I believe all this because I've lived it, and I've lived it because I'm a writer. For 20 years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life, the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible, but in the past several years the work has started coming back to me, or the readers have. Musicians and dancers face their audience and visual artists can spy on them, but reading is mostly as private as writing. Writing is lonely. It's an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who, even if they do read you, will do so weeks, years, decades later. An essay, a book, is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago and the response to your words may come long after you're gone and never reach your ears if anyone hears you in the first place.
After all, this is how it's been for so many books that count, books that didn't shake the world when they first appeared but blossomed later. Writing is a model for how indirect effect can be, how delayed, how invisible; no one is more hopeful than a writer, no one is a bigger gambler. (Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark)
If Keynes says that "foul is useful and fair is not," he propounds a statement of fact which may be true or false; or it may look true in the short run and turn out to be false in the longer run. Which is it?
I should think that there is now enough evidence to demonstrate that the statement is false in a very direct, practical sense. If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence. The Gross National Product may rise rapidly; as measured by statisticians but not as experienced by actual people, who find themselves oppressed by increasing frustration, alienation, insecurity, and so forth. After a while, even the Gross National Product refuses to rise any further, not because of scientific or technological failure, but because of a creeping paralysis of non-cooperation, as expressed in various types of escapism on the part, not only of the oppressed and exploited, but even of highly privileged groups.
Hi y'all. These exercises are from Andy Smallman of Kind Living. I received this in my email and thought I would pass it along. And if I get the other reflections I will post it here too...just in case you want to do these exercise. For the year. Alternatively, if you don't want to keep checking my blog, you can go to http://kindliving.net and sign up for yourself. Have fun. Be kind.
As we get started this week, the focus is simply to get you thinking about the difference between being courteous and being kind. For the sake of simplicity, I'm suggesting that being courteous is a social custom we're taught. It comes with an expectation of being treated with courtesy. Same with using good manners and doing what is expected of us.
For our purposes here, kindness is something else.
Kindness is a self-contained act in which the action or thought involved brings its own reward. There is no expectation for reciprocity; in fact, sometimes we worry that receiving something in response to a kind act diminishes our kindness. For this reason, many of us prefer to complete our kind acts anonymously.
Take some time this week to think about what I've written above. Get a nice journal or notebook to reflect on your thoughts. Write about a time when you behaved with courtesy and another time when you behaved with kindness.
What was the same? What was different? How did you feel in both cases?
Carrington, on the other hand, believed that art derived from and was a distillation of personal experience. Gertler must be made to accept her at her own estimate, instead of treating her as a mere embryo to be incubated in a man's passion, hatched out into a common sluttish mistress or submissive dowdy wife and helpmate. Realising that if she surrendered herself to his desires she might also have to relinquish her hold over him, she refused to comply with his authority. His crude insensibility, his trick of plunging into intimate life without waiting for the ripening of intimacy, his rough and tyrannical rages repelled her and roused her own fighting qualities so that she gathered all her forces to resist him.
If you're a follower of this blog or any of my blogs or a friend on Facebook, you would know that I love Libera. So when I saw their latest blog on their website, I couldn't resist sharing it, along with the preview for their new song:
Libera has been all over the place……to America, Japan, Philippines, Korea, Singapore, all over the world – in fact, to the other side of the world. But now, the trip to top all trips…..Leeds in the North of England !
‘W-H-A-T I-S G-O-I-N-G O-N’ we all wondered?
We had an exciting purpose of going there. It was to record the song ‘Wonderful World’ at a 1800’s MILL, which meant of course we would have to leave our nice white robes at home and get ourselves covered in something they call….. DIRT – but in film type make up form. My reaction to this was ‘Dirt, what a peculiar prospect! Jolly ho, let’s not waste another moment, cover me immediately in mud, dirt, soot etc. It is my natural habitat.’
Of course the journey between London and Leeds was quite long, so the usual scenarios happened. ‘Where’s my tablet?’ ‘Did you seriously eat all of it, and keep none for me?’ ‘Barbara, can I have my DS back please?’ ‘Kuba can you stop talking about Pokemon?’ But then Mr Peabody and Sherman came to the rescue on the coach DVD, and all was peace and calmness.
Anyway the next day was a ‘Wonderful’-Day! We were off to the mills to record ‘Wonderful World’, and as I said earlier, we had to get rid of our robes and get covered in the aforementioned dirt. We got dressed in old-fashioned ragged dirty clothes, which enabled us to look the part. On a more serious note we were re-enacting one of the most horrific jobs in the history of the Industrial Revolution. So our clothes and dirt were not for a kind of nice friendly Oliver Twist scene, with happy boys dancing and singing about pickapocketortwo, but more real – we had to have bare feet for a start – and we were to be working in the mill where children would have to crawl under dangerous machines risking their lives. We all had different parts to play: nippers, weighers, machine cleaners (one of the most dangerous jobs of all), floor cleaners, hand spinners and bobbin basket carriers.
The children would have been working very hard for very long hours each day and due to the awful working conditions they would not have seen much of the outside world. Their world in itself may not have seemed altogether too wonderful either. Some may indeed have been optimistic about themselves but not all.
We all learnt a lot about the history and the cruelty to children working in the mills. Not that we could hear much – the machine made the most ghastly noise. They told us that most of the children became deaf. It was all so sad, and we felt a bit guilty really as we were kind of play-acting what was real life to them, almost as if their ghosts were around us.
Anyhow, back to the 21st Century, evening came and we went back to the place where we were staying to spend our final night and had a massive Italian meal – in other words, pizzas - on the way.
The next morning we got up at our own times and went down for breakfast. We had the whole rest of the day in Leeds, so we went to see the charming sights of Leeds. It was a nice, sunny day so we started the day by heading to the accommodation’s grounds where we played a bit of football which is very popular in Libera. Then to the Media Museum which is rather nicely related, as it is all about film and television. Later on we went back to our rooms to pack our stuff into our suitcases. We got to the coach and made our way to our next destination. The Park. We played our world famous chase game called ‘Disease”. After about an hour we decided to move out to a zoo. There were orangutans, crocodiles and even blue whales (okay that last one was a bit of a fib!) Anyhow, it was time to head back to London, and we were all sad to be leaving but happy to be reuniting with our families. This was a tour that was not going to be forgotten quickly. Now we are all looking forward to see what the film will look like!
Have you watched Begin Again? Yes? Did you love it? No? Why not? I thought it was a movie about moments of redemption. I would embed the moment of redemption right here but YouTube is not allowing me to share it. And after the moment of redemption we get the first iteration where the formerly hotshot producer approaches what he thinks is a young ingenue and offers to produce her and she rebuffs him quite cruelly. He deserves it. And he leaves.
And the second iteration is when he waylays her outside the bar and comes clean. Presents himself just as he is, no disguises. And this time, she listens. For ah, it may be that the young ingenue is wiser than you think.
Dan: OK, here's the truth. I couldn't have signed you even if I wanted to, you know?
Gretta (looking apprehensive): OK.
Dan: I didn't come from a signing tonight. I haven't signed anybody in seven years. My label's completely lost all faith in me.
Gretta: So why did you give me your card?
Dan: Force of habit. If I look homeless it's because I practically am. I left my home about a year or so ago. I'm sleeping on a shitty mattress in some shitty apartment. And I wasn't celebrating tonight. I was drinking my ass off, standing on a subway platform ready to kill myself. And then I heard your song.
