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moving

2011-12-13T19:10:00.001-08:00

Just a reminder to my very small handful of subscribers that this blog has been moved here to tumblr: http://yellow-noise.tumblr.com/ where I will continue my usual short posts consisting of quotes, but also hope to do more substantive writing over the next few months.

restart

2011-09-12T06:51:00.000-07:00

I seem to start a new blog whenever I start a new season. (My choice of platform may also reflect changing Internet trends: self-hosted --> xanga --> blogger --> tumblr).

I started a new season over a year ago, but it's taken me a year to get back on my feet and write again. Please find me here: www.yellow-noise.tumblr.com

(I'm finally abandoning my 7th grade internet alias. No more leighcia. Too bad I still have my embarrassing 7th grade email that I still use for all those frequent buyer miscellaneous rewards programs.)

(For the time being, I will keep most of this blog up, but may be deleting some of the more personal entries.)

the recruitment of human assets

2010-06-23T19:02:00.000-07:00

I recently picked up Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Reading about recruitment at elite universities brings back memories of investment banking and management consulting propaganda. Note their profligate use of words that suggest opportunity and elitism.

David Pyle, Managing Director of Fixed Income at Morgan Stanley at a Princeton recruiting event, 2000:

Our goal is to be the preeminent global firm, to be what we already are, the top. We want people coming into work every morning knowing that we’re at the top and always striving to be at the top. We are global; if you’re not global, you can’t win…. People are our single most important asset… Our people are the smartest in the world… There is no one in the world that we can’t reach and that’s middle of everything. We have huge reserves of capital and human assets, and we want to recruit the type of person that always wants more, who is not happy being second… Our theme is “network the world”.

From a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter 2001 recruitment ad:

Anything is possible. This is where the generation of new ideas lives. Because we’ve built a global network of people who see possibilities where others see confusion and risk—and who know how to turn those possibilities into realities. And by working at internet speed- propelling dozens of companies and millions of investors into the new economy. We are propelling careers all over the world.

These messages compelled confused and anxious undergraduates into hours of resume writing, recruitment presentations and interviews. For those of us who have spent a lifetime climbing the meritocracy ladder, investment banking and management consulting is a comforting next step compared to the prospect of actually figuring out how to live our lives. These careers promise prestige, excitement, learning, wealth and endless opportunity--- who could refuse? And it is only expected that we would be attracted to institutions that reproduce the elitism and selectivity of the colleges we attend. If the future is uncertain, we should strive to preserve the privilege of our Ivy League educations in the most secure way possible. *

And so, in 2010, even after the financial crisis of 2008, investment banking and management consulting recruitment remains attractive and competitive.

* Teach for America has taken advantage of this by being super selective in order to create an “elite cadre of teachers”…. For us organization kids, we need achievement paths.
** All recruitment excerpts taken from Karen Ho's Liquidated

luxurious times

2010-06-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

The stunning productivity of the agriculture and manufacturing sectors-- the roots of post-industrialism-- should be cause for celebration. The ancient Greeks would have seen the current moment as a turning point in human history, where only a tiny fraction of the population's hours are needed to produce all the food, clothing, shelter and material goods people need to live comfortable. Surely, we were on the verge of a society devoted to a life of art, literature, and contemplation. Instead, Americans face economic anxiety and chronic insecurity about the future. Houses are going into foreclosure, food prices climb ever higher, and millions of families are one medical crisis away from bankruptcy. Why is there such a disjuncture between the economy's capacity to produce and the lived experience of Americans?

~ Gerard Davis, Managed by the Markets

conspicuous consumption

2010-05-30T18:34:00.000-07:00

It may turn out that the life of idiotic ostentation makes humanity quite as despicable as the life of a drunkard, and that the image of God is less defaced in a saloon of the Bowery than in those jeweled birthday parties for dogs with which the New York Four Hundred disgust all civilized mankind. That much of this is, in the face of the world's needs, an enormity for which all defense is mere shamelessness no conscientious person will deny... Take the advertisement of a present-day 'millionaire's hotel,' with the assurance it gives of 'the very last word in sumptuousness.' Is this not one of the features of our time upon which we all trust that a wiser age will look back, not only with condemnation, but with a sense of nausea?

~1918 article in the American Journal of Sociology by Herbert Stewart, professor at Dalhousie University in Novia Scotia

If we allowed ourselves to see what we're doing every day, we might find it too nauseating. I mean, the way we treat other people-- I mean, you know, every day, several times a day, I walk into my apartment building. The doorman calls me Mr. Gregory, and I call him Jimmy... Now already, what is the difference between that the Southern plantation owner who's got slaves? You see, I think that an act of murder is committed at that moment, when I walk into my building. Because here is a dignified, intelligent man, a man of my own age, and when I call him Jimmy, then he becomes a child, and I'm an adult. Because I can by my way into that building.

~ Andre Gregory in 1981 Film My Dinner with Andre

It appears that I'm back. That may have been a record length hiatus. Sometimes real life takes over. In any case, I thought I'd ease back into blogging by posting these two quotations found in Rachel Sherman's Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, an excellent book for the record (which also reminds me, I'm about a year behind on book reviews). Blogger's Amazon Associates Integration ads has also reminded me that I should stop patronizing Amazon. If you click through the book link above, it'll take you to a social enterprise firm, Better World Books, a B Corporation... but I feel like a hypocrite because I just made an order of books off Amazon...

*Note: For professional reasons, I'd like to keep my blog anonymous. I'd appreciate it if you refrain from mentioning my name or identifying characteristics in the comments. Thanks! I am also contemplating getting rid of all my labels. They don't make any sense!

work/life balance revisited*

2010-02-23T17:48:00.000-08:00

In the nineteenth century, there was a prohibition in the United States on banks opening branches in communities other than the ones in which they originally operated. People had to trust the bank if they were to deposit their money in it, and bankers had to assess the character of borrowers before writing loans; it was generally believed that “the bankers’ interests and the interests of the larger community are one and the same,” as a historical sociologist of banking writes. We might imagine a banker sits down with a young couple and begins to form a judgment of their credit worthiness, that is, their character. This character is knowable because there is a community. Maybe the banker asks around at the grocery and the hardware store, and notes subtle cues in the tone of voice or body language of their proprietors as he mentions the name of the applicants and inquires after their record of credit. Satisfied, he vouchsafes their creditworthiness to his colleague bankers, who live in the same community, and a mortgage is secured. A thirty-year relationship is established between the bank and the couple. The banker feels he has done a good turn, helping virtue to its reward by the diligent application of his own powers of discerning observation, and his knowledge of the ways of men. He exercises prudence; his work calls on some of his best capacities…

Now consider the reality of the mortgage broker circa 2005, whose work takes on a very different character under absentee capitalism. Knowing the mortgage he secures will be sold by the originating bank (a branch of a nationwide bank) to some other entity, he needn’t concern himself with the creditworthiness of the applicant. The bank has no interest in the ongoing viability of the loan; its interest is limited to the fees it gets from originating the loan. The mortgages will be bundles on Wall Street then these bundles will themselves be transformed through securitization… The original encounter between mortgage broker and borrower as they sit across from one another is fraught with moral content- questions of trust- and both of the original parties no doubt experience it this way, in 2005 as ever. The mortgage broker gets a feeling in his gut. But this information is discarded through a process of depersonalization. The discarding is purposeful. Indeed the originating banks get frequent phone calls from Wall Street investment houses, urging them to invent new kinds of loans in which the borrower doesn’t even need to claim income or assets, much less prove their existence. This makes a certain kind of psychic demand on the mortgage broker who actually writes the loans: he must silence the voice of prudence, and suspend the action of his own judgment and perception.

Why would a system demand the stupidification of the mortgage professional? Again, imagine it is 2005. Unprecedented concentrations of capital have arisen, and these pools of money are competing with one another to find a home, and get a return. As a result, there is an insatiable worldwide appetite for mortgage-backed securities among investors. Further, the fees to be made from all the transactions between originator and investor are fueling a Wall Street boom. Therefore more loans must be written. So our mortgage broker writes loans that he knows to be bad, and makes a lot of money. Stripped of the kind of judgments that are at the very heart of the idea of “credit,” shot through with bad faith, his work is now predicated on irresponsibility, rooted in the absence of community. Whatever lingering fiduciary consciousness he may have has become a liability, given the rush to irresponsibility by his competitors. The work cannot sustain him as a human being. Rather, it damages the best part of him, and it becomes imperative to partition work off from the rest of life. So during his vacation he goes and climbs Mount Everest, and feels renewed. The next summer, he becomes an ecotourist in the Amazon rain forest. It is in this gated ghetto of his second life that he inhabits once again an intelligible moral order where feeling and action are linked, if only for a couple of weeks.

~ Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

* The original work/life balance post can be found here.
** Wow, that quote took a very long time to type up. Please let me know if I made any typos.

addendum

2010-02-20T20:27:00.000-08:00

Speaking of the dangers valuing abstract knowledge over tacit knowledge, this American Life broadcast Two Steps Back (275) recounts how standardization efforts have frustrated a successful public school teacher's ability to teach.

(This American Life contains some very interesting programs. They're interesting enough that I'm actually willing to up to put up with Ira Glass and general NPR smugness in order to listen to them.)

perfectly normal

2010-02-20T07:54:00.000-08:00

The Unknown Citizen

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

~ W.H. Auden (Found via 3QuarksDaily)

Ultimately society becomes nothing more than a collection of statistical regularities and statistical categories. It makes little difference whether the category is a traditional one of social structure (age, sex, class) or a kind of person (child abuser, homeless) because the statistical category is the great equalizer—it strips the meaning from a social category and the individuality from a human kind. Society is statistical and so are the individuals who comprise it.
…
The main reason we measure everything human is that the concept of normality has placed that of morality, or as Ian Hacking puts it, the concept of normal people replaced that of human nature. The traditional view of human nature was a moral one. Belief in a transcendent God or in natural law allowed humans to be defined according to an ideal or to virtues. Virtue was not based exclusively on public opinion, or average behavior.
…
The normal is now an epiphenomenon of statistics, which when applied to human culture and the individual turns quality into quantity and imperialistically imposes the equality of standardization upon the individual and society.

~ Richard Stivers, The Illusion of Freedom and Equality

calculating fashion

2010-02-19T18:25:00.000-08:00

Matthew Crawford, in Shop Class for Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work*, distinguishes between two types of knowledge— abstract/universal knowledge and experiential/intuitive/tacit knowledge. According to Crawford, universal knowledge “aspires to a view from nowhere. That is, it aspires to a view that gets at the true nature of things because it isn’t conditioned by the circumstances of the viewer. It can be transmitted through speech or writing without loss of meaning, and expounded by a generic self that need not have any prerequisite experiences.”

Our society values this abstract knowledge—we crave more “technique” as Jacques Ellul would describe it. We value processes, technical manuals, best practices and flowcharts, rather than experiential or tacit knowledge. Crawford describes the basic idea of tacit knowledge:

“We know more than we can say and certainly more than we can specify in a formulaic way. Intuitive judgments of complex systems, especially those made by experts… are sometimes richer than can be captured by any set of algorithms.”

Perhaps the difference between intuitive knowledge and abstract knowledge is best illustrated by the supercomputer Deep Blue and the master chess player Garry Kasparov. Though Deep Blue did beat Kasparov, it relied on a different sort of intelligence, if it can be called that at all, than Garry’s. Kasparov himself writes:

“Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force.”

When we only recognize abstract knowledge, we bureaucratize human intelligence. In the words of Crawford:

“Appreciating the situated character of the kind of thinking we do at work is important, because the degradation of work is often based on efforts to replace the intuitive judgments of practitioners with rule following, and codify knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that then stand in for situated knowledge.”

The nonprofit sector subscribes to abstract knowledge, evidenced by the proliferation of jargon about “innovation,” “portfolio,” “outcome measurement” and “performance”. In my consulting work, I struggle with what kind of knowledge I implicitly support. But like a good stereotypical female blogger, I'm going to spend the rest of this blog post writing about clothing (Actually according to this, female bloggers prefer to write about Christmas, family, love and babies. Matt says that I ought to question whether the dataset analyzed is a representative sample).

Getting dressed is a difficult and stressful task for me. It’s a complicated operations procedure, rather than an expressive fun activity. Basically I think of it this way: I need to optimize my appearance given a set of constraints: amount and type of physical activity (e.g. biking or walking), indoor and outdoor temperature, level of desired formality and professionalism, level of comfort, clean clothing available and semi-clean clothing available. (I complicate this task by keeping a pile of worn-once-or-twice-but-still-clean clothing that I keep in a drawer that I try to wear before that drawer overflows).

In deciding what to wear, I first think about all my constraints. For example:
- Need to bike in regular clothing today. Need a skirt that will allow ample leg movement. No pencil skirts.
- Workshop presentation. Need to dress professionally and make sure that you have a decent shirt underneath your sweater because you get really hot when presenting…
- Um, you’ve already worn that black cardigan three times this week.
- Um, you don't have enough time to put on two pairs of tights. (Trust me, when you wear two pairs of tights at the same time, the second pair is very difficult to put on).

And then I rely upon mental algorithms I’ve developed to optimize appearance, primarily from my husband’s excellent fashion advice:
- Best colour combinations for me are black + grey + one other colour (which cannot be yellow, brown or navy, but would ideally be purple or blue).
- I can ditch the black and do grey + navy + white. Or maybe do beige + navy or beige + brown, but beige and brown are not the best colours for me.
- Only one article of clothing can have patterns, ruffles or extra embellishment
- Skirts generally look better than pants as long as I can find appropriate matching tights. Skirts must be above the knees!
- I can’t wear dangly earrings when I have my glasses on. It's just too many metal appendages.
- Fitted clothing usually looks better. I am supposed to avoid empire waists, puffed sleeves, boatnecks and blazers.
- Apparently the whole trendy/Michelle Obama wearing a belt over a cardigan looks stupid on me.

Given that my algorithms are not very well developed, I often find myself venturing in foreign territory. This often proves disastrous or atleast results in a tardy appearance at work. For instance, this morning, I wanted to wear a brown sweater. My algorithm for brown (brown + beige) was not going to work because I didn’t have any beige skirts or khakis. So I tried a pair of grey jeans, but they didn’t fit over my long underwear. Then I tried brown workpants that were too stripey compared to the stripe texture on the brown sweater. Then I tried a brown skirts which proved too brown. Then I panicked, since I was running later, and finally opted to just wear blue jeans, which were rather uncomfortable.

So this is why it takes me 20 minutes to get dressed in the morning. Perhaps I can reduce it to 10 minutes if I use a flowchart. Or maybe I should diagram a set of successful outfits at different levels of constraints and choose from the list. (I once though about creating such a diagram for biking clothing for weather… e.g. which thickness of gloves do I need given the daily range of temperature and windchill?). Or write a computer program that draws from a database of all my clothing and then compiles outfits based on inputted variables. That would be pretty awesome.

Alternatively, I could try to develop some experiential knowledge.**

* The famous essay that preceded the book is well worth reading.
** Or I could get rid of all my clothing and just buy a few sets of black skirts, black tights + grey shirt + grey cardigan. And just wear it ALL THE TIME. Simplicity is so tempting sometimes, but unfortunately I like novelty and variety and other comforts afforded by my American educated class privilege.
*** This only a slight caricature. I actually think about getting dressed in the morning this way. That is why it is so stressful. It’s up there with grocery shopping and meal planning and cooking (yet another algorithm-dependent area of my life). A quick google search has yielded a few others who have "best practices" for getting dressed.

you can only trust debtors

2010-02-16T17:23:00.000-08:00

… another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has argued, through the installment plan previously unthinkable acquisitions become thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. The display of a new car bought on installment became a sign that one was trustworthy. In a whole sale transformation of the old Puritan moralism, expressed by Benjamin Franklin (admittedly no Puritan) with the motto “Be frugal and free,” the early twentieth century saw the moral legitimitation of spending.

~ Matthew Crawford in Shop Class as Soulcraft

Not only do we have moral legitimitation for debt, but we also have institutional legitimitation. Matt and I have been entangled in paperwork as we’ve tried to establish his credit score. Every credit card application has resulted in rejection, not because Matt has bad credit, but because he has no credit. He’s a poor candidate for credit because he has never had a debt before.

*That being said, with the recent recession and growing concerns for the environment, debt and spending are beginning to take on different moral meanings.

simulating friendship*

2010-02-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

Priority of sensation over substance. William Deresiewicz writes, in reference to Facebook:

We have turned [our friends] into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.... There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in the same place, or, rather, they're not my friends. They're simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.

Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls. The same path was long ago trodden by community. As the traditional face-to-face community disappeared, we held on to what we had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word, no matter how much we had to water down its meaning. Now we speak of the Jewish "community" and the medical "community" and the "community" of readers, even though none of them actually is one. What we have, instead of community, is, if we're lucky, a "sense" of community—the feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective experience. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have "friends," just as we belong to "communities." Scanning my Facebook page gives me, precisely, a "sense" of connection. Not an actual connection, just a sense.

* I could also call this, as you may expect, "when words change their meaning" or "when words lose their meaning", but I thought it might be nice to have a change
** I discovered Deresiewicz via Charles Petersen's article In The World of Facebook

when words lose their meaning*

2010-02-06T22:05:00.000-08:00

Diversity.

Example 1: Fashion magazine Love celebrates the diversity of eight of the most “beautiful people” in the world. Is it just me or do they look pretty similar? (via Sociological Images)

Example 2: Visit any business school website and you’ll be sure to find the words “diversity” mentioned somewhere about their student bodies. Yet my friend related to me earlier this year that admissions officers at top business schools told her that they prefer students to have no more than three years of work experience.

Example 3: In our workplaces, in our churches, we comment with smug satisfaction about the diversity present, generally in reference to multilingual capabilities and skin color. But oftentimes, this diversity is superficial at best, a visual characteristic of a group of people who share similar educational background, political views, lifestyles and socioeconomic status.**

A commenter on the Sociological Images blog entry referenced earlier writes:

Media decision-makers know that in 2010, the concept of “diversity” is a useful tool to generate a positive response in audiences, especially when the piece explicitly says, “Hey, this is diverse.” Whether or not there’s discernible “diversity” in whatever they’re labeling as such, the label itself gets the applause.

It’s like putting puppies or daisies in an ad. And it’s a particularly cynical trick they use when they just throw in the word “diversity” to drum up feel-good vibes in something that’s actually quite mundane and not at all groundbreaking, diversity-wise. (Original comment found here)

* I’ve lost count of the number. It might be 7, not counting variations. I should probably make this a tag. Speaking of which, I hate my tags. What I mean when I use them seems to keep changing.
** Not to say that ethnic diversity is unimportant and should not be celebrated, but let’s recognize that there are other forms of diversity that in multicultural America may be more meaningful.

standard of living

2010-02-05T15:29:00.000-08:00

I attended an informal fundraiser for Haiti hosted by my sister-in-law in order to raise funds for Explorers Sans Frontieres last weekend. A friend shared about her numerous trips down to Carrefour, Haiti (Carrefour is about 6 miles south of Port-au-Prince). She lived with a family and spent many months teaching English. She recounted the love, the joy and the generosity amongst the people she lived with and related how the community has been coming together post-earthquake to rebuild.

The media has bombarded us with so many images of suffering, of chaos and of poverty since the Haiti earthquake, a sensational portrayal of a poor backward country: multitudes of impoverished (black) people in need of aid and help from our superior society.

Before we condemn Haiti and its people to our categories of exoticized and backward other as we succumb our personal opinions to the CNN newsfeed, let us remember the richness of the lives of people who live there. I was particular moved by my friend’s reflection on the death of a close friend of hers:

“He didn’t survive the earthquake. He was 30. But I thought to myself at age 30 in Haiti, you’ve already lived a long hard life, but he lived a full life. He experienced so much.” (paraphrase)

A full life. Many of us here in America never live a full life.

I leave you with something from Reason for Being: Meditation on Ecclesiastes by Jacques Ellul:

Let me repeat that the absence of progress does not result in sameness or stagnation. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done” (Eccl. 1:0). These words do not amount to a quantitative or practical assessment, but, as we have said, a judgment concerning being (“What has been… what will be”), and the way people carry out their action- not the means of human action. There is an enormous change in the way Genghis Khan killed (with the saber) and our way (with nuclear bombs), but the behavior pattern is the same. Murder, envy, domination—these do not change. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

To use a classic distinction, we can have (quantitative) human growth, but this does not indicate (qualitative) human development. As noted earlier, we need to look at reality in terms of what God reveals to us. We may live in the “illusion of progress,” but God’s revealed truth shows us what it really amounts to.

* Note: This post was written one or two weeks ago.
** My sister-in-law is involved in another fundraiser for Haiti that will take place on Thursday Feb. 25th at 6:30pm. The event is called Help for Haiti: Beyond Media Coverage and will be held at the Penn Museum.

when words change their meaning

2010-01-21T18:59:00.000-08:00

In its original sense, a profession is an occupational grouping that has sole authority to recruit, train, and supervise its own members. Historically, only medicine, law and the academic disciplines have fit this description. Certainly flight attendants do not yet fit it. Like workers in many other occupations, they call themselves “professional” because they have mastered a body of knowledge and want respect for that. Companies also use “professional” to refer to this knowledge, but they refer to something else as well. For them a “professional” flight attendant is one who has completely accepted the rules of standardization.

~ Arlie Russell Hochschild in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling

Being professional once suggested integrity. True professionals governed themselves, establishing and holding themselves accountable to the standards of their field. Now being professional mostly means conforming to a set of outward behavioral standards. It has everything to do with the exterior and nothing to do with the interior.

charitable hypocrisy

2010-01-09T07:40:00.000-08:00

I posted a link about a year ago referencing a satirical piece that highlighted the social context in which a nonprofit operates. The nonprofit provides job training and employment for ex-cons, “black or brown men”, who were mostly arrested for petty crimes such as drug possession. Ironically, the daughter of a rich board member of this nonprofit was also involved in drugs, but sits comfortably in rehab with “her needs met” and her “crimes mitigated”.

W.E.B. DuBois’s the Philadelphia Negro, a study of blacks in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century, reminded me of this satirical piece. DuBois notes that while Philadelphians were unwilling to give blacks decent jobs, they supported charitable institutions that cared for the poor. He writes:

For thirty years and more Philadelphia has said to its black children: “Honesty, efficiency and talent have little to do with your success; if you work hard, spend little and are good you may earn your bread and butter at those sorts of work which we frankly confess we despise; if you are dishonest and lazy, the State will furnish your bread free.” Thus the class of Negroes which the prejudices of the city have distinctly encouraged is that of the criminal, the lazy and the shiftless; for them the city teems with institutions and charities; for them there is succor and sympathy; for them Philadelphians are thinking and planning; but for the educated and industrious young colored man who wants work and not platitudes, wages and not alms, just rewards and not sermons—for such colored men Philadelphia apparently has no use.

~ W.E.B DuBois in The Philadelphia Negro (1899)

While much has changed since DuBois’s time, similarities remain. Too many jobs do not pay a living wage. And in the current state and structure of the economy, I don’t believe there are sufficient living wage jobs for everyone in this country. We live in country that relies upon low-paid labor to sweep our floors, clean our toilets and wash our dishes. We live in a global system where we rely upon low-paid labor to sew our clothes and manufacture our toys. And so the poor must always be amongst us.

