Jason Hickel
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
The benefits of shorter working week keep multiplying. One group of scientists summed up the evidence like this: “Overall, the existing research suggests that working time reduction potentially offers a triple dividend to society: reduced unemployment, increased quality of life, and reduced environmental pressures.”[*] Transitioning to a shorter working week is key to building a humane, ecological economy.
* Jared B. Fitzgerald, Juliet R. Schor and Andrew K. Jorgensen, ‘Working hours and carbon dioxide emissions in the United States 2007-2013,’ Social Forces 96(4), 2018, pp. 1851-1874.
And so for day 2940
30.12.2014
I do like this bit from the New Yorker interview with Nigella Lawson:
The first time I did publicity in the States, I was on some talk show—I don’t know where it was—and someone said to me, “You’ve suffered a lot of loss in your life. What has it taught you?” And I said, “It’s taught me that the universe is random and cruel, or chaotic also.” The panic in this man’s eyes when I said that! Because that’s not an answer he could deal with. I waited for a while, and then I thought, I’ll be kind, so I said, “And it’s taught me to cherish life and be grateful for the good things.” And, oh, the look of relief! He almost sank back in his chair. I feel that often—people ask you questions, but there are only certain answers they want.
Simply divine.
Reminds me of Donald Culross Peattie “May Nineteenth” in An Almanac for Moderns
But grant but a single teleological explanation in biology, and you have left the path of scientific thinking. Plan there may be, but only a working plan, a vast experimentation still in course.
And so for day 2939
29.12.2014
Agatha Christie
Murder at the Vicarage
I do love the television adaptations of the Miss Marple series. I also love the novels for the tricks that are hard to reproduce televisually. I like how Christie through the voice of her narrator, the Vicar, provides commentary on a servant’s demeanour.
A very correct butler opened the door, with just the right amount of gloom in his bearing.
One instantly imagines a fictional universe where there could be too much or too little. That touch appears so easy and simple and we know that such marks of style are hard earned through the writing process — so very much a question of acute observation and the gentle but firm conveyance of the observation. One could of course imagine a voice over to capture this inner moment of the Vicar’s recounting but somehow such a voice over would be precious and affected and the mild humour lost.
And so for day 2938
28.12.2014
William Stafford
“You and Art”
via The Analog Sea Number Three
opening stanza (and for me what should be the final stanza)
Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.
And somehow you are not there yet because someone addresses you and you are not alone.
And so for day 2937
27.12.2014
Dominique Scarfone
The Time Before Us
https://talksonpsychoanalysis.podbean.com
The “true past”, indeed, is not a “scrapbook,” let alone a “scrapyard,” but a most precious possession; it is not something dead and useless, but a treasure of references that nourish the present and help prepare for future events. […] The present is not arrested time any more, but the locus of a passage.
The image as to be expected breaks down — quotation as scrap — part of a quilt …
But examined carefully the negation is not aimed at scraps per se but at books and yards where the treasure is hoarded in the form of scraps and avoids the scrappy presentness of passages.
And so for day 2936
26.12.2014
The World Is Not Done Yet
A Weblication of Theoretical Poetics
https://theworldisnotdoneyet.com
by Annie Grosshans
Such personal poignancy :
After, when I sorted the remnants in his wallet, his library card, still there.
poised between an after and a still there is the artefact a special type of passport for journeys, it remains now useless but a strong memento… more potent than a driver’s license
the library card is evidence of being a borrower and in some respect living a life is a borrowing
And so for day 2935
25.12.2014
Jane Siberry
‘Hockey’
on bound by the beauty album
Don’t let those Sunday afternoons
Get away get away get away get away
Break away break away break away break away
part of the pleasure is the gentle morphing of “get away” escape into “break away” score
And so for day 2934
24.12.2014
Joanne Fluke
Strawberry Shortcake Murder
It is not quite writing about this writing but it is about writing…
Hannah sat down at the white Formica table she’d found at the thrift shop and reached for the green-lined stenographer’s notebook that was a twin to the ones in every other room in her condo. There was something wonderful about a blank sheet of notepaper. The lines were there, just waiting to be filled, and the page could turn into anything from a grocery list to the opening of The Great American Novel. The possibilities were endless.
I like the humble nature of the acquisition of the means of production: a thrift shop table, steno pads. And the note of humour in juxtaposing the practical grocery list and the elusive beast of the Great American Novel.
And so for day 2933
23.12.2014
Fredric Jameson
Hegel Variations
The problem with names is that, deeply embedded in history, after a certain time and at different rates of speed they begin to show their age. Some systems are canonized and as it were mummified, others begin to rot and stink of an intolerable past, still others give off the musty smell of archives and long-shuttered houses. There then gradually arises a new kind of philosophical ambition, not merely to invent a foolproof new system of correct names, but also somehow to elude the ravages of temporality and to invent remedies to ward off the inevitable historical reification of these historical linguistic systems (the word “reification” is of course itself just another such historical name). The prestidigitation of an operation that might be called name and variations is only one attempt to move so fast as to elude the fatal process; another is the Magritte formula (“ceci n’est pas une pipe”) in which, marked as names from the outset, the formula in question is already as it were homoeopathically secured against some later denunciation. But of course all such operations are themselves the signals of their own historicity, and condemned, like past fashions, to go into the past without the kind of immortality they desperately sought.
how to write when you know the writing will d i s s o l v e
And so for day 2932
22.12.2014
