FUNNIES AND WEE-WISDOMS

Preamble:

I wrote the following little bit of prose on Wee-Wisdoms and Funnies: A Sub-Genre
of the Email Industry due to the many humorous and not-so-humorous, wise and not-
so-wise emails I've received in the last 15 years. My guess is that about 5% of
all the emails I’ve received from 1993, when emails first began to enter my life,
are of these types. I hope you enjoy the read. This little bit of prose which
follows is a digest of the twenty-one page, 10,000+ word, essay that did NOT make
it into Dr. Funwisdum's new book Human Communication in the Twenty-First Century,
editor, Harry Funwisdum, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Dr. Funwisdum rejected my contribution to his book, but encouraged me to try for
his next collection so impressed was he with the quality of the short essay which
follows. I trust you enjoy it, too, even if it is a little longer than my normal
emails to you and even if it is a little too critical of the sub-genre with which
it is concerned. If you don't enjoy what you read here, I'm sure you will at
least tolerate its presence. We must all, in and out of the world of emails,
increasingly learn to tolerate each other's eccentricities, thus making the world
an easier place to live in.

Recently, since my retirement from full-time, part-time and casual work in the
years 1999 to 2005, I have been writing prolifically and, although I am neither
famous nor rich, I like to think I am churning out some provocative, entertaining
and intellectually stimulating stuff from my word-factory near the mouth of the
Tamar River, at Port Dalrymple, here in northern Tasmania at the last stop on the
way to Antarctica if you take the western Pacific rim route. Of course, what one
likes to think and what the reality is about one’s writing or, indeed, anything
else is often at significant variance.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania,
Valentine’s Day, 14 February 2008.

To : All Senders of 'Wee-Wisdoms and Funnies'

From : Ron Price
Date : 14 February 2008
Subject : Funnies and Wee-Wisdoms
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I hope you enjoy this little piece of gentle satire, perhaps sarcasm is a more
accurate word, analysis and comment. It will serve as a more detailed response to
the many emails I have received over the last 20 years, 1988 to 2008, emails which
were intended to be either funny or wise or both. In my first years in Perth
Western Australia, while working at the Thornlie Campus, now part of the Swan Tafe
system, my first contact with email systems began. There is virtually no one I
am writing to now and from whom I received emails then in the years 1988 to 1993
who is on my current email list, although I now have many email correspondents who
have lasted more than a decade in the years 1993 to 2008.

When one is not teaching sociology and the several social sciences and humanities,
as I had been doing for so many years; when one is not having one’s mind kept busy
by a hundred students a week and trying to be a father, husband, friend, neighbour
and citizen; when one retires from the employment, the job-world part of one’s
life, other things come into the gap. For me, one of these things is writing and
posting on the internet and responding to the inevitable emails that result from
all this writing.

Emails need to be given some sort of analysis, at least the sub-genre I am

concerned with here, due to their frequency as a form of communication during
these fifteen years. This piece, this email, is probably a little too long given
the general orthodoxy of most personal email communication which tends to be
shorter and shortest--before giving up entirely as non-existent. This is not true
of all my correspondents some of whom send me many a long piece of print usually
written by someone else and sent as an attachment or a cut-and-past exercise.
Not everyone is into writing any more than everyone is into gardening or cooking,
washing the car or shopping.

Perhaps you could see this missive from yours truly as one of the long articles on
the internet that you need to copy for future reading rather than seeing it as one
of those quick-hit-emails you receive as part of your daily quota. Then, with this
alternative framework in mind, perhaps, your emotional equipment will be able to
make a positive adjustment to this lengthy, some might say verbose, piece of
communication which I send for your pleasure.
SIX PAGE SUMMARY ARTICLE:

Receiving so many funnies and words-of-wisdom as I have month after month for over
some 15 years now, from a small coterie of people, a coterie which changes with
the months and years, I thought I would try to respond more befittingly than I
normally do with my perfunctory and usually brief set of phrases and sentences, if
indeed I respond at all, to these sometimes delightful, sometimes funny, sometimes
wise and wonderful pieces and sometimes tiresome in their frequency that are sent
to me with regularity. It is a regularity that reminds me to my days as a teacher
when I was the recipient of similar pieces of humour and wisdom on A-4 paper and
not in cyberspace.