There is a place for charity. But sometimes we might spend too much time trying to figure out most effective educational and training and rehab programs, and not enough time addressing the social structures that may have led to this poverty in the first place. We spend so much time trying to move individual people up the “educational ladder”—college or proper vocational training—so they can get good jobs. But many have already noted that there are too many people overeducated for their jobs. And I’m not sure if the economy will grow out of this problem.

America also likes to romanticize the individual entrepreneur both locally (Joe the Plumber) and internationally (microfinance anyone?), but worker-owned companies or cooperatives are often more effective at achieving economies of scale and lifting more people out of poverty.

Without resorting to the failed model of state ownership, could there be better ways to organize and structure work? Could we get rid of the need for janitorial staff by creating a cleaning rotation amongst office-workers? It may be inefficient, but that doesn’t make it a less appropriate way to organize work. Or, what if workers owned their companies so that they can share in the profits that their sweat and blood created? So that they are no longer just a cost to be reduced in order to increase profits.

Maimonides, a 12th century Jewish philosopher, noted that the highest degrees of charity was a business partnership (shared ownership) with a poor person. The rich board member no longer sits on the board of his fancy schmancy nonprofit/bakery, giving his large contributions (large for the nonprofit but pitiful compared to his assets), but instead starts a bakery and makes the poor black man a co-owner.

pieces of history

2009-12-20T19:47:00.000-08:00

Some people who buy used clothing become fascinated by their previous owners. They want to know why the person originally bought the item and when he or she wore it.* I usually have no interest in the “personal history” of used clothing, but earlier this week, I had my moment of historical fascination.

After picking up prescriptions, I decided to browse in this thrift store on 19th street between Market and Chestnut. I don’t even know its name, but it’s one of those “real” “hole-in-the-wall” thrift stores. The stuff is cheap, it smells funny and there was a homeless man, or atleast a man who smelled homeless, sitting in the store, talking to one of the employees.

In any case, I bought three 100% wool skirts.** All three of them had ILGWU International Ladies Garment Workers Union “Union Made” “Made in the USA” tags on them.

Founded in 1900, ILGWU was one of the most progressive and important unions in the United States, reaching its peak of power in 30s and 40s. It began to decline in the 1960s and eventually merged with two other textile unions in 90s. Aside from being a union, ILGWU was also primarily a women’s union and given its start date, it was giving women economic and political representation even before they were allowed to vote.

So I feel like I’ve brought home three little pieces of history. (In fact, I feel reluctant to take out my scissors and do my usual round of alterations). I wonder about the women who produced them. Where did they work? What were their working conditions like? Did their union involvement make them feel like they had some control over their jobs?

It’s difficult these days to find union-made clothing. “Made in China” is a far more common label. Yet buying these three old skirts reminded me that this was once not the case.

Speaking of buying stuff, please refer back to last year’s entry for sources for buying fair-trade or ethically-produced gifts. I also seem to regularly rant about labour issues.

And speaking of the holidays, here's some light and pleasant reading suggestions. I actually haven’t read most of these, but they are all on my never-ending to-read list. The first book is political philosophy about community organizing. The next two are written by journalists about working conditions in America, either based on first-hand undercover experience (Ehrenreich) or interviews and research (Greenhouse). The latter three books are written by academics. Class Acts is, if I’m not mistaken, based on participant observation and research at a luxury hotel and is primarily concerned with the relationships that develop between the rich clientele and the hotel workers. The final two are more theoretical works about the organization and structure of labour.

Reveille for Radicals (Saul Alinsky)
The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (Steven Greenhouse)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (Barbara Ehrenreich)
Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (Rachel Sherman)
The Ownership of Enterprise (Henry Hansmann)
Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Michael Burawoy)

Note: I actually wrote this entry in late November. I just haven’t had a chance to photograph the skirts and post the entry until now.
* I also hate it when people distinguish between “vintage” and “thrift” clothing. To me, used clothing is used clothing. Some items may be better quality than others and some may be older, but I don’t find clothing called “vintage” inherently more valuable than clothing called thrift. (Then again, it could be more valuable in that I could probably sell an old skirt called “vintage” for much more than thrift store skirt). It’s marketing. Vintage shop geniuses who make money off ugly 70s polyester dresses.
** I initially planned to buy two skirts, for a total of $14, but the cashier decided to give me one of the skirts for free. After buying these skirts, I noticed another skirt and decided to try it on. Unfortunately it had a small stain on the front so I decided it wasn’t worth the $10. The cashier was disappointed that I wasn’t going to buy it so he offered to sell it to me for $2. That wool fabric alone would cost me $20 to buy, so I bought the skirt. Three skirts for $8, the price of a Center City lunch. Nice! This is why I love *real* thrift stores, as opposed to pricey consignment shops.

on being feminine

2009-12-18T15:22:00.000-08:00

I occasionally like to visit the website Real Simple for recipes and organization tips. One of my secret indulgences is reading “how to organize your life” books and articles. It makes me feel like I am actually organizing my life, rather than just reading about it.*

This poll appeared on one of the side panels:

What is your favorite type of book?
a. A good mystery.
b. A heartfelt romance.
c. A historical novel.
b. A memoir.

If you haven’t noticed already, NONE OF MY FAVOURITE TYPES OF BOOKS are in this list. General journalism? Sociology? Theology? Even science fiction? I suppose I’m not Real Simple’s target audience and that I don’t have typically “feminine” tastes in books. In fact, I find it insulting that the poll suggests that women mostly like fiction (mystery, romance, historical fiction) or “emotional” non-fiction (i.e. the memoir).

But atleast the poll suggests that women read. Most women’s magazines would lead me to conclude that women are only interested in losing weight, attracting men, buying clothes, planning weddings, cooking, hosting parties and keeping a house clean. Not that male-targeted magazines are any better. What’s the tagline for Maxim again? Girl. Sports. Beer. Gadgets?

Our mainstream representation of gender is limiting and depressing. Is being feminine about shopping, watching chickflicks and dressing like Carrie Bradshaw? Is being masculine about drinking beer, watching sports, and checking out girls?

In any case, I had no particular agenda for this entry. Much like my ethnicity, I don’t often reflect on how gender affects my life and others’ perceptions of me. But it does become relevant from time to time. I especially find it amusing that I have a “masculine” personality type (INTJ), but feminine hobbies.

If you’re interested in exploring media representations of gender, Sociological Images is a great source. Check out their tag for gender. A few highlights:

Should a phone be masculine or feminine?
The infamous I’m a boy, I’m a girl books
Business Week posts a story about women hedge fund managers that mentions nothing about families or motherhood under the “Working Parents” section of their paper
The uncanny juxtaposition of girls playing with "boy" toys

Other interesting stories I’ve stumbled upon:

We use men and women’s names differently
The mockery of Twilight is a gendered mockery because it's easy to hate on teenage girls

*One of my other secret indulgences is reading “Top 10 Trends” list. I like to read them so I can conclude that all the trendy items are ugly. As a result, I can feel superior because I'm not a slave to fashion. But if I realize that some cheap shirt I picked up from the thrift store is on the list, then I can also feel superior because I own something fashionable . It’s a win-win situation! Instant smug satisfaction boost!

an ethic for knowledge

2009-12-13T18:14:00.000-08:00

The notions of 'scientific' detachment and objectivity in ethics research appear illusory at best, a betrayal of both our respondents and ourselves, at worst. Yet, if all truth is subjective and shared meanings are impossible, are we wasting our time as scholars, conducting studies to satisfy our own selfish pleasure in the discovery of the particular-- with no hope of finding something of value to say to those who inhabit the world we examine? If that is the case, shouldn't we perhaps move on to a more productive line of work-- writing fiction or making widgets?

~ Jeanne Liedtka from her article "Exploring Ethical Issues Using Personal Interviews" published in Business Ethics Quarterly Vol. 2 (1992)

Something of value to say to those who inhabit the world we examine. If I ever do become a serious researcher, that's what I hope I can do. I want to contribute to knowledge (knowledge with a lowercase k), that helps people better understand their lives. Otherwise, I might as well just knit socks, because we all know there is much weariness in the making of many books.

In any case, I finish my class on Thursday. I promise that I will post ten gazillion blog entries after that. Then again, knowing my incredible powers of concentration, I will probably post ten gazillion blog entries before my final proposal is due.

when words hide their meaning

2009-11-28T16:42:00.000-08:00

We rarely evaluate anything as morally right or morally wrong anymore. Those terms seem outdated. Many of us celebrate this cultural shift as it suggests freedom from oppressive social norms. But while we no longer resort to a vocabulary of right and wrong, our language can still speak with power and oppression.

From Edward Skidelsky, Regular Words that think for us:

Beyond inappropriate

No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.

Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called “improper” or “indecent.” An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate; a once indecent joke is now unacceptable.

This linguistic shift is revealing. Improper and indecent express moral judgements, whereas inappropriate and unacceptable suggest breaches of some purely social or professional convention. Such “non-judgemental” forms of speech are tailored to a society wary of explicit moral language. As liberal pluralists, we seek only adherence to rules of the game, not agreement on fundamentals. What was once an offence against decency must be recast as something akin to a faux pas.

But this new, neutralised language does not spell any increase in freedom. When I call your action indecent, I state a fact that can be controverted. When I call it inappropriate, I invoke an institutional context—one which, by implication, I know better than you. Who can gainsay the Lord Chamberlain when he pronounces it “inappropriate” to wear jeans to the Queen’s garden party? This is what makes the new idiom so sinister. Calling your action indecent appeals to you as a human being; calling it inappropriate asserts official power.

The point can be generalised. As a society, we strive to eradicate moral language, hoping to eliminate the intolerance that often accompanies it. But intolerance has not been eliminated, merely thrust underground. “Inappropriate” and “unacceptable” are the catchwords of a moralism that dare not speak its name. They hide all measure of righteous fury behind the mask of bureaucratic neutrality. For the sake of our own humanity, we should strike them from our vocabulary.

We speak like enlightened relativists, circumscribing our judgments within the rhetoric of tolerance. In the end, we judge everything without believing in anything.

*This reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s saying: A cynic is the one who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Being cynical, I suspect his witty phrase applies not only to cynics, but to our consumer society as a whole. We know the price of everything (and how to shop for the best price), but of value, we know little.

it's a wonderful life revisited 2008

2009-10-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from the article "The Rise and Fall of Finance and the End of the Society of Organizations" cited from the death of the corporation? on orgtheory.net:

The traditional model of banking is fairly simple: Banks gather deposits from savers, who are paid interest, and lend it to borrowers, who pay it back at a higher rate of interest.

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, banker George Bailey explains this model to his anxious depositors, who are causing a run on the bank: “No, but you . . . you’re thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then, they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?”

The best-known form of securitization is mortgage- backed bonds, in which hundreds or thousands of mortgage loans are pooled together and then divided into bonds that, by the law of large numbers, have more predictable and “safer” returns. This practice allows banks to free up funds for additional lending and generally lowers the cost of taking out a mortgage. Rather than relying on a local bank and its depositors to fund their home purchase, buyers can access funds from dispersed investors around the world via mortgage-backed securities.

A modern-day George Bailey might have a more difficult time explaining contemporary banking: “No, but you . . . you’re thinking of this place all wrong, as if I held your mortgage on my balance sheet. I sold your mortgage to Countrywide 10 minutes after we closed the deal, and they sold it along with 3,000 other mortgages to Merrill Lynch, which divided it into bonds that were bought by a Cayman Islands LLC, which bundled them together with other mortgage-backed bonds into a collateralized debt obligation that Citigroup sold to a Norwegian pension fund. Now what are you going to do? Stop making your payments and force those Norwegian retirees to go back to work?”

obscenely rich

2009-09-20T19:25:00.000-07:00

To be rich means... to live in more than one room... to own more than on pair of shoes... to have a choice of what to eat...

It’s humbling to be reminded of how obscenely rich we are.

a new species (2)

2009-09-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

I would have just twittered this article, found via orgtheory.net, but it was too good to pass up for a quick late night quotes-only blog entry:

During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

...

On today's court, the direction Justice Sotomayor suggested is unlikely to prevail. During arguments, the court's conservative justices seem to view corporate political spending as beneficial to the democratic process. "Corporations have lots of knowledge about environment, transportation issues, and you are silencing them during the election," Justice Anthony Kennedy said during arguments last week.

~ Jess Bravin

I'm sure it's a real hard guess as to who I agree with more. =)

true understanding

2009-09-14T19:47:00.000-07:00

For those who become serious scholars, the ultimate test of a good idea is the taxi-driver test. If you are on your way somewhere to present your idea and you cannot in five sentences explain what you are talking about well enough so that your taxi driver or the person in the adjacent aircraft seat can understand it and see why it’s interesting, you don’t really understand your idea yet. You aren’t ready to present it. This holds no matter how complex your idea is. If you can’t state it in everyday terms for an average person with no special interest in it, you don’t understand it yet. Even for those working in the most abstruse formalisms, this is the absolute test of understanding.

~ Andrew Abbott in Methods of Discovery

Think back to your first years in graduate school. The most mathematically complex papers required a great deal of time and effort to read. The papers were written as if to a private club, and we felt proud when we successfully entered the club. Although I copied the style of these overly complex and often poorly written papers in my first few research attempts, I grew out of it quite quickly. I didn’t do so on my own. I was lucky to be surrounded by mature confident researchers at my first academic appointment. They taught me that if you are confident in your research you will write to include, not exclude. You will write to inform, not impress. It is with apologies to my research and writing mentors that I report the following events.

The preference falsification in which I engaged was to intentionally take a simple clear research paper and make it so complex and obscure that it successfully impressed referees. That is, I wrote a paper to impress rather than inform—a violation of my most closely held beliefs regarding the proper intent of research. I often suspected that many papers I read were intentionally complex and obscure, and now I am part of the conspiracy.

~ from economist David Hakes, quoted on orgtheory.net

the recovery of virtue

2009-09-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

After many months of what appeared to be politics as usual, President Obama managed to give me hope again with his speech on Wednesday night. (And I can only hope that his rhetoric is matched with substance—integrity is after all often defined as coherence between the internal and external).

I was especially moved to hear him quote Ted Kennedy towards the end of his speech:

[Ted Kennedy] repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that "it concerns more than material things." "What we face," he wrote, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."

…

That large-heartedness - that concern and regard for the plight of others - is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.
…

And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter - that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al.) noted back in 1985, the loss of the notion of civic virtue and warned of its potential consequences. Obama’s speech suggests that we recover the value of virtue and character in our national discourse. While the concept of virtue may not give us clear answers about the size and role of government in our technologically complex society, it can atleast be a guiding principle in how we frame our public debate about how this country should be governed.

From Habits of the Heart:

We spoke of the belief of Madison and the other founders that our form of government was dependent on the existence of virtue among the people. It was such virtue that they expected to resolve the tension between private interest and public good. Without civic virtue, they thought, the republic would decline into factional chaos and virtue, and probably end in authoritarian rule. Half a century later, this idea was reiterated in Tocqueville’s argument about the importance of mores – the “habits of the heart” – of Americans.

…
As the twentieth century has progressed, that understanding, so important through most of our history, has begun to slip from our grasp. As we unthinkingly use the oxymoron “private citizen”, the very meaning of citizenship escapes us. And with Ronald Reagan’s assertion that “we the people” are a “special interest group”, our concern for the economy being the only thing that holds us together, we have reached a kind of end of the line. The citizen has been swallowed up by the economic man.

Yet this kind of economic liberalism is not ultimately liberating, for, as became quite clear with the final two visions of the public good described, when economics is the main model for our common life, we are more and more tempted to put ourselves in the hands of the manager and the expert. If society is shattered into as many special interests as there are individuals, then, as Tocqueville foresaw, there is only the schoolmaster state left to take care of us and keep us from one another’s throats.*

* I realize this quote may suggest that one-payer government-run healthcare system would be the perfect example of putting ourselves in the hands of the manager and expert and handing the disciplinary ruler over to the schoolmaster state (you know with the death panels and all). I am not inclined to read the passage in that way, especially not in the context of the book, but I will leave it up to you ponder.

instant gratification

2009-09-08T19:34:00.000-07:00

With class starting this fall (I am a teaching assistant for one course and taking another course) in addition to my full time job, I suspect this blog may fall into neglect. That being said, I want to try to update this semi-regularly. So here goes:

After working on never-ending projects with teeny tiny needles and sock-weight yarn, I’ve forgotten how quickly you can finish something if you use thicker yarn.

Project: Gretel Hat Attempt #2
Pattern: Ysolda's Gretel
Yarn: Cascade 220 in Black
Needles: Size 4 for the ribbing; Size 6 for the cable section
Size: Knit size regular but omitted rows 6-9 in the "Regular and Slouchy Only" section
After a failed attempt to knit this hat earlier this year, my second attempt turned out fairly successfully. The hat fits well, does not make my head look like a gigantic balloon, will be warm and does not clash with my coat or scarves. In my book, that counts as a success. More photos can be found here and here.

Project: Very Fetching Mitts
Pattern: Fetching on Knitty.com
Yarn: Patons Australia Merino Deluxe DK (a gift from Australia from Matt)
Needles: Size 4 circulars
Modifications: Added an extra set of cabling at the wrist.
Yet another pair of fingerless mitts to protect me from the cold that will be our house this winter. These ones are thicker, looser and cover less of my fingers than my other pair. We'll see which one ends up being more practical. This project was also incredibly quick to knit! It only took me about 4 days of regular knitting. I believe the hat took about 1-2 weeks of regular knitting.

In comparison, normal socks take me about 3-4 weeks of regular knitting. Fancy socks take about 4-8 weeks. And good old tangled yoke cardigan is probably going to take me 20+ weeks of regular knitting to make, if not more.

I guess if I like instant gratification, I should try sewing more.

*Note: Photos are courtesy of hubby whose status as a rock star has made his blog more popular than mine. I am slightly jealous. Every blogger secretly dreams that he or she can blog full time and earn a living, and then win a Pulitzer Prize for "Serial Online Commentary".

what does it mean to own something?

2009-08-24T18:58:00.000-07:00

As Matt and I adjust to renters and new neighbours, we wonder what it means for us to own a house, the pivotal piece of our private American dream. What does it mean to own something? Most would say that owning something entitles you to use it however you wish, as long as you do not harm anyone else or cross certain cultural taboos (e.g. sale of organs etc…).

But as with any concept, our understanding of ownership has been culturally determined. Nowhere is this more evident than our understanding of a corporation. Currently, a public corporation, or more precisely, a for-profit publicly-traded private company exists to increase shareholder value. What is owned serves solely the owner. And what is owned by the corporation must serve the owners of the corporation. But our understanding of corporations and of ownership was not always so, and many wish for a change.

From Habits of the Heart:

Henry Lee Higginson, a leading member of Boston’s business establishment, wrote in 1911, “I do not believe that, because a man owns property, it belongs to him to do with as he pleases. The property belongs to the community, and he has charge of it, and can dispose of it, if it is well done and not with the sole regard to himself or to his stockholders.”

The word [corporation] refers to any association of individuals bound together into a corpus, a body sharing a common purpose in a common name. In the past, that purpose had usually been communal or religious; boroughs, guilds, monasteries and bishoprics were the earliest European manifestations of the corporate form… It was assumed, as it is still in nonprofit corporations, that the incorporated body earned its charter by serving the public good… Until after the Civil War, indeed, the assumption was widespread that a corporate charter was a privilege to be granted only by a special act of a state legislature, and then for purposes clearly in the public interest. Incorporation was not yet thought of as a right available on application by any private enterprise.

~ Alan Trachtenberg

Reasserting the idea that incorporation is a concession of public authority to a private group in return for service to the public good, with effective public accountability, would change what is now called the “social responsibility of the corporation” from its present status, where it is often a kind of public relations whipped cream decorating the corporate pudding, to a constitutive structural element in the corporation itself. This, in turn, would involve a fundamental alteration in the role and training of the manager. Manager would become a profession in the older sense of the word, involving not merely standards of technical competence but standards of public obligation that could at moments of conflict override obligations to the corporate employer.

There’s a recently-created legal entity, known as the low-profit limited-liability company (L3C) that has been structured to be a business entity for the public good. While reading and hearing about the L3C, I was struck by how the language and the hype surrounding this new legal entity was rooted in pragmatism and lacked a greater moral vision.

The public good is privatized as L3C’s must “significantly further the accomplishment of one or more charitable or educational purposes,” as though “charitable or educational purposes” are but fragmented demands and desires of special interest groups. It is designed to attract program-related investments from foundations and hopefully obtain certain tax benefits.

I have yet to read anything that suggests the L3C could be part of building a moral vision of stewardship. (But if you do see anything, please let me know!) In fact, its very existence reinforces the idea that private companies and public corporations serve the private interests of their owners. That being said, I do commend the creators of the L3C for making a legal entity that could be a better vehicle for improving the common good.

Rather, what all this suggests is our collective poverty of language and imagination. We are caught in thinking in categories of for-profit, non-profit and government. And when we think about ownership, we are foolish enough to presume that our property really is ours.

*This was supposed to be a quotes-only post. Oops. I guess I like this topic a lot.
**It feels rather self-aggrandizing to bold your own text. I suppose they are my little delusions of grandeur in this little corner of the interweb. Alternatively, I could also argue that I bold text because I don't actually believe anyone will read this entire blog post...
***Sigh, time to make my mortgage payment. Ownership is only enjoyable when you get to exercise tyranny, not when you assume the liabilities.

bursting at the seams

2009-08-18T19:23:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot that I will be going up to Boston this weekend for a wedding. Aside from good times with friends, the long road trip will translate into plentiful mindless knitting time. This fall may turn out to be insanely busy on the books/words/intangibility facet of my life, so I’m trying to take advantage of these last few summer weeks to spend extra time on the tangible side of things.
On this trip to Boston, I hope to make progress on my Tangled Yoke Cardigan. I have been lusting after this cardigan ever since I started knitting almost three years ago. I have been working on it since March, even hauling it over to Europe. The sleeves are finished and I am about a third of the way up the body, so perhaps only halfway done overall. I am excited about completing the sweater, but not so much about wearing it. That’s my unfortunate gripe with knitting – there’s no instant gratification, so often by the time I finish a project, I no longer like it. My Ms. Marigold sweater vest is currently languishing in the bottom of a dresser drawer, on the verge of being donated if it weren’t for sentimental reasons (it fits small to medium, does anyone want it?), and my purple short-sleeve cardigan is experiencing the frustrations of being a short-sleeve heavy sweater, weather appropriate for only two hours out of two days of the year.

Meanwhile, I’ve been able to complete two other projects that will hopefully be more useful:
Herringbone socks for my husband which turned out beautifully despite many sloppy errors that I will choose not to disclose. The pattern and the yarn went together perfectly. As beautiful as the final sock turned out, I will never use this pattern again, because it was too annoying to knit. It requires you to knit two stitches, slip them back to the left needle, slip another stitch over, and then slip two stitches back. These socks probably took three times longer than usual to knit. The pattern also requires your full attention and yet was boring to knit. (Usually, boring things to knit don’t require attention so you can watch TV or read at the same time, while things that do require attention are quite interesting to knit).
Blue & blue endpaper mitts to keep my hands warm in the winter, since our house will be kept frigid now that we’re paying the actual heating bill. They are slightly tight, but will hopefully loosen with wear. My first colorwork project.

