Starting in July, we will be living in Rio de Janeiro.
...will be a month without alcohol.
This Guardian story cites examples of how the Bush administration will be punishing its allies who didn't sign on for the war against Iraq.
A visit to Ottawa next week has been cancelled, because Mr Bush is too busy. However, time has been found to host Australia's prime minister...at the presidential ranch in Texas.
[...]
And this year's Mexican Cinco de Mayo holiday, previously marked by the Bush White House, will be toned down or not held at all.
I wasn't following the Argentine elections all that closely, so I was quite surprised to see Carlos Menem among the front-runners in the first round on Monday. I remember the compromises of the past; how Menem changed his religion to run for president, then changed the constitution to run again. How the people used to deride him for his sports-car dashes to Mar del Plata. And with the woes in Argentina over the past couple of years, it's really surprising to me why the Argentines have not swept further away the vestiges of their old regimes and moved to a new leader.
It's surprising to me to see two men of the same party take the top two slots - it not only speaks to the lack of coordination or enthusiasm amongst the country's political parties, but it also bodes ill for the ability of the country to use fresh ideas to pull themselves out of the malaise they have been wallowing in since the collapse of their economy. Considering the many years of stasis beforehand which took hold under Menem's colarito and the privatisation grab that robbed a nation of its patrimony while not delivering the promised economic security and independence, I am not surprised the markets greeted this news with a rousing thumbs-down, and I will be curious to see how long the people give their choice before the tables turn again.
I've been away from the weblog for a while, spending time with my in-laws (wife's sister and her husband) who were visiting from the UK. They were out to see a bit of Brazil and also visit with their co-favourite niece (all nieces and nephews are co-favourites, naturally, the way we lads are co-favourite sons-in-law to the girls' mother).
Anyway, it was good to look at Curitiba once again from a tourist's perspective. To see what makes it unique in the eyes of a visitor - the cleanness and emphasis on the environment and parkspace, the (relatively) high standard of living, the public transport systems, the beautiful scenery not so far from here.
We took them for a visit to Morretes and Antonina down the Graciosa road. They all took the litorina train, while I drove down and met them, and then we had a lunch of barreado and a moqueca of seafood in Morretes before moving on to Antonina for a cruise from the old harbour city. When we first visited Antonina, I said to my wife that this is the kind of place where I would like to buy an old house and fix it up. It's a city that progress has left behind, and its crumbling charm suits a person like me who sometimes wishes progress would also leave him alone.
They also managed (without me) a trip out to the spectacular waterfalls at Foz do Iguacu. The cataratas are different at different times of the year, depending on how much water is in the river. I've only been out the once, but I get reports from my wife, whose has now been three times and has become something of an authority on the place.
It was also nice to have family visit again; nice to sit around the patio, catch up on news from home, share in our discoveries of nearly a year in Brazil and sip some Scotch, which sure as not leaves you feeling a little homesick (or was it the whisky?).
And with our visitors we have managed to eat at most of our favourite restaurants in town and I am sure I've packed on a few kilos of excess baggage. So now, a few days of recovery are in order.
I am in the middle of reading Thomas Merton's "autobiography of faith", The Seven Storey Mountain. I feel a bit self-conscious of writing about why I would be reading this book, but I found Merton writing about the same uncertainty in his own faith journey, so I feel that even though I may...no, I certainly will never reach the same point in the journey, I am in good company. What I mean is that I am seeking for something...but I am not yet sure what it is. I will leave it there for now and hope I might find a spark of something in Merton to help me bridge to the next level of understanding.
Via The Memory Hole, The Observer publishes a brief interview with Matthew Branton about his giving away his fifth novel for free on the web. Quoth reporter Miranda Sawyer, "I've read it. It's great.":
MS: Why are you giving away your work?MB:The deal in British publishing is supposed to be that the crap is published and put up with because it funds the good stuff. I'm afraid that I have to ask, where is the good stuff? To quote the Manics: 'Libraries gave us power.' Not any more they don't. They're stuffed full of Sophie Dahl and Naomi Campbell's novels, along with Tony Parsons's drivel, a gang of floppy-fringed public schoolboys and their precious pointless literary fictions, a few failed PR girls and all the rest of the cobblers that passes for a publishing culture these days.
