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Joseph Boyden — The Orenda

I’m gripped at about 20% into the book.

This Item puts me off a bit, though it also provides extra food for thought.

So far I think the author presents the world a world animated with the spirit of life in a sympathetic way and the Catholic view to the contrary is almost mocked, thus so far so good.

Amazon

the orenda

Enjoyed the CBC video about writing the novel, here:

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Later – upon finishing the book — Thursday, 18 December 2014

It was horrendously violent – and it is hard to believe that such cruelty is possible. However I don’t agree with the article linked to above that is biased towards the priests or the against the Iroquois.

I finished it a few days ago and the book is still with me, it had an impact, not just the violence, but the characters, and particularly the sense of the soul of things and people – the orenda – that gives the book its title.

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The Peripheral – William Gibson

I just heard there was a new William Gibson book out, and pre ordered it on Amazon

In the meantime I’ve enjoyed this interview in The Guardian by Ned Beauman here are the last two paragraphs:

I understood perfectly well before reading The Peripheral that our planet is beginning to roll down a very steep slope. And yet there was something terrifying about finding it here, perhaps because I’ve been absorbed in Gibson for most of my lifetime. His previous dystopias, with their overflowing slums, feel jolly by comparison; here, even Gibson’s hackers and mercenaries and television personalities are bereaved by climate change. It’s as if Gibson’s work is a city, and I have lived in that city since I was a teenager, and now that city is being drowned before my eyes. Before I left, Gibson admitted that his own story “surprised me with its grim matter-of-factness. I wasn’t fully aware of the implications, at the start. Though in my personal model of writing fiction, one never really is.”

All the same, this shouldn’t discourage anyone from reading The Peripheral, which is not, in fact, a remotely grim book. First of all, books that are as frantic with imagination as Gibson’s books, as frantic with the appetite to see what happens to us next, cannot be grim; second, Gibson’s famous weakness for happy endings has not been entirely suppressed here; and third, the details of our fate are mostly confined to that one scene towards the end, when Netherton, our descendant, explains what happened before he was born. As we read it, we ought to be like Flynne, who sits under the oak in her front yard and listens without hysterics as she hears the story of a world in which “everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new.”

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My review of James Hillman biography – Goodreads

Archetypal Psychology (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman)Archetypal Psychology by James Hillman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Loved the book, learned so much. Finished up disliking him more. Never liked him, always awed by his genius, and impacted. His attitude to his affair and his relationship with women is not just of its time – it is callous and a-psychological, out of touch and this is so disappointing. It shows a flaw in his professional as well as personal life, not one that I can forgive. I sort of knew this but here it is laid out – blatant. Even though the author seems to be sympathetic, colludes.

So I rate the book 5 for illumination and remove stars for an ultimate disdain for the character.

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My Review of The Golden Notebook – Goodreads

The Golden NotebookThe Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

I’m now about 20% into the book. I like it because have lived some of this life she describes. Middle class intellectuals in some colony. I see other reviewers don’t like hearing the privileged ruminate about their agonies. But we are a select bunch! For everyone one of us who entertain marxist ideals of a change in the system there are hundreds who don’t. It takes a modicum of privilege to even read stuff. So to hear how thes commies and fellow travellers carried on in the fifties is of interest to me. But I can see you had to be there perhaps to get it.

But then I was not there. I’m a generation older. It may not be common knowledge but there was a small wave of Marxist revival in the late sixties and early 70s. I imagine all round the world. It grew out of the vietnam war protests and the countercultural movement. It dawned on some of us liberals that we did not just want Peace. We want the Viet Cong to win. The imperialists needed to be defeated, and they were. It became clear too that national liberation was a viable and worthwhile step in the march of progress. Maybe that was not so clear to Lessing in her time? And the communes and alternative endeavours did not really work, not as a way of changing the system. It may sound crazy but I, along with many thought the “Times were a’ changin”. But really, no. And then China was in a stage before the cultural revolution disasters. It was easy to see there was something to be learned from the communists.

And there was! And then there was not!

Why did she get a Nobel Prise for her work? I think of Obama getting the peace prize – do you have to be a phoney to get it? I don’t think Lessing is a phoney. However she may have been mistaken for someone who is anti communist. It is very different to be a disillusioned to being anti. Jesuit priests apparently do not need to believe in god, they need to be searching for god. I wish there was some sort of world order of people searching for the marxist line of out time. And a Doris Lessing of our time – or at least one for baby boomers. Perhaps Marge Piercy? Is there anyone like her today, filling that niche she filled in 62?

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Evernote killed my blog

I used to write more in this blog than I do now. I always said I was just writing for myself, that it was a sort of note taking.

I have become an avid user of Evernote – and it is all private.  Notes to myself.  This has taken the driving force out of my motivation, which, I’m sorry to say, dear reader, was not to inform or please you but more about me.

Of course blogging has lost its pride of place as a form of communication with the advent of social media.  I don’t do much of that, but some, and that will have had an impact as well.

The other thing that never worked well in this blog is that I am a multiple personality.  I have six.

Which one is writing this blog?  The psychophile, the technophile… those two do ok here, after all the blog is on the cusp of these two interests, but I also do art, and I am a bushwalker and then there is a passion for specifically psychodrama and imago.  And movies and books!  And I used to be a communist so there is that whole interest in politics.  I use the tag World for that.