In examining the stitch quality of the endpaper mitts, I’ve noticed that my colourwork skills seem to atrophy quickly, so I’ve already started working on the gorgeous Selbu Modern hat in lovely lavender and white to keep up my technique. This is all with the end goal of knitting in the distant future the Autumn Rose sweater, which I now anticipate, I will no longer like once I have spent 500+ hours knitting it.

I also plan to re-complete my Gretel hat, after my previous sizing disaster. I’ve started it, but I’m currently stalled in my usual state of indecision about which size to knit.

Otherwise, once the Tangled Yoke Cardigan is complete, I may hunt for another sweater project (currently considering: Farmer's Market Cardigan, Millefiori Cardigan, Oriel Lace Blouse, Carnaby Street Pullover, Lace Cardigan, Printed Silk Cardigan and a few sweaters from Feminine Knits) but I may also get started with stash-reduction and gift and charity knitting. In this pile of lovely yarn, I see socks, lace shawls, hats and scarves! (There's actually two drawers, not just one, filled with yarn). I may even try to design something myself again. If you praise my knitting enough, you may receive something, but no promises.

In the sewing world, I finally mustered up the courage to install my walking foot and quilted two placemats. After weeks of procrastination because I couldn’t find an appropriate quilting pattern, I improvised, which proved to be easy, fun and successful.

Unfortunately, this also means I no longer have an excuse to avoid working on my Bento Box Quilt, which I started in June 2008. The quilt top is complete. I just have to sew and measure the backing and then it should be ready to quilt. I still have no idea how to quilt it beyond ‘stitching in the ditch’ (in other words, stitching along the seamlines), but hopefully if I stare at the quilt long enough, inspiration will strike.

I also need to muster up the motivation to complete this New Look halter dress, which I also began last summer. After frustrating alterations to the bust, I gave up and let the dress sit. It would be nice to be able to wear it before another autumn rolls around.

I’ve also noticed that I’m more interested in alterations to clothing, rather than sewing them from scratch. I’m not sure whether this is related to wanting instant gratification or whether there’s something intimidating about starting with just cloth and tissue paper. We shall see. Meanwhile, despite a few thrift store alteration failures, there have been a few successes. Perhaps I will post pictures in the weeks to come.

Phew! Now it felt good to get that all out! I can pretend to be all intellectual, writing about society and culture and smart stuff like that, but what really gets me going is talking about my knitting, my sewing and what I ate last night. If you don’t believe me, you can just ask my husband. He spends plenty of time listening to my endless mundane ramblings sans theoretical or philosophical musings. Or atleast I think he's listening...

nonprofit news

2009-08-18T16:08:00.000-07:00

In Dallas, Plano children’s clinic refuses county funds because of reporting requirements, which would force them to screen patients’ income and citizenship status.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s budget impasse is wreaking major havoc on Philadelphia nonprofits, including childcare centers and other social service agencies.

a new species

2009-08-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Great and rational organizations- in brief, bureaucracies- have indeed increased, but the substantive reason of the individual at large hast not. Caught in the limited milieux of their everyday lives, ordinary men often cannot reason about the great structures- rational and irrational – of which their milieux are subordinate parts. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any ideas of the ends they serve, and there is the increasing suspicion that those at the top as well- like Tolstoy’s generals- only pretend they know. The growth of such organizations, within an increasing division of labor, sets up more and more spheres of life, work, and leisure in which reasoning is difficult or impossible. The solider, for example, ‘carries out an entire series of functionally rational actions accurately without having any idea as to the ultimate end of this action’ (Mannheim, Man and Society) or the function of each act within the whole. Even Men of technically supreme intelligence may efficiently perform their assigned work and yet not know that it is to result in the first atom bomb.

~ C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, quoted previously

Whatever kind of future suburbia may foreshadow, it will show that atleast we have the choices to make. The organization man is not in the grip of vast social forces about which it is impossible for him to do anything; the options are there, and with wisdom and foresight he can turn the future away from the dehumanized collective that so haunts our thoughts. He may not. But he can.

He must fight The Organization. Not stupidly, or selfishly, for the defects of individual self-regard are no more to be venerated than the defects of co-operation. But fight he must, for the demands for his surrender are constant and powerful, and the more he has come to like the life of organization the more difficult does he find it to resist these demands, or even to recognize them. It is wretched, dispiriting advice to hold before him the dream that ideally there need be no conflict between him and society. There always is; there always must be.

~ William Whyte. Jr., The Organization Man

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when ascetism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate the worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determines the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

Since ascetism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history…

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained level of civilization never before attained.”

~ Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

on a superficial note

2009-08-16T11:53:00.000-07:00

you are what you spend

Americans can spend quite a bit of money on their beauty routines. After seeing this, I was curious to see how much I spend each year on “beauty” so I made a list.*

Makeup
Illuminare Foundation Shade Sienna Sun (once or twice a year) - $30 - $60
Powder (once a year) - $10-$20 depending on the brand
NARS Blush Shade Mata Hari (once every 3 years)- $25 or $8/year
Revlon 12 Hour Eyeshadow in Berry Bloom (once every 2 years) - $8 or $4/year (The colour looks amazing but the pigmentation isn’t great. I may buy similar colours in MAC next time around. That would bring this up to $50 probably)
MAC Fluidline in black (once or twice a year) - $18 - $36
Nailpolish (once a year) - $5
Makeup brushes (I have enough for now, because I bought a whole bunch around wedding time, but let’s say one per year) - $10-$20

Makeup total: $85-$153/year or $7-$13/month.

Hygiene
Eyemakeup remover (once a year) - $10
Facewash – usually CVS rip-off of Cetaphil though I’m using Chinatown stuff right now (once a year) -$10
Bodywash - $15/ year (I’m a sucker for stuff that smells nice)
Deodorant - Tom's of Maine (once every two years) - $5 or $2.50/year
Toothpaste - $5/year
Floss - $5/year
Toothbrush – FREE. My dental hygienist always gives me lots of toothbrushes! I once got 4 toothbrushes on one of my visits!

Hygiene total: $47.50 annually or $4/month

Hair
Hair Elastics/Bobby pins/Claw clips (if only I didn’t lose them or break them so easily!) - $10-$15
Haircut (1-2 a year) - $50-$100
Shampoo/conditioner (My husband and I use the same stuff and even though I only wash my hair twice a week and he only washes his hair once a week, I feel like we are ALWAYS BUYING conditioner) – So maybe $20-$30/year just for me?

Hair total: $80-$145/year or $6.50-$12/month

Misc
Facial moisturizer/Sunscreen - $10/year
Sunscreen - $10/year
Random chapstick/lip balm purchases -$7/year
Regular moisturizer (I am finally trying not to buy the expensive smelly kinds) - $7/year
Eyebrow wax (once or twice a year) - $10-$20

Misc total: $44-$54/year or $3.50-$4.50/month

GRAND TOTAL: $256.50-$409.50/year or $21-$34/month.

It’s a large annual total but seems reasonable on a monthly basis and not bad compared to the others who were profiled by the photographer. The large expenses are haircuts, good foundation and eyeliner. I try to buy drugstore brand as often as possible and I try to keep things very minimal—I don’t buy perfume (it’s all about asking for free samples), hair product, shaving cream, mascara (it irritates my eyes), lipstick (it rubs off in about… 2 minutes off whatever I happen to be eating or drinking at the time), concealer, toner, spot treatment, primer etc… etc…

That being said, this list does not include impulse purchases and other things I probably forgot like hand soap, cotton balls etc. I’m not sure what that would add up to—it depends on the year-- but maybe anywhere between $30-$75/year.

In any case, the prospect of posting this blog entry is making me feel exposed. At work, we frequently say that looking at someone’s finances is like going through their underwear drawer. I suppose the same applies to one’s spending habits.

* Please excuse the brand names. I had a strange urge to shamelessly promote products that I really like. As a result of deciding to do my own makeup at my wedding, I spent about a month browsing beauty stores, buying and returning products. I proudly managed to mortify a Sephora associate by buying blush the day before the actual wedding. That being said, I probably won’t buy anything from Sephora anymore because I found out that they’re owned by LVMH conglomerate. In any case, if there’s a brand name listed, it’s because they’ve got me with the whole “I really like the product/brand” loyalty thing.

of making many books

2009-08-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.

~ Ecclesiastes 12:12

Today’s elite educational institutions often seem more intent on churning out more books (publish or perish as they say), than teaching students how to become good citizens. So it was refreshing for me to stumble upon this blog entry. Below is an excerpt from sociologist Monte Bute's column in the American Sociological Association's official newsletter, written in 2004. His blog, entitled Backstage Sociologist, is worth following.

An outsider to the disciplinary canon, Alfred Schutz, developed a sociology of knowledge that poses an alternative to this elitist paradigm of practice. He distinguished between scholarship aimed at the “expert” and scholarship directed to the “well-informed citizen.” American sociologists once saw the well-informed citizen as their primary audience. Conversely, the disciplinary elite today sees fellow experts as their only audience.

How do we restore sovereignty to that large majority of sociologists who toil under a more populist paradigm of practice but remain second-class citizens within the profession? The state professional association is one important venue. As an apprentice to the craft, I found congenial homes, first in Sociologists of Minnesota (SOM), and later in the National Council of State Sociological Associations (NCSSA).

I was welcomed by colleagues who refused to be constrained by the “expert” model but were engaged in scholarships of integration, application, and teaching. I was mentored by master teachers who prided themselves in conducting three to five sections of undergraduate classes each semester, devoted to developing a sociological perspective in students who may never take another course in the discipline. These folks practiced service the old-fashioned way; a “good citizen” took on those often-thankless tasks on campus and in the community that needed doing.

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.

~ Proverbs 22:6

when words lose their meaning* (6)

2009-08-13T16:19:00.000-07:00

Christians love the word “community” and we like to use it liberally in our conversations, our blog entries and our prayers. There’s just something about the phrase “building community” that seems to justify any activity or desire.

It’s not just Christians who are fond of the word. Nonprofit mission statements often reference “serving the community”. We talk of the artistic community, the anarchist community, the gay community etc… The Internet has further nurtured the growth of various communities. For instance, sites like ravelry.com, craftster.org and personal blogs have contributed to a vibrant knitting and crafting community.

But what do we really mean when we say we build community or that we are part of a community? What is the nature of this community that we refer to? What exactly is our commitment to it? Is it just a group of people who share conveniently common interests, tastes and perhaps even religious beliefs? Or is it, or should it be, something more interdependent and inclusive?

Whereas a community attempts to be an inclusive whole, celebrating the interdependence of public and private life and of the different callings of all, lifestyle is fundamentally segmental and celebrates the narcissism of similarity. It usually explicitly involves a contrast with others who “ do not share one’s lifestyle.” For this reason, we speak not of lifestyle communities, though they are often called such in a contemporary usage, but of lifestyle enclaves. Such enclaves are segmental in two senses. They involve only a segment of each individual, for they concern only private life, especially leisure and consumption. And they are segmental socially in that they include only those with a common lifestyle. The different, those with other lifestyles, are not necessarily despised. They may be willingly tolerated. But they are irrelevant or even invisible in terms of one’s own lifestyle enclave.

Even those of us who are trying to create true community inevitably find ourselves in a lifestyle enclave:

(Wayne) sees his life as that of a full-time activist contributing to the community by organizing its members in efforts to create a more equal and just society…. It does not denigrate Wayne’s aspirations to point out that Santa Monica (where he lives) is a very special kind of place with a very high concentration of people like Wayne. Even more to the point is that Campaign for Economic Democracy activists share a lifestyle, even down to similar tastes in music, wine and food. Thus even those who would most like to think of our society in organic communitarian forms cannot avoid the lifestyle enclave as the effective social expression of our personal lives.

We say we go to a certain church because we enjoy its diversity. But when we embark on our church-shopping, we’re most likely intent on finding a church where there are like-minded people who we would enjoy spending time with.

To be fair, "most groups in America today embody an element of community as well as an element of lifestyle enclave". But it bears asking whether the activities we conceive of as “community-building” are more about lifestyle and preference than interdependence and commitment.

*Despite caring deeply about what words mean, I seem to use the wrong words ALL THE TIME. For instance, a few entries ago, I initially used the word "mulch" instead of "munch". And at home, I always say one noun when I really mean another: I'll say "cup" instead of "plate" or "downstairs" instead of "upstairs". Sigh. I have some bizarre form of verbal dyslexia.
**All italicized sections of the above blog post are from Habits of the Heart, a book that I am enjoying immensely in case you haven't picked that up yet. It might even get 5 stars.

can means justify the ends?

2009-08-12T15:54:00.000-07:00

The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”, we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere.

~ Jacques Ellul

Thus all four of the persons whose voices we have heard assume that there is something arbitrary about the goals of a good life. For Brian Palmer, the goal of a good life is to achieve the priorities you have set for yourself. But how do you know that your present priorities are better than those of your past, or better than those of other people? Because you intuitively appreciate that they are right for you at the present time. For Joe Gorman, the goal of a good life is intimate involvement with the community and family into which he happens to have been born. But how do you know that in this complicated world, the inherited conventions of your community and your family are better and more important, and, therefore, more worthy of your allegiance, than those of other communities and families? In the end, you simply prefer to believe that they are better, atleast for you. For Margaret Oldham, the goal of a good life is liberation from precisely the kinds of conventions that Joe Gorman holds dear. But what do you aim for once you have been liberated? Simply what you yourself decide is best for you. For Wayne Bauer, the goal of a good life is participation in the political struggle to create a more just society. But where should political struggle lead us? TO a society in which all individuals, not just the wealthy, will have power over their own lives. But what are they going to do with that power? Whatever they individually choose to do, as long as they don’t hurt anybody.

The common difficulties these four very different people face in justifying the goals of a morally good life point to a characteristic problem of people in our culture. For most of us, it is easier to think about how to get what we want than to know what exactly we should want. Thus Brian, Joe, Margaret, and Wayne are each in his or her own way confused about how to define for themselves such things as the nature of success, the meaning of freedom, and the requirements of justice. Those difficulties are in an important way created by limitations in the common tradition moral discourse they- and we- share. The main purpose of this book is to deepen our understanding of the resources our tradition provides- and fails to provide- for enabling us to think about the kind of moral problems we are currently facing as Americans. We hope to make articulate the all-too-inarticulate search of those we have described in this chapter to find a moral language that will transcend their radical individualism.

~ Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart

I am falling behind (2nd quarter + July books reviews)

2009-08-10T17:28:00.000-07:00

I have read around 10 books in the last quarter + July and have failed to keep up with the reviews after I read them. Buying a house, going on tour to Europe and moving may have had something to do with it. But now I am backlogged, so I will be brief.*

I had briefly considered abandoning the practice of reviewing books, but for an unapologetic skimmer like me (my favourite justification “It just wasn’t worth my time to read more closely”—blame it on the Twitter pace of contemporary life), this is critical in helping me retain atleast some small fraction of what I read.

Sociology/History
**** Forgive and Remember (Charles Bosk) ~ I was delighted to discover that one of the judging criteria (atleast according to Wikipedia) of an ethnography is “aesthetic merit”. While this book is not primarily aesthetic, it is a well-written and compelling scholarly work. It is an ethnography of surgeons-in-training, with a focus on medical error—which errors are considered normative and forgiven, and which errors are not. Bosk also reflects on his research methodology and choices.
** The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Max Weber) ~ This is perhaps one of the most quoted and most famous works of social science. Unfortunately, it can be tedious and dense to read as Weber traces the development of the spirit of capitalism from the protestant understanding of work and labour. He spends quite a bit of time explaining the different religious sects of Protestantism, setting up his question and justifying his conclusions. His most compelling chapter is the final one, entitled, “Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism”, which traces the transformation of the protestant work ethic into its modern secular instantiation.
*** The Overworked American (Juliet Schor) ~ An approachable, mostly statistics-based analysis on American work habits over the past century. Schor demonstrates that American work hours, both at home and at the workplace, have increased. Though most households have appliances such as washing machines and microwaves designed to save time, Americans now spend more or the same amount of time on housework as they did before. And generally speaking, most employees will prefer higher pay as compensation rather than more flexible or reduced hours. In addition to making these observations, Schor provides reasonable explanations: higher standards (e.g. cleanliness etc...), labour market competition, corporate incentives and consumption habits.
**** White Collar: The American Middle Classes (C. Wright Mills) ~ As always, I enjoy C. Wright Mills. In White Collar, he explores the transformation of America’s middle class from small property-owners or entrepreneurs to white collar workers, cogs in the bureaucratic corporate machine. The introduction is absolutely fantastic to read. The rest of the book is more methodical, but remains enjoyable, informative and thought-provoking. Mills describes the old middle class, the bureaucratic structures of corporations, common white collar professions, but also reflects on the changes in the meanings of work, success and status.
**** The Illusion of Freedom and Equality (Richard Stivers) ~ This book is extraordinarily well-written, easy to read and understand. Yet because of the subject matter, it requires rereading to fully absorb the extent of Stivers’ ideas. Stivers traces the transformation of Freedom and Equality as conceived by 18th century thinkers to its modern day conception. I considered trying to summarize his book in my own words, but using some of his chapter sub-headings would be more helpful. Freedom and Equality as the Modern Ideology: Freedom as Consumer Choice and Abundance, Freedom as Individual Right, Freedom as Technological Possibility, Plural Equality, Cultural and Communicative Equality. The Reality of Freedom and Equality: Freedom as Forced Consumerism, Freedom as Legal Process, Freedom as Technological Necessity, Equality as Group Conformity and Competition, Equality as Uniformity.
**** The Cold War (John Lewis Gaddis) ~ An excellent, well-written and balanced book about the cold war. Gaddis manages to be honest about America’s numerous failures and shortcomings without idealizing other countries or cultures. Gaddis also ties chapters together with thematic interpretations rather than chronological ordering. I found this book enjoyable to read and informative for someone who usually finds history books boring.
** People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (David M. Potter) ~ The beginning half of this book addresses the difficulties in assessing and describing “national character”. The second half explores how the specific characteristic of economic abundance has affected some aspects of American character. Potter indicates that his analysis is only a sampling and by no means comprehensive. He explores how the nation’s economic abundance affected democratic ideals, social mobility and consumption practices. The book’s ideas are well-thought out and fairly interesting, but there were several sections that were a bit tedious to read.
*** Organization Man (William Whyte) ~ Written in the 1950s, this book is a classic study of American middle class conformity. Whyte describes the organization man—his aspirations, his training, his workplace and his residence of choice—the suburbs. Whyte’s journalist background is evident—the book reads well, with the exception of the first section, a theoretical reflection on individualism and conformity.
*** The Power Elite (C. Wright Mills) ~ Mills describes the various cross-sections of the American elite. He explores each group’s characteristics, but focuses mostly on the influence they have in decision-making. Mills particularly highlights the close connections between corporate, military and executive power as well as the gridlock of Congressional, representative government. He asserts that most decisions that affect American lives, are made without democratic assent.
*** The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (Joan Jacobs Brumberg) ~ A historian explores the changing attitudes of girls towards their bodies by reading diaries from the 1830s to the present day. Brumberg particular highlights how girls’ relationships to their bodies were once primarily mediated by their family and relatives, while now it is mostly affected by the media and their peers.

Christian
*** Courage and Calling: Embracing Your God Given Potential (Gordon Smith) ~ I read this book over a 24-hour women’s retreat and remember that it was calming and reassuring in my never-ending struggle to figure out what to do with my life. If I remember correctly, the book explored the idea of vocation—that God calls us to specific tasks (not necessarily in the form of career) in different seasons of our life.
*** The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics (Ched Myers) ~ A set of essays on economics in God’s kingdom, reflecting particularly on what regular debt forgiveness and repatriation of land would mean in today’s society. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but it’s an excellent introduction for those interested in the topic.

Fiction
? Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (Yu Hua) ~ Sometime in April, I felt compelled to read a novel about China. There was nothing available in English so I picked up Chronicle of a Blood Merchant in Chinese, because the author Yu Hua, is known to write in very simple Chinese. Yu Hua’s other novel, To Live, which has been adapted into a movie, is one of the most depressing books I have ever read. So far, Chronicle is much more light-hearted, though not as good…. Then again, I haven’t finished reading it yet… and I’m not sure when I will. I guess I will re-review it later.
** Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi) ~ This graphic novel narrates the childhood of a girl living in Iran during the political unrest of the 1970s to 1980s. I wanted to like the novel but to be honest, I was disappointed. If this wasn’t a graphic novel written about Iran by a female, I doubt it would have gained quite as much acclaim. The story is simple narration via a child’s perspective. I found it interesting from a factual and historical perspective, but did not find it emotionally moving. It reminded me of Art Spiegelmann’s Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, but not quite as compelling.

* After completing these reviews, I noticed that very few of them were actually brief. Once I started, I guess I couldn’t stop. But I did use the same words over and over again: "enjoyed", "well-written", "tedious" etc...
** Enough with the computer screen, off to read and contemplate. I am currently munching on: Habits of the Heart.

cleaning and purging

2009-08-08T07:59:00.000-07:00

I have finally admitted that it takes me longer to figure out what to throw away than it does for me to just pack it up. Fortunately, I have discovered that it's easier to throw things out after you move, when you realize that despite moving into a larger space, there's still not enough space for all your crap.

So continues my constant struggle not to hoard, lest I become this Asian woman. (There are better photos here and here). I know I already have a tendency to hoard up plastic bags because they’re so “useful”.

Going through my stuff and living in a lower-income neighbourhood reminds me of how wealthy I am. (And it's about what you own, not just what you make). And I am trying to think about what I actually need versus what I think I need.

In addition to recognizing my wealth, I also have to acknowledge my snootiness. Apparently, I like smart people books.

Then again, what makes a good life is rarely tied with wealth or worldly achievement, but rather relationships and social adjustment. I’m sure a healthy marriage would help to that effect.

But if history and statistical research determines my life, then I may have a few more husbands in store. In the meantime, I am thankful to be in an egalitarian marriage and not an extreme complementarian one.

But I’m still glad I’m a girl, just not in the way that this book would suggest. The book now sells for $270 on Amazon.

And if you can’t get enough of learning more about your gender, you can try the Exciting Career Game for Girls. Your options are endless: model, actress, ballerina, nurse, teacher or airline stewardess! Sure beats becoming a fallen Disney princess.

And a random list:

Another call for duty and virtue
Day in the life of an elderly folks care home
American Apparel ingenuity, hipster stupidity
And censorship does not always come from the government
And as always, remember to care for the introverts in your life

life on hiatus

2009-07-13T12:27:00.001-07:00

(written last week)

After 14 days on tour with my husband’s band, it’s a bit of a shock to be back home. While the first few day were challenging, I grew accustomed to packing up my bag every morning and moving on to the next location every night. Towards the end, I felt like I could continue indefinitely. Wake up. Walk around and explore. Pack my bag. Get in the van and go on to the next location. Repeat. Again and again.

Life is simple. Everything I needed fit into one bag. The immediacy of each location kept me from worrying about the elusive future. So despite constant change and movement, and little sleep, the trip ended up being mentally refreshing.

And now I’ve returned to my boxes upon boxes of possessions, a 9-5 desk job, a mortgage, and all those other lovely American dream promises that seemed so distant while I was gone.