[...]MS: Explain your take on British culture.
MB: The culture industry in Britain since the early Nineties has come to consist almost entirely of consumer capitalist propaganda dressed up as 'better living': young people are made to feel that living some kind of cross between Sex and the City and Cold Feet with a swindling mortgage and a swindling pension and a house stuffed full of cheap tasteful shit manufactured for sub-breadline wages in China is the best you can hope for in this life. Lots of people (not just let's-run-a-vineyard type yuppies) have rejected this and pissed off out of it to try living another way that doesn't make you so ashamed. Do you remember that census last year that showed a million young men unaccounted for? The only comment was facetious: maybe they're all in Ibiza. No. We're in the remote places of the world, growing our own food, working in kind for what else we need. You don't hear about us because really, why should we tell you?
Stop it already! With the arrival of in-laws, visiting from the UK, two more books I have recently ordered - these, used, from ABE books. First up is a book by Eric Rolls called A Celebration of the Senses, which I first read years ago, and which I have been without since separating from my first wife. I don't think this book was ever released in the US (could be wrong), but it is still available in Australia, where its publisher calls it "a joyous testament to life, and a frank and powerful exploration of the five senses." Questing for a stronger attachment to place, it seemed appropriate to me to add this back to my resources.
Also arriving is Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce, another book I've been meaning to buy and read for a long time (I finished reading Ulysses in 1999). Whenever I get up to making an order through ABE, I always check the availability of editions, and finally found one that seemed reasonable in price, quality and shipping cost. My in-laws have gone the last mile (or so) by hauling it out from England to Brazil with them. Just remains to be seen if I take the time to read it here or haul it home and read it there.
After a lot of non-fiction of late (Hoinacki, Nearing, Glendinning), I'm returning my reading attentions to the world of fiction, with Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet (no link - the US editions are out of print; I bought mine via Amazon UK).
I first heard of the Quartet in a guidebook about Egypt - it was regarded for its descriptions of the city. The guidebook said that although much had changed since the 1930s, you could still see the vestiges of Durrell's Alexandria in the modern city. I couldn't find a copy then (1994, when I visited Alex), but it has always stuck in the back of my mind to pick up a copy of the book whenever I came across it. I remembered to add it to my "to buy" list, and finally bought it in my book-buying frenzy just before coming out to Brazil. So now, ten years on, and thousands of miles from its former relevance to my life, I am reading these four volumes (together in one book).
I actually started reading it during Carnaval, in early March, but have put it aside a couple of times to make room for some of my recent non-fiction reading. Yes, of course I feel bad that I am here and not devoting more energy to my Portuguese studies (and reading). But I have a logjam of stuff that interests me just now, and unfortunately a lot of it is not published or available in Portuguese. Que pena!
Anyhow, I am presently about halfway through the third volume, Mountolive, and am enjoying the change for a more straightforward narrative approach. The other volumes are more personal, and the combination of a story told from three different angles sheds a lot of light on the motivations of many of the principal characters in the story. Definitely a "fun" read.
Mountolive begins with a sort of summary of the title character's career, as he makes a tour of the diplomatic postings he holds for the British up to the point where "gets his 'K'" and is named ambassador to Egypt. This evoked in me both a recollection of reading Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios and a desire to read more (or maybe even write) sort of pulpy 1930s detective fiction - probably more Ambler, to start. Some day.
So, with a long Easter break ahead of us, I hope to finish off Alexandria and then get back to Portuguese for the balance of our first year in Brazil, which will wrap up at the end of June. Not much travel forecast between now and then (quick trip to Rio for househunting). I am thinking to finish off the Hobsbawm book (I have a loooooong way to go, and then to read some Clarice Lispector. But who knows...I have an awful lot to choose from just now, and Amazon will be beating a path to my door one of these minutes with the new order.
