at Peyton’s (#1 fish in southern Illinois) said you gotta quite getting your weather from those channels with the political clowns. If you want weather watch the weather channel. An old man goes out the door. That’s my father he said. He’s ninety seven. He said his father had told him that he’d take care of him when he got old. He (the guy painting) had broke his hip and had just gotten off his walker yesterday. That’s what he said. These country folks, once you get them started talking you can’t ever get them stopped. I had the same trouble with the host at the campground. I learned all about the administration of the state park system. Now that one near Dixon City has a prison work camp next to it. You can never trust a prisoner, he said. He knew he had spent his life working corrections (sounds like a newspaper editor – the grammar police). He recommended anyone still in to get out of it (the correctional system i.e.). It will save your life, he said. Can’t they told him, no other job will pay this much. That happens when you ‘enhance’ your life style and go into debt doing it. Can’t afford anything else. Too bad. How can you see back there in the dark, I asked the guy painting. It don’t make any difference, he said, I do this every couple of years to make it look clean. I put the extra chairs back here anyway. There’s another old guy a hundred and three. That’s his picture on the news clipping on the wall (he’ caught a big fish). He broke his hip recently and is on a walker too. He’s making progress and will be off it soon. He still serves on the hospital board. He was seventy-two, the guy back there in the dark corner, and has just managed to get back up off the floor after painting around the bottom edge. He has one of those canes that stand up on their own. They are supported on a tripod.  His dad might be right. The old-man just came back in. He looks like someone out of the forties with his pork-pie hat and big brass buckle and unshaven whiskers. He’s a city slicker. The population here is all of three-hundred. If he were a farmer he’d be wearin overalls (or Overhauls as the pronounce them). He ambles on back towards the kitchen. They aren’t a gonna make him cook are they?

The fastest growing religion in the United States is a group collectively labeled ‘nones’ who spurn organized religion

And [the] inevitably supine gesture of dressing and undressing, which, as is less true of any other garment, are those of harnessing and of unharnessing the shoulders of a tired and hard-used animal - James Agee – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1939 p266

Federal subsidies make up about half of the earnings of a typical American corn farmer

Drawn–on and  bibbed on the whole belly and chest, naked ‘from the kidneys up behind’, save for broad crossed straps, and slung by these straps from the shoulders; the slanted pockets on each thigh, the deep square pockets on each buttock; the complex and slanted structure on the chest of the pocket shaped for pencils, rulers and watches. Coldness of sweat when they are young, and their stiffness; their sweetness to the skin and pleasure of sweating when they are old; the thin metal buttons on the fly … They are pronounced ‘overhauls’. – James Agee – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1939 p265

Economists have a tendency to refine away their own ontologies

If the goal of a simulation is accurate prediction then the model assumptions may need to be quite complicated but if the goal is understanding of a fundamental process then simplicity of assumptions is required

Crime committed for money or revenge without sex is much less commercial [it doesn’t sell books], so I look for the sex angle, for murders [with] adjudicated killers, and increasingly for multiple bodies. The manner of death has to be very violent, very visceral – Paul Dines, 1993

The poor working class conservative – hates the liberal – he hates him more than he hates those that exploit him. After all he envies his exploiter. He wants to be among his number. And he hates anyone that says he can’t. He has no class. But he claims title to a middle class. There is no middle class (what the French called the petti bourgeoisie) in America. They were the shop-keepers. We only have Wal-Marts and Dollar Stores now. There are no mom and pop shops among us, maybe the 7-11 but it don’t count, it’s more like a little box.  Don’t remind him that he lives from pay check to pay check (if not on an actual welfare check as if yet). They (the shop keepers) are gone and will never come back so long has you shop at  the big box. He drives his automobile on a four lane road out to the edge of town as the core goes to hell and wonder what’s happened to America. He believes in the American dream in spite of the fact that his chance getting ahead is the lowest in the development world. Don’t remind him that he’s poor and getting poorer. He don’t want to hear it. It makes him mean when he should be getting angry. He a fool for his accoutrements of class. He buys them all at a big box they just built out at the cross-roads.

A new suit of overalls has among its beauties those of a blueprint; and they are a map of a working man – James Agee – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1939  p266

Is it beer time again? Yes, it is getting warm again. Soon it will be summer. It will be hot again. The winter was long and it was nasty. We’ll probably skip directly from winter to summer without a transition.  A cold beer will be nice. Beer time is near. Even if its only a near beer? Hell, no! I want one of them hardy malty mashes. But you’re on a diet. You’ve promised yourself that you’d lose thirty pounds and you can’t do that on beer. I could cut out the solid stuff. Shut up and drink your lunch. Something to fill you up and not out. If only they made a lite beer that had some taste. That’s what I’m going to miss the most. I can take all this rabbit food but, god do I want a good beer. The domestics were already tasteless before they started messing with them. Making them lite only makes them worse. At least they’re cold and when its hot, that is at least something.

There is greatly among negroes, and considerably too among working-class whites, an apparent reverence for the nature and symbolic dignities of the head (which is generally lost in the softer classes of whites);  so that, perhaps even more than the rest of the body, it is dressed according to symbolic and imitative enhancements – James Agee – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1939 p272

What I eventually discovered was that the Little People could pass on almost ‘word for word’ (see explanation below regarding transposing plurals for the singular), what went on in the minds of nearby people. Sometimes they could even do it for dogs but not for other animals like cats or horses. How far away could they pick up on what other people thought? Was there a diminution of accuracy with distance like there is for sounds that we hear (the fainter a distant voice the more we guess at what is being said).

They couldn’t exactly read people’s minds. It was a form of telepathy but not exactly. When someone was mulling something over in their head they could pick up on that. And of course when they spoke even if only talking to themselves, they could pick up on that. But they did not repeat it word for word. They tried to make sense of it first. They translated it into their own thoughts sort of like a translator will do when they translate word for word and miss out on the sense of what the original meant. For instance they had no concept of number and hence everything came out plural (because and has been said before – there may be more and there may be less but there is never just one).

Interpretosis: a Western disease that traces all becomings back to some origin. “Every experienced affect is ‘read’ as the signifier ‘of’ some original sense”. Clair Colebrook – Gilles Deleuze, 2002 p134