"centrally-administered materialism"

2009-06-07T16:13:00.000-07:00

David Warren wrote an excellent editorial in commemoration of the Tiananmen massacre and D-Day:

The Second World War ended in split decision. There was victory in the West, and nominal victory in the East, but as Churchill said, an Iron Curtain fell, and those to the east of it were abandoned to a Communist tyranny little different from the daily Nazi tyranny that had preceded the war; indeed, worse for being prolonged. Two generations were condemned to slavery: whole lives passed under the twitching thumbs of party apparatchiks, with only the briefest respites, in Berlin, in Warsaw, in Budapest, in Prague. And each of those respites, bloody.

It was a mixed result also within the West, for it seems today that we learned nothing, and the principles for which men and women once died have been progressively abandoned in our public life. Yes we have democracy, of a sort: mass democracy, and rule in the name of numbers. But the numbers have been used to establish Nanny States that deeply impinge our freedom, and to advance the very cause of atheist materialism that once marked Nazi, Fascist, and Communist regimes as exceptional.

The people of China are now passing out of the third generation of Communist tyranny. Outwardly, it has eased. The Red Chinese state has relaxed its controls over minor arrangements in everyday life, to the extent of permitting the kind of "capitalist" consumerism that can enhance its own power.

We have been left with less to choose than we think, between the two systems, for we now have centrally-administered materialism in both East and West.

The soldiers who fell in Normandy were not fighting for swimming pools and home entertainment centres. They had before them a view of the dignity of man: of things worth more than life itself. The students who stood in Tiananmen Square -- who raised the home-made statue of Lady Liberty -- did not die for the sake of cellphones, and skyscrapers in Shanghai. They faced the tanks and bullets of the "People's Revolutionary Army" with something more substantial in their hearts.

Yet the generation after them, there as here, has been largely bought off with the false promise of material prosperity. There, as here, we have agreed to become a kind of indentured labour, on the promise that we will be taken care of, cradle to grave.

Let us at least celebrate, for a moment in time, men and women who were better than we are.

But perhaps more revealing about modern China was a joke made by a Chinese visiting scholar– “Nobody’s thinking about Tiananmen in China, they’re all thinking about Gao Kao.”

Gao Kao is the National Higher Education Entrance Examination that takes place over 3 days in China every year. It is basically SAT on steroids. If I’m not mistaken, it occurs only once a year and it completely determines where one goes to college. It conveniently occurs in and around the week of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

*On an unrelated note, here are some more encouraging slopes relating to the decreasing incidence of bike casualities in NY.

the slippery slope

2009-06-05T20:38:00.001-07:00

Improved technology and more goods and services have raised the standards for what is acceptable in our culture. While there is more to choose from, we also have more to live up to. The introduction of indoor plumbing, electricity and household appliances into our homes have only pressured us to maintain higher levels of cleanliness. While wrinkles were once an accepted symptom of aging, we are now pre-occupied with anti-wrinkle creams and Botox treatments. The greater variety and availability of clothing has only raised expectations for our appearances (It’s not terribly acceptable to wear the same thing every day, unless you’re my husband. He somehow manages to get away with it).

The odd thing about the constancy of (housework) hours is that it coincided with a technological revolution in the household. When the early studies were done, American homes had little sophisticated equipment. Many were not yet wired for gas and electricity. They did not have automatic washers and dryers or refrigerators. Some homes even lacked indoor plumbing, so that every drop of water that entered the house had to be carried in by hand and then carried out again.

By 1950, the amount of capital equipment in the home had risen dramatically. Major technological systems, such as indoor plumbing, electricity, and gas, had been installed virtually everywhere. At the same time, many labor-saving appliances also came into vogue- automatic washing machines and dryers, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and freezers, garbage disposals. By the 1990s, we had added dishwashers, microwaves and trash compactors. Each of these innovations had the potential to save countless hours of labor. Yet none of them dead. In terms of reducing time spent on domestic work, all this expensive labor-saving technology was an abject failure.
…
Laundry provides the best example of how technology failed to reduce labor time... Laundry that had previously been sent out began to stay home. At the same, standards of cleanliness went up… In the (colonial) days, washing would be done once a month at most and, in many families, much less—perhaps four times per year. Nearly everyone wore dirty clothes nearly all the time. Slowly, the frequency of washing rose… Standards have crept up for nearly everything that housewives do—laundry, cooking, care of children, shopping, care of the sick, cleaning…

One 1920s housewife realized: Because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after dust that grandmother left to a spring cataclysm. If few of us have nine children for a weekly bath, we have two or three for daily immersion. If our consciences don’t prick over vacant pie shelves or empty cookie jars, they do over meals in which a vitamin may be omitted or a calorie lacking.

But we were not always like this. Contemporary standards of housecleaning are a modern invention, like the vacuum cleaners and furniture polishes that make them possible. (The culture of cleanliness) was delayed because it was expensive. The labor of colonial women was far too valuable to be spent creating spic-and-span…

~ Juliet Schor in The Overworked American

Likewise, more freedom around what parts of our body we can display has resulted in more concern for how those parts of our body appear.

By the 1920s, both fashion and film encouraged a massive “unveiling” of the female body, which meant that certain body parts-such as arms and legs- were bared and displayed in ways they never had before. This new freedom to display the body was accompanied, however, by demanding beauty and literary regimens that involved money as well as self-discipline. Beginning in the 1920s, women’s legs and underarms had to be smooth and free of body hair; the torso had to be svelte; and the breasts were supposed to be small and firm. What American women did not realize at the time was that their stunning new freedom actually implied the need for greater internal control of the body, an imperative that would intensify and become even more powerful by the end of the twentieth century… cultural pressures have accumulated, making American girls today, at the close of the twentieth century, more anxious than ever about the size and shape of their bodies, as well as particular body parts.

~ Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project

No doubt we have made progress since the early twentieth century. And while most of these accomplishments have materially improved our quality of life, we continue to expect more. Improved technology designed to make life more convenient has not given us more leisure and rest time. And more freedom to choose what we wear and how we appear, may have only increased anxiety and worry.

* Somehow I feel a bit better that my apartment is not Real Simple-worthy. There are piles of books and papers stacked up in the corners collecting dust. Our bathtub is developing a ring of soap and scum residue and I believe our sink is building a lovely layer of grime. Yes, I would like my home to be cleaner, but I’m just too damn lazy to do it myself or to nag my husband to do it. But now I can say something elitist like I’m intentionally being counter-cultural and protesting the absurd standards of hygiene in our society… or tell everyone that I’m saving the environment. But don’t we often discover that our practical decisions end up being political? We didn’t buy a car, because we’re cheap. We line-dry our clothing, because there was no room in our apartment for a dryer. We try to reduce our meat consumption, because I don’t like cooking meat…
** Did you see this study that asked households to rank appliances as luxury or necessity? Fascinating!

fashion victim

2009-06-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

Before World War I, girls rarely mentioned their bodies (in their diaries) in terms of strategies for self-improvement or struggles for personal identity. Becoming a better person meant paying less attention to the self, giving more assistance to others, and putting more effort into instructive reading or lessons at school. When girls in the nineteenth century thought about ways to improve themselves, they almost always focused on their internal character and how it was reflected in outward behaviour.

In 1892, the personal agenda of an adolescent diarist read: “Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self restrained in conversation and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”

A century later, in the 1990s, American girls think very differently. In a New Year’s resolution written in 1982, a girl wrote: “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.” This concise declaration clearly captures how girls feel about themselves in the contemporary world. Like many adults in American society, girls today are concerned with the shape and appearance of their bodies as a primary expression of their individual identity.

~ Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls

Not to suggest that life was better back in the nineteenth century, but merely to point out that we really do follow the fashions of our time. And when it appears that we have the greatest abundance of choice, we are often less free than we think we are.

confession: I like clothes*

2009-06-01T15:34:00.001-07:00

Lotus Dress

Question: Is it less superficial and materialistic to like clothes if I make them myself?

I’ve spent a lot of time recently altering and reconstructing thrift and consignment store clothing that I’ve purchased in the last few years. (In some ways, I’m on a permanent Wardrobe Refashion Pledge—I only buy used clothing). While this activity is a creative and technical process, it also conveniently gratifies my constant craving for new clothing.

I may escape some elements of shopaholism, but some minor (or major) spirit of clothing consumption still holds me captive.

In any case, I have been working on a blog post or series of blog posts relating to fashion and clothing, which may eventually see the light of the internet. As luck would have it, I got stopped on the street today, photographed in an awkward pose by SnapGlow TV from Philly.com because my outfit “was fantastic”. Now I am the laughing stock of my husband, if I wasn’t already.

* And I suppose I have to add purses and shoes to that list.
** The dress above was sewn by yours truly using Amy Buter's Lotus Dress pattern. Sewing your own clothing from new fabric is unfortunately not terribly economical. I probably spent $50 on the fabric for the dress, though there is plenty left-over. The pattern also cost about $10 or $15. Sewing clothing using fabric from thrift store clothing, however, can be quite budget-friendly.

the chief end of man...*

2009-05-31T20:27:00.000-07:00

Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for satisfaction of his materials needs.

~ Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In the words of the English historian E. P. Thompson, time became “currency: it is not passed but spent.” As employers consolidated control over their workforces, the day was increasingly split into two kinds of time: “owners’ time, the time of work”; and “their own time, a time (in theory) for leisure.’ Eventually, workers came to perceive time, not as the milieu in which they lived their life, but ‘as an objective force within which [they] were imprisoned.'”

~ Juliet Schor in The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

(The source of the last passage should be fairly self-evident. And in case there is any confusion, it is not from Philip Pullman's Golden Compass)

*and a different sort of iron cage.

sharing time

2009-05-08T19:50:00.000-07:00

A glimpse into my soul: this is a fitting representation of my computer desktop. Women’s fashion and lifestyle magazines always recommend that if you haven’t worn a piece of clothing for over a year you should throw it out. I am beginning to wonder if the same rule should be applied to half-written blog entries and articles on my computer desktop.

But seriously:

“the religious right was not good for religion”

“when scientists are silenced by colleagues, administrators, editors and funders who think that simply asking certain questions is inappropriate, the process begins to resemble religion rather than science”

“marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed”

“laws aren’t supposed to be enforced only when convenient”

And not so seriously (or perhaps, more seriously):

interactive knitting

obamanomics

the recession is great!

the course I would someday like to teach

the sociology of scrabble letters

is it uncool to hate on American Apparel?

food is the new sex

and sex still sells. especially in france.

when words lose their meaning (5)

2009-05-05T19:59:00.000-07:00

I stumbled upon Kasmeneo’s fashion photo stream via the Sociological Images blog. Kasmeneo regularly wears women’s clothing and posts photos of his outfits on flickr. While I have no objection to him wearing women’s clothing**, I am disappointed with his choice of vocabulary to express his opinion on the matter:

Fashion is one of my major hobbies… and mainstream men’s fashion is much too boring. So I take most of my clothes and shoes from the women’s department, as there’s just much more items, styles, colors, and materials to choose from.
That’s also my personal statement regarding equal rights - they include the right of clothing choice. What you see here is what I wear everyday, at work, in town, for shopping, whatever. And I hope that publishing my pics here can convince some men that nice clothes and shoes are not a girl’s privilege. It’s all there, you just have to take it - just like the girls do with our stuff.

The term “rights”, whether “equal rights” or “human rights”, is constantly co-opted for the purposes of demanding or justifying our desires. The line between our postmodern consumer wants and the “basic rights and dignities to which all humans are entitled” is gradually blurred.

I don’t know a single politician who doesn’t mention ten times a day “the fight for human rights” or “violation of human rights.” But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone towards everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights.

~ Milan Kundera, quoted in Richard Stivers’ "The Illusion of Freedom and Equality"

If right implies choice, choice suggests desire. Indeed, right as an expansionistic concept is a metaphor for desire… Rights easily become the desires that advertising presents to us as needs, the fulfillment of which is left open to our choices.

~ “The Illusion of Freedom and Democracy” Richard Stivers

* In order to keep up with trendy summer blockbuster movies (Terminator Salvation, Star Trek) I am officially rebooting this series.
** To be fair, he makes the clear point that women do wear men’s clothing and it would be unreasonable to impose a double standard for matters of fashion. Furthermore, he actually pulls off the look fairly well. I really don't think men look that bad in skirts.

my destiny*

2009-05-03T18:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like I will spend my entire life longing to go back to Torres del Paine.

It’s been over a year since Matt and I flew halfway around the globe and trekked Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. The memory of being there – instead of fading with time--- has grown to mythical proportions.

I think about the place a lot. I can still hear the thunder of ice breaking off from the glaciers during the night. The stream water still tastes refreshingly cold. And I remember that even though I felt exhausted each night from the hours of hiking, I felt restored and cleansed from breathing the fresh air. But I most vividly remember the sense of awe I felt as I was surrounded by the towering mountains and endless pampas. Confronted with something I had no category to understand, I felt small and frail. And yet, I felt safe and comforted within something so much greater than myself.

There are very few times in my life where I actually behold the immensity of God’s power. And when I do, I long to live those moments again.

* This entry is melodramatic. Except it’s not. I actually feel this way.
** Photos were taken by Matt. More of his photos can be found here. Maybe I'll post some more on my flickr photostream, but it will have to compete against my knitting pictures for bandwidth. It'll be a tough battle.

late night thoughts

2009-05-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

David Brooks' article Genius: The Modern View echoes the great words of wisdom of Thomas Edison: Genius is one percent inspiration and 99% perspiration. Genius is not produced by inherent, divine talent, but by methodical practice. Which is to say, that my aspirations to be come a world-famous writer will not be realized unless I blog more often :P.

But seriously, my knitting has improved significantly since I first started over two years ago, but I spend anywhere from half an hour to three or four hours knitting every day. To be fair, most of those hours are spent knitting during movies or Star Trek The Next Generation episodes, but I am still practicing. It makes me wonder: How would the quality of my ideas and communication improved had I made a similar commitment to writing?

If Edison's words are true, then I am not sure if we are to be encouraged or discouraged. It is encouraging to know that anyone with slightly above-average skill in some area can become a "top performer", but it is discouraging to confront the amount of time and discipline required to develop that excellence. It makes me wonder if it's too late for me to excel in any area and to reverse my current trajectory of becoming jack of all trades and master of none. But it also makes me wonder how much is it worth sacrificing to become the best of the best?*

* A professor once told my friend that she was capable of becoming a leading history scholar. She would just have to pick a good area and master everything written on that topic. Of course, her research may also require her to spend several months away from her family each year. Not an easy price to pay.

I'm yellow!

2009-04-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

and I like yellow butterflies

I have neglected this blog. I suffer from on average month-long writer’s block and this recent one has lasted longer than usual. Perhaps I’ve been distracted by more immediate things—work, house-buying ambivalence, obsessive knitting and hemming my ten gazillion skirts that are too long and hit me at the unflattering mid-calf length. Garbage in garbage out, so I suppose I can complain about nonprofit bureaucracy or ramble at length about the lengths of my dresses, but I won’t put you through that torture. That’s reserved for my husband (who is quite wonderful in case you were wondering).

Today I stumbled upon the Circle Ventures (somehow related to Circle of Hope church) blog post on white guilt concerning this history of the United States with regards to African Americans. It reminded me of how foreign America’s history is to me—the American Revolution, the westward expansion, the Civil War, the Great Depression, WWII, the Vietnam war – all this could be the history of another country. The history of my “nation” is a jumble of Communist and Cultural Revolution stories, the fall of the Berlin wall via our TV set in British Columbia (mildly upsetting because I wasn’t allowed to watch cartoons), Quebec separatism and a president south of the border notable for his extracurricular engagements. When I watch British or American period movies, I might as well be watching a movie about Sri Lanka, or Chile or Malawi.

My ethnicity, my family culture, whatever convenient label you might want to use, pops up in surprising but subtle ways. My husband and I have a now-resolved dispute about the “magic realism” in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (one of my favourite books by the way…), most notably the yellow butterflies that follow around a character in the novel. These yellow butterflies offend my husband’s rational, INTJ sensibilities! For him, they are excessive ornamental flourishes because insufficient information is given to determine what they might mean or symbolize. And I know of a few others who feel the same way. But for me, it completely makes sense that this magic is embedded in the way of narrating a story or of seeing reality and no explanation is needed. While my family did not subscribe to Chinese folk stories, my mother practiced Chinese medicine. In the world where I grew up, sticking needles in a person’s face can relieve paralysis, too much “yang” in my system caused my colds and feeling one’s pulse could discern temperaments and long-term illnesses. And for the most part, I hold that all of this is true. Not true in the Western, rational, scientific sense, but true in another sense. We believe in truths in different ways. And so the fact that the yellow butterflies in the Marquez’s novel didn’t mean anything per se, never bothered me, because it corresponded with my cultural hybrid way of seeing (I can’t believe I just used the word hybrid...).

It’s funny how I’ve come to embrace my Chinese-ness recently, as I generally dislike acknowledging my ethnic background. I’ll smile if someone asks me about China, but the moment someone says something along the lines of: “Maybe you do that because you’re Chinese”, the smile becomes forced and my irritation becomes palpable. I will stiffen even more if someone says something like “You need to understand how being Chinese impacts who you are.”

This annoyance may stem from reading far too many “What’s my identity” “I’m a hybrid” minority novels in college (some of which were actually excellent), but it is primarily a strong reaction against the expectation that I must understand who I am in the context of my ethnicity. White people are not confined to conceive of their identities in terms of their ethnicity, then why must ethnicity be my starting point? What if my race is not the defining characteristic of who I am? Why must we limit the driving factors of our formation to race, gender and class when there may be influences that matter far more?

But I’m lucky. Because though I might occasionally receive awkward comments and rude questions, I have not been significantly marginalized because of my ethnicity. Fortunately for me, the privileges of education and wealth were also handed down to me along with my skin colour at birth. And so I am here and not elsewhere. And this is who I am, not someone else. Mostly Canadian-American well-educated wealthy Christian but with bits of Chinese weaved into the holes.

There I did it! My crowning contribution to minority literature. New genre: Chinese Canadian American. CCA literature. Memoirs of my childhood amongst huckleberry bushes, chopsticks, francophones, and ice rinks. Maybe they will even have a CCA studies department!

another first quarter

2009-04-04T21:02:00.001-07:00

I noticed that every book I’ve read this quarter is one that I physically own. Our post-marriage bookshelf (or more appropriately, our bookshelves plus random piles of books), are a gold mine, especially after Christmas, birthdays, routine trips upon my insistence to the Last Word Bookstore and a year of using Paperbackswap. Two books are missing from this photo because they are at my office. I’ve started keeping personal books at my office, because there’s really no space in our current apartment. Sigh. (Wait, three books are missing. I suppose one has just been misplaced....)

Seeing all these books stacked on top of one another reminds me of how much I love the physicality of books—the binding, the texture of the cover, the smell of the pages. Hannah Arendt describes the printed book as the “transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things,” something that is lost in the gadgetry of Kindles and the liquid crystals of internet text. From Christine Rosen’s People of the Screen:

As he tried to train himself to screen-read—and mastering such reading does require new skills—Bell made an important observation, one often overlooked in the debate over digital texts: the computer screen was not intended to replace the book. Screen reading allows you to read in a “strategic, targeted manner,” searching for particular pieces of information, he notes. And although this style of reading is admittedly empowering, Bell cautions, “You are the master, not some dead author. And that is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master”; you should be the student. “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,” he observes.

So for now, no Kindle for me. Let me submit to the mastery of the printed text! I’m already susceptible to skimming. Besides, I don't get along with gadgets-- I drop my cell phone frequently and lose it for days on end...

In any case, in the past, I usually review books right after I read them. This time around, I procrastinated and ended up writing most of these in the last two weeks, so they may be a little lacking in quality. At the very least, I hope they can give you an idea of what the book is about and whether or not you might want to read them. Italicized books are the ones that I did not finish.

Rating scale from Goodreads
* didn’t like it
** it was ok
*** liked it
**** really liked it
***** it was amazing

Fiction

* or ** The Tin Drum (Gunter Grass) ~ I wanted to like this book, as it’s been compared to two of my other favourites: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. With a trip to Europe planned for the summer, I was also excited to learn about Poland and Germany, as the novel recounts a midget drummer’s childhood and coming of age during the Nazi’s rise and fall of power. But what can I say? I didn’t really like the book. The novel’s language lacked the narrative fluidity that made me love the other two novels (perhaps because it was originally written in German?). The novel’s surreal details were less magic realist (which resonates more with me) and more absurdist in the line of Pynchon (which perhaps because of my cultural background, doesn’t make any sense to me). The novel had several funny and/or insightful passages and I can understand why it has been acclaimed as one of the greatest pieces of German literature since World War II, but to be honest, I can’t say I enjoyed reading it very much.

*** China Men (Maxine Hong-Kingston) ~ I didn’t really get into this book as much as I had hoped. I wrote on Maxine Hong-Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as my senior thesis so I am familiar with her work and style. Hong-Kingston weaves together myth and fact as she recounts the stories of Chinese male immigrants to the United States, from as early as the gold rush and railroad construction to the 1990s. The narratives are detailed, vivid and suggest a mythical historical memory. Her descriptions of the railroad construction by Chinese men and the confusion of the Communist revolution are particularly compelling, but some of the latter stories in the novel were less interesting.

**** Beasts of No Nation ~ After reading the first chapter, I wasn’t expecting to like the book. It was very “loud”, full of yelling and violence and what you’d normally expect from a book about child soldiers. Fortunately, the book did not turn out to be the usual narrative about the horrors of war. Instead, the book explores the psychology of a child soldier amidst the violence of war. What does it mean for someone so young to kill? What does it mean to be both perpetrator and victim?

*** Black Hole (Charles Burns) ~ This graphic novel depicts the spread of a mysterious STD amongst high schoolers in Seattle in the 70s. The disease manifests itself in bizarre physical mutations—tails, mouth, peeling skin etc… The graphic novel is as much as about the initial AIDS as it is about high school social politics, isolation, boredom and rebellion. The artwork is also remarkable as the drawings are also entirely done in black and white strokes (no gray-scale). As a warning for those who are sensitive, the novel has graphic depictions of male and female genitalia.

Non-Fiction

**** On Writing Well (William Zinsser) ~ The first section of the book covers general principles for writing well, while the second section describes guidelines for specific types of writing, including business writing, sports-writing, memoir-writing etc.. The book helped me think about how I can better improve both my business writing, my blog writing and my elusive in-my-head magazine articles that have never actually been written. It is also very enjoyable and readable—much less dry than Strunk’s Elements of Style, which I don’t think I ever finished reading.

***** Engaging the Powers (Walter Wink) ~ I haven’t had a five star book in awhile, but this book definitely qualifies as such. Walter Wink writes about the domination system of the world and the spiritual interiority of institutions. Though Wink may fall on the more liberal end of scriptural analysis, his ideas concerning the spiritual core of institutions and the role they play in society, the significance of Christ’s death and the power of nonviolent action provide a much more comprehensive understanding of the world.