At the weekend, I finally made it through My Name is Chellis & I'm In Recovery from Western Civilization by Chellis Glendinning. I have to say that I was underwhelmed.
I came across Glendinning by way of her Schumacher lecture, which I still think is worth a read. Glendinning has moved to the back country of New Mexico, where she lives in a small, more or less native, settlement. In her lecture, she says:
In order to re-map the dominant society, we must turn to this kind of awareness, to this kind of place-based sustainability. But because the wholeness and ways of our lives have been so fragmented by what is required to conduct the bigness of empire, we - like Rex Tilousi in a cold hotel room in Salzburg - are left with disparate parts disconnected from one another. What I can tell you, from a place where the earth is pink and people grow chili and hunt elk, is that we were right, and we are right. Living in land-based community, making the future with our bodies, knowing the seasons and the land is a better way. It feels better; it looks better; it politics better; it lives better. For myself, I am in a constant state of amazement that I have the opportunity to live my life, not according to a bird's-eye-view map of nonsustainability limited to visual cues but rather according to the cartography of a living, breathing, dreaming experience of sustainability.
I was looking to her longer writing as perhaps a more complete justification for breaking with a regular urban Western professional existence, making a transition back to the land, for finding a sense of place, which is what a lot of my own searching has been about. But I really didn't find much of use in this book. So I will accept that maybe my expectations were misplaced to begin with.
Still, I find this book flawed, and to me it seems those flaws arise from the conflict inherent between her emerging worldview and her prescription for healing. Her call for a return to nature and place-based sustainability really seems to argue against her psychotherapeutic practice and the framing of her own arguments in terms of the Western understanding of the mind.
To follow her argument, Western mankind has been suffering from a 10,000-year-old wound to its primal matrix caused by domestication and the severing of the link between nature and man's survival. All of the ills of the West can be traced back to settlement. Wars resulted from border skirmishes between more and less powerful settlements and the need for territorial expansion. The woman's role in society has been damaged by the division of labour that saw men become the breadwinners, women the homemakers, and a divide in the determination of the value of useful work. This has perpetuated inequality in all civilisation since. The entire Western world has been suffering this trauma and subsequent post-traumatic stress. The only way out is to heal the wound by taking a lesson from the native peoples of this world who have not lost their connection to the land and to nature.
So far, so good. That is her thesis. But then she starts down the slippery slope of using an academic framework to unpack these ills. She makes an introduction to a nature-based way of living, then is diverted by a long litany of the catastrophes of Western living. This happens more than once. Here's how it could be...here's how it is, see? And again.
Interspersed with these societal calamities are graphic tales of personal abuse. Abuse fueled, she argues, by the failure of our civilisation to reconcile itself with its traumatised past. She invokes the suffering of Viet Nam veterans and Holocaust survivors (which struck me as a bit text-book). She really goes over the top, casting far and wide to fill the existence of Western civilisation with so many traumas and tragedies, all tied back to the original break from nature, that to deny the trauma would then itself be a symptom of the wounding. Every Westerner is suffering from PTSD, she is saying. The weight of living with the guilt is making us all sick or crazy - just because millions are similarly deluded doesn't mean they are the healthy ones.
But then it takes a psychological (or eco-psychological) approach to get to the bottom of the trauma. And in the reading, it seemed more and more like a call for professional help. Help in coming to terms with the ills and traumas of the past 350 generations. It's a big task for a book, or even a lifetime of therapy.
So, this is not self-help, and as a prescription for other-help, it fell short. I'll be frank...I found her approach to be pretty touchy-feely (which may appeal to many who consider themselves 'damaged', I concede). At times I was thinking, "Why don't you just get on with it?" Because she seems to have sorted this out for herself, but it isn't the kind of message that transfers easily through to others.
