This has been hanging on my desk for nearly two years. Like expensive wine or cheese, it seems better with age. Sorry about the poor scan quality. Here is the dialogue.
Investor: "I'm thinking of investing in the Dogbert Hedge Fund. Can you explain how it works?"
Fund Manager:"It's simple. I take your money and then use math to turn it into my money while destroying the overall economy."
Investor: "Is that legal?"
Manager: "more so than you'd think.
Investor: "What's in it for me?"
Manager: "My inflated claims will give you false hope. That way you won't stress out until after you retire and discover you're penniless."
Investor: "But I..."
[scene of dinosaur violence]
Investor: "I don't remember the last five minutes."
Manager: "I was just telling you that my hedge fund will earn you 520% per year."
I've had Morning Meeting on lately when doing morning paperwork. Dylan Ratigan has taken to replacing Wall Street and/or Banks with the word Casino. Like every 5 minutes. And I think it's clever. Words need replaced sometimes to make the trickery a bit more obvious.
ReplyDeleteROBERT FROST
ReplyDelete“Mowing” By Hand
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound--
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
I hope you don’t find this too floofy but thinking about your obsession with productive work using tools made for human hands made my little ears perk up when I ran into Robert Frost (who I thought I would not like) and his constant attention to what it is like to work at something. Tools for Frost give the worker (he thinks poets are workers/workers are poets) a way to impose his will on the world, the tool is part of the object world and allows the worker to cut and build his world. Tools are not something that the man controls as a simple extension of himself. Tools in Frost are tricky. You have to learn how to use them. They have in Frost a kind of independent, objective existence, which require the worker to adapt to them and what they can do. Tools, for Frost, are hand tools: they make little sound if they are used right and made correctly. They exert force exactly, in a way that elaborate mechanized machines often don’t.
Facts (Line 13) (or objects) are made and not found in Frost's poetry, that is, work is the fact of life and it should be loved and done right. It is the object of life and it produces objects, artifacts. The work of living is something daily, ordinary, ongoing; and for these reasons incapable of completion. It's something that we have to do over and over again: making and remaking the world. "Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right." Wallace Stevens said that, but Frost could have said it, too. True creativity requires the vocational use of available tools, not dreaming (Line 7 -- because the dream is more than the truth) but doing (Line 10 -- because “doing” is “earnestly loving” for Frost); not destroying because you disbelieve the facts of the powerful but making because you believe.