*** Reclaiming Capital: Democratic Initiatives and Community Development (Christopher Gunn) ~ Similar to his other book Third Sector Development, Gunn explores ways to reclaim capital for investment and use within a community. To set the context, Gunn describes the way in which capital is internationally mobile and flows to the area of greatest return. Communities who wish to attract firms often do so at their own detriment—lax labour and environmental standards or tax incentives. Frequently, firms who do locate within a community do not provide the benefits promised. For instance, Gunn assesses how little of the economic benefits generated by the opening of a new MacDonald’s restaurant are actually retained by the community. For the rest of the book, he describes the efforts of different community institutions in reclaiming capital for improving their own communities. This book is clear and well-written even for those unfamiliar with economics or development. It is an excellent introduction for thinking more critically about how capital flows in the world and how it affects different communities.

**** Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (William Webb) ~ Through the examination of three controversial issues in the church historically and/or currently, Webb provides a framework for “the hermeneutics involved in distinguishing that which is merely cultural in Scripture from that which is timeless." He presents a set of 18 or so criteria that can help us determine how scripture texts apply to our current context. He explains each of the criteria and then assesses the three controversial issues in his title in light of those criteria. While his final conclusions on the three controversial issues are important, the book is most valuable for providing anyone with a framework of distinguishing what is cultural and what is transcendent in scripture.

** The Financial Ascent of Money (Niall Ferguson) ~ When I read non-fiction books, I tend to get irritated at the author’s tone after about 100 or so pages. It was a bad sign when I got annoyed at the Ferguson’s writing style after about one paragraph. He writes like a slick modernist, one that firmly believes in greatness of our Western cultural and economic trajectory. However, I decided to give the book a chance and ended up reading/skimming most of it. It turned out to be okay. I expected the book to be focused on currency specifically, rather than all sorts of financial instruments. The book covers the historical development of bonds, stock exchanges, insurance, real estate and derivatives (including the crash of Long Term Capital management). Ferguson’s final chapter describes the influence of finance on the British empire and international relations, including the recent development of Chimerica (China + America). Ferguson goes into great narrative detail describing specific events and/or people—not surprising given that he is a historian. I don’t think he goes into sufficient detail in explaining how the different financial institutions and instruments work. As someone with a business education (is that an oxymoron?), it was okay for me to understand but it may be more challenging for someone who isn’t as familiar with these terms. Not bad, not great. The writer’s tone also became slightly less annoying over the course of the book. He makes a good point of indicating that despite all our mathematical models, our current form of capitalism is subject to extreme volatility—bubbles and crashes—and that history may be as important a lesson as statistics.

*** Eichmann in Jerusalem (Hannah Arendt) ~ I expected this book to be a philosophical and psychological exploration on the nature of evil, but it turned out to be more about the trial of Karl Eichmann in Jerusalem and a historical overview of his rise to power and his orchestration of Jewish deportation in each of the German-occupied nations. The book reads tediously at points, but other sections are fascinating—the Denmark resistance to Nazi orders, the significance of Eichmann’s kidnapping from Argentina by the Israeli Mossad, the desire for Eichmann’s sentence to deliver justice not just for the crimes for which Eichmann was individually responsible but for also for all Nazi crimes against Jews, and the contested fairness of a trial where the judge was Israeli and no defense witnesses were available because no former Nazi would come to testify in Israel. The last chapter provides the best overview and commentary of the trial, with a particular focus on legal and judicial philosophy. If you don’t want to read the whole book, but are interested in the ideas—I would suggest reading the last chapter.

**** Money and Power (Jacques Ellul) ~ From the title, I thought this book would be about people with money and power. However, the book could be more appropriately named the power of money. Ellul first explores wealth in the Old Testament. He examines instances when God used wealth as a reward or blessing, emphasizing that the riches were a gift and a material demonstration of God’s power. Ellul then elaborates on how Jesus completely transforms our relationship to money, especially as He becomes the “Poor One”. Why are the poor amongst us? How must we relate to them? Ellul’s final conclusions are challenging—that Christians should not be in the practice of saving or hoarding, and that everything beyond what they need should be given away. This practice allows one to be freed from serving Mammon (the system of selling and buying) and to “enter” the kingdom of God, where grace and giving reign.

** The People’s History of the United States of America (Howard Zinn) ~ I had read some excerpts from this book earlier and enjoyed them and was hoping for a insightful critique of the mainstream reading of American history. However, the book (or atleast the parts I read) seemed to list the usual liberal grab bag of events and facts combined with a hefty dose of lefty rhetoric. While a decent introduction to the injustices committed by America to its own people and to others, I don’t think the book provided any astute or significant commentary on either American history or the writing of American history.

*** Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (Mike Davis, Daniel Bertrand Monk, editors) ~ This book is a compilation of essays on the urban and spatial developments of the wealthy in the world. I have read about half the essays-- most of them elucidate not just the stark contrast between the rich and the poor, but also the economic, social, environmental and moral cost of these “dreamworlds” to the poor and to humanity.

**** Commager on Tocqueville (Henry Steele Commager) ~ Despite a somewhat self-preoccupied and unenticing title, the book is excellent. Commager assesses American history in the last century through the set of questions raised by Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French aristocrat who wrote about America in Democracy in America. Tocqueville primarily was concerned with democracy – especially the tensions raised between liberty, order and equality. He examines issues of slavery and justice, centralization and democracy, military vs. civil power and political equality and economic inequality in America.

fruits of my labour

2009-04-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

In the case of the white-collar man, the alienation of the wage-worker from the products of his work is carried one step nearer to its Kafka-like completion. The salaried employee does not make anything, although he may handle much that he greatly desires but cannot have. No product of craftsmanship can be his to contemplate with pleasure as it is being created and after it is made. Being alienated from any product of his labor, and going year after year through the same paper routine, he turns his leisure all the more frenziedly to the ersatz diversion that is sold him, and partakes of the synthetic excitement that neither eases nor releases. He is bored at work and restless at play, and this terrible alternation wears him out.

~ C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes

As white-collar worker in a nonprofit institution (which inevitably has its bureaucraucies), I understand my craving and my need for my manual creation. A desire to touch and hold the product of my labour—to contemplate it with pleasure. To partake in an activity that is not mere diversion, but creation that eases and releases. A comfort from the haunting sense that my work is disappearing into a labyrinth of papers, emails and electronic files and meetings.*

Finished product:
Collared Wrap from Sally Melville's the Knitting Experience Book 2: The Purl Stitch. Knit as a mother's day gift. I can't say I enjoyed four months of knitting with dull green worsted-weight acrylic wool. But I am so pleased with the final result that I am tempted to make the same item for myself...

Finished product:
Garter Rib socks from Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks
Knit as a father's day gift. I am concerned that these socks are going to be too big for him.... but he will probably wear them anyways. Aren't fathers great?

* Though for the record, for the most part, I do believe my work is valuable. I just have occasional melodramatic days. :) Or perhaps, I posted this to have an excuse to present pictures of my knitting-- Why must the intangible justify the tangible? Actually, to be honest, I'm just crazy about C. Wright Mills. Everytime I read something by him, I end up highlighting every other sentence and resisting the urge to type up his entire book in a blog entry...

the inverse kingdom

2009-03-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

Traditionally, creditors wielded more power than debtors. Creditors charged exorbitant interest, resorted to intimidation and violence, and seized land and possessions of their debtors.

Strangely enough, today in America, if you’re willing to take a loose definition of creditor and debtor, the debtors often wield more power than the creditors. This idea was suggested in Jacques Ellul’s Money and Power in application to the modern corporation: … the ancient reality of the superiority of the creditor. Obviously in our society, the debtor is often much more powerful than the creditor. The corporation cannot be compared with the hundreds of shareholders who compose it.

To further complicate matters, the corporation is not an individual and a corporation does not just consist of its shareholders or its board of directors or its employees. It takes on a life and a spirit of its own. And then we find ourselves faced with an unwieldly monster whose actions and decisions can have enormous impact on our lives.

The injustice of the debtors’ superiority is what angers us so much about the AIG bonuses as billions of taxpayer dollars trickle into the banking system.* I feel sympathy for Edward Liddy and those who received bonuses who were not directly responsible for credit default swap transactions that were the downfall of AIG.** Yet I am also outraged at the debtor’s entitlement—but it’s not Edward Liddy nor the bonus recipients who are the actual debtors to America, it’s AIG the corporation. And how do we understand how AIG’s employees are both part of and yet distinct from the corporation? And as a result, though they may have no personal wrongdoing related to the credit default swaps, they may have to uphold the moral responsibility of a powerful debtor before less powerful creditors.

So for better or for worse, the 90% tax may get passed and we may feel a little bit better.*** But the larger problems still remain unsolved…

* Compared to the total amount lent to AIG, the bonuses were a drop in a bucket. Dealing with large amounts of money can have two contrary psychological impacts—either you start penny pinching and counting every little cent or you figure since the debt is so large, little savings won’t make a big difference in the long run. Clearly in this case, the American public as the creditor feels the former. No creditor would like to see a debtor living the good life if there is no evidence of repayment.
** I’m sympathetic to the fact that many of them are the wrong target of the angry mob. That being said, I personally find large bonuses rather distasteful wherever, but that stems from a larger critique of American capitalism and compensation.
*** Has it been passed already? I don’t think I’ve been paying that close attention to the news in the last few days.

the tyranny of private enterprise

2009-03-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

History has always been one of the hardest subjects of me to understand. It’s either a muddle of events that I cannot understand or a simplistic narrative that I do not believe. Perhaps I relate to how Hayden White sees historical narrative: “translations of facts into fictions” as “the events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and highlighting of others”.

The motives and actions of presidents and prime ministers, of ambassadors and representatives. The handshakes made behind closed doors and the secret chain of command through bureaucractic institutions. What story can you spin out of the sparse paper trail of letters, memos and communiqués? Or out of Obama’s Blackberry log? What do you believe?

I have been making an effort to learn history better, since I have been, historically, rather ignorant of it, precisely because I couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t until I read two books, the Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills and funny enough, the children’s book , A History of US All the People that history finally began making sense.*

These books presented history or insisted that we study history from a more sociological standpoint—looking at the impact of historical events on the consciousness of individuals in society. I don’t really care about what country was a world power or what conferences and negotiations took place, but I am fascinated about how people living in that country felt amidst the whirlwind of headlines and changes. And recently, I’ve also become intrigued by what history has to say about various philosophical questions: How do you reconcile order and liberty? Equality and freedom? Justice and law?

This newfound fascination came as a result of a book recommended to me by my husband, called Commager on Tocqueville (one of the benefits of marriage is that you get more books and if you’re lucky, your husband has similar tastes to yours). Despite a somewhat self-preoccupied and unenticing title, the book is excellent. Commager assesses American history in the last century through the set of questions raised by Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French aristocrat who wrote about America in Democracy in America (who I vaguely recall having to read in my US AP History class). Tocqueville primarily was concerned with democracy – especially the tensions raised between liberty, order and equality. In Commager’s words:

Would democratic majorities destroy liberty? Would centralization of power, which democracy made almost inevitable, prove incompatible with liberty? Would individualism—so ruthlessly being exercised on the vast North American continent- be compatible with either democracy or with liberty? And what of justice? There can be no liberty without justice and no justice without order. Can individualism tolerate order? Can democracy be trusted to safeguard justice?

Published in 1993, Commager’s conclusions still speak relevantly to what is happening today:

... in the interaction between two forces that (Tocqueville) himself thought the most powerful: majority rule and individualism. He was fearful that majoritarianism would take over the surrender to its natural propensity for tyranny with catastrophic consequences. In that event, it was not the majority that imposed its will on desperate minorities, but the spirit of individualism and private enterprise that permeated majorities and persuaded or seduced them into supporting even the most extreme manifestations of private enterprise. The danger today is no more from majority tyranny than it was in the 1930s when Tocqueville first sounded the alarm. It is rather in that excess of virtue of individualism that we now call private enterprise, but which is no longer private but public, and which, for that matter, is no longer very enterprising. The operation of military-industrial-financial-labor-academic-scientific complex is an example of this. This group or complex does not constitute a majority, but it appears to represent a majority. And to speak for it, it does not formally exercise what we call tyranny, and as for all its triumphs and conquests, these have been brought about legal means and are not therefore tyrannical. But its character and conduct takes on more and more the character of tyranny. In all this, Tocqueville’s fears may yet be vindicated.

I wonder how history will write this past year—the demise of banking as we know it, the economic crisis, the first black president, the new uneasy alliance between banks and government.... What is happening? What does it mean? And how does all of this make us feel? Do we feel powerless as each company announces its own round of layoffs? Do we feel hopeful because there is now a president who seems to be intelligent and concerned about the people and because we may be able to rebuild new and better institutions? Or do we feel angry, ready to charge forth with our pitchforks and flames, because this military-industrial-financial-labor-academic-scientific-governmental complex has failed to demonstrate that it knows what it is doing, though it has justified its privilege and power on that very basis?

*So I am attempting to link to Goodreads more often, rather than Amazon. After all my ranting and railing about large corporations and all my lamenting about the demise of small bookstores, I really should stop giving Amazon free advertising. At the very least, I should sell out and have them pay me.
** For a progressive/liberal reading of American history, I recommend Commager on Tocqueville over Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States of America. This post was originally intended as a rant against Howard Zinn, but I decided to write something more positive instead…

America's welfare state

2009-03-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

“the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world… multitude of men… incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives…”

“That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild… It seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking all the trouble of living… It does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

“…everyone wants to be free; everyone wants to eat… Everyone does indeed want to be free: free from bureaucratic control, free from burdensome taxation, free to exercise and enlarge the area of private enterprise. Everyone does indeed want to eat: the poor want welfare, the aged want security, the ill and the handicapped want medical care, parents want education for their children, consumers want protection.. The rich, too, want to be fed. They believe in private enterprise and delude themselves that corporations are somehow private rather than the product of very special privileges granted by the state and to be enforced by the state… When coal miners are in trouble they recommend government takeover. When railroads and airlines are in trouble they persuade the government to subsidize them, at least the bankrupt ones… We have developed not only a welfare state with all of its bureaucracy for the poor, but a welfare state for corporations and business interests as well. Clearly the most completely socialized ingredient in our economy is not the poor who are on welfare, but the complex that President Eisenhower first publicly identified as the military-industrial, which we can now see embraces as well labor, banking, the scientific community, and the academy. If these want governmental protection and aid, as clearly they do, they must take for granted big government, big bureaucracy and centralization. Those who yearn to diminish the powers of government must learn to lower their expectations from government, to restrain their demands on nature, to temper their insistence on endless growth and progress that is almost entirely material.”

~ Henry Steele Commager, Commager on Tocqueville, 1993

*I’m really scraping as far as blog posts are. I just can’t bring myself to write anything. I did, however, like my husband, cave in and start a twitter account. I have yet to determine whether or not I will update it regularly or whether or not I like the whole affair. It feels all a bit too suspiciously trendy to me, but perhaps 150 character posts will be more palatable to my creative tendencies. It also fondly reminds me of those good old AIM profiles and away messages I used to check. I guess Twitter is its syndicated version.

the inflection is near

2009-03-09T17:06:00.000-07:00

I feel like I haven't posted anything substantial here in awhile. In any case, Thomas Friedman wrote an excellent Op-Ed in the New York Times about this recession marking an inflection point in the way that we think about the economy. (I suspect that you've already read it since it's currently Number 1 on the popularity list for "Most emailed"). Perhaps in the future, we will no longer measure the health of the economy in terms of growth, but rather in terms of flow (sustainability and reproduction). Friedman has a way of finding witty little catchphrases and analogies to describe current events, which for some reason I find annoying, despite the fact that they are generally intelligent and helpful in explaining the matter at hand. Perhaps I am jealous :P

In any case, now that I am done rambling, here are some notable excerpts from the article:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,” he wrote me. “No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.” We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

speedy swallowtail shawl

2009-03-01T12:11:00.001-08:00

It’s been hard, but I’m trying to rely less on knitting patterns. Browsing blogs and ravelry and knitting magazines, I am always finding pattern after beautiful pattern that I would like to knit. It's much easier to follow a pattern without thinking, than it is to try to design something on my own..

But I'm trying to challenge myself to design my own patterns. To do the tedious swatching, the fussy calculations and force myself to learn the basic architecture of different garments instead of relying upon printed instruction. My hope is that it can move my knitting more away from the realm of passive consumption (more patterns, more books, more yarn) to the realm of active engagement and creation.*

So here’s my first design-- though to be honest, it’s really just a pattern alteration. More photos can be found on its ravelry page. My grandma has been very sick in the hospital and I needed something quick to knit up to give to her as a gift. Taking inspiration from Ysolda’s Ishbel, and the Wool Peddler’s shawl, I kept the majority of this shawl plain, but added in the border and edging from the Swallowtail Shawl, a row of gathered stitches (inspired by the Miranda Triangle Shawl from Knitted Lace of Estonia) and some garter rows for distinguishing the different patterns. I thought this would take me atleast a month but I finished in about 10 days! Thanks to season 1 of Star Trek and my need for distraction from my ongoing crisis about what to do with my life.

The pattern instructions are below. In order to follow them, you also need to download the Swallowtail Shawl pattern from Evelyn Clark's website.

Gathered stitches (worked over 3 stitches)
K3tog but do not slip these stitches from the left needle, yo, then knit the same 3 stitches together again, then slip all 3 stitches from left needle. (From Knitted Lace of Estonia)

Follow Swallowtail instructions up until the end of row 6. Be sure to place marker where indicated on the chart.

Starting row 7:
On all RS rows: Knit 2, YO, Knit until Marker, YO, slip marker, Knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit until last 2 stitches, YO, Knit 2.
On all WS rows: Knit 2, Purl until last two stitches, knit 2

Knit until you reach 207 stitches, ending on a RS row (207 stitches - 1 middle stitch + 103 stitches on each side)

Next WS row: knit 2, purl 1, knit until 2 before the marker, purl 1, purl 1 (center stitch), Slip marker, purl 1, knit until 3 from the end, purl 1, knit 2

RS row: Knit 2, YO, Knit until Marker, YO, slip marker, Knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit until last 2 stitches, YO, Knit 2.

WS row: Knit 2, Purl until last two stitches, knit 2 –> you should end with 211 stitches (1 middle stitch + 105 stitches on each side)

RS row: Knit 2, YO, knit 2, make gathered stitches until 2 stitches before the marker, knit 2, YO, slip marker, knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit 2, work gathered stitches until the last 4 stitches. Knit 2, YO, knit 2. --> you should end with 215 stithces (1 middle stitch + 107 stitches on each side)

WS row: Knit 2, purl until last two stitches, knit 2.

RS row: Knit 2, YO, Knit until Marker, YO, slip marker, Knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit until last 2 stitches, YO, Knit 2. --> 219 stitches

WS row: knit 2, purl 1, knit until 2 before the marker, purl 1, purl 1 (center stitch), Slip marker, purl 1, knit until 3 from the end, purl 1, knit 2

RS row: Knit 2, YO, Knit until Marker, YO, slip marker, Knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit until last 2 stitches, YO, Knit 2. --> 223 stitches

WS row: Knit 2, Purl until last two stitches, knit 2

You are now ready to begin the Lily of the Valley Border 2. You should 223 stitches on your needles. The chart has you working the pattern over 219 stitches to begin with. In order to adjust for the extra four stitches in each row, knit an extra stitch in the following places in the chart:
- After the first YO
- Before the YO right before the center stitch
- After the YO right after the center stitch
- Right before the last YO

Purl these extra stitches on the wrong side row and place them in the same locations on the RS row.
The pattern will not be noticeably different.

After completing Lily of the Valley Border 2, you should have 243 stitches on your needles.

RS row: Knit 2, YO, Knit until Marker, YO, slip marker, Knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit until last 2 stitches, YO, Knit 2. --> 247 stitches

WS row: knit 2, purl 1, knit until 2 before the marker, purl 1, purl 1 (center stitch), Slip marker, purl 1, knit until 3 from the end, purl 1, knit 2

Now you are ready to begin the Peaked Edging chart. You will have 247 stitches on your needles instead of 239 as called for in the pattern. In order to adjust for the 8 extra stitches, make the following adjustments. It helps to mark it on your chart—it will make it a lot more easy to understand.

All WS rows: just purl the extra stitches.

For rows, 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 of the chart, knit 2 extra stitches:
- After the first YO
- Before the YO right before the center stitch
- After the YO right after the center stitch
- Right before the last YO

From rows 11, 13, 15, work additional stitches as following:
- Knit one extra stitch after the first YO
- Knit one extra stitch after the first sk2p
- Knit one extra stitch before the sk2p right before the center stitch
- Knit one extra stitch before the YO right before the center stitch
- Knit one extra stitch after the YO right after the center stitch
- Knit one extra stitch after the sk2p right after the center stitch
- Knit one extra stitch before the last sk2p of the row
- Knit one extra stitch before the last YO of the row.

This adjustment will make the peaked edging slightly wider on the side and center peaks, but is not very noticeable.

For the RS row before the bind off,
K2, yo, k9, yo, k1, *yo, k7, yo, k1; repeat from * until 11 stitches remain, yo, k9, yo, k2.

Bind off as indicated in the pattern.

*This is not to say that I won’t knit any commercial patterns at all—in fact, there is still a lot I need to learn from them and I will probably still rely heavily on them—but I need to delve into them deeper and understand them better. What exactly distinguishes the different cast-on techniques? How does a short row work? How does this pattern writer construct a sweater? What are alternate ways to do it?
** Speaking of exercises in futility, Yarn Harlots’ multiple attempts at casting on the 600+ stitches for the Miranda Triangle Shawl can only make me cringe. I would have given up after try #2. I still have not had the heart to unravel my rasta fari hat.

out of ideas

2009-02-21T10:27:00.000-08:00

So... it’s the usual link posts, because I’m out of ideas for blog posts, aside from my usual ranting about Wall Street. Perhaps it’s time to give up on idea blog posts and convert this to a full fledged knitting blog? Wouldn’t my blog title “Look at this Tangle of Thorns” be equally applicable? Then again, I've received quite a collection of Mike Davis books for my birthday, which may provide some much-needed blog inspiration.

In any case, I have been collecting these links for a month or so, so some of them may be outdated.

As the Stanford Group’s $8 billion investment fraud was exposed the other day and Madoff’s ponzi scheme remains fresh on our minds and Wall Street’s excesses continue to anger us, this quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt seems appropriate:
“A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”

But what better way to describe the American economy than a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip?

However, I do believe, aside from our Dick Fulds and Bernard Madoffs, there are plenty of other people who deserve to be punched in the face.

On a side note, I’m glad Caroline Kennedy did not get nominated to Senator. Kathleen Parker accurately describes my sentiments: “The real rub is that she hasn't earned it. The sense of entitlement implicit in Kennedy's plea for appointment mocks our national narrative. We honor rags-to-riches, but riches-to-riches animates our revolutionary spirit.”

Borrowing words from the Oscar-nominated movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that I didn’t like so much, “Nothing lasts”. It’s unfortunate that good things don’t last forever. White Dog Café, a model restaurant for socially-responsible business practices was sold earlier this January. While most news sources report a rosy, PR-friendly story, other sources indicate otherwise. I'm not sure if I will be eating there again.

Likewise, this site illustrates the transformation of the organic food industry over the years—as small businesses end up being acquired by large corporations.

But nothing lasts also means that George W. Bush is no longer president. So instead of complaining about what a horrible president he was, we can now remember with endearment his unique patterns of speech.

Oh my gosh! It’s a utility knife for knitters! And I just got it for my birthday thanks to my hubby!