But who is it for? The 6 billion souls that pack the world? What would happen if they returned to a state of nature, hunting and gathering in a world so damaged by the past? I wasn't convinced that this is what Glendinning was after. More a talking cure, a balancing of the self that better reconciles individuals to their own place in the world.
Am I wrong? Not everyone could or wants to drop what they are doing and head for the hills. I think it speaks to rather a few - the tuned-in - those who could be persuaded to bear the guilt of past generations; to conflate the injury of the world with their own "traumatic stress." I just don't see how any of this - the communing with nature, the sweat lodges, the treatments, the native sense of holism - can be expected to impact Western civilisation at a societal level.
At times I felt that "Beavis and Butthead" voice coming up inside myself "Feel your pain...huh-huh, huh-huh." There's a section where a woman talks with a cactus, and the cactus talks back, providing spiritual guidance. Communing with nature. It stops shy of tree-hugging, but not much (one reckons a cactus to be a slightly less cuddly familiar).
I don't have a problem with people who want to live this way, but I find it a bit rich to recommend this path over others as the road to recovery. Maybe I find the whole approach implausible...unlikely to lead where it proffers; more likely to bog down in the search for a catharsis that may or may not lead to a richer understanding.
Glendinning's idealisation of native peoples neglects, or rather does not mention, the problems in their own commnities (she would, no doubt, attribute these to their interaction with the West). What she really seems to be urging is to tap the religions of these peoples. That route to wisdom seems to me "other than psychology."
Beyond that, the book is a collection of nice quotes, warm fuzzies and shock-horror sequences. I felt that there were about four or five riffs in here, clumsily woven into a plea for healing. Not the justification for a place-based existence that I was looking for.
To me, it seems that there are other routes to recognising the ills of the modern world and addressing them in a meaningful manner. Collective trauma and healing sounds a bit like original sin; responsibility for the fall. It seems it may be one path, but a long one, to approaching a sense of place. We have "evolved" this way (Glendinning would argue that we talk of evolution on the wrong scale), but there is still room for forks in the way forward (even if they may prove to be dead ends).
It seems to me that Glendinning has found herself a place in the world; a place in the country, accepted by and in community with the native people she so respects. That I truly admire. For myself (and my family), I am looking for one of these forks in the road, and this book wasn't the guide I thought it might be.
As if I needed more books in English, here's a new Amazon order, scheduled to arrive in 13-21 days (the last is a gift for my Portuguese teacher, who is studying Japanese at the moment. The Kanji book is really beautiful for what it is - a reference on the most common Japanese characters):
"The Seven Storey Mountain" - Thomas Merton
"A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River" - Aldo Leopold, Charles W. Schwartz (Illustrator)
"From Sugar Camps to Star Barns: Rural Life and Landscape in a Western Pennsylvania Community" - Sally Ann McMurry
"The Existential Pleasures of Engineering" - Samuel C. Florman
"Plowing the Dark" - Richard Powers
"I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941" - Victor Klemperer
"Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon" - Jorge Amado
"Survival In Auschwitz" - Primo Levi
"Kanji & Kana: A Handbook of the Japanese Writing System (Tuttle Language Library)" - Wolfgang Hadamitzky
In passing, my Portuguese teacher said something to me that I don't know how to process. "You're too lazy to watch TV."
Her contention is that watching television is a good way to pick up a foreign language. She said that she learned German in part by watching German television for 3 hours per day.
Maybe. But I really don't have the time or the inclination to watch television, even if it is meant to be educational. She says that you learn the dialect, the slang and by watching commercials (the repetition factor) you learn more vocabulary and more idiomatic usage.
This may be true, but I can't go there right now. If that is the language I could learn, I guess I question how much I need that language. Sometimes I acknowledge these gaps - I have no idea how to swear like a Brazilian. I know a few interjections, but don't have any idea (and maybe am better for not having any idea) of how to swear up a storm.
