End-year Round Up

This year I got much clearer on the corruption and incompetence of our various leaderships.  

All the information coming to me via Twitter, some great Tweeps out there, and several super blogs have helped me get a lot clearer this year, and here they are, fyi.

But first of all, a couple of websites have also been really useful, data-wise:

• "The Spirit Level" is an excellent explanation of why social democracy, at a minimum, and re-distributive fiscal policies are pre-conditions for a semi-decent, non-barbarous society. The related website of The Equality Trust has all the data, and the principal critiques of the analysis. 
•  False Economy also has lots of data on how and why the decision to cut rather than increase public spending will protect the wealth of a lot of already rich people, and provide massive new sources of income to others through privatisation, but not solve the underlying tensions.  It also has a great little video.

And very importantly for me personally, a friend shared a terrific paper on social democracy, by the late, much admired Tony Judt:  What is Living and What is Dead about Social Democracy.  This really clarified for me what we are fighting for right now, and the limitations of that fight.

Image via Wikipedia

Of course, this could/should be about way more than social democracy, but we've got to defend that first off.

But back to blogs ....

The brilliant and very funny Madam Miaow has done a good brief  round-up of some of the greats of the leftist blogosphere, including HarpyMarx, Gauche, Laurie Penny at the New Statesman, not to mention herself of course.  And she includes fellow Orwell Prize short-listee Jack of Kent, who's so lovely and interesting we wish he was a lefty.  Madam M also mentions Dolphinarium, but she is just way too into the catholic hierarchy for me.

In addition, I keep going back to these ones :-

• One of yer actual (former) bankers gives an inside view on what's going on via Leftbanker

• Also, there are some very useful progressive tax blogs, which have all the counter-arguments.  I will get the links to these.  And who'da thunk that tax issues could actually be interesting?

• Not Just the Minutiae has loads of interesting articles, videos and other bits of leftist this and that, always illuminating

• And for sheer solid up to the minute analysis, New Left Project, Lenin's Tomb, Michael Meacher and Counterfire are all great.

• Too Much To Say For Myself has a solid feminist perspective, often tackling issues others are not.

• And currently for stuff on Wikileaks, but a whole lot of other things too, you can't do better than Glenn Greenwald over there at Salon.com

• Oh, and don't forget to check out the truly great Amy Goodman at Democracy Now VERY regularly (wish we had something like this in UK) 

And, finally, I really liked Socialist Unity's Blogging at the Crossroads.  It gives a solid overview of the status of left blogging and social media organizing just now. Very interesting, with lots of links in case, like me, you missed stuff.

I could go on and on of course .......

Some thoughts on thought Itself, in poem and painting

The older I get the more I find myself lost in thought, and very pleasant it is too.  So it was a joy to find my feelings about it so well described in two different media, separated by 2000 years: a poem by D.H Lawrence, and a fresco by an unknown artist in Pompeii.


I love this poem;  both thought-provoking, and straight out provoking.  

Thought:  by D.H. Lawrence
Thought, I love thought.

But not the jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas

I despise that self-important game.

Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness,

Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of the conscience,

Thought is gazing on to the face of life, and reading what can be read,

Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to a conclusion.

Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges,

Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.

See what I mean?  Hopelessly flawed!  Banal and arrogant in the opening, betraying the very self-importance that he disavows, followed by soaring and beautiful descriptions of inner experience in the middle, and an ending which I (not a man) find highly affronting, and at the same time totally descriptive of exactly what happens to a person lost in thought.  Most provoking.  But I love it even so.

I also love, perhaps even more, the way in which this ancient artist has captured exactly the same moment of full engagement, of gazing into the middle distance, but without a touch of self-importance.

Sapho (?).  Pompei.  

In fact, I'm finding this really a haunting picture, of the moments, perhaps long moments, before writing.


__________________


You may also enjoy The Gift.  It, too, includes a quote about the inner person, and if I remember rightly was also dogged by inappropriate use of the masculine pronoun.  Although there I did not resist the temptation to excise it.

Jim Jarmusch: Nothing is Original. Steal from Anywhere

The quotation below "speaks directly to my soul", and so I stole it, as suggested, from Not Just the Minutiae.

It is a remark by the wonderful, totally original and dramatically silver-haired film-maker, Jim Jarmusch

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. 

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to”.” 

I hope you like it as much as I do.

And this related video is really very nice too.  

• Video Interview: Jim Jarmusch (gointothestory.com)

Image via Wikipedia

P.S.  