Speaking of hubbies, for those of you in the midst of wedding planning, this blog documents one couple's $2,000 wedding. It also might be nice to determine to see if your interior decorating styles match up and whether or not you want to have children and invest in a few good cookbooks. And if you really want to feel cool at your wedding, you can hire paparazzi to mob you.

* Knitting details. Two sets of socks. The grey speckled pair above is a pair of Garter Rib socks from Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks for my dad. I am fretting that I will run out of yarn. The blue/pink pair of socks are a set of baby socks, loosely based on Two at Once, Toe Up sock pattern. I am using size 0 needles and koigu yarn, which has some of the most beautiful colorways that I have ever seen. I am also fretting that the final socks won't fit. How big are newborn baby's feet anyways?

the life and death of great american corporations

2009-02-12T15:14:00.000-08:00

ramblings on the economy

“Around one in ten US companies disappears each year. Between 1989 and 1997, to be precise, an average of 611,000 businesses a year vanished out of a total of 5.73 million firms. Ten per cent is the average extinction rate, it should be noted; in some sectors of the economy, it can rise as high as 20 per cent in a bad year. According to the UK Department of Trade and Industry, 30 per cent of tax-registered businesses disappear after three years. Even if they survive the first few years of existence and go on to enjoy great success, most firms fail eventually. Of the world’s 100 largest companies in 1912, 29 were bankrupt by 1995, 48 had disappeared* and only 19 were still in the top 100.”

~ The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

In these hard economic times, I doubt it’s any consolation to know that capitalism has been characterized by innovation and failure at the micro-level and cycles of boom and bust at the macro-level.

But we should still remember that it’s not all bad news.* Many of us still have jobs (and are feeling more thankful for them than we ever have before.) It’s also encouraging to see the nation shifting away from consumerism, but the accompanying layoffs are troubling.

That’s the complicated part about fighting against consumerism-- every purchase links back to a job. (And likewise for sweatshops). We stop buying and companies start hurting, which in it of itself doesn’t bother me, but then the layoffs begin. And while this recession has been hard-hitting for well-educated financial professionals, it is still the most hurtful for the least educated and the most vulnerable in our society. (I can’t seem to find the article, but basically decline in employment has affected high school diploma-less men the most).

Bankruptcies and layoffs in a capitalist economy that champions creative destruction technically shouldn’t be something we fear. Nevertheless, when the destruction doesn’t just affect legal entities and the pocket change of the rich, but begins to leave many without jobs, then we do need more consolation than “It’s just the nature of capitalism. Boom and bust. We just have to wait it out.” (“Collateral damage” for a “cyclical adjustment” perhaps? It will just be a matter of mathematical calculations before the supply and demand curves reshift.)

How many days or years or decades of waiting before you can get back on track with your life?

I hope that as we wait out this recession, we will actively care for those who are most vulnerable. I hope that while we may be cautious with our spending, that we can still be generous with our giving. And I hope that as we are trying to fix the economy, we’re building something more sustainable and just, rather than just patching up something that was never that great to begin with.

* Interestingly enough, the longest-existing institutions in our day have been nonprofit organizations such as universities…
** For instance, Amazon is still doing okay and so is Wal-Mart, which obviously makes me happy since you all know how much I love and adore and worship Wal-Mart.

opium of the masses

2009-02-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

Whenever we talk about money, we always end up asking, How should we organize the economy? –or even, What economic system should I support? “At the moment,” we explain, “I may not be using money the way I should, but when the new system (whatever it may be) is instituted, when the general money problem is solved, I in turn will become just.”

Thus we subordinate moral and individual problems to the collective problem, to the total economic system. If a man is a thief, it is not his fault; his economic conditions were such that he could be nothing else. Let us beware. If we accept this excuse on behalf of a poor person, we must accept it for everyone. Both the capitalist who exploits workers and the farmer who dabbles in the black market are also involved in impersonal economic conditions which leave them no options. As soon as we accept the supremacy of global concerns and of the system, as soon as we agree that material conditions remove our freedom to choose, we absolve all individuals of all responsibility for their use of money.

…

… human nature (with its lust for money) is corrupting the system. And that is why it is horribly wrong to believe that the problem of money can be solved by a system. It is horribly wrong thus to cheat man’s hopes and thirst for virtue and honesty. “You want justice? Then establish my system.” This is the error of all committed economists and others who think they can solve the problem without considering human nature.

But it is more than an error: it is also hypocrisy and cowardice. For then I ultimately ask no more than to believe the system-builder. It is so convenient. I don’t have to think about what I do. I don’t have to try to use my money better, to covet less, to quit stealing. It’s not my fault. All I have to do is campaign for socialism or conservatism, and as soon as society’s problems are solved, I will be just and virtuous- effortlessly.

…

But all this activity is a justification for avoiding personal decision making. My money? My work? My life? I don’t have to worry about them because I am involved in such-and-such a movement which will take care of all that for everyone once it comes to power.

~ excerpts from Jacques Ellul's Money and Power

Sometimes you just stumble upon the right book at the right time. Providential perhaps?

exercises in futility*

2009-02-07T14:29:00.001-08:00

Ohhh knitting, you are such an exercise in futility. I spend hours upon hours knotting you with gentle care and love, eagerly anticipating the beautiful final product and then you let me down. And I must resign myself to the fact that I will have to pull out all those individually placed loops and roll you back into a ball.

My most recent failure: remember the lovely cabled hat that I was excited about? Well, it turns out that it’s just a tad too big and looks like a rasta hat.

So…. whenever I can muster up the courage to unravel it, I will have to reknit it with smaller needles, but I don’t think I have the persistence to do that before warm spring days roll around. So I will be taking a nice long break from it.

Knitting requires quite a bit of unraveling to fix stitch or sizing mistakes. Luckily, most knitting can be undone and redone, but it can be quite frustrating to spend hours working on something, only to discover that it has to be undone and redone again. Unfortunately, making mistakes doesn’t go away as you become a more seasoned knitter (atleast not in my experience). In fact, I rarely complete a knitting project without some unraveling and re-knitting. I suppose it builds character.

So after a failed project that has required quite a bit of concentration, I’ve been unmotivated to embark on anything new. I’ve been trying to finish up some simple part-tedious, part-relaxing gifts.

Since November, I have been working on a Collared Wrap for my mother.

It’s in a jumbled mess in this photograph, because the shawl is over 50 inches long and I’m currently doing the edges, which have probably over 300 stitches. (That sounds like a lot, but gorgeous lace shawls with teeny tiny cobweb yarn often have over 1000 border stitches). While easy to knit, it hasn’t been too enjoyable because the yarn is acrylic, (Lion Brand Vanna’s Choice-- I believe that is Vanna White’s Vanna’s Choice) and not as pleasant as wool. I would love to knit my mother something out of nice wool, but she likes to use her washing machine.

I’ve also started on a pair of Garter Rib socks for my dad out of the book Sensational Knitted Socks by Charlene Schurch (a sensational knitting book by the way because it provides charts to help you figure out the sock sizing based on your gauge). Tiny needles, tiny stitches. I have yet to knit my dad anything as a gift and I think these will be nice and useful.

*Or exercises in humility depending on your predisposition towards half-full or half-empty glasses of water.

chariots and horses

2009-02-06T20:39:00.000-08:00

Today’s headlines worried me. Growing unemployment. Risk of deflation. As Matt and I consider buying a house this spring, the prospect of losing a job or of deflation are troubling. Suddenly the solid ground of good education, strong work ethic and prudent financial management seems shaky. And with that comes the hope that this economic recession will humble us and remind us where our provision truly comes from.

the humble social activist and the humble civil servant

2009-02-05T15:06:00.000-08:00

Social activists annoy us because they can be so full of it. They tote around their Adbusters magazines, walk in their Blackspot sneakers, wearing thrift store rags like some halo of righteousness. (Sort of like the guy who won’t stop talking about how he doesn’t own a television set)

Unfortunately, the profession naturally lends itself to pride. Being a social activist generally entails that you think you’re right and the rest of the world is not.

So how do we practice humble activism? How do we go about believing that what we stand for is true, while still acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge? How do we go on acting on issues that we care about deeply, while still being open to the possibility that we might be wrong? What would that look like? Would we be so seized with uncertainty that we could not do anything at all? Or, would a more humble spirit emerge? (One that is less concerned with being right and more concerned about loving others)

I wonder what happens to people as they climb up the ranks of prestige, power and wealth. In the Senate Banking Committee, it was testified that the treasury may have overpaid by $78 billion for troubled assets in its first round of investments of the TARP Program. How do you mess up $78 billion dollars? I may have overpaid for a shirt from a consignment shop, but that was $10 too much, not $78 billion. But perhaps at those amounts, the numbers cease to be real, especially when you’re sheltered within the comfort of prestige and power.

How does it feel to manage $800 billion? Do you feel confident and smart because only the best and the brightest could ever climb so high in the ranks of government? Or do you move forward with fear and trembling and much prayer?

* I use the word “we”, which seems to imply that I consider myself a social activist. However, I don’t really identify myself as a social activist because my accompanying action seems lacking. All talk, no action. However, Kalle Lasne would argue that words do matter—so perhaps I am just uncomfortable with my hypocrisy.

I'm just trying to keep up with the trendy topics

2009-01-31T19:02:00.000-08:00

Just like everyone else, I have something to say about what our first lady is wearing.

As a knitter, a sewer (the kind that makes things with fabric as opposed to the kind that harbours strange smells and rats), and someone who is attempting to dress better, I appreciate beautifully-designed and well-made clothing. And I appreciate the privilege of being able to choose what I wear in the morning.

That being said, it frustrates me how the media expects Mrs. Obama to wear a new outfit everytime she attends a public function. I would be delighted to see our first lady repeat a prior outfit for her appearances.* Not everyone can, nor needs to, buy something new for every new party, conference or fundraiser. And perhaps if people wore more of the same outfits to these events, we’d talk less about what people wore and more about what the event was about. (Is it frustrating for Mrs. Obama that people seem to talk more about her clothes than what she's accomplished or what she is going to do as the first lady?)

It is sad when so much public effort is dedicated to anticipating, observing and criticizing appearances. Does it say something about our country that we care more about inaugural ball gowns than economic stimulus packages? But to be honest, it’s more interesting to look at pictures of Michelle Obama’s clothing and comment on whether or not I like it, than it is to read the full text of the economic stimulus bill and try to figure out whether or not it will work. I guess I never said I wasn’t part of the problem. Back to knitting I suppose?

*And obviously, given the amount of media attention around her outfits, I would love to see Mrs. Obama buy and wear ethically-produced clothing. She already seems intent on supporting smaller, local designers and I would love to see the same enthusiasm for fair-trade, union-made or cooperative-made clothing.... My opinions are so predictable, aren’t they?
** And related to my previous entry, I am thrilled that Obama called the $20 billion worth of Wall Street bonuses shameful. We need to return towards an ethic of integrity and responsibility towards one another, rather than lowering ourselves to the least common denominator of legality.

where’s my $100 million bonus?

2009-01-28T19:23:00.000-08:00

Nonprofits get criticized all the time for being inefficient. Our sector is told that we must operate more like for-profits so less money gets wasted.*

So shall we go off and buy jet planes with our donor money? Citigroup did it. Or why don’t we renovate our executive offices with crystal chandeliers and mahogany furniture? Former Merill Lynch’s former CEO certainly thought that doing so would improve his productivity. Or why don’t we give our employees exuberant bonuses? It’s the only way we can make sure they will return to work.

Our sector has had its share of scandals and has not always used donor or government money responsibly, but hardly do we emulate the excesses of Wall Street even in its post-bailout days.** We may sometimes shuffle around paper and spend tons of time trying to get organized (most likely because we’re not funded sufficiently to invest in the proper infrastructure and technology!), but we do a lot with a dollar. And even if every dollar that goes to a nonprofit doesn’t go directly to paying for a bed for a homeless man, it’s at least providing a job and a salary to an employee.

There’s a fear that if more money goes towards “administrative costs”, some nonprofit employee is getting rich. Let me assure you this is rarely the case. Most employees at nonprofits are hardly paid enough for the work that they do, and almost any nonprofit organization stretches each dollar for the maximum benefit possible. Every Fed-Ex mailing, every new printer toner, every maintenance repair is questioned and cut back if possible. Nonprofits can be penny pinching extraordinaires. Buildings with broken roofs, lack of air conditioning, and old donated computers are commonplace.

Wall Street suggests far more wasteful spending and inefficiency than the nonprofit sector. Maybe Wall Street can learn some frugality from the nonprofit sector.

Done rant. (Yes, I have been ranting about Wall Street A LOT. I’ve been meaning to stop, but they just keep doing things that make me angry.)

* Lots of donor advisory articles and websites, such as Charity Navigator tell you to look at the infamous “administrative” vs. “program” expense ratios. The underlying message: Nonprofits should be spending money on program, and not on administrative expenses, because they need to be more efficient with their donor dollars.
** Though this doesn't surprise me -- I remember from my consulting days how we enjoyed food, booze, nice hotels and fancy parties on company dollars, without a thought as to whether we were using shareholder's or our client's dollars responsably. The indoctrination starts at an impressionable age.

a simple twist

2009-01-26T15:06:00.000-08:00

how can anyone resist a well-formed cable?

In my first few months as a knitting newbie, I saw my mother-in-law knitting cables on a sweater. Having only knit shapeless charity sweaters and scarves, the cables looked incredibly complex and difficult to me. Much to my surprise, my mother said that they were rather easy and encouraged me to try making the same sweater. So I did. After an hour or two of intense concentration, I was pleasantly surprised to see the same beautiful aran cable pattern emerging:

And that is the wonder of cables, and most knitting in general—beautiful, complex-looking but often only a matter of following instructions to create. As some say, knitting requires learning two types of stitches, and the rest is just a matter of counting. Or to borrow the words of former President George W. Bush, it’s not “rocket surgery”.

Cables are made when stitches are knitted out of order—creating the effect of twisting or traveling strands. Many store-bought sweaters, especially the J. Crew and Gap variety, feature simple cables.

For those of you who would like further eye candy, here are samplings of cable designs that go beyond the Gap/J.Crew/Express variety:

Most sweater designs have cables that run vertically but they can also run diagonally across a sweater.
Sideway running cables can create beautiful yokes such as this Cable Luxe Tunic and this Tangled Yoke Cardigan (hopefully my next sweater project!).
A few simple cables can create a gorgeous gathered front or celtic designs.
Cables can also be used to create elaborate designs such as this wedgewood blouse.
Twist Collective designs often prominently feature cables. I particular love this sweater coat, but doubt that I'd have the patience (or yarn money) to knit something of that scale.

And for those of you who do knit (I don’t know how many people who read this blog actually knit…I know that I’ve tried to teach a few people who read this blog how to knit in a rather imposing and imperial fashion…), here are some useful tutorials:

General cable tutorial (in general, knitty.com has excellent tutorials... but really, you could just ask me and I will happily harass you with endless knitting instruction...)
Cabling without a cable needle tutorial
Unventing a cable – how to decipher a cable and figure out how it was knit

As for free cable patterns, the Knit for Kids Aran Sweater that I first made was a bit on the complex side for a beginner, but still doable. However, if you're looking for a shorter project, I would recommend trying a headband, a simple scarf or some fingerless mittens. The headband pictured below may also make a good first cable project, but it's not a free pattern. I used the Cabled Headband pattern from the book Knitter's Book of Yarn.**

* The black beret is knit with size 8 needles in Cascade 220 100% wool, based on the pattern Gretel
** The book is actually available from the Philadelphia Public Library, (if any branches still remain open...). I knit this on size 3 needles using Brown Sheep Nature Spun Worsted Yarn. You may see me sporting this around Philadelphia. It looks a bit like a halo because my head is so round.
*** On a side note, does anyone have good recommendations on how to post photos in blogger? I'd like to show more images on my knitting posts but can't seem to get around the annoying blogger interface...

evaluating just wars

2009-01-26T15:00:00.000-08:00

This post was conceived earlier this year. Posting it now seems a bit outdated as the Gaza conflict has faded from the headlines, but then again, war and violence continue and so our discussion about their justice must also go on.

In this LA Times opinion article, writer Etgar Keret of the "The Girl on the Fridge and Other Stories,” responds harshly against the proportionality principle. The writer was responding to those who argued that Israel’s main injustice was not in retaliating, but in responding out of proportion. (This Economist article suggests something of that sort, but comes down a bit harsher on Israel).

Is there anything in the proportionality principle that can rationally justify killing of any kind?

The motives of vengeance, which drive us to kill those who have killed people we love, are completely irrational, even if we try to wrap them in rational packaging. We exact vengeance because we hate and are hurting, not because we excel in mathematics and logic. Early in the aerial bombing of Gaza, five young girls from the same family were killed, and many more children have died on both sides of the border in recent years. The attempt to introduce their bodies into an equation that would make their deaths justifiable or comprehensible might be necessary to influence current events, but it is still enraging.

The only equation I can wholeheartedly accept is one whereby zero bodies appear on either side of the equation. And until that time comes, I'll choose outcry and protest that appeal solely to the heart. I shall reserve my appeals to the mind for better times.

Walter Wink wrote over ten years earlier in Engaging the Powers:

Most Christians assume that any war that they feel is just, or merely necessary and unavoidable, is just. The just war criteria, however, are extraordinarily demanding. They presuppose that no Christian should be involved in a war unless it meets all or atleast most of the criteria. The burden of proof is always on those who resort violence.
We can easily kill oppressive rulers, but doing so makes us killers. We want to believe in a final violence that will, this last time, eradicate evil and make future violence unnecessary. But the violence we use creates new evil, however just the cause.
…
The problem is not merely to gain justice but to end the Domination System. Those engaged in a struggle for liberation may actually achieve a relatively greater degree of justice for their side, yet do so in a way that fails to address the larger issues of patriarchy, domination hierarchies, ranking, stratification, racism, elitism, environmental degradation, or violence. In the struggle against oppression, every new increment of violence simply extends the life of the Domination system and depends on faith in violence as a redemptive means. You cannot free people from the Domination System by using its own methods. You cannot construct the City of Life with the weapons of death. You cannot make peace – real peace- with war.
But we also cannot condemn those who in a desperation resort to counter violence against the massive violence of an unjust order. We must wish them success, even if they are still caught in the myth of redemptive violence themselves. Who knows? Perhaps their victory will usher in a better society able to divest itself consciously of some of its oppressive elements.
…
A nation may feel that it must fight in order to prevent an even greater evil. But that does not cause the lesser evil to cease being evil. Declaring a war just is simply a ruse to rid ourselves of guilt. But we can no more free ourselves of guilt by decree than we declare ourselves forgiven by fiat. If we have killed, it is a sin, and only God can forgive us, not a propaganda apparatus that declares our dirty wars “just”. Governments and guerrilla chiefs are not endowed with the power to absolve us from sin. Only God can do that. And God is not mocked. The whole discussion of “just” wars is sub-Christian.

subjecthood vs. objecthood

2009-01-25T11:39:00.001-08:00

towards an ethic of integrity
(unfinished*)

I’ve ranted for quite some time about the need for integrity in our professional lives, which has become more evident with the recent economic crisis. Our society has functioned by obeying the letter of the law, with no regard for its spirit. We do what is legal, not what is right.

Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian, provides a principle that may be used to establish a framework of integrity. He describes two modes of relating with word pairs in his book I and Thou. The word pair “I-You” “establishes the world of relation”, which involves encountering the other as a subject, whereas the word pair “I-It” treats the other as an object, a thing to be experienced. This can apply to any sort of relationship, including between human and nature, and between human and God. In Buber's words:

The Life of human beings is not passed in the sphere of transitive verbs alone. It does not exist in virtue of activities alone which have some thing for their object.
I perceive something. I am sensible of something. I imagine something. I will something. I feel something. I think something. The life of human beings does not consist of all this and the like alone.
This and the like together establish the realm of It.
But the realm of Thou has a different basis.
When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds.
When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation.

Buber’s "I-Thou" relation suggests Jesus’ bold command to “Love your neighbour as yourself.” To love another as ourselves, we must first behold another as ourselves, not just another thing to serve us. (And Buber later suggests that the “I” in the “I-It’ relationship is not as fully “I” as the “I” in the “I-Thou” relationship. To be fully “I”, we must fully behold “Thou”)

Our modern life is ordered to maximize the “I-It’ relationships and to avoid the discomfort of “I-Thou”. We buy from anonymous employees of large multi-national corporations, sit in front of the plasma screen to receive our daily dose of information and entertainment and travel by enclosed climate-controlled vehicles. Commodification is the theme of our generation and perhaps its most insidious impact is not obscuring people with things, but turning people into things. And as such, we have lost integrity in the professional world and failed to nurture authenticity in life.

How would this past year differ if we had aimed to treat others as subjects, instead of objects in our professional life? "I-Thou" instead of "I-It". The recognition of a common humanity, of the image of God.

Yet the implementation of “I-Thou” does not merely entail treating people we encounter extra nicely, it goes deeper. To fully redeem relations between people, social institutions that structure the relationships between people also require reform. “I-Thou” relationships cannot be created by some elusive ideal social institution, they ultimately require personal transformations. But institutions can be structured to enable “I-Thou” relationships to be more easily established and realized. Could slave-owners, even the really nice ones, truly have been in an “I-Thou” relationship with one of their slaves? Could a CEO making millions of dollars a year truly treat a minimum wage worker in his company as a “Thou”? Could I ever treat a homeless man on the street as a “Thou” rather than an “It”? We do not meet each other in a vacuum—an entire societal structure props up our encounters.

Whether we are traditionals who don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water, or revolutionaries who’d like to burn everything, or reformers who value gradual change, we should seek to reshape society, its culture and its institutions, so that “I-Thou” can flourish, and integrity and virtue can be recovered.

* I keep a Word document on my computer named dl_MONTH with unfinished blog entries. “DL” stands for “delete later,” suggesting that I will finish using the notes and delete the document. Scrolling through my unwieldy 24-page document, I find this prospect unlikely and am contemplating a less misleading name for the document. In any case, I am attempting to polish up and post some of these unfinished blog entries and atleast reduce the number of pages in the file. Funny enough, I recall having tried this once before without much success—the more reliable alternative is to save the unfinished “DL” file as BlogIdeas_2008 and start a new file called DL. Rinse and repeat!

knitting blog?

2009-01-23T17:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the knitting bug hits hard and all I want to do is stay at home on the couch, watching some illegally downloaded TV series (LOST or Ugly Betty perhaps?), with my fingers wrapped in yarn.

I might write good reports or interesting blog entries, but nothing compares in quality with the satisfaction of creating fabric. From one dimensional string to two dimensional cloth to three dimensional garment. The pleasure of physical creation is embedded in each stitch of this seemingly repetitive and mundane activity.

I’ve been knitting for over two years and can now handle almost any pattern (aside from extremely thin lace-weight yarn and complex colourwork), and am becoming comfortable with the structure and math that goes into making garments. I find myself daydreaming about being a knitting designer—sitting at home producing patterns and then running around the countryside taking photos, and keeping a knitting blog of course. (Though to be honest, it may be another year or two before I will be able to design something on my own).

