Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza – review. Guardian
I’m found relevant images as I read the book.
Hubert Robert
THE TEATRO DELLE ACQUE IN THE GARDEN OF THE VILLA ALDOBRANDINI
Reading List 2020
In scribd
Kindle
Audiobook Scribd
Scribd — I’m just interested in “A Place of Greater Safety.” French Revolution.
Identity politics
Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider review – the best criticism of identity politics
I found this review of the book by Asad Haider satisfying — despite the title of the book, and the title of the review, I don’t think he just criticises identity politics. Haider defends a strand of it and criticises another and makes the distinction quite clear.
Haider traverses a tricky area. OTOH he can be critical of corporate feminism or indigenous capitalism. On the other hand he avoids two traps: One would be to go (or be seen to go) all sexist and racist. The other would be to fall into offensive class dogma, and say that all will be well in these areas of identity after the working class revolution.
Even in the summary in the review what is constructive and what is not, comes through clearly:
This is the original demand of identity politics, and it’s one that Haider embraces: for a revolutionary practice rooted in people’s identities as racialised, sexed, gendered and classed individuals who face interlocking systems of oppression. These systems have to be fought together, by organising people of different identities in what Haider calls “a project of universal emancipation” devoted to dismantling all of the structures that make them unfree, including and especially capitalism itself.
But if anticapitalist revolution is where identity politics began, it has since become something quite different, and is now invoked by certain liberals and leftists to serve distinctly non-revolutionary ends, Haider argues. It involves members of marginalised groups demanding inclusion, recognition, or restitution from above – a seat at the table. These demands are made in response to very real injuries endured by those groups. But their method, he says, ends up strengthening the structures that produced those injuries in the first place.
*
I’m intrigued that Asad Haider is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness. I listened to him in a podcast and he is indeed knowledgeable in this area. See my blog post.
I look forward to what else he has written.
*
Found this:
Yanis Faroufakis
Listened to the meeting: Yanis Varoufakis with Shami Chakrabarti (2018 Event) found it uplifting.
Just ordered it from Scorpio
Listen to the Marriage: A Novel – by John Jay Osborn
Amazon
I love this book! ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Probably because I’m possessed by all things couple therapy. Though because of that i’d hate it if it was terrible therapy. Most of the therapy in movies is bad. Books are not much better. This one surprises!
I love the bit where a client is about to walk out, and the therapist says “Sit down!”. Sounds terrible, but it’s perfectly timed, authentic, edgy for the therapist, and good for the client as it turns out.
I’m still puzzling how a law professor could write a book with such grasp on the art of therapy.
Get this book if you are interested in relationships!
Later: Sunday, 11 November 2018
A wonderful interview with John Jay Osborn.
The link is to Pocket casts – a great app for iPhone – but I’m sure you can find other ways to listen to it.
A remarkable book and writer! And a good interviewer.
Booktopia – Call of the Reed Warbler, A New Agriculture – A New Earth by Charles Massy
Very impressed by this guy.
Listened to him being interviewed here:
An agricultural insurgency — Thursday 11 January 2018
This all sounds too good to be true. But I do trust him!
Looks like we can manage the anthropocene.
Relational paradigm – Bruce and Francine
I think they nail it here:
“Imago shifts the focus from the self to the relationship and posits “relationship” as fundamental reality of which individuals are derivatives. To embody this paradigm shift, partners must shift their focus from their own need gratification to the needs of the relationship. The paradoxical outcome of that counter-intuitive shift is that such a sacrifice will insure the satisfaction of their needs in a way that was not possible when the focus was on the self. When the couple becomes partners rather than opponents in the project of creating and enacting their dream relationship, they create a thriving relationship. This perspective rests on the assumption that human beings are intrinsically relational, that the human problem is relational rupture, that all emotional symptoms are expressions of relational anxiety and that relational repair is the only and sufficient path to human well being.”
Beauvoir, Francine; Crapuchettes, Bruce. Getting Back The Love We Had: Forty-Two Answers To Real Questions From Couples Who Feared They Were Losing Their Way (pp. 4-5). Kindle Edition.
The Fuse Box
I want to get this book.
I heard about it in this excellent podcast: Kim Hill interviews Emily Perkins — Emily Perkins – Ibsen and The Fuse Box
Thought it might be fun to offer the protagonists in The Dolls House couple therapy.
Later Monday, 23 April, 2018
I’ve read nearly every item in the book and liked them a lot. One thing that struck me was how much creative writing talk relates to psychodrama directing. I’d recommend any director of drama to read the book. Probably would work for painters or musicians as well.
Milestone Mentors
People who impacted on me. Roughly in the order they did so. How I came to think the way I do, the intellectual & cultural biography. The juicier life story with real people is another, more personal story. The post about this post.
I had a few pop idols when I was a teenager. Mostly my mentors were people living around me. Then something new happened in a moment while reading Bertrand Russell that changed how I saw things. I think the book was called “On Morals”, but that does not seem to exist. Maybe it was Marriage and Morals but I can’t find the line I recall. “Morals is the science of how to live one’s life.” That does not Google, but that is what I recall. And as a teenager how to live my life was a burning question – that there was a science for that was very appealing. Further reading did not help much in a practical way (I will add Zorba The Greek to the list), but I began to read philosophy, and loved it.
I think of Russell as of marker in the sand for humanist, atheist, positivist rationality. ““I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.” I liked that. It summed up the atheism I was bought up with. (Now I think it is all a bit more mysterious. Maybe the universe forks and folds?)
And for a readers digest version of philosophy there is nothing to beat A History of Western Philosophy
And he was part of Ban the Bomb. And The Committee of 100
Talking of pop stars – this one was the first one I noticed. I was about 12.
Great stuff, but really, my main heroes were not popstars.
We had a book of his paintings at home, I saw a movie and read a biography. Later I saw exhibitions. Loved it all. I am attracted to outsiders.
CMW
Peter Pinney
The link to an album presented in Adobe Flash no longer works
Why he’s on the list.
Led to travel, New Zealand mountains.
Zorba the Greek
Colin Wilson
His book The Outsider led to my big shift at about same time as Peter Pinney
The book is a series of essays about what he calls outsiders, but presented from Wilsons existentialist position. Again how to live life! I identified with the central theme that outsiders are those who see too much. The main thing I got from the book is that I follwed through on every writer he mentioned. Now I knew who to look for in the library.
Colin Wilson is a bit of an embarrassment. He has an elitist perspective. Outsiders are artists and gifted, but not “supermen” above the doomed masses. He has an idea that the outsider has failed on some journey to enlightenment. I don’t like that type of spiritual approach to life, and did not even as CW put it forward.
Ivan Illich
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Marshall McLuhan
Stewart Brand
Karl Marx
Moreno
Osho
James Hillman
Thomas Moore
Marriage dead or alive
Marshall Rosenberg
Harville Hendrix
Hedy Schleifer
Bill Doherty
Tao
I have a few versions of this book, now this one. Lovely.