What you find below is intended as a reflective piece that sets all these wisdoms
and funnies I receive from you--and others--in some perspective, a perspective
that derives in large measure from my years, as I say, as a teacher/lecturer and
from well-nigh half a century now of imbibing funnies and wisdoms from a multitude
of sources. It is probably these years as a teacher, though, that have resulted
in my habit, engrained after all these years, of responding if I can to any and
all incoming mail/email.

I enjoyed teaching but, as the years approached thirty-in-the-game, I got tired of

much of what was involved in the process. At the same time, as this fatigue was
developing, I experienced a simultaneous life enrichment from writing prose and
poetry and a certain increase in sensory sensitivity and awareness. As the 1990s
advanced and the new millennium opened I retired from teaching and went on a new
medication for my bipolar disorder. The positive processes that had begun in the
1990s increased many fold. Fatigue only now returns after eight to twelve hours
of reading and writing in a day or as a natural bi-product of my medication
cocktail.

The emails and the occasional letter I receive now are somewhat like pieces of
work I used to have to mark. It’s part of my life-work, my responsibility, my
role, my task, in life, my burden of duty. Like making comments on the work of
students, I now respond to emails and letters with courtesy and with honesty.
This is not always easy for courtesy and honesty do not sit easily together,
especially if the content of the received material is, for me, neither funny nor
edifying, as is the case with so much of the material I receive and have received
over the years—again like much of the stuff I had to mark as a teacher and
lecturer, a tutor and facilitator. It has been 15 years(1993-2008) since the
email became part of my daily life, after a several year warm up from, say, 1988
to 1992,(circa) while I was a Tafe teacher. This short think-piece in which I am
attempting to summarize the 15 years of experience with this sub-genre of emails
is but a series of reflections. It is also a celebration of the many advantages
of reading the products of this wonderful mechanism of technology and its products
which are, sadly, not always rewarding or intellectually engaging.

I think I write this for me more than I do for you since the thrust of so much of
this sub-genre of email communication does not, for the most part, require any
reflection, or at least a minimum of reflection on the part of the sender of the
material. It is primarily meant to entertain and, like so much of TV and the
print and electronic media, it generally accomplishes this task. Hence its
popularity. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not against entertainment. I'm sure that
the entertainment function is the primary reason for the success of this sub-genre
of communication.

Quick hits as so many emails are, like jokes themselves-"affections arising from
the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing," as the
philosopher Emmanuel Kant once defined laughter, on occasion stir the mind.
Perhaps, they are a sign of "a mind lively and at ease, as Emma once said in Jane
Austin's book by the same name. These quick hits require quick responses, if any
at all. Many of the emails, as I say above, both the funnies and the wee-
wisdoms--are funny or wise and sometimes both. But given their frequency over the
last decade and a half, I felt like making some statement about them. Perhaps it
is the slight itch they have created in my sensory emporium. I remember listening
to the famous Australian author Tim Winton express his concern for what, from his
point of view, was a wasted use of a wonderful technology. My feelings to not run
as deep as Winton’s; I have little to no angst over this internet form, this “I
want to tickle your fancy” type of communication. In Australia it’s part of a
modus vivendi, part of a leg-pulling, pleasure-loving ethos with its cynical
beneath surface mentality, downunder. It is a mode, a manner, I have come to
enjoy for it has helped to give me a balance, a balance to the quite serious side
of my life which I brought with me in 1971 when I moved to Australia from Canada.

Some writers and analysts see these funnies and wee-wisdoms as part of the
trivialization of the human battle, the denial of tragedy, the dislike of
authority, part of a defence mechanism to ward off real personal commitment. Such
writers see the authors of this form of communication here in Australia as a form
based on the desire to dismiss all self-questioning as ratbaggery. Ronald Conway,
Australia’s most famous clinical psychologist, puts it this way. Others see it as
part of a chronically skeptical society as the literary critic Susan Langer once
defined so much of the output of the electronic media factories? I hope you
don't find this little think-piece too heavy, too much thinking, too long without
the quick-natural-lift, message or laugh that is part of this particular sub-genre
of emails. In the end you may see me as too critical but, as I used to say to my
students, that is the risk you take when you open your mouth or write or send
items my way.