Way back in October I discovered the possibility for my interaction with the internets (I KNOW, but better late than never), and I naively wrote this little number - How Pumped Am I about 2.0!  

It was exactly the potential for all this thievery that I was excited about, but did not yet have the words to describe *smiles fondly at such childishness (not yet fully outgrown)*.


If you like this post, you may also like another little piece of theft:  The Gift

History of the World in 100 Objects

Am I alone in thinking that the sub-text of the rather fabulous BBC/British Museum radio series / media extravaganza "History of the World in 100 Objects" is actually the text?

I haven’t seen a single comment on its lightly argued position that the loot in the BM should stay there, and I’m feeling pretty lonely.

It’s a terrific programme.  Fifteen minutes of un-missable delight every week-day, as one selected object from the past, and its historical implications, are described by the highly-regarded Director of the British Museum, the brilliant, unassuming and engaging, if hubristic, Dr. Neil MacGregor.

Go to the websites, both of them, (BBC and British Museum) see the objects, get the podcasts, upload your own historical object, be a part of emerging intellectual history.     You can listen to the story while looking at the object, brush-stoke close if you want to. New technologies are yielding new insights from old objects, and the latest multi-media communications bring it all alive. 

But there's a bit of a whiff in the air ....

For starters, under all this wonderfulness, its pretty weird, isn’t it,  that all the objects in a programme about world history are in one place:  London.

I mean, seriously, WTF??

And they’re not only in one place: they’re in one institution – the British Museum.

And we all know how all this stuff got there, some of it paid for, some of it not. That world historical process we call colonialism.  Which denied people their own history.

It's almost too obvious to mention, but on the other hand, should we be dazzled into overlooking it? That's the point.

So even while I’m hearing all this terrific stuff about how multi-faceted history is, and how connected we all are, I can’t help remembering that much of the evidence got there through that kind of connectedness we call exploitation.


And precisely because they are there, Dr. MacGregor feels that: "a world narrative can only be told in a museum like this".  Only? (emphasis mine)  If we want to have "world" history, it seems, we have to overlook the rather mixed provenance of the objects: the other history embedded in them.


Here's how the argument goes.  We can understand  world history more easily if, for example , we check out the Elgin Parthenon Marbles and then pop down the corridor and see the Persian sculptures, because Greece and Persia were at war at the time, and we can make a comparison.  

This is true, very true.  And its certainly a very nice thing to be able to do,  if you can, if you happen to be in London, and so much easier for the scholers than having to schlep around all over the place.  But its not the only way to get a handle on world history.  It's not necessary to an understanding of world history.


And how much better if we could look out from their beautiful new museum in Athens and see their original location in the Parthenon itself, and then stroll over and make a comparison with the footworn stones that were there when the marbles were first carved,  and sit on the warm stones in the agora and think about the kind of society that produced both the marbles and democracy, right there where you are sitting.  Feel the heat.  Hear the cicadas, that were also here when the marbles were.  Get a real sense of the place of these marbles in history.  

Through all the multi-media glitz of this glamorous tour de force, the deep message is that it’s OK for us to have hijacked their history because (only) we can tell it as world history, and tell it better.


Bejabers, that’s hubris, if ever I heard it !!

Me, I think its time for the formerly colonized peoples to have their own damn things back, if they want them, and tell their own history.

Then some-one could make a block-buster series about that, and how the objects  transformed knowledge generation in their own communities.  Now that would really be world knowledge.

That would be a great sequel.  

Love it.

Elgin Marbles by Chris Devers

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons.

Rosetta Stone

And in case we forget, it’s not only the objects from places like Greece and Egypt that matter, where their governments have made a high-profile effort to get them back.

My friend Leone Ross, the brilliant Jamiacan/British novelist and short story writer, has reminded me that there are plenty of people who bitterly wish they could take back their things when they go into museums, even if their governments havn't made a big show about it, and I can well understand the sentiment.

That makes this particular representation of “world” history seem pretty much a masquerade, doesn’t it?  Pretty darn hollow?

Here’s what I think should happen: there should be a world network of, say, 100 museums, big and small  (especially small), that are collectively, jointly, presenting a holistic view of world history, with the originals where they belong, and copies elsewhere.  We have the technology to make perfect copies now,  and all the networking bells and whistles to bring it alive.

That would be world history.  That would be context.  I think the public would be delighted, and everyone's bottom lines would benefit.  Terrific idea!

