In news today, Blogrolling was hacked, and the NY Times is cutting out the IHT's Internet presence. I had no idea it was its readership was that small compared to the Times. It will be truly sad when its print version disappears in the next year or two, likewise assuredly not for any sort of financial reason.
In other news, people of all political stripes in all corners of the world declared that John McCain said 'my friends' 22 times too many in Tuesday's debate. Convenience stores predict a continued sharp decline in sales, with many customers so horrified at the price of gas they are no longer venturing into the stores after fueling, and C-store visionaries urge a change toward the European model of offering value on staples along with convenience to blunt the blow of gas costs. And apparently even the price of plastic is up 40% (from when exactly I don't know), further hurting soda pop sales.
Although the Seattle area has been less affected by the recession than most other areas, many industries have seen significant layoffs and restaurants from low to high end are feeling the effects. On the other hand, oil is below 88 dollars a barrel and expected to continue to decline. Until producers pout and cut production. It is also Fashion Week in Athens, where many of the clothes looked like someone's acid-trip version of Jacqueline Kennedy, and Zimbabwe's inflation is at 231,000,000 %.
Camp Pendleton, the only area on the California coast with a view of the sea not blocked by luxury condos and McMansions, and the site of the federal government's last brash land grab, is on fire, with 1000 acres already in flames, and the fire 70% contained by early Thursday. The national debt clock has run out of digits sufficient to display the full amount, so the dollar sign was replaced by a number when it hit ten trillion. Three hundred undocumented poultry workers were arrested in South Carolina for stealing crap jobs from Americans. Dowsing is up as drought continues to ravage the California agriculture industry, and here in Washington, many employers in the same industry, as well as state workers charged with connecting guest workers with employers, are protesting that new federally-imposed fact-checking strictures are impossible to comply with, and that were the federal government to cut funds as punishment for failure to comply fully, that would simply make matters worse for the state, its employees and their already-too-great workloads, private employers, the job-hunting guest workers, agriculture, and residents of Washington and the United States who rely on Washington agricultural products for eating purposes.
Also a photo on Seattlest was featured on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. Wild.
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
'Laissez-vous faire, Milord,
Venez dans mon royaume!'
And I'm sorry to be redundant about my royaume, such as it is, but when I turned on the BBC World Service very late last night (this is what happens when there are too few dishwasher-volunteers and one's 'nap' ends at 11:30 PM), the first upcoming story they promoted was about an 800-year-old Dominican church in Maastricht, once serving a long-since-destroyed friary, eventually turned into bike storage, and now become a bookstore. (Both those links go to stories on the converted building.)
Seriously. I don't ask for this stuff. And it's getting odd. I'm scared that if someone should send me a gift of an old book found in their grandfather's attic they thought would amuse me, it's going to be Tintin and the Black Friars, or that if I haphazardly throw on an Edith Piaf CD in the car, 'Milord' and 'L'Accordéoniste' will have been replaced somehow by a recording of a Dominican Mass.
(By the way, try one on for size at the historic Blessed Sacrament church in Seattle's University District, on 8/8/08, as part of their centenary celebration. I make no guarantees about la Piaf or Tintin being there, however.)
And I'm sorry to be redundant about my royaume, such as it is, but when I turned on the BBC World Service very late last night (this is what happens when there are too few dishwasher-volunteers and one's 'nap' ends at 11:30 PM), the first upcoming story they promoted was about an 800-year-old Dominican church in Maastricht, once serving a long-since-destroyed friary, eventually turned into bike storage, and now become a bookstore. (Both those links go to stories on the converted building.)
Seriously. I don't ask for this stuff. And it's getting odd. I'm scared that if someone should send me a gift of an old book found in their grandfather's attic they thought would amuse me, it's going to be Tintin and the Black Friars, or that if I haphazardly throw on an Edith Piaf CD in the car, 'Milord' and 'L'Accordéoniste' will have been replaced somehow by a recording of a Dominican Mass.
(By the way, try one on for size at the historic Blessed Sacrament church in Seattle's University District, on 8/8/08, as part of their centenary celebration. I make no guarantees about la Piaf or Tintin being there, however.)
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Those Pesky Dominicans Return -
and just where you'd least expect them...
