BERNEVAL

Elizabeth McLean
The Swallows Uncaged

Ngọc climbed the pole to the thatched roof, hauling her work with her — a bin of rattan splints, which she whittled with her awl until they were thin enough to weave into baskets and fishing nets.

I was tripped up by this passage because I did not associate awls with whittling. For me, whittling is a progressive shaving off accomplished with the blade of a knife. An awl is a pointed tool for piercing. Upon further reflection I could see how a more general definition of whittling as reducing in size could accommodate envisioning the work of an awl especially if dealing with rattan. The character could pierce the rattan splints and strip off a segment thereby thinning.

Still can’t quite shake off the suspicion that the selection of “awl” was influenced by the internal rhyme with “haul”. A word pierced and stripped: whittled down.

And so for day 1932
28.03.2012

From the directions to the butler

Never let the candles burn too low, but give them as a lawful perquisite to your friend the cook, to increase her kitchen-stuff, or if this not be allowed in your house, give them in charity to the poor neighbours, who often run on your errands.

Jonathan Swift Directions to Servants

And so for day 1931
27.03.2012

The marker here is ‘attention’ which is marshalled by an implicit (and perhaps dubious) equation (more attention = better quality). This is abandoned in the second example with its stress on ‘convenience’. There must be a sweet spot between attention and convenience that spells quality experience.

For some other services, the apparent higher productivity is due to the debasement of the product. A teacher can raise her apparent productivity by four times by having four times as many pupils in her classroom, but the quality of her ‘product’ has been diluted by the fact that she cannot pay as much individual attention as before. A lot of the increases in retail service productivity in countries such as the US and Britain has been bought by lowering the quality of the retail service itself while ostensibly offering cheaper shoes, sofas and apples: there are fewer sales assistants at shoe stores, so you wait twenty minutes instead of five; you have to wait four weeks, rather than two, for the delivery of your new sofa and probably also have to take the day off work because they will only deliver ‘sometime between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.’; you spend much more time than before driving to the new supermarket and walking through the now longer aisles when you get there, because those apples are cheaper than in the old supermarket only because the new supermarket is in the middle of nowhere and thus can have more floor space.

Ha-Joon Chang 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism

And so for day 1930
26.03.2012

The Politics of Aesthetics Jacques Rancière translated by Gabriel Rockhill.

The ‘fictionality’ specific to the aesthetic age is consequently distributed between two poles: the potential of meaning inherent in everything silent and the proliferation of modes of speech and levels of meaning.

The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.

Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions’, that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done.

Reminds me of the work of Nicole Brossard on fictions du réel and theory.

And so for day 1929
25.03.2012

You said, “He doesn’t need to ask questions.” He was a senior manager going into a facilitated session with a number of experts in an area that he is not an expert in. So I pondered what you said and thought of it as being anti-intellectual. Upon further reflection I saw differing theories of change competing. I tend to favour the open-ended questioning that brings people to consider options and by consensus arrive at a course of action. The leader incites. The no-questions-asked approach is one of insertion. A strong message is conveyed and in some cases imposed. In short, the leader preaches.

Mary Daly would have had a field day characterizing it as dick-tation.

I tend to favour the optative over the imperative. Except when I’m reading John Preston I Once Had a Master…

And so for day 1928
24.03.2012

Like a master class in Bourdieu’s Distinction

Gilbert, who noted the contrast with the true Washington style, in which evening clothes were as dowdy as the equivalent daytime dress, either because the important people weren’t rich or were politically motivated to look frazzled, was sorry his own clothes were perfect and new. He knew that for people of position in Washington, evening clothes were working clothes, and therefore, both the men’s and the women’s tended to be sensible, unmemorable, and slightly worn.

Judith Martin. Gilbert

And so for day 1926
22.03.2012