I'm hoping that someone more in the loop on these things than me can tell me its already in the works. 

That’s the way to go.  It would be hard to arrange, but would make a cosmic world-class multi-media blockbuster. 

Love it.

 

Mooretown Museum, Jamaica.  By Wayne Gunne

Dedicated to Nanny, a Maroon Heroin, who defended her people right here in this valley.

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License

The Gift

I'm still deep in deadline management (see last post), but can't resist this quotation, courtesy of the always interesting Diet Iced Me.

“ …The task of setting free one’s gifts was a recognized labor in the ancient world. The Romans called a person’s tutelar spirit his (sic) genius. In Greece it was called a daemon … "

"In Rome it was the custom on one’s birthday to offer a sacrifice to one’s own genius.  People didn’t just receive gifts on their birthday, but would also give something to their guiding spirit. Respected in this way the genius made one “genial”: sexually potent, artistically creative, and spiritually fertile…"  

"An abiding sense of gratitude moves a person to labor in the service of his or her daemon. The opposite is properly called narcissism. The narcissist feels his or her gifts come from himself/ herself. They work to display themselves, not to suffer change... The celebrity trades on his or her gifts, and does not sacrifice to them."

"And without that sacrifice, without the return gift, the spirit cannot be set free."

adapted from “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde 1983

I've changed some of the nouns and pronouns to remove any implication that it is only men who have creative genius. Seems that's what they thought way back in 1983.  I made about 10 changes, and left one.  Anyway, it's still a great passage about self-respect and creativity.

Now I'm an Aries, so its not my birthday today, but I don't think we need wait for birthdays.  I find it's fun to dish out gifts to my inner genius on a daily basis, in fact even more frequently.  A walk?  Some journaling?  A little bit of chocolate?  A few moments staring into the middle distance (one of her favourites)?  a stretch?

I am also grateful to Diet Iced Me for reminding me of Kafka:  "the purpose of a story (a book, surely?) is to be an axe for breaking up the ice (frozen sea) within us", or something like that.  It's quite a free translation, but all the better for that, perhaps.

I prefer "frozen sea" to "ice" - deeper and fuller of mystery, but I prefer "story" to "book".  Storytelling has a lot of power for inner healing and growth, more than books themselves, I would say, in general, with some exceptions.

And talking about Kafka .....

Kafka, By Rue Meurt d'Art, StreetArt, Paris, France
Originally uploaded by balavenise

It's difficult to read what Kafka's saying here, especially if you don't speak French.  It says: "A person is not created from bottom to top but from the interior to the exterior." Or something like that.  Its by an entity called "Street of the Death of Art". Not that Kafka actually ever wrote that gobbledygook, but its a nice piece of street art.  Intellect in the midst of decay. Very kafkaesque.


I like Kafka actually, despite my (delightfully? nauseatingly?) bright and sunny take on life.  As I have said elsewhere, positive thinking is my default mode.  Thats how I deal with decay and decadence


And if you pay attention to your inner genius, as Lewis Hyde suggests, it tends to bring out the positive side.  I mean I wouldn't have used Kafka's notion of and "axe", or even a "frozen sea" because that's not how it feels to me, but the message is pretty positive - break down inner barriers.  


And there's nothing like a gift to yourself for breaking down barriers: depending on the barrier of course. Sometimes only an axe will do.

You may also enjoy:


Happiness:  The "Cruise" part of Financial Cruise Control


Food Group Dilemmas


And, for story-telling


What can we do about Berlusconi-think?

Life is Just a Bowl of Dialectics

Pick a Bowl of Cherries by **Mary**
Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License

Warning:  Pompous heavy weather and pretentious obscurity up ahead (but I like the topic anyway).


There could hardly be a sillier take on what life is all about than "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries", written in 1931 by the now largely forgotten Lew Brown.   The lyrics are also largely, and advisedly, forgotten, but you can see them here if you want to, and get the ring-tone.  

Nevertheless, the title is a catchy phrase which has passed into idiomatic use, fortunately not without a tinge of irony.

So, as we move right along into 2010, change is in the air as usual, and I am thinking how much I‘m totally lovin’ it.  

The reason I am loving it is that I am analysing it (see my post on Epicurus and the analyzed life).   And when I say "just" a bowl of dialectics, I mean "like totally, dude".  I'm only being slightly satirical.  Life itself is totally dialectical:  that's just how I see it, and that's how I'm analyzing it.