Perhaps my love of knitting has grown in recent months, because I finally sense that I might actually be good at something. While my previous delusions of writing grandeur have resulted in the beginnings of silly fantasy novels that I will never show anyone, atleast I have a few hats, socks and sweaters to show for this. But then you also have to wonder if this impractical activity is just a distraction from figuring out more important matters, like what I am actually going to do with my life.

But in the meantime, a few practical matters:
1. Should I start posting more pictures and information about my knitting/sewing projects on this blog? This could result in frequent posts cluttering up your blog feeds with flash photos of awkward poses, strange blogger formatting and chatter about what needles were used and how delightful the yarn was. Or, should I start a separate knitting blog? I fear that would imply too much of a split between my brain and my body… but I may be willing to sacrifice idealism for the sake of practicality and retaining readership (!)…
2. Crochet/Knitting group at my place on Monday night! Please figure out how to contact me if you’re interested. You’re welcome to come if you don’t know how to knit or crochet and would like to learn. You can also come if you’re male.

*The cardigan above is from the pattern Cherry, knit with Rowan RYC Silk Wool DK on size 4 needles.

2009-01-15T19:25:00.000-08:00

I posted this excerpt from Walter Wink's Engaging the Powers a few weeks ago as a response to a comment on my entry on afflicting the comfortable. With Obama's inauguration coming up, it's been on my mind:

God did not create capitalism or socialism, but there must be some kind of economic system. The simultaneity of creation, fall and redemption means that God at one and the same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of full human actualization; and presses for its transformation into a more humane order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The Christian is expected to hold together all three.

lazy blogger

2009-01-09T15:59:00.000-08:00

These link posts are the easiest blog entries to produce. Then again, posts consisting entirely of quotations from books are also easy to produce. Perhaps if I continue this trend, I will start twittering, facebook status-ing and then I will need to take this seminar in order to re-writer’s block myself. (I compile these links and comments over time, so some may be a bit outdated):

2008 marked the demise of Wall Street and the humbling of the proud. Mr. Madoff’s ponzi investment scheme further reminds us that we need better monkeys. Meanwhile, rich folk who have lost lots of money may need better matchmakers.

Not that any of this short-term profit-driven excess should surprise us, since we’ve turned a blind eye to corporate abuses for years. In particular, wage theft has been in the rise as the economy tightens. We don’t just need a federal bailout, but an ethical bailout as well.

Until the 111th new Congress passes ethical bailout legislation, let’s read dystopic novels about how the world will end. Some suspect this is already happening:

Argentina is experiencing a chronic moneda (coin) shortage. (oh no!)
Though some experts fear stagflation (oh no the seventies!), inflation on a standard basket of Christmas goods (based on the 12 days of Christmas) has gone up by 8.1 percent this past year (oh no! inflation!)
Colleges need to reconsider tuition rates and how much parents are subsidizing their children’s extracurricular activities (oh no! Penn's only all-freshman all-Californian all-opera-style a capella group won't get its annual funding from the university!)
Publishers continue to advance large amounts of money to the likes of Sarah Palin (oh no!)
Some are beginning to declare the end of the hipster (oh no! no more irony!)

While some things in this world may change dramatically, other things stay the same. It makes me sad when a man with as much power and influence as Blago could still be hungering for more. But there is hope for those who find themselves hitting rock bottom after climbing high on the ladder of power and influence. Maybe Blago will do something useful with his life after all of this-- maybe he will land a book deal like Joe the Plumber or a Slate column like Eliot Spitzer. America is the land of opportunity!

I’ve only talked about economics and politics and endtimes so far. Looking for something more light hearted? This website chronicles ugly prom dresses. It’s bound to keep you entertained for hours, or atleast a few minutes. If you’re looking for something unexpectedly beautiful, check out these toilet paper wedding dresses. And this knitter suggests some accessible classical music that you can listen to while you endlessly surf the web...

whoever fights monsters...

2009-01-08T19:15:00.000-08:00

... should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

~ Fredrich Nietzsche

Conquerors have all through history been conquered by those they conquer. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, proved either a shrewd student of history or a prophet when he reputedly said, “Even if we lose, we shall win, for our ideals will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies.”

World War II, many still feel, was a just, or atleast a necessary, war. Nonviolence as a means for settling international disputes is so recent—an international nonviolent movement (apart from the “peace churches”) dates only from 1914- that the means were simply not in place inside and outside Germany to mount an effective nonviolent alternative. It may well be that in ten or fifteen years we will be more prepared to respond to conflicts with an international outpouring of nonviolent resistance. So perhaps there was, tragically, no alternative at that time to war.

The point I am making is that even if a war does appear to be just, or atleast tragically necessary and unavoidable, it will inevitably require that relatively more just opponent (if there be such) to become increasingly molded into the likeness of its adversary. The greatest evils are usually perpetrated by people determined to eradicate an evil by whatever means necessary. War is not, then, a mere continuation of diplomacy by other means, as Clausewitz claimed. It marks the abject failure of diplomacy, and the adoption of means that have very little likelihood of achieving desirable ends.

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy”

~ Martin Luther King

Some of us engaged in struggles for social justice have been incredibly naïve about what has been happening to our own psyches. Our very identities are often defined by our resistance to evil. It is our way of feeling good about ourselves: if we are against evil, we must be good. The impatience of some activists with prayer, meditation and inner healing may itself represent an inchoate knowledge of what they might find if they looked within. For the struggle against evil can make us evil, and no amount of good intentions automatically prevents it from happening.

No wonder so many people, gentle and kind people, quiet and unaggressive people, find themselves saying at long last: “There’s only one way to deal with the Marcoses and Enriles. There’s only one way to deal with the Khmer Rouge. There’s only one language these people understand – we say it not joyfully, but reluctantly and sadly—the only thing they understand is the gun.”

To such people I say: Welcome home, welcome to the largest consensus the world has ever known: a consensus between east and west, between capitalist and communist, between mosque, church and synagogue. All agree that there comes a time when it is just to kill each other. Welcome home to the consensus on which our world is built.

Ultimately we are faced with two choices: to accept the “myth” of the just war, that as a last resort killing is moral, or to accept the ”myth” of nonviolence: we have no last resort, killing is never right. In the first case, we will come to the moment when the conditions for using violence are verified, when we reach the “last resort”. In the second case, believing in our “myth”, that violence is never justified, having no “last resort,” human beings come up with alternatives from the depths of their creativeness… We can and we will learn to live together, but only when we have closed off that escape route known as the last resort”

~ Niall O’Brien, “Making the Myth Real”

All of the above text, including quotes, are from the chapter “On Not Becoming What We Hate” in Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers (Published in 1992). (Is the history of the world but a narrative of violence where right and wrong is determined by the victors? I suppose the answer is not so simple.)

no man's land

2009-01-06T15:21:00.000-08:00

Terra nullius. From the Latin terra, earth, ground, land, and nullius, no one's
Thus: no one's land, land not belonging to anyboyd. Or at any rate, not to anybody that counts.
Originally: land not belonging to the Roman Empire.
In the Middle Ages: land not belonging to any Christian ruler.
Later: land to whcih no European state as yet lays claim. Land that justly falls to the first European state to invade the territory.

~ excerpt from Terra Nullius

I am not familiar enough with the Israel/Palestine history to have a strong opinion on the current conflict, but in watching the violence escalate, I am reminded of the near impossibility of forgiveness and redress for land appropriated and lives lost. It reminds me of how deeply our world is still rooted in the power of violence and how much of our world was established on the basis of dispossession.

We can condemn Israel's aggression (or defense, depending on your viewpoint) and condemn Hamas' terrorism, but we also need to be reminded that we have all benefited from violence. And when blood is shed and homes are displaced, it is not always easy to say who is more right or who is more just.

A re-posted excerpt from Terra Nullius, regarding the theft of land from Aborigines in Australia:

According to my Religious Education teacher in at secondary school, ‘contrition’ is at the core of all religions. It’s easy to make mistakes. Anybody can make mistakes, even commit crimes. The important thing is knowing how to feel contrition afterwards. That was why he began every lesson with the same question: ‘What constitutes contrition?’ To this day, I can still rattle off the answer in my sleep:
I realize I have done wrong.
I regret what I have done.
I promise never to do it again.
Today I tend to think these three criteria for contrition are far too introverted. ‘Realize’, ‘regret’ and ‘promise’ can all be done internally, in complete secrecy, without betraying any outward sign of realization of promise. Such an internal contrition process is precious little comfort the victim of the wrong I committed. And the promise is easily forgotten if nobody knows it was made. So the criteria should demand a more public process of contrition. Perhaps like this:
I freely admit that I have done wrong.
I ask forgiveness of those I have wronged.
I promise to do my best to make amends to them.
Here, the third criterion promises not only that I will not repeat the crime, but also that I will make efforts to put things right to the best of my ability. For the victims, redress is the most tangible result of my contrition and a measure of sincerity.
Can we feel contrition for other people’s crimes? Can we feel contrition for crimes we have not committed personally, but have subsequently profited from? How can we formulate the criteria for contrition to make them applicable to collective responsibility for historical crimes? Perhaps like this:
We freely admit that our predecessors have done wrong and that we are profiting from it.
We ask forgiveness of those who were wronged and of their descendants.
We promise to do our best to make amends to those who were wronged for the effects that still remain.
The larger the collective, the more diluted the personal responsibility. The less intimate the contrition, the greater the risk that it will just be hollow ceremony. A representative steps forward on our behalf, admits the wrong committed, apologizes, pays what it takes and appoints a committee to ‘monitor our practices’. Australia isn't even doing that.

lists*

2009-01-01T18:38:00.001-08:00

I've been digging through boxes of my old diaries, photos and other knickknacks while at my parent's house. They are planning to sell their house in California, so I am trying to throw away more of my stuff stored at their place. Actually, this is not a new activity for me. I go through these boxes twice a year in my semiannual family visits in an attempt to cut down on the pamphlets and trinkets I've collected over the years. Every year, the vast majority of these inanimate objects end up back in their boxes because they are attached to some event or person-- I am afraid that if I throw the stuff away the memories will disappear along with them. I let go of these objects by photographing them. Yet this time, even after photographing old Playbills and movie stubs, I still stuffed a few travel brochures and postcards back into a box for old time's sake. Though I've managed to whittle down the contents of two dressers, two bookshelves, and two closest full, 12 boxes remain as a testament to my packrat qualities.

In glancing through my old diaries, I noticed several “year in review” entries at every New Year’s, birthday and even diary-end. (I used to personify my diaries, like Anne Frank, except I would name them after crushes—some parts of my past are perhaps better forgotten). I would write long reflections about the prior year and interpret my personal life themes. I abandoned that practice of self-contemplation and reflection towards the end of college. But 2008 was an important year, a milestone year in my nearly quarter-of-a-century long life, so perhaps I will inaugurate the new year with some lists.

memories of 2008 (the good, the bad and the ugly):
altar cloth scorch marks.
moving speeches from fathers.
nights climbs by flashlight up rocky slopes.
shiny kitchen gadgets.
warm tights.
hardwood floors, drafty windows and sunlight.
American citizenship and voting.
Martin Buber.
20,000 at 52nd and Locust.
Wall-E.
Phillies World Series Win.
Alan Greenspan.
Sarah Palin.
$700 billion dollars.
Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and many others… R.I.P.
$4 gas and $1.50 gas.
Foreclosures
Casino zoning in Philadelphia Chinatown.

hopes and dreams for 2009:
daily journaling and prayer (though I’ll settle for three times a week)
read read read write write write (and actually make submissions!)
knit knit knit sew sew sew
more blogging with more photos
using dried beans instead of canned beans
figure out what to do with my life
a growing awareness in our culture of institutional/systemic guilt and responsibility
executive compensation caps
a better economic system
world peace and an end to hunger and poverty
finish writing our wedding thank-you notes
finding a good pair of black flats
start practicing pilates again (I think the odds are for world peace over this)

* As a result of reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, I would like to make a concerted effort to write better. I will be experimenting with different writing styles so my entries may be hit or miss in the next while.

book reviews last quarter 2008

2008-12-22T16:45:00.001-08:00

I seem to be at a blank with trying to write blog entries so I decided to post my book reviews for this quarter early, though I will probably end up reading quite a few additional books in this last week of December as I will be on vacation. I'm excited about having some time to read since I have some really fascinating books lined up. A semester of assigned reading has awakened a desire for further exploration of different topics. I’m currently reading Engaging the Powers by Walter Wink as I have been reflecting on individual responsibility in systems of oppression. The book is so far absolutely fascinating….

I seem to be similarly stalled with my more tangible crafting pursuits. Here's a photo of a pair of baby socks I've knit up recently for an undisclosed recipient. I have plenty of "stash" yarn still sitting around, but nothing seems to be inspiring me to knit...

In any case, here are the reviews. I use the lovely non-pretentious rating scale from Goodreads
*didn’t like it
**it was ok
***liked it
**** really liked it
***** it was amazing

Fiction

*** The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) ~ Having studied minority and postcolonial literature in college, I’ve been wary of reading “minority fiction” since much of it follows a similar narrative format. However, after attending a very interesting reading by the author, I decided to read the book. Using references to popular American science fiction and fantasy and to Dominican culture, the book narrates the life of Oscar Wao, a nerdy boy who cannot seem to get a girlfriend. The book also traces the history of his mother and his mother’s family during the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. The ending was a slight letdown but by no means ruined the book. Diaz is a phenomenal writer—his style is engaging and funny and this novel is a fresh take on the traditional immigrant narrative. It is not obsessed with identity, but rather concerned with presenting a story and a history for its characters and the Dominican Republic.

*** Migritude (Shailja Patel) ~ This continues my respect for relatively unknown authors that we never see grace the display tables of Barnes and Nobles. Shailja Patel is a Kenyan poet, playwright and theatre artist. Migritude is the transcript from one of her spoken word performance peaces. In poetic form, it traces the impacts of colonialism and postcolonialism and her own migration around the world. I’m not much of a reviewer or connoisseur of poetry, but I enjoyed reading the poems very much and found the images and phrasing powerful, beautiful and memorable.

Non-Fiction

*** Theories of Development (Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick) ~ This book presents an overview of major theories of development (a.k.a. why some countries are poor and some are rich and what to do about it)—neoclassical, sociological, dependency, feminist etc… It does an excellent job of describing the different intellectual assumptions that underly these theories and how it influences the solutions that they advocate. Throughout all of this, the authors present their own view on development. While this book is an great primer on development, it can be at times a bit dull and confusing. The authors try their best to coin the development of these different theories, but sometimes end up listing a bunch of scattered conferences, papers and ideas.

** The Mystery of Capital (Hernando de Soto) ~ De Soto argues that what prevents poor countries from becoming rich is the lack of property law that enable individuals to transform their fixed assets into capital. He explores the history of property rights in America and examines the untapped wealth owned by the poor. De Soto’s assessment of the situation may be too idealistic and overromanticizes the potential of the small micro-businesses but his book still provides an accurate assessment to one of the significant reasons why the poor are still poor.

**** Third Sector Development (Christopher Gunn) ~ This book provides an excellent overview of various third sector organizations—credit unions, community land trusts, traditional nonprofit organizations and cooperatives. It highlights their role in American society and in particular focuses on how these organizations increase and create social surplus in their communities and contribute to development efforts.

*** Culture Jam (Kalle Lasn) ~ Written by the founder of Adbusters, this book describes and critiques our consumer and marketing oriented culture in America. The book explains concepts in a conversational and easy-to-understand tone, though at times it appears to be trying too hard to be cool. In particular, the book emphasizes meme warfare, and the importance of changing American consciousness and attitudes.

*** The Meaning of the City (Jacques Ellul) ~ From Cain’s first city to the new Jerusalem, Jacques Ellul traces the role that the city plays in the Biblical narrative. He highlights the city as a symbol and source of man’s pride, the city’s significance as a work of man’s hands and its importance in the new heavens and earth. While conversational, Ellul’s style and arguments can be hard to follow at times. There were definite sections of the book that were skimmed or “zoned” out as I was reading. That being said, Ellul has some real fire in his prose and his ideas were very provocative and insightful. His Biblical exposition of the city definitely provided a better framework for how I should relate to the city.

*** Not Just the Levees Broke (Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc) ~ Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc is from a working class family whose house and home were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. The first part of this memoir narrates her family’s experience of the disaster, including the multiple day grueling aftermath of waiting to be rescued. The remaining portion of the memoir recounts Phyllis’ emotional life after the hurricane as she copes with her trauma and continues to grow in her faith in God and love and forgiveness for others. This memoir is no literary masterpiece but it manages to be very real, moving and powerful.

two roads diverged in a wood

2008-12-11T18:30:00.000-08:00

I know you must all be annoyed with my endless sweatshop rants,* but I was surprised to find out yesterday that Judy Wicks, the founder of White Dog Café, co-founded Free People (which later became Urban Outfitters/Anthropologie clothing chain) with her then husband Richard Hayne.

It’s amazing how far apart these two business people’s paths have diverged since then:

Richard Hayne is currently the president of Urban Outfitters, the company that now operates the stores, Free People, Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie. He has a net worth of $1.8 billion, ranking the 262 richest person in the United States, atleast at the time in which this article was written.

His stores have stirred up quite a bit of controversy, both for politically incorrect t-shirts and allegedly ripping-off of independent designers. While people who shop at these stores tend to be liberal leaning, Richard Hayne is actually a die-hard Republican (not that that is necessarily a bad thing). Urban Outfitters evokes an aura of rebellion and independence while Anthropologie gives off a sense of vintage old world sophistication, but both are extremely corporate brands. Commodify your dissent all the way. Coolness and authenticity can now be purchased.

Furthermore, Hayne’s stance on sweatshops reflects the easy reasoning that sweatshops offer a better alternative to abject poverty (The Onion actually did an interesting video parody on sweatshops yesterday). I’ll let you be the judge:

"Years ago I visited one of the factories we work with in India, and there was 500 people standing in a line three people deep stretching around the building," he recalls. "I said to the foreman, 'What's going on?' He told me they were all applicants for the four positions they had open. I toured that facility and it was reasonably clean--for India. And it was reasonably well-lit--again, for India. And yes, it was mostly young women working there. But it is my understanding that the only other option those women had to feed their families was selling their bodies. So I don't want to hear people from the suburbs with their fat American stomachs telling people in other countries how to run their societies."

Meanwhile, Judy Wicks is not quite as wealthy as her former husband, but is by no means poor. (Let’s be honest- what would you really do with more than a billion dollars?) She is the founder of the restaurant White Dog Café, located near Penn campus. White Dog Café has become a renowned model for Triple Bottom Line business practices, with regard for profit, people and the environment. In addition to paying its restaurant workers living wages, White Dog Café also became one of the first restaurants to source local organic food long before Michael Pollan became trendy reading. She’s a vocal advocate for local sustainable economies and has written some interesting and inspiring articles on the subject.

Two very different versions of how to run a business in today's society. Richard Hayne was ingenious in creating the compelling pull of his brands**, managing to convince alot of us silly consumers into buying into image without substance, but Judy Wicks gives real hope. Her dissent has not been commodified.

* Though, is it not sad that nobody really cares passionately about anything anymore? And isn't it sad that we tend to think that those who care passionately about anything are a little loopy and crazy. Everything in moderation n’est ce pas?
** I have to guiltily admit that I love anthropologie clothing, but atleast in the last three years, I have been able to resist buying anything from the store despite the fact that it is located very close to my office. (It helps that it is really expensive) It's interesting though to read the customer target of anthropologie as described on Urban Outfitters corporate website:
... Over the past decade, we have traveled the globe, broken new ground with our catalog and web design, and most significantly of all, found customers who are our soulmates on this journey. Our core customer is 30 to 45, educated, fashionable, creative, and youthful. She values family and friends and loves shopping in the vibrant environments we create for her. Our unique and eclectic product assortment is carefully designed and selected with an eye for craftsmanship and detail...
Here's the Urban Outfitters description:
Our goal at Urban Outfitters is to be the brand of choice for well-educated, urban-minded young adults. We accomplish our objective by creating a differential shopping experience, which creates an emotional bond with the 18 to 30 year old target customer we serve. Currently, we operate more than 129 stores in the US, Canada, and Europe. Our stores offer a unique and eclectic mix of fashion merchandise in a lifestyle sensitive store environment. Products range from women's & men's apparel, accessories and footwear to items for the apartment, as well as gifts and novelties.

is this still an exercise in hope and cynicism?

2008-12-08T19:46:00.000-08:00

Just yesterday, I rediscovered this passage from Thomas Merton tucked in between some of my old papers. A man I respected very much gave paper copies to me and two others while we were volunteering at the Woodstock Family Center in the summer of 2006. (Tim also posted it on his blog early January of this year.)

Somehow the weight and the wisdom of the passage did not quite register for me in the past, but when I read this yesterday, Merton's words were such a gentle yet truthful reminder of the futility of my half-hearted efforts and the hope that is to be had in my God.

Letter to a Young Activist

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

You are fed up with words, and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.

...[T]he big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour our your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ's truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments...

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand...

Enough of this...it is at least a gesture...I will keep you in my prayers.

All the best in Christ,
Tom

christmas season

2008-12-07T15:04:00.000-08:00

exercises in cynicism and hope (continued...)

"Any history of hope in America must ... make room at its center for this dogged companion of hope--the lurking suspicion that all our getting and spending amounts to nothing more than fidgeting while we wait for death"

~ Andrew DelBlanco in The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope

political apathy

2008-12-04T15:26:00.000-08:00

It’s shocking how quickly I’ve stopped following political news and reverted back to my usual perusing of arts and letters daily and crafting websites. Shouldn’t I be more interested in politics now that a new administration is about to begin? Shouldn't I be more interested in following the news after all my rambling about the fact that our duties as a citizen do not end with just voting?

I wonder if my sudden drop in interest could be related to a sense of disenfranchisement from the political process. (Disenfranchisement—now that’s a melodramatic word). I voted for a few elected officials back in November, but now I seem to be out of the process, and without much power or say. Everyday, the headlines scroll by with Obama’s new picks for his cabinet, and I become aware that I do not have much ability as a citizen to influence his decisions.

It is to a much lesser degree, the same frustration I feel towards City Council’s decision to approve the zoning to build a casino in the Gallery in Philadelphia despite significant resident and city-wide protest. (Asian Americans United, Casino-Free Philadelphia and Chinese Christian Church and Center are all major organizers). And then there is an even greater frustration concerning Pennsylvania state’s decision to force Philadelphia to accept casinos. There’s a sense that decisions are made by important people in closed rooms and no matter how much protest and how many people hit the streets, nothing will change. Of course, history has proven that in many cases, community organizing has been effective at bringing about change (Montgomery bus boycott anyone?). But I find myself wishing there was a more direct and effective way of influencing the choices that affect us.

Or perhaps an easier explanation would be to say that I am so easily taken in by the spectacle of the election campaign, but not fully engaged yet to be interested in actual government policies, decisions and legislation.

Meanwhile, Canada’s government is going through some turmoil of its own. There’s a rather clear explanation on this knitter’s website.

internet links from a brainwashed radical

2008-11-28T11:58:00.000-08:00

To prove that my blog hasn’t just turned into one long rant based on my indoctrination from my "radical" “leftist” “progressive” “post-Marxist” “feminist” Penn class, I thought I’d try to amalgamate some other links and thoughts of interest. In order to remain true to shameless self-promotion, I’ve also provided links to past blog entries relating to these topics. I guess in an ideal world, I would post a follow-up blog entry tying in the article. But we all know this isn't an ideal world...