To begin, here are some of the books I'm reading right now: Chesterton's Aquinas bio in a double volume with his Francis, Josipovici's On Trust: Art and the Temptation of Suspicion, Rancière's Hatred of Democracy, the Dalai Lama's The Good Heart, Jean-Luc Nancy's Dis-Enclosure: the Deconstruction of Christianity, and Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions. Apart from the Chesterton, which is very chatty, 'personable,' and inviting, the rest are more, well, I take time off. With different things: with the Chesterton, with poetry (a lot of Jorge Guillén at the moment),
a slim, early volume by Eco on aesthetics in the Middle Ages and, I just decided today when I lay down for a nap, Merton's The Sign of Jonas, which I probably haven't read since I was 17 or 18.
Now, why there is no fiction in there, either as a primary reading or as 'relief,' is that I can't do with a novel what I can do with poetry or non-fiction, which is to say stop and start wherever and whenever I please. In fact, even with language textbooks, as long as you have a good base already you can go forward and backward, practicing just the dative case one day and the past dubitative-abilitative mood the next. A good novel consumes the reader to the exclusion of all other books until it is sated; a bad one merely bores and is tossed away - and then the reader is back where he started in either case.
And at the moment I am enjoying this profligacy, so no novel right now.
But back to Merton.
As I said, this particular book I haven't read in many years. It is five years of Merton's daily journal early in his vocation just before and after his ordination, an it was interesting (in a manner now completely unshocking to me) that I picked it today, as just last night I had written to a friend just starting a blog how sometimes I become frustrated with what I would call the 'definitional' issues of the medium. It is not at all a diary, though a personal blog does, or can, share attributes with that form. It's not the same as even a completely open op-ed column, since if the blog is truly non-commercial/personal, the sense of writing for/to one's audience is naturally different - if the writer even considers the issue of audience at all.
For me, certain topics seem clearly too boring to subject others to (not that I don't sometimes ignore this concern altogether), some too emotional to discuss in a (potentially, at least) public space, some too heavy or controversial to feel right mixing them in with postings about shoe organization and exboyfriends' irksome proclivities. Then, too, there is the idea of coherence of the whole, coherence of voice, something which has bedeviled me to the point of not posting anything at different times, because the stuff I was writing about wasn't 'bloggy' enough in my view. I have no idea how to address this, because worrying about it overmuch defeats one of the points of personal weblogs, which is that sense of freedom the medium shares with diaries, but which distinguishes it from even the most unrestricted columns in the paid world. Minimally, a columnist would have to find a way to unify that week's concern with the voice and the stance that come through the column as a whole. More typically, the subject itself would have to appear clearly congruent with the other topics in the series.
But back to me.
I'm not a columnist (despite any sartorial similarity to Peggy Noonan in the above; I'm just running out of photos and my mother insists upon 'seeing your pretty face' every so often). Any sense of wishing a consistent voice or outlook or stance is my own preoccupation, comes from my own meditations on why anyone would be writing one of these things in the first place, and a desire to make it 'earn its keep.' The reason I started to write a blog was as a discipline, to make myself write regularly. The reason I was told to write a blog is the same as with anyone who has demonstrated evidence of writing ability: people tell you that since you can write, you should write; in fact, you should 'be a writer.'
Which, as those less reactionary among us are all too aware, is something altogether different than merely being able to write. And it is not solely a matter of discipline: being able to expatiate endlessly on the differential merits of various wardrobe-organizational systems is not the same as being able to write 500 pages on the social history of wardrobe-organizing systems, nor certainly 500 more on the history of railroad building in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
And yet there is overlap: those who taught themselves to read, those who spent their childhoods in books, read books about books and books about words, those to whom language comes easily and those for whom a well-turned description is as alluring as a well-turned ankle, clearly have much in common with those who spend lifetimes capturing their own or others' lifetimes in print. Even if not Writers, they can certainly be called writers, without any need of scare quotes to emphasize their non-professional status. I look at it this way: my exhusband was and is a musician. He can do other jobs, he has done other jobs; like all of us, he has various different abilities. But his gifts as a musician are so clear, so profound, that they are, I would argue, constitutive of who he is, his self, his way of being in the world, such that one reveals much of substance to say about him 'he is a musician,' the copula there doing what it is has the power to do but seldom does.
But back to Merton.
As I said above, I enjoy being able to open books and start reading at whatever page I happen to land on. It doesn't always work so well while in school, I admit, but I'm not in school, and I like the way it works much of the rest of the time. In cases of postmodern history and historiography, it works very, very well, I must say, as I get to miss the introduction wherein the same list of the same secondary sources is tiresomely trotted out to ensure the reader understands just how thoroughgoingly postmodern the coming exegesis of trends in kitchen appliances in postwar Bavaria is going to be. I like skipping that bit and getting right to the riveting parts about the evolution in backsplashes and cupboard-pulls.