Trouble is, its hard to see a dialectical situation if you don't know what you’re looking for. A change of plan can be forced upon you unexpectedly, as little Miss Newton here is just finding out.  (See the end of this post for more on this little cutie)

What Yoga Pose is This? by Colour

Downloaded from flickr with special permission.  

Thanks Colour.  I love this pic.

So you need to know what you are looking for.


My very first sociology professor said, at my very first lecture, many years ago:  "If you don't know what a carburetta is, when you look at an internal combustion engine you won’t see a carburetta".  

I found this to be very true. It exactly reflected my own experience at car mechanic class.  Once you know the various parts of a car engine, it resolves from a meaningless mass of pipes and caps and wires into a thing of rationality, order and purpose.  

And so it is with life itself, without the sense of rationality, order or purpose.  

Car Engine by Greygoatcoat

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License

Boss 429 Engine by Morven

See what I mean? The colour-coding helps, and that’s what dialectics is in a way: intellectual colour-coding of trends.  Kind of.


Me, I don't care that life is not rational or well ordered, and I can live with all the contingencies of which it is entirely composed.  But I do like to really understand what's happening as much as I can, and here a dialectical perspective can help, because, as I say, life is itself dialectical.  

Dialectics is, in fact, the extremely useful, if complex, theory, or explanation, of how everything changes (which it does, at various speeds, all the time).  It is particularly good at describing the many resonating impacts of a change process, and especially in identifying the underlying factors, and the further factors underlying them.


First elaborated over two thousand years ago by the Greeks (of course), with multiple developments since, including most famously by Marx and Engels,  this body of thought is still very much evolving (along with everything else).  Some people never look at dialectics because of Marx and Engels, but that's just so naff.


I love it because it enables me to see beyond surface appearances to all the movement, contradiction and interconnection of things. It gives the whole picture. I mean, not just a static snapshot, but the total moving picture in all its reflexivity and flux. All at once, in multiple, inter-connected and mutually responsive layers and dimensions.  Marvelous really.  Cosmic.  Exhilarating.  Look it up.

Not only does it help me with change, a dialectical perspective is absolutely best at sorting out the difference between form and content:  that most things contain their own contradictions, and are at the same time both positive in principle but negative in operation, and/or partially or totally the other way around, depending on the context, the actors and the historical moment.  Still with me?

For example, the United Nations, the European Union and good old congressional or parliamentary democracy, all of which I support actively, are in essence necessary and perhaps even “good”, but are, at the same time, I think we can all agree, hopelessly and inherently flawed, not to say corrupt, and part of the problem.  


So a touch of dialectics helps very much in the whole area of critical support for the things we need more of, and informed resistance to the things we need less of: in other words to steer change in the most advantageous direction (as we see it, of course). 


In fact, its really essential for my goal of financial cruise control for all:  its the control part.

So I'm not suggesting we cherry-pick our understanding of life (hahaha).  Quite the reverse.  I’m saying we absolutely need the whole picture: that nothing less will do,  going forward.

Have I been totally pompous? I really believe this stuff -  I think its important. 


Anyway,  Happy New Year, Everyone !!!

So this is It? by Vimrod

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License

You may also like: 

What Leonard Cohen Means to Me, especially his remarkably dialectical "Democracy". (spotify or YouTube - live in London).

Happiness: The Cruise Part of Financial Cruise Control (Epicurus and the Analysed Life)

John Lennon: its Christmas and What have you Done?, and especially this lovely video.  I really like what he is saying here, and the respect he has for his young interviewer, and the message of "pay attention" is pretty much what I am saying.  A little less anarchism might have enabled a little more precision on what we need to watch out for, other than "them", but still, he's really thinking dialectically.

And for those of you who love cats, more pictures of the incredibly cute Miss Newton can be found here, in The Daily Kitten (I kid you not).  Colour and Obularity are terrific photographers.

Oh dear, already breaking my resolution not to bring cats into every darn topic (see last comment of the John Lennon post, which is below)

Happiness: The "cruise" part of financial cruise control

Regular visitors to these pages will know that  "financial cruise control" is what I'm after, and its about way more than money.  I find, not surprisingly, that it has three parts:

Financial -  the money part;

Cruise -      the fun and happiness part, and:

Control -    the strategic, conceptual part, the dialectics of life.

And why am I doing this?  I want loads of boodle?  No, actually.  I'm a control freak?  Not at all.