Being nice is, for me, part of the great Canadian white-way and has been all my
life; perhaps this epistle is just a means, a tool, for a man now in the evening
of his life, to balance off all this niceness with some elements of my ego, my
dark, my animalistic heritage which I have been struggling with successfully and
unsuccessfully, at least with partial success all my life.

GETTING TO THE POINT: CARRY ON GANG

In a more general sense, I have been giving and receiving various forms of
advice/wisdom for some 65 years now: 2008 back to 1943 when I was in my mother's
womb and she was imbibing, as she so often did, the earliest 20th century form of
positive thinking and Christianity from Norman Vincent Peale's radio program which
my mother first heard in the years before she met my father circa 1940. The
program was called "The Art of Living" which began in 1935. In 1952 Peale
published The Power of Positive Thinking which has now sold over 7 million copies.
By the early 1950s my mother began to read passages each morning to me from The
Daily Word, a publication of the Unity School of Christianity with its world
centre in Madison Wisconsin, if I recall correctly after all these years. I see
those readings now as the experience of my first mantras. Then, in those same
early fifties, when my mother began to take an interest in the Baha'i cause, I was
exposed to Baha'i prayers. Baha'i was a religion that had been in Canada then for
more than fifty years and the books my mother read from, English translations of
Persian and Arabic Baha'i prayers, were just beginning to be published in prayer
books. I found these words beautiful then and I still do after the slow
evolution of nearly sixty years.

Life began to assume a more serious aspect in the years of my late childhood(1953
to 1957) and, then, in my teens: school, sport, girls and entertainment found some
competition in life's round of activities from the more earnest side of life. I
first imbibed wisdom as a student from the several founts of knowledge I was then
exposed to or that I investigated as a youth, a period I have always defined as
those in their teens and twenties taking as that period did the years of early
adulthood; then wisdom came my way as a teacher/lecturer in the social sciences
and humanities—including such subjects as human relations, interpersonal skills,
conflict resolution, negotiation skills, working in teams and a list of subjects
as long as your proverbial arm. During these years as a teacher I received and
dispensed advice and wisdoms in a multitude of forms. I was clearly into the
advice and wisdom absorbing and dispensing business right from the dawn of my
life. It was part of the very air I breathed.

I'm sure even in those years of unconsciousness, in utero and in the years of
early childhood where no memories reside, I had my very earliest experiences of
wee-wisdoms, although funnies were in short supply during the war and shortly
thereafter, at least in my consanguineal family. My mother was one of those
seekers, always willing to try on a new idea if it came into town. And now, thirty
years after her passing, I have a small book of the wee-wisdoms she collected in
her half a century of collecting from the late 1920s, in her early twenties, to
her death in 1978. I should by now be a fount of unusually perspicacious
aphorisms from the wisdom literature of history or, at the very least, I should
run 'wisdom workshops' for the lean and hungry.

The funnies department of my life as a child, as an adolescent or in the first

decade of my young adult life from 20 to 30, was never as extensive or successful
as the wee-wisdom section. Right from my first exposure to jokes about: Newfees,
Polocks and the Irish or the genitals of males and females and their mutual
interconnections, I generally found much of the humour distasteful back in my late
childhood and adolescence; perhaps this was due to the gently puritanical and
pious(perhaps religious is just the right word) upbringing I had, an upbringing I
now appreciate to the full, although not in its entirety then. I must confess,
indeed I am pleased to acknowledge, that nearly 40 years of living in Australia
has taught me a rich appreciation of the funny side of life probably due to the
humour that lurks both below the surface and at the surface of so much of
Australian culture and inevitably bubbles to the surface in this essentially
pleasure-loving people.

Australian stoicism is strengthened by an ability to see the lighter side of life.

In this dry dog-biscuit of a continent, with a beauty all its own and where fires
burn up part of its landmass every summer from December to March, humour is
virtually compulsory. By now, I should have an accumulation of jokes-and-funnies
to keep everyone laughing in perpetuity. And I did by 1999. By the time I
retired as I headed toward the new millennium and away from FT teaching, I had a
whole section of my filing cabinet stocked with items, with funnies, received from
my students, in their hope that I could see the funny side of life--and
occasionally I did.