I take my vocabulary from the books that I've read; for usage I listen to news radio (with its own dialogues and commercials). I haven't made much progress reading in Portuguese of late - too much to read in English. I acknowledge also that there is no better time to learn Portuguese than while here, but I am making overriding decisions based on my interests. I find it hard to credit that I am too lazy to watch television!
Via Robin at ambiguous.org, a link to a rainwater harvesting system, with in-line links to other harvesting resources. I concede...it's...sexy.
Our twelve hundred square foot roof captures on average 3600 cubic feet (27,000 gallons) of water per year.This system [...] cost less than $1,500.
Author Richard Powers, interviewed in the Winter 2003 The Paris Review:
Plowing the Dark started when I heard a lecture by Terry Waite, who told about his five-year captivity in Beirut. After the lecture, he took questions from the audience and someone bluntly asked, "What was the main thing you learned in being locked up for five years?" In the moment after my stomach lurched at the question, I ran through all the possible answers: "Love life while you can," "Never take people for granted again." But his answer was shocking. He said, "Contemporary humanity has lost the ability to engage in productive solitude."
As an aside, it's a shame that TPR is so protective of its back issues. For a small-circulation literary magazine with an absolute treasure trove in its archives, a lot of really useful and interesting information is kept pent up unconstructively, far from would-be writers who might find the information useful.
I pay $20 per year to access the on-line New York Review of Books. I don't look at it all that often, but when I do I have access to their complete archives in a searchable user-friendly format. TPR should consider something like this. Or is it a question of copyright?
I seldom find Slashdot articles about which I have anything to contribute (my karma is positive), but today I actually came across a subject about which I have too much to say - by the time I could say it, the subject would be growing cold in the Older Stuff section. And I don't propose to stop what I am doing and dig into this in depth. I would say that my own critique is still forming.
In amongst the (Slashdot-) typically high noise:signal ratio of blather, flame and +5 (funny), there were relatively few people brave enough to pose the meta-questions of technology for technology's sake:
1) Is technological progress inherently good? Who does it benefit and who does it hurt (if any)? If technological progress is inherently good, are scientists ethically or morally responsible for their inventions? Are consumers responsible for their use of technology?
2) We are seeing that technology is making the world increasingly dangerous in the form of "asynchronous threats" or rather individual empowerment through technology that cannot be foreseen or prevented. (briefcase bombs, artificially engineered diseases, computer viruses, etc.). Is this a threat to human interdependence, or an inevitable feature?
3) Technology is making the world a lot smaller, and eroding private space and information. Will the ability of people to be in constant contact with each other, and perhaps in constant surveillance of each other, be a good thing or a bad thing? How will this affect human society and culture?
4) Lastly, are we asking these questions too late? Will humans ever be able to control the path of discovery and uses of technology? If not, should we?
and the appropriate scale of technology.
A very simple ethical dilemma - if a machine can do what ten people can, is it unethical to take away their jobs in the name of saving money? I mean, these are real humans we are talking about!
On a side note, I'm an information systems specialist, and the systems I design do flatten organizations and often eliminate people's jobs. This issue is one I often think about.
Is there a balance between how much machine replaces man?
The best thing that came out of this is a link to an article (new to me) that appeared in Wired in 2000 by Bill Joy. What is refreshing about Joy's article is its willingness of a technologist to think outside the universe of the technology-friendly.
I'm also grateful for a pointer to The Existential Pleasures of Engineering:
A very good book on the moral implications of technology is The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. It's not about engineering particularly, but about technology (and a reaction against anti-technologists), building infrastructure, and very much about the moral responsibilities and questions of being someone who designs and builds the things that surround us, without being able to make many key decisions about those things. It applies very well to computer programmers.
Questions like this, on a tech-savvy site like Slashdot, are often pilloried as flame-bait (even if modded up). I enjoy reading Slashdot (at +3) but I would suspect an a priori bias to technology, or a failure to consider such questions, particularly in the areas that most interest me.