I'm doing this because I want to be happy in this, the springtime of my senescence (Gore Vidal).  So the middle part is, naturally enough, central to the whole project. 

The best way to find out exactly what it is that makes you happy, so you can get more of it?  Journaling, without question, or as we say today, blogging.

(Actually I still like the old kind, the blank book and pencil kind, and you just have to search "journaling" on Amazon to see how popular it is.  And as for googling or twitter-searching "happiness", oh boy!  We are all getting desperate.  And its not surprising when you think how much shopping we are all doing.  But I'm coming to that).

It turns out that journaling can not only help us find out what makes us happy, the very process of journaling itself produces happiness.

Read on:

If there is one thing you should do, its refresh your memory (or in my case, find out for the first time, can you believe?) what  Epicurus had to say about happiness.  He's is my man, and he lived in a commune, dude.  Way back then in 350 BC, or thereabouts.

He was the first (as far as we know), and he said it all, set the framework.  Everything since has just been details.

Photo downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License.  Snastopoulos

Epicurus believed we could all be happy, but are looking in the wrong place.  Contrary to popular belief he did not advocate self-indulgence.  He was more interested in frugality and quality: knowing what we really need.  Simple pleasures that really satisfy.  Or, to put it another way, financial cruise control.

That's the whole thing wrapped up, right there.

Epicurus felt that there are three requirements for happiness:-

1.   Friends: good companions, constant communication and interaction among people who like and support each other.  Absolutely.

2.   Freedom.  Don't worry, not the eagle and gun kind: it means not keeping up with the Jones's, which gives you freedom from financial worries.  Doing your own thing.  Modest pleasures.  Simple pleasures, Affordable luxuries.  Self-sufficiency even.  This is actually the hardest one of the three to achieve, thanks to recreational shopping and the advertising that drives it.

And finally, get this ....

3.   An Analysed Life.  In other words, journaling, blogging, the lovely process of stepping back, taking stock, reflecting on what matters, thinking about "your place in the family of things" (Mary Oliver).   What a brilliant guy.

So the first thing you gotta do, as soon as you have about 10 minutes to spare, is click right here and watch this totally brilliant vid. about Epicurus and his ideas about financial cruise control.

And I'm going to keep right on trucking with this little blog of mine, which led me to Epicurus (better late than never), and I have to say is making me very  ..........   happy.

And I'm also working on all that other stuff.  Definitely.

So come back soon to see what I find out, but while your here, why not subscribe or share this blog, or become a follower (right there in the side-bar) ?

And meanwhile, here are some simple epicurean pleasures to enjoy, from Epicurus' birthplace in Samos, Greece:

A simple pleasure  

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License  Vtveen.

Another simple pleasure   

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License  Vtveen

And yet another simple pleasure. 

Downloaded from Flickr .  angelsgermain.

You see, its not so difficult.

And you don't have to go to Samos.  Here is simple pleasure right in my own back yard last Spring.

And don't forget this one (See Duality in the Archive)

How pumped am I about 2.0

I am so totally loving Web 2.0.

On 1st October I wrote an e-mail to my dear friend Paula to ask her what she knows about Adsense  - I need to diversify, see, - and she's a bit of a techie.

I never sent it: I thought damn, why should I bother her? I should just do what I want to learn, like the gurus say.

What I found was this brilliant little course on Learning 2.0.  Perfect for beginners.  I havn't finished it yet, but five weeks later I'm blogging and tweeting like crazy and loving it.  And this is only the beginning!  I'm totally pumped.   Thanks to the Universe for lifelong learning.  :))

The Last Rose of Summer (should I read anything into that?), by spisaram-AWAY

Duality

Isn't this lovely?

For a larger image click on the link below

It was created to portray the love between two people from different cultures, and what a respectful image it is, reflecting also the deep beauty of our wonderful world, north and south.

For me it also symbolises the inherent connections between cultures and peoples that I was striving to strengthen through my work in the UN, although of course the unresolved contradictions of corruption, over-consumption and warmongering are overwhelming all the good efforts, without as yet a sufficiently strong fight-back (see "What Leonard Cohen Means to Me").

But putting that aside, this was and is the dream, actually fantasy, that I tried/try to realise through my work, and it also symbolises the reconciliation of all the dualities in my life, including being cash poor but resource rich.  This is such a positive and balanced image to keep front and central as we reflect on what really matters.

Thanks for a brilliant piece of work Visulogik: Connected Version 2