Now, in the evening of my life, I feel a little like the marriage guidance
counsellor who has been married six times. He has never been able to pull-it-off,
marriage that is, but he has had a lot of experience trying. For some nine years,
during the final part of my educative process as a full-time teacher(1990-1999)--
and educative it was--I used to give out "a summary of the wisdom of the ages" on
several sheets of A-4 paper to the approximately one hundred students I had every
term or semester. One of the strong threads in this summary of wisdom literature
were several quotations from Murphy’s Law a set of sayings that contained many
grains of truth and humour and which had gained a high degree of popularity in
Australia. Thousands of intending students of leisure and life and I went through
the material to see if we could come up with the 'wisest of the wise' stuff,
practical goodies for the market-place and the inner man/woman. For the most part
I enjoyed the process. Giving and receiving advice was a buzz, particularly when
it was sugar-coated with humour. Advice-giving can be a tedious activity and the
advice can act as a weight even if it is good advice, unless the context is right.
Humour often makes it right.

Now that the evening of my life is in full swing, the wee-wisdoms and the funnies
continue to float in or on cyberspace unavoidably, inevitably if one is open to
human contact in that increasingly popular domain. From emails and the internet,
among other sources, material is obtained from my interlocutors which they, in
turn, obtain from:

(i) the wisdom literature of the great historical religions;

(ii) the wisdom of the philosophical traditions
(outside traditional religions);
(iii) the wisdom of popular psychology and the social sciences
….usually from the fields of: (a) human relations, (b) interpersonal
skills,
(c) pop-psychology, (d) management and organizational
behaviour
and (e) endless funnies and wee-wisdoms from known &
unknown word and audio-visual factories; and
(iv) the electronic media.

The social sciences provide the disciplines in which so much of the wisdom
literature I receive is now located. The social sciences are either old: like
history, philosophy and religion; or young: like economics, psychology, sociology,
anthropology, human relations, inter alia. Unlike some of the other academic
fields, say the biological and physical sciences, all these social sciences are
inexact, highly subjective and infinitely more complex than the physical and
biological sciences--or so I see them anyway. Everybody and their dog can play at
dispensing their wisdoms, with the dogs sometimes providing the best advice in the
form of close friendships, at least for some people with canine proclivities.
Unlike the physical and biological sciences, too, knowledge and experience is not
required. Anyone can play the game. Often the untutored and apparently ignorant
and those who have read nothing at all in the field, can offer humble wisdoms and
funnies which excel the most learned, with or without their PhDs. So be warned:
it's a mine field, this advice and wisdom business. It’s highly democratic,
individualistic, egalitarian.

The result for many practitioners who would really like to be both wise and
entertaining is the experience of a field that resembles a mud-pie, poorly
constructed and not of much use to humanity, although lots of laughs are had and
wisdom gets distributed liberally—which, as far as it goes, obviously has some use
to us all in what very well may be the darkest hours in the history of
civilization.. Who would want to deny or prevent the liberal effusion of this new
art form? The industry, the word factories, pour out their wisdoms and their
humour with greater frequency on every passing day. I often wonder how Voltaire
would have coped downunder. He said he never had one "ha ha" in his whole life.
I think he would have gone home to France pretty fast on a boat with the whinging-
poms, if he had ever come to Australia way back when in the years of the
Enlightenment over two centuries ago.

And so I begin or, should I say, end with apologies all-round to any who might
take offence here. But I felt like having a little think about this sub-genre of
emails at this 15 year mark(1993-2008) in my email-life. In what you might call
my wisdom/advice-lifeline I am just about to pass the 65 mark and enter the middle
years of late adulthood, 65 to 75. As I, and you, continue to imbibe the endless
supply of resources available from the endless supply of word and audio-visual
factories, we will continue to get both our laughs, our funnies, our wisdoms and
the endless aphorismx. And we should thank the Lord for them! For who would want
a life without laughs and/or without wisdom?

I hope my satire, my sarcasm, here is gentle and does not bite too hard or at all.
Canadians are, on the whole, a nice people who try to perform their operations on
their patients in such a way that these patients leave the hospital without the
suspicion they have even been operated on at all, but with the new glands, the new
body parts, fully installed for daily use. Like the pick-pocket and the burglar, I
want to get in-there-and-out without alerting anyone to my work. A state of total
anesthesia is helpful during the process.