Anyway, not that Merton has exhausting prefaces, or cites much Gramsci, Derrida, Butler, or Homi Bhabha, but part of my enjoyment in reading this way, at least with certain types of material, is to imagine why I'm being given what I'm being given right then. It's often shocking, and always productive. I tuned in when Merton has just become a subdeacon, and I had to go back a few pages to find out what he was referencing when he referenced his current experience with Sertillanges' La Vie Intellectuelle. It turns out (a few pages earlier, which is one of the downsides of this reading method) that he received a copy during this time, when he was really struggling with writing what became The Ascent to Truth. He got stuck a lot, he wrote a good deal he was completely unhappy with, but spending time with Sertillange had on him 'the effect that Dale Carnegie's advice might have had on a despondent salesman.'
Now, I've loved Merton forever. He taught me invaluable things, led me in all sorts of meaningful directions, and I have to say a good deal of that was due to the personal tone of much of what he wrote. I do love struggling with prickly authors and thorny texts at times, and in my weaker moments I can take great delight in the recondite and the recherché, but we're all human, and it is only the deeply, universally human expressed in the works of great novelists, poets, memoirists, and diarists that speaks directly to the heart, and results in a staggering convincement of the soul, rather than a gradual assent via logic.
***Because this is already too long for a blog posting, I'm going to leave this with 'logic' as the last word in the body, since that is surely a one-off, and I should savor it!
To begin, here are some of the books I'm reading right now: Chesterton's Aquinas bio in a double volume with his Francis, Josipovici's On Trust: Art and the Temptation of Suspicion, Rancière's Hatred of Democracy, the Dalai Lama's The Good Heart, Jean-Luc Nancy's Dis-Enclosure: the Deconstruction of Christianity, and Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions. Apart from the Chesterton, which is very chatty, 'personable,' and inviting, the rest are more, well, I take time off. With different things: with the Chesterton, with poetry (a lot of Jorge Guillén at the moment),
a slim, early volume by Eco on aesthetics in the Middle Ages and, I just decided today when I lay down for a nap, Merton's The Sign of Jonas, which I probably haven't read since I was 17 or 18.Now, why there is no fiction in there, either as a primary reading or as 'relief,' is that I can't do with a novel what I can do with poetry or non-fiction, which is to say stop and start wherever and whenever I please. In fact, even with language textbooks, as long as you have a good base already you can go forward and backward, practicing just the dative case one day and the past dubitative-abilitative mood the next. A good novel consumes the reader to the exclusion of all other books until it is sated; a bad one merely bores and is tossed away - and then the reader is back where he started in either case.
And at the moment I am enjoying this profligacy, so no novel right now.
But back to Merton.
As I said, this particular book I haven't read in many years. It is five years of Merton's daily journal early in his vocation just before and after his ordination, an it was interesting (in a manner now completely unshocking to me) that I picked it today, as just last night I had written to a friend just starting a blog how sometimes I become frustrated with what I would call the 'definitional' issues of the medium. It is not at all a diary, though a personal blog does, or can, share attributes with that form. It's not the same as even a completely open op-ed column, since if the blog is truly non-commercial/personal, the sense of writing for/to one's audience is naturally different - if the writer even considers the issue of audience at all.For me, certain topics seem clearly too boring to subject others to (not that I don't sometimes ignore this concern altogether), some too emotional to discuss in a (potentially, at least) public space, some too heavy or controversial to feel right mixing them in with postings about shoe organization and exboyfriends' irksome proclivities. Then, too, there is the idea of coherence of the whole, coherence of voice, something which has bedeviled me to the point of not posting anything at different times, because the stuff I was writing about wasn't 'bloggy' enough in my view. I have no idea how to address this, because worrying about it overmuch defeats one of the points of personal weblogs, which is that sense of freedom the medium shares with diaries, but which distinguishes it from even the most unrestricted columns in the paid world. Minimally, a columnist would have to find a way to unify that week's concern with the voice and the stance that come through the column as a whole. More typically, the subject itself would have to appear clearly congruent with the other topics in the series.
But back to me.
I'm not a columnist (despite any sartorial similarity to Peggy Noonan in the above; I'm just running out of photos and my mother insists upon 'seeing your pretty face' every so often). Any sense of wishing a consistent voice or outlook or stance is my own preoccupation, comes from my own meditations on why anyone would be writing one of these things in the first place, and a desire to make it 'earn its keep.' The reason I started to write a blog was as a discipline, to make myself write regularly. The reason I was told to write a blog is the same as with anyone who has demonstrated evidence of writing ability: people tell you that since you can write, you should write; in fact, you should 'be a writer.'
