Harold B. Curtis

“Watching college football creates social capital.”

Indeed, though this is one of Melissa’s pet peeves. We started throwing regular New Year’s parties some years back, and part of the motivation for which was for Melissa to have someone to watch the bowl games with, because I just wasn’t into it. Well, knowing me, these parties gradually turned into day-long gabfests, with so many people in attendance that the games were unwatchable, with the tv monopolized by children watching videos in the backroom anyway. Melissa enjoys the parties–she really gets into planning the menus for these salons–but she misses her football.

I miss college football, as I never seem to have enough organization and social capital to arrange to watch games other people’s houses.

Thanks for your reproach of Harold; I only just got back to the computer.

“I am curious as to your decision that DVDs do not constitute a threat to the simple life.”

It’s a lame post, as were many of those long ruminations on “simplicity” that I posted at the beginning of the year. There are some good ideas in there, I think, but I don’t develop them properly, and instead pile on a bunch of unrelated stuff. Basically, all the post amounts to is the argument that DVD technology makes it possible to, in a way, “get ahead” of television and thus set some bounds upon it, enclose it and keep it from being a drain on one’s life. Since most people don’t have that problem anyway, the post is of limited relevance to most.

Russell: I am curious as to your decision that DVDs do not constitute a threat to the simple life. I wonder to what extent the simple life is simply getting defined in terms of small pleasures that you happen to enjoy or that happen to be within your price range. In other words, what stands behind your claim other than a consumption preference. (Do philosophers have consumption preferences?)

Rosalynde’s point reminds me of an interesting lecture that I once attended on Marlowe’s Faustus. The argument was that the play was all about contract law, which was a relatively new legal relation. As commerce expanded in the 16th and 17th century, wealth became associated with commerce and contracts rather than agriculture and real estate. In Marlowe we see the contract as a Satanic insturment, which would make sense to a society that was hostile or at anyrate anxious about the spread of commerce. Interestingly, one of the Satanic pleasures that Faustus gets in Marlowe’s telling is fruit out of season and — if I remember correctly — other culinary luxury’s such as spices. To continue the Marxist point, it seems that one might argue that gluttony was no simply about class, but also about the means of production, ie a preference for wealth associated with land rather than commerce, conveyances rather than contracts. I would also point out, of course, that the real-estate bound world tends to be one of limited mobility and stable hierarchies, while the contract bound world tends to be one of fluidity, opprotunity, and change.

Harold B. Curtis

http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/25/Autos/nissan_cannons/

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1476253/posts

http://www.theorator.com/bills109/s517.html