The New Testament calls it, or so one could argue, the act of: 'The Thief in the
Night,' or so one could render one possible interpretation. The phrase was
applied to prophecy when Christ said He would come again. But, again, this is a
prophecy capable of many interpretations, as all prophecies are. I send this
communication your way in response to the many emails I've received in this sub-
genre in recent months/years. There are, perhaps, a dozen people now who are
'into this sub-genre' and who send me this special type of material in the course
of a year, some with a zeal bordering on the religious or should I say the
fanatical. This dozen sends me many delightful pieces, more it seems as the years
go by, including photos, images, attachments of various kinds and colours, to
embellish the content of the wisdom and humour.

I feel, after so many years of giving out my jokes as a teacher, that it is only
fair that I now receive humour and wisdom as graciously as mine was accepted by my
students over those many years. Like my in-class jokes, some of the material I
receive is funny, some not-so-funny; some is wise, some not-so-wise. But, then,
you can't win them all. Both wisdom and humour are hopefully irrepressible
quotients, at least in some people. And again, perhaps, we have the Lord to
thank for that. So, carry on gang with your own particular brand of giving and
receiving. Who am I to put a lid on your enthusiasms?

I have noticed, might I add parenthetically, that some enthusiastic senders of

these email goodies often drop off the radar screen suddenly and their goodies are
seen no more or, at least, far less than they once were in the hey-day of their
goodie-sending life. There are, of course, many reasons for this that one might
hypothesize: a change in their life’s role, a drop or a rise in their lifeline
status, a desire to save downloading space in their monthly allocation from their
internet provider, a simple fatigue with the process of getting and sending(by
which as the poet Wordsworth once said “we lay waste our powers”)-- for one can
only get overkill, overdone, overwork, overstate, overfunny, so many times.
Sometimes such enthusiasts completely drop-out of the email game. As their life
goes in other directions their output moves to other domains.

As Gore Vidal, a man of irrepressible humour and erudition as he criticizes

American society from his home in Italy, once said, “our whole society has
laughing gas pumped into its billions of lounge-rooms every night--as the world
continues its mad, mad race and pace.” Can one get tired of laughing? Who knows?
But there is definitely a lifeline, a lifespan, a life-funny-line trajectory for
each person who gets into the funny-wee-wisdom sending and receiving business. It
does not continue at the same pace year after year in perpetuity. And thank the
Lord for that.

George Bernard Shaw used to say that: "I can no more write what people want than I
can play the fiddle to a happy company of folk-dancers." So he wrote what he
thought his readers needed. What people need and what they want are usually not
the same. Many found George presumptuous. I hope what you find here is not in the
same category as Shaw's, presumptuous that is. I hope, too, that this somewhat
lengthy read has been worth your while. If not, well, you now have......ten
choices regarding what to do next:

A FOLLOW-UP EXERCISE FOR READERS

A.

(i) delete the above;

(ii) print and save the above for pondering because it's wise, clever
and something quite personal from the sender;
(iii) read it again now, then delete it;
(iv) save the very good bits and delete the rest;
(v) none of the above;
(vi) all of the above, if that is possible;
(vii) write your own think-piece on this sub-genre of emails;
(viii) send me a copy of your 'writing on this sub-genre of emails'
for: (a) my evaluation(1)and/or (b) my pleasure;
(ix) don't send your evaluation to me; and
(x) don't think about what I've written; just dismiss it as the meanderings of
a man
moving speedily within the early years of his late adulthood.

B.

If time permits from your busy life rate the above piece of writing using either
the scale:

A+(91-100), A(81-90) and A-(75-80); B+(71-74),B(68-70) and B-(65-67); C+(60-64,

C(55-59) and C-(50-54); D(25-49 hold and try again) and E(0-24 attend a workshop
on 'wisdoms and funnies')---or

C.

You might prefer to provide feedback in an anecdotal form with: (a) commentary,
(b) advice, (c) suggestions for improvement, (d) et cetera. Just forward it to
Dr. Funwisdom via myself. And I will

.....remain yours sincerely

Ron Price
Tasmania
Happy Valentines Day!
Updated: 14/2/08
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That's All Folks!
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