No unified focus.  Does that matter?

My Evernote account is more than capable of containing wild diversity.  Tags.  

There are tags here too.  And “notebooks”  This one has the notebook Journal.  And a bunch of tags, but who would ever use them? I do, Psyberspace is a resource with all my ramblings for a couple of decades.

 

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Turning the Paradox – my review on goodreads

Turning the ParadoxTurning the Paradox by Michael Harvey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I liked it! This is written by a good friend. I read it about a year ago, and at the time I thought I could hear a bit much of mike’s philosophy of life being thrust at me. A good philosophy it is, but in a novel I want to be shown not told. Yet a year later I recall the feel of the place and enjoyment of the story and the characters.

I’d recommend it if you like a novel of ideas, about communes and the west coast of New Zealand, with a touch of the thriller thrown in.

I am starting on his next novel with positive anticipation. Dog Harbour

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Dog%20Harbour

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The technium

Kevin Kelly Interview – transcript:

http://edge.org/conversation/the-technium

Sums up many of his ideas.  I find his clarity inspiring.  There are just some ideas he explains well.

 

with new tools:

 

So you have the power to do evil expanded. You have the power to do good expanded. You think that’s a wash. In fact, we now have a choice that we did not have before, and that tips it very, very slightly in the category of the sum of good.

Does it? I can’t quite make that moral leap, but what is clear is that there are more options. For the baddies too! The root of evil may be ignorance and there fore as knowledge tools improve so does good?

I like this idea too:

It may be that for us to really master the issues of attention management, critical thinking, learning how technological devices work and how they bite back, all this techno-literacy may be something that we have to spend several years being trained to do. Maybe you can’t just learn it by hanging around people who do it or else just hanging around trying to learn it by osmosis. It may require training and teaching, a techno-literacy, and learning how to manage your attention and distractions is something that is probably going to require training.

I think the same about relationship. We now have so many relationship tools that need teaching that we need, as he puts it (in relationship to new media):

We know that from plenty of studies of literate and illiterate people from the same culture—that reading and writing changes how your brain works. That only came about because of four or five years of deliberate practice and study…

I get inspired like this with Kevin Kelly usually because I like what he says about the future and tools, but sense that I have a psychological perspective that he, and the whole Edge buch miss.

The evolution of psyche.

Then I want to get writing.

I also like:

There’s this conundrum, this dilemma of remaining different while connected, because if you’re just different but not connected, there’s no power in that, and that’s actually easy to do, but can you remain different while connected? You’re different in certain degrees, yet you’re part of the uniform standard. So it’s like you don’t want to make up new words that don’t mean anything. You want to write a book that uses the standard words in the dictionary, so you’re going to be different while connected to the standard. You’re connected to the English language, but you’re going to be different with what the words say.

I suppose that is what we get heretics, they speak to powers they are connected with. Not just to the desert.

I now want to read the “new economy”

http://kk.org/books/KevinKelly-NewRules-withads.pdf

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Language in couple therapy.

I am highly conscious of the language in couple therapy I do at the moment. I used to use the Imago language in couple therapy for many years. I was resistant to the rather ugly “sender and receiver” words.  Though not as accurate for what was actually happening I preferred talker and listener in the last few years.  However after listening to audios by Hedy Schleifer I’ve shifted to the “crossing the bridge” language of “visitor and host”.  As one client told me, that is a bit fruity, whatever that means.  

The thing is that is not just a change in language, but a whole different mode of being. Sending is a metaphor for posting something into space and it is then received like an email. This is not a metaphor that is very connecting. It also leaves the receiver wanting to respond… it invites reply.  Responding is close to reactivity, and replies are close to argument and debate.  

Host and visitor are quite different.  Each person is having a turn at the same time, one as visitor, on a trip to another land, as a learner, a witness as an explorer a learner.  The other as a host, a presenter, a storyteller.  with this metaphor for the work there is not the same need to coach appreciations… I just say, be a good host and be a good visitor, and immediately they say such things as “Thanks for inviting me into your world, I appreciate you taking the initiative, I know it might not be easy for you.”

In the visit I use the exact mirroring , summary, validation and empathy structures.

In every culture there is some protocol and ritual for crossing the bridge into another persons territory or space.  The protocols for visiting a neighbour apply.  The leave taking can be quite lovely.  I’ve heard people say.”Thank you for having me.”  or more fully, such things as: “Thank you for inviting me, I appreciate you showing me how things work in your land. I will be much more aware how not to stomp on those areas that are so sore.  I enjoyed meeting your little child and seeing how burdened your mother was while she had three under four.”

The language and the change facilitates dramatic enactment.  Show me your world is an action cue for sculptures and role reversals with the social and cultural atom.  

With maori clients and some other kiwis as well I have used some of the concepts from a meeting on a marae. The visitors are: manuhiri and the hosts the, the people of the land, the tangata whenua.

The depth of meaning of the pōwhiri or welcome could well be used to make the crossing into each others worlds more meaningful. For example the concept of Pōwhiri – the Māori welcome carries with it all the richness of the english word dialogue and more: “… po can be translated as a venture into ‘the unknown’ or a new experience, while whiri is derived from whiriwhiri meaning the act or experience of exchanging information and knowledge.

Pōwhiri – the Māori welcome

 

 

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