Which, as those less reactionary among us are all too aware, is something altogether different than merely being able to write. And it is not solely a matter of discipline: being able to expatiate endlessly on the differential merits of various wardrobe-organizational systems is not the same as being able to write 500 pages on the social history of wardrobe-organizing systems, nor certainly 500 more on the history of railroad building in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
And yet there is overlap: those who taught themselves to read, those who spent their childhoods in books, read books about books and books about words, those to whom language comes easily and those for whom a well-turned description is as alluring as a well-turned ankle, clearly have much in common with those who spend lifetimes capturing their own or others' lifetimes in print. Even if not Writers, they can certainly be called writers, without any need of scare quotes to emphasize their non-professional status. I look at it this way: my exhusband was and is a musician. He can do other jobs, he has done other jobs; like all of us, he has various different abilities. But his gifts as a musician are so clear, so profound, that they are, I would argue, constitutive of who he is, his self, his way of being in the world, such that one reveals much of substance to say about him 'he is a musician,' the copula there doing what it is has the power to do but seldom does.
But back to Merton.
As I said above, I enjoy being able to open books and start reading at whatever page I happen to land on. It doesn't always work so well while in school, I admit, but I'm not in school, and I like the way it works much of the rest of the time. In cases of postmodern history and historiography, it works very, very well, I must say, as I get to miss the introduction wherein the same list of the same secondary sources is tiresomely trotted out to ensure the reader understands just how thoroughgoingly postmodern the coming exegesis of trends in kitchen appliances in postwar Bavaria is going to be. I like skipping that bit and getting right to the riveting parts about the evolution in backsplashes and cupboard-pulls.
Anyway, not that Merton has exhausting prefaces, or cites much Gramsci, Derrida, Butler, or Homi Bhabha, but part of my enjoyment in reading this way, at least with certain types of material, is to imagine why I'm being given what I'm being given right then. It's often shocking, and always productive. I tuned in when Merton has just become a subdeacon, and I had to go back a few pages to find out what he was referencing when he referenced his current experience with Sertillanges' La Vie Intellectuelle. It turns out (a few pages earlier, which is one of the downsides of this reading method) that he received a copy during this time, when he was really struggling with writing what became The Ascent to Truth. He got stuck a lot, he wrote a good deal he was completely unhappy with, but spending time with Sertillange had on him 'the effect that Dale Carnegie's advice might have had on a despondent salesman.'
Now, I've loved Merton forever. He taught me invaluable things, led me in all sorts of meaningful directions, and I have to say a good deal of that was due to the personal tone of much of what he wrote. I do love struggling with prickly authors and thorny texts at times, and in my weaker moments I can take great delight in the recondite and the recherché, but we're all human, and it is only the deeply, universally human expressed in the works of great novelists, poets, memoirists, and diarists that speaks directly to the heart, and results in a staggering convincement of the soul, rather than a gradual assent via logic.
***Because this is already too long for a blog posting, I'm going to leave this with 'logic' as the last word in the body, since that is surely a one-off, and I should savor it!
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Nanny Bloomberg
I do have more important things I could talk about; why, tomorrow I hope to sharpen about 30 knives for a meal program I volunteer at. However, this story from the 19th in the London Times (go down to the penultimate bullet point) about a memo distributed to Bloomberg's London staff made me a) cringe and throw up a tiny bit in my mouth and b) wonder whether James in the Tokyo office has likewise received such a thorough explanation of the precautions to take regarding the use and proper stewardship of plastic water bottles.
What it neglects to address is what staffers are to do if they own a permanent marker themselves.
"'These bottles are yours to look after and as stated in the original message, you will only get one,' it says. To ensure 'your bottle does not go walkies and [you] are drinking out of your own one and no one elses [sic]' it might be an idea to mark them with your name. 'There are permanent markers in the stationery cupboards you can use.'"
Anyway, James is the one I got this gossip bench from:
What it neglects to address is what staffers are to do if they own a permanent marker themselves.
"'These bottles are yours to look after and as stated in the original message, you will only get one,' it says. To ensure 'your bottle does not go walkies and [you] are drinking out of your own one and no one elses [sic]' it might be an idea to mark them with your name. 'There are permanent markers in the stationery cupboards you can use.'"
Anyway, James is the one I got this gossip bench from:
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