Alain Le Foll illustrator. French Favourites (1969)
Two page spread from a small (67 p. ; 15 cm.) but enticing cookbook.
Many of the illustrations like the recipes themselves open expansive spaces beyond the borders of the page.
And so for day 2881
01.11.2014
Ursula K. Le Guin
Comment on #16 Returning to the Root
in her translation of the Tao Te Ching
To those who will not admit morality without a deity to validate it, or spirituality of which man is not the measure, the firmness of Lao Tzu’s morality and the sweetness of his spiritual counsel must seem incomprehensible, or illegitimate, or very troubling indeed.
Redoubtable tricolon.
And so for day 2880
31.10.2014
Kate Raworth
“Get Savvy with Systems”
Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist
Worth quoting at length this capsule history of the Monopoly board game.
The game’s inventor, Elizabeth Magie, was an outspoken supporter of Henry George‘s ideas, and when she first created her game in 1903, she gave it two very different sets of rules to be played in turn. Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (echoing George’s call for a land value tax), and the game was won (by all) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the second, ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, players gained by charging rent to those who were unfortunate enough to land on their properties — and whoever, managed to bankrupt the rest was the sole winner. The purpose of the dual sets of rules, said Magie, was for players to experience a ‘practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences’ and so understand how different approaches to property ownership can lead to vastly different social outcomes. ‘It might well have been called “The Game of Life”, remarked Magie, ‘as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world.’ But when the games manufacturer, Parker Brothers, bought the patent for The Landlord’s Game from Magie in the 1930s, they relaunched it simply as Monopoly and provided the eager public with just one set of rules: those that celebrate the triumph of one over all.
Summarized from a New York Times article by Mary Pilon author of
The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game – a history worth circulating.
And so for day 2879
30.10.2014
Kate Raworth
Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist
I like the shift from the spoken to the thought captured in a neat tricolon:
Economics is the mother tongue of public policy, the language of public life and the mindset that shapes society.
Makes one want to pay attention.
And so for day 2878
29.10.2014
egg-bearing time
knitting a nest
from another time
le temps ovipare
nidification
d’un autre temps
I first came to these lines and attempted a translation through the work of Tara Collington. “Le nid du temps : le chronotope créateur dans Lithochronos ou Le premier vol de la pierre d’Andrée Christensen et Jacques Flamand” in L’espace-temps dans les littératures périphériques du Canada. She reads this image and text collaboration in the light of Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope. She arrives at the conclusion that the the creator-creating-chronotope (chronotope créateur) enfolds more than one temporality. This chimes in perfectly with Flamand’s and Christensen’s attention to the different time series of the stone and of the disintigrating bird carcass which cross in the figure of the nest and with the different time series of authoring and of reading enfolded in the creation. Collington writes: “Ce n’est pas la nuit des temps, mais plutôt le nid de temps, un espace-temps créateur qui donne naissance à quelque chose.” The homophonic play between “nuit” and “nid” that she detects invites the reader to meditate on the imbricated times that the poetic text figures. An so with entwined times twisting in my head, I attempted a translation:
le temps ovipare
nidification
d’un autre temps
egg-bearing time
knitting a nest
from another time
And so for day 2877
28.10.2014
One I used to frequent. And one I would enjoy to visit.
I do like the rolling pin shape of the Books for Cooks marker.
And so for day 2876
27.10.2014
Edward Said,
Reith Lectures 1993: Representations of an Intellectual
Lecture 4: Professionals and Amateurs
Broadcast: 2 August 1993 – BBC Radio 4
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1993_reith4.pdf
The final paragraphs — inviting us to think about authority and audience:
Therefore, the problem for the intellectual is to try to deal with the impingements of modern professionalisation as I have been discussing them, not by pretending that they are not there or denying their influence, but by representing a different set of values and prerogatives. These I shall collect under the name of amateurism, literally, an activity that is fuelled by care and affection rather than by profit, and selfish, narrow specialisation.
An amateur is what today the intellectual ought to be, someone who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalised activity as it involve one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies. In addition, the intellectual’s spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thought.
Every intellectual has an audience and a constituency. The issue is whether that audience is there to be satisfied, and hence a client to be kept happy, or whether it is there to be challenged, and hence stirred into outright opposition, or mobilised into greater democratic participation in the society. But in either case, there is no getting around authority and power, and no getting around the intellectual’s relationship to them. How does the intellectual address authority: as a professional supplicant, or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?
Seems to call for a complementary notion of an “amateur audience” — informed, engaged and committed to an ethos of care.
And so for day 2875
26.10.2014
John Terpstra
Naked Trees
From the final entry (“Yes”) to the ABC “A deciduary”
[last words of the book]
There is a white elm behind the shape of our twenty-fifth letter. In the upper case. That single stem dividing in perfect fluidity against the clean sheet of the sky, the pencil never leaving the page. An elm behind the letter, and the entire alphabet of trees behind the three letter word, YES.
A tree is an act of affirmation.
At Barton and Clinton there is a fine specimen of ulmus up against a house
Elm at Barton and Clinton – Toronto – Ontario – urban tree canopy
Now having read Terpstra this elm in my mind is kindred to affirmation.
And so for day 2874
25.10.2014
Cory Doctorow
“I, Row-Boat”
in Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present
From the perspective of the instance of an AI
He left an instance of himself running on the rowboat, of course. Unlike many humans, Robbie was comfortable with the idea of bifurcating and merging his intelligence when the time came and with terminating temporary instances. The part that made him Robbie was a lot more clearly delineated for him — unlike an uploaded human, most of whom harbored some deep, mystic superstitions about their “souls.”
Most of the interesting bits of this thought experiment are scattered across the story’s incidents. It is rare to find a bit of discursive explanation. Here the focus is on sentience but throughout the theme of agency arises and also the nature of intervention. It gets complicated fast and makes a good story when the pace slows down and the temporary instances are terminated.
And so for day 2873
24.10.2014
I am thinking about time and theories of change after reading Suzanne Guerlac‘s Thinking in Time.
But first a detour through the poets:. As Seamus Heaney wrote (in another context) “A new rhythm, after all, is a new life given to the world, a resuscitation not just of the ear but of the springs of being.” Biding one’s time is listening for the broken rhythm or consciousness’s shift from simultaneity to the multiplicity of Bergsonian duration. Waiting becomes a mode of inquiry.
Out of this rearranged experience of time through a broken rhythm emerges refreshed ways of perceiving. As Guerlac explains, Bergson approached perception as a readiness for action. But it is a readiness thanks to duration that is not mere reflex. “Perception, then, is a question posed to the body that responds to it.”
Bergsonian duration opens up a new view of causation. The world becomes perceived in its indeterminateness. “In the duration, there is no juxtaposition of events; therefore there is no mechanistic causality. It is in the duration that we can speak of the experience of freedom.” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/)
This is almost a narrative, a theory of change. But it’s not a step-by-step mechanical procedure. Broken rhythm, open perception, indeterminacy and freedom: in duration and multiplicity they overlap and are not discrete nodes in a narrative.
This brief excursion doesn’t directly cultivate pragmatic approaches. But it might provide a reminder that engagement on multiple fronts reflects a trust in emergent properties of systems. Change is possible. And even surprising. And to remember this is to resist predeterminations.
And so for day 2872
23.10.2014