When I was a student, the one day that we spent on engineering ethics included questions like, "What if a supplier gave you a gift of a nice new leather briefcase?" and "What if your employer asked you to lie about emissions reporting?" It would be interesting to see if there is room in today's engineering curriculum for a more conceptual debate on the ethics of technology itself.
I finished reading Helen and Scott Nearing's The Good Life today. The Nearings were two dedicated people - dedicated to their beliefs, and dedicated to living an austere existence consistent with them. If you subscribe to their theories, you could attribute their healthy longevity to their choice to turn their backs on a "conventional" life and trade it in for life of homesteading and organic farming.
I can't say I bought into everything that they were saying - they are pretty extreme on animal rights and husbandry, on their reasons for being vegetarian (which I am not), and on their diet (pass the raw oats, every day - yikes!). But what they have provided is a sort of how-to manual for making the break. Not detailed enough to make a go of things, perhaps, but enough to show that laypeople can do these things with a little patience and a little help.
If you read between the lines, you also get the sense that the Nearings didn't abandon the world when they moved to Vermont and then to Maine. They still maintained a busy schedule of travel, writing and lecturing. And they derived some support from this (although they suggest that most of it was channeled through a foundation). It's also clear that they had a leg up on breaking with the city - they brought with them, without apologies, enough cash to get started (Scott was almost 50 when they made the move). I cannot fault them for this - I would do the same.
After finishing Lee Hoinacki's El Camino on our holiday in Peru, I wanted to dive right into his other book, Stumbling Toward Justice: Stories of Place. I finished reading it last night.
Stumbling is a different book than El Camino. Here, Hoinacki revisits key phases of his own life, reflecting on their meaning in his intellectual journey. Like El Camino, this is beautifully written, contemplative prose, demanding extra time to take in its richness. We are exploring Hoinacki's responses to patriotism, economic citizenship, family, faith and his own place in the world.
I was interested to read about his decision to turn his back on his career in the academy and adopt a lifestyle of subsistence farming. He cites as his influences to making this move Wendell Berry, Helen and Scott Nearing, and Ivan Illich. He writes of the sense of sickness he experienced when he realised that his attaining tenure, being a "made man", as it were, essentially admitted him to the fraternity of those who would perpetuate everything that he criticised.
I also wanted to know, and learned, why he gave it up. And how he came to continue his journey through life, and to deal with arriving old age as a man of faith and principle who has lived to avoid the trappings of wealth and privilege that would have been available to him had he chosen an easier course.
Ultimately, I think what Hoinacki captures best - the message I will carry forward - is in his comments in El Camino (p.218-9) about the limits inherent in humanness:
But because I am a mere creature, there must be some criterion of limit; limit is necessarily a defining characteristic of myself as creature. Only the intention and gift of the Lord are infinite, reaching out to touch all persons. I cannot presume to act in this way. I must search for the mode proper to me. [...] My intention can affect all those whom I have touched since my birth. These are the people whose lives I have entered, the people who are a part of my life. If intention is possible, if it can reach another, then these are precisely all those whom I can hope to affect.
This is what is real: what I can touch...my own flesh, the ground under my feet, the aura of this place, the young woman who befriended me today, my family, and all those whom I have known or who have known me. For me, this is the limit of the real. I cannot reach out to some hungry child in the confusion of Africa, to some drugged young man in the hell of New York, to a yuppie in the golden ghetto of Scottsdale. For me, all these are abstract chimeras; they are not real.
[...] I have already experienced an overwhelming plethora of graces, which increases each day. Now all my attention must be focused on the other, all the others, of my life. My intention must be directed to them, away from my self.
Posted by sagwalla at 07:27 AM | Comments (0)
It takes great courage for anyone to offer up "home truths", but especially for a non-American to point a finger at American complacency. Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has the courage, and the credibility, to offer frank comments on America's failure to demand accountability and leadership from its leaders.
If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They'll decide that your city on the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you'll have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They'll think you've abandoned the rule of law. They'll think you have fouled your own nest.