For those of you who left comments on my last blog post, I haven’t had the opportunity to reply yet, because you both posed thought-provoking questions and I need to think a bit more before replying. Thank you for taking the time to comment.

Ideology vs. Money. In China, the latter speaks the louder word.

Ted Stevens was not re-elected. What a relief. Otherwise, the Penn maintenance guy would lose his faith in America: “If a convicted felon can be elected into the Senate, why can’t a felon in jail vote?”

Sick and tired of ethics in America? Just as we may no longer believe in neoliberalism in economics, we’re perhaps also in need of a change in the field of ethics:

We don’t need microfinance. We need sweatshops. I’m only half kidding. But Oxfam’s Uttaran in some ways manages to get the best of microfinance and manages to approximate more formal employment.

Michael Lewis, the writer of Liar’s Poker, comments on his experience and on events and people leading up today’s Wall Street mess.

I criticized WalMart in my last entry. Jonathan has redirected me to an article that argues to the contrary. I hope to post a response at some point.

Sometimes, I just want to make something beautiful, but it certainly tries my patience. Here's my half-finished quilt top:

I manage to look supremely uncool on my bike with my pant leg retainers, mismatched mittens, and Eco vegan sneakers. Practicality trumps narcissism. I definitely do not follow these instructions. Apparently, there are plenty of others who manage to bike fashionably. Though sometimes, in looking at their footwear, I wonder if they will soon remove themselves from the gene pool.

Incharacter.org runs a feature on forgiveness. Notably, Ten Greatest Moments in Forgiveness History highlights the extraordinary forgiveness exhibited by the Amish community after the school shooting.

If you’ve ever read C.S.Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, you might understand the theory that the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia proxy atrological symbolism of the planets. A review on the book Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the ¬Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Michael Ward

Single Young Male (SYM). Single Young Female (SYF). The dating scene turns Darwinian (the end result of Sex and the City). It makes me really glad that I’m married. Young Married Couple (YMC) I suppose. Some notable quotables from the dating article:
“I am not going to hitch my wagon to a woman . . . who is more into her abs, thighs, triceps, and plastic surgery. A woman who seems to have forgotten that she did graduate high school and that it’s time to act accordingly.” “Maybe we turn to video games not because we are trying to run away from the responsibilities of a ‘grown-up life’ but because they are a better companion than some disease-ridden bar tramp who is only after money and a free ride.” “Men are finally waking up to the ever-present fact that traditional marriage, or a committed relationship, with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery.”

From Orion Magazine: Why are corporations treated as individuals and not nature?
“In particular, we should examine the fact that, in the eyes of the law, corporations are considered people and entitled to civil rights. We often forget that corporations are only a few centuries old and have been continually evolving since their inception. Imagine what could be done if we changed the fiduciary responsibilities of directors to include obligations not only to profitability but also to the whole natural world, and if we imposed collective personal liability on corporate managers and stockholders to restore any damage that they cause to natural communities.”
Corporations are treated as individuals as a result of the 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad Company in what some would argue is actually the most significant Supreme Court case in the US.

Find out how many earths would be required to support the human population if everyone lived the same lifestyle as you.

The game of monopoly provides an explanation for today’s economic crisis. While we need to fundamentally reform our economy, so that it is no longer a casino for speculation but an arena for responsible production of goods and services, we still need banks and financing. While many banks loaned with only an eye for increasing short-term profit, there are many subprime mortgage lenders who did it responsably.

As this financial crisis has forced us to question whether or not buying a house is always a wise financial decision for the poor, this economist questions whether accumulating savings is a good idea.

And oh, what shall I do now that the elections are over? Unfortunately, I forgot to save the links to all the articles I found interesting. I did find myself frequently crying the week after his win whenever I read anything about his historic election. Symbolically, Obama’s win has meant a lot, we have yet to see what it will mean practically.

In retrospect, some of the articles above are rather “lefty” or “progressive”. I guess I can’t help it. So I wonder if I think this way because of the class I am taking now, or whether I have always thought this way and this class has merely given more concrete words and frameworks to express it. I suspect the latter, given that I wasn't indoctrinated by my Wharton or economics classes, but it's always important to question how we form our opinions. How much of our thoughts are truly our own and how much are they influenced by what we hear and read and the people we hang out with? And how much of our common sense and knowledge as a society as a whole is influenced by the way the academy produces and frames research?

On a similar note, I also have noticed that my husband and I (or perhaps to use more PC terminology, my "partner" and I) have experienced a convergence of opinions in recent years. Do we have similar opinions because we started dating and got married? Or, did the similar opinions make us attracted to each other in the first place? Chicken and the egg.

afflicting the comfortable (challenging the system)

2008-11-18T14:20:00.000-08:00

Gramsci compared the Marxist notion of domination, by which was meant direct physical coercion by police, army, and law to political society, with that of hegemony, or ideological control though consent in civil society (unions, schools, churches, families etc.). Civil institutions, Gramsci thought, inculcated an entire system of values, beliefs and morality supportive of the established order and its dominating classes: hegemony was a worldview diffused through socialization into every area of daily life which, when internalized, became part of "common sense" (115)

~ from Theories of Development by Richard Peet with Elaine Hartwick

It’s always easy to believe in the system.* Sure, we might be critical of certain aspects of it, but overall we don’t think that much about it, because we live and function in it. We are not even aware of what the system is and how it informs the way we think and live.

But that’s to be expected, because those who are in power (and that includes those who are in power of knowledge), will work to justify their own authority. And while physical force and the threat of violence may sometimes be effective, why bother if you can compel obedience through “common sense”?

Unless we’re willing to be critical and aware of the system we inhabit—the authority structures, the institutions in place, the implicit “common sense” that we believe, we’ll just buy into the system. It just goes to show that they’ve gotten to us.

Remember that in Romans, Paul called for a renewing of the mind—that renewal must require a critical re-thinking of all our current assumptions and beliefs, even the ones that seem so deeply ingrained in us that they must just be “true” as opposed to socially constructed. We may not be able to “work outside the system” in most instances, but at the very least, we should be aware of its presence.

Examples:

A slaveowner over 200 years ago could feel like a ethical, upstanding human being because he treated his slaves well and did not beat or rape them.

A rich man (made rich off predatory mortgage lending) feels good about himself because he tutors once a week in a lower income community and leaves large tips at restaurants.

Wal-Mart corporate believes that they are offering a valuable service to Americans by selling stuff at low, affordable prices. Meanwhile, they are depressing wages everywhere because they pay their own “associates” so poorly.

The most celebrated way to leave poverty is to receive a good education and get a higher paying job. What about the millions of others who still must sweep the streets, clean restaurants, take care of our parents in nursing homes and sell stuff? Will they always be left out of the equation? Is our pitiful minimum wage the best we can do?

We are told the poor will always be amongst us. Are we to complacently resign to that fact and continue to bandage wounds instead of addressing the causes of their poverty? And the cause of their poverty may not just be lack of education or skills, but it may be in the actual economic system of the country they live in.

Working within the system is not altogether impossible but requires a high degree of integrity. You must be willing to risk losing all the benefits you may have gained in the eyes of the world. (Daniel, Esther).

Perhaps to change the world, one must be willing to work with a set of compromises. Is compromise bad if it is necessary to create enough cooperation to effect real change?

Sometimes, it may be a matter of creating alternatives or complementary systems so that others can see that another world (i.e. another system) is possible.

Recently, our system has been failing. Are we going to bandage up the current system and assume it is still inherently okay or do we try to build something new?

If it is the task of the prophet to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable and I consider myself among the comfortable, then do I need to be afflicted?

* By “the system”, I mean the set of various sub-systems or ways in which we organize and structure our life—from our companies, our government, our nonprofits, our businesses, our workplaces, our schools, our churches, our families, our property, our currency etc…

shopping season

2008-11-10T15:19:00.000-08:00

Now that election season is over, it’s holiday (a.k.a shopping) season.

Our political voting may be over for the year, but we still vote with our money. As I mentioned in my last post, we implicitly support the way that businesses are run when we buy from them and give them revenue.

While it’s near impossible to ensure that everything you buy is produced justly and sustainably, please consider making atleast a few purchases (if not all) from businesses that pursue ethical labour and good environmental practices this holiday season. As you will see in the list below, there are lots of options.

I thought I’d list a few stores and brands that I like. They usually have some combination of local, ethical labour or sustainable environmental practices, though few of them are 100% perfect in any of those categories. Below my list, I’ve also included a list compiled by Co-Op America in this brochure. It’s an even more comprehensive list of different businesses. I haven’t browsed most of these stores but some of them sound like great places to find gifts for others or for yourself. It's also possible to look up retailers on Responsible Shopper. I've also blogged extensively about labour practices in the past (1, 2, 3, 4)

If you know of other brands or stores that you particularly like, please feel free to leave them in the comment section. Or if you find out that any of these stores or brands are not quite what they're made out to be, please let me know as well. I’ll update this page as I hear about more stores and brands.

Please feel free to forward this link or this list to others. Spread the word! If you’re going to consume, you might as well support good business practices while you’re at it.

Food
Equal Exchange - Fair trade coffee, tea and chocolate. Yummy!
Your Local Farmer’s Market – To find one near you and if you’re in PA, try Buy Local PA or Local Food Philly

Clothing and accessories (Online ordering available for all of the below)
Fair Indigo – Fair trade clothing online retailer that sells Ann Taylor Loft-like clothing. They are sleek and corporate-looking, which immediately arouses some suspicion, but for the most part, I believe that they are genuine. Proceed with caution.
Wiksten – Handmade clothing sewn by a woman who resides in Kansas City; A bit on the pricey end and a small collection but I appreciate people who start their own craft business working out of their houses.
Passenger Pigeon Clothing – Eco-friendly clothing and bags made in Canada. Also pricey so I’ve never bought anything from them, but they have some really gorgeous designs
Anti-Factory - Hand-made "urban" clothing made from recycled materials. Really nice, colourful casual styles.
ReLoad – Handmade custom messenger bags, backpacks and other accessories. Orders can take up to a month to process as they are all hand-made and based on customized colours. They also do custom graphics and machine appliqué on their bags. They are headquartered in Philadelphia.
VicPickle – Purchase your own customized handbag (i.e. you get to pick out the fabrics, style etc…) which will then be made by hand in Philadelphia. They’re headquartered in Philadelphia as well.
Mooshoes – Vegan and cruelty-free shoes and bags. Store is in NY.
WarmLegWear – A family business operating out of Maine (I think?). It sells lots of tights and socks, most of which are made in Canada.
Sockdreams – Similar to the above, but with a wider selection, including organics. Not sure where most of their socks/tights are manufactured though.
Adbusters BlackSpot Shoes - Union made canvas sneakers ($79) and boots ($120)
Planet Bike - Bike lights and other accessories
Camper – is a Spanish shoe company with long history of environmental and labor responsibility. They’re also pricey but the shoes are very stylish—they’re famous for the “Twin” shoes where two shoes have different but coordinating designs.
The Green Guide also has a good list for ethically-made and environmentally-friendly shoes (including Timberland and Birkenstocks)

Miscellaneous
Etsy – Online retailer of vintage and handmade items. It’s Ebay meets an arts and crafts fair.
Ten Thousand Villages – A fair trade nonprofit organization. It sells jewelry, home décor (including beautiful wicker baskets), cards, notebooks, china and other gift items.
LUSH – Organic bath and body products made in Canada with minimal packaging. They’re pricey but the store smells good.
Paperbackswap – Not really a source for gifts but a good website to post and swap books with other members.

Local Stores specific to Philadelphia
I’ve tried my best to list the intersections but if you do plan to visit any of these stores, please google the addresses to be sure.
Thrift stores and consignment stores – There are plenty in the Philadelphia area. To list a few: The Second Mile at 45th and Locust, Goodwill at 22nd and Market (across from Trader Joe’s), a place at 50th and Baltimore, Buffalo Exchange at 17th and Chestnut, Sophisticated Seconds at 21st and Sansom, Immortal Uncommon Resale at 18th and Sansom, Greene Street (or something like that) on South Street etc…
Smak Parlour – A boutique located on Market Street between 2nd and 3rd Street in Philadelphia. It has great (somewhat flashy) clothing mainly for parties and nightclubs. Most of the clothing is designed by the owners and sewn in Chinatown. I almost got the bridesmaid dresses for my wedding from this store, but they unfortunately would not be ready on time.
Vix Emporium – VIX Emporium is a handcraft store located at 50th and Baltimore. They have quite a bit of fun jewelry, t-shirts, cards, soaps, bags and other
Black Cat – Another gift shop located 3424 Sansom Street Philadelphia. Straight from the website: “We strive to be a socially responsible business by focusing on merchandise that contributes to the good of the planet as a whole. These "Whole World Products" include pieces made from recycled materials, the work of local artists and craftspeople, fairly traded international handicrafts, and products sold in support of disabled or disadvantaged people.” It’s the counterpart to the famous White Dog Café.
Firehouse Bikes - Worker-owned used bike store and repair shop; Bikes range from about $100-$600; Great service (though sometimes slow), good prices, really friendly owners! I purchased my own bike there June of 2007.
Used/local book stores – The city also has plenty of used or locally-owned bookstores Book Trader (2nd and Market), A House of Our Own (39th and Spruce), The Last Word (40th and Locust), Big Jar Books (2nd and Arch)
Some of the above stores in the other lists are also headquartered in Philadelphia or have stores in Philly, including Ten Thousand Villages (13th and Locust), LUSH (15th and Walnut), VicPickle and ReLoad.
Fabric stores – Fabric Row has a whole bunch of fabric and notions stores located near 4th and Bainbridge; Spool Sewing at 19th and South; Cloth & Bobbin in Narberth
Yarn Stores – Rosie’s Yarn Cellar at 20th and Locust, Loop at 19th and South, Ewe and I in Narberth; Look specifically for Manos del Uruguay and Shokay yarn purchased from cooperatives in China and Uruguay.

Co-Op America List

A Greater Gift
www.agreatergift.org
Fairly traded home decor, jewelry, and more from artisans and farmers around the world.

Autonomie Project, Inc.
www.autonomieproject.com
Fair Trade, sweatshop-free footwear and clothing made by worker-owned cooperatives in the developing world.

Bamboosa
www.bamboosa.com
Makes bamboo fiber clothing and baby products that are sweatshop-free and American-made.

BaaBaa Zuzu
www.baabaazuzu.com
Jackets, mittens, hats, scarves and bags: one-of-a-kind and made in the USA from reclaimed woolens.

BTC Elements
www.btcelements.com
Offers earth-friendly and socially conscious apparel, accessories, beauty, and baby clothes.

Chapter One Organics
www.chapteroneorganics.com
Uses organic fabrics sewn in the US to make stylish, fun, and practical baby and toddler clothing.

Certified Jean Co.
www.certifiedjean.com
Jeans for men and women, made from organic cotton: grown, milled, and made in the USA.

Cottonfield
www.cottonfieldusa.com
Organic cotton and hemp clothing including sweaters and underwear for men and women.

Decent Exposures
www.decentexposures.com
Shirts, leggings, skirts, bathing suits, and over 200 sizes of organic cotton bras made in the USA.

Dreams on Looms
www.dreamsonlooms.com
Collection of apparel and accessories handwoven by tribal women from northeast India.

Earth Creations
www.earthcreations.net
Clothing in organic cotton, hemp, tencel, and bamboo blends; dyed with natural clay dyes.

Ecolution
www.ecolution.com
Direct Romanian sweat-free manufacturer of hemp products: hats, bags, apparel, fabric, and more.

Ecoganik
www.ecoganik.com
Private label sweat-free organic fashion for men, women, and kids: career and casual wear and more.

Esperanza Threads
www.esperanzathreads.com
Organic fiber clothing made under fair conditions in Cleveland, Ohio.

Equita
www.shopequita.com
Fair Trade, organic and green essentials including: apparel, jewelry, handbags, and baby
clothing.

Fair Industry
www.fairindustry.com
Fairly traded women’s clothing and jewelry; modern design combined with traditional skills.

Fair Trade Sports
www.fairtradesports.com
Fairly traded eco-certifi ed sports balls for soccer, football, basketball, rugby, and more.

Far East Handicrafts
www.fareasthandicrafts.com
Direct importer from indigenous craftspeople, specializing in handmade paper, singing bowls, chimes, bells, silver and wood carving, and more.

Global Exchange
www.store.gxonlinestore.org
Not-for-profit, non-exploitative online store supporting artisan cooperatives in 40 countries.

Global Mamas
www.globalmamas.org
Clothing and jewelry handmade by women’s cooperatives in Africa.

Greater Goods
www.greatergoodsonline.com
Fair Trade hats, natural fiber clothing, jewelry, gifts and more.

Justice Clothing
www.justiceclothing.com
Men’s and women’s union-made-in-the-USA clothing, coats, underwear, socks, ties, and more.

Kusikuy
www.kusikuy.com
Fair Trade llama and alpaca blend knits. Ponchos, sweaters, hats, mittens, and scarves.

Maggie’s Organics
www.organicclothes.com
Sweat-free clothing including T-shirts, camisoles, tops, socks, and tights made with organic cotton.

Marigold Fair Trade
www.marigoldfairtradeclothing.com
Fair Trade clothing and household items from a women’s cooperative in India.

Natural Beginnings
www.naturalbeginnings.biz
Organic and natural sweat-free products for babies and their moms.

No Sweat Apparel
www.nosweatapparel.com
Union-made, sweatshop-free sneakers and clothing for men, women, and children.

North Star Toys
www.northstartoys.com
Creative, nontoxic, nonviolent wooden toys made by a family business.

Parnassus Investments
www.parnassus.com
Offers seven socially responsible mutual funds, all of which consider both financial and social factors when making investment decisions.

Rugmark
www.rugmark.org
Working to end child labor in the rug industry, and offer education to former child weavers.

Splaff
www.splaff.com
Sandals, bags, and belts handcrafted from used tires, hemp, and recycled materials.

Traditions Fair Trade
www.traditionsfairtrade.com
Promotes Fair Trade relationships with artisans around the world; offers sweat-free sneakers.

T.S. Designs
www.tsdesigns.com
Full-service apparel domestic manufacturing and screenprinting company based in North Carolina.

Under the Nile
www.underthenile.com
Children’s apparel, diapers, bedding, blankets, and more, made fairly in Egypt.

World of Good
www.worldogood.com
Fair Trade apparel, scarves, jewelry, housewares, and gifts from around the world.

exercises in hope?

2008-11-04T14:28:00.000-08:00

I waited in line two hours to vote, but I voted and it was my first election ever, given my newly minted US citizen status. I hope you voted too (if you’re eligible). *

While voting is definitely important, our rights and responsibilities as citizens and our role in shaping this country extends beyond what we do in a voting booth once every few years. We vote with our money, with what we buy and what we do not buy. We vote with our actions, whether they be daily mundane acts or larger life decisions. We vote on an individual basis, on the choices that we make and we vote in our participation and involvement in other groups, whether political or not.

We can have a half-hearted democracy where we vote for representatives every few years or we can work towards a more rooted democracy where we use our voice and our actions to influence and implement changes that affect our lives on a regular basis, through political or other means.

While this election may promise some change and hope with new leaders for this country, real change does not always come from above. We are responsible. Just as we consciously make history today with our votes, we also make history daily whether we are conscious of it or not.

* If you’re ineligible to vote, you can still be like a citizen and influence what kind of country this will be or will not be.

the greatest challenge of our generation

2008-11-01T14:32:00.000-07:00

exercises in cynicism and hope (4)

~ Political cartoon by Ted Rall

Have we really arrived at the end of history? Have the great debates of ideology already ended? Is our current system of capitalism and democracy the best of all possibilities? Is our most important duty to our society now to buy and to blog? Or is another world possible? (implicit in that question: is a better world possible?)

Meanwhile, it appears that I will continue to buy and to blog. After all, I am a product of my culture.

the curse is over

2008-10-29T20:28:00.000-07:00

CONGRATS

PHILLIES!!!!

This is the year where the first become last and the last become first. The giants of Wall Street came tumbling down, a black man may become president of the United States of America, and the Philadelphia Phillies win the World Series.

subjecting the city

2008-10-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

Note (11/13/08): Having received back the paper from the professor and having done some additional reading on alternative currency systems, I may need to change and revise some of the ideas in this paper...

As per my dear husband’s suggestion, I am posting a two-page paper that I recently wrote for my Community Economic Development class. It touches upon several subjects that I’ve blogged on before, including a rather biaised comparison of Philadelphia and New York* and reflections on gentrification and the personalities of cities.

Subjecting the City

Martin Buber writes about two modes of relating in his book I and Thou. The word pair “I-You” “establishes the world of relation” (Buber 56), which involves encountering the other as a subject, whereas the word pair “I-It” treats the other as an object, a thing to be experienced. Cities exist along a continuum between the city as a subject, that is, a community where individuals encounter each other in reciprocal relationships; and the city as an object, that is, a provider of income, a commodity to be consumed, a physical space where a set of transactions take place. The different approaches to community economic development, as described in Peter Boothroyd’s and H. Craig Davis’s article “Community Economic Development: Three Approaches” can result in cities that either encourage transactions between objects or promote relationships of reciprocity between subjects.

Growth planning’s emphasis on monetary transactions produces more “I-It” relationships. The use of money leads individuals to consider one another as objects, because money assigns a quantitative value, or as Buber would put it, a “border” to contain the other. Money speaks the language of “I-It” as it allows a person to limit and quantify what he might exchange with others. The other person is only a conduit to some service or product for purchase or some earned income. A person is not valued beyond his or her function in a transaction of exchange.
Furthermore, growth planning does not take in consideration the structure or ownership of firms. If firms are owned by anonymous shareholders or by external wealthy proprietors, workers are much more likely to be treated as an “It” by their employer, and subsequently lose a sense of control and investment. Profits from successful firms may not trickle down into higher wages and rising home prices may only result in gentrification. A city that prioritizes “I-It” relationships will be, at its best, a spectacle like the casinos of Las Vegas or the advertisements of Times Square. People’s commitment to the city will end whenever the city can no longer benefit them. The city becomes a transaction space where people work as an “It” for money, which people then use to buy things or acquire “experience capital” in more “I-It” interactions.

In contrast, the structural change approach and the communalization approach recognize the importance of noncash transactions and local and cooperative ownership, which are important conduits for “I-You” relationships. Noncash activities, which include volunteer children groups, babysitting co-ops and community gardens, require mutual trust, commitment and responsibility from its participants. It relies upon and builds up social capital. More local and shared forms of ownership such as worker-owned cooperatives and community land trusts also bind people together in more formal organizations. While these activities and forms of organization do not guarantee “I-You” relationships, they provide a better basis for them. When people must rely upon each other directly for assistance, and when people must make decisions collectively, reciprocity is more likely to exist. People will be more likely to consider themselves as part of the city, a community member who contributes to the well-being of the place.

The structural change approach and the communalization approach have been criticized for being “out of step with the mainstream” emphasis on economic growth (Boothroyd and Davis, 236). Yet to focus solely on economic growth with no concern for the other aspects of city life runs the risk of “the proliferating It under which the I” becomes “more and more impotent” (Buber 97). To create a city of “I-You”, one must emphasize what cannot be measured in dollars and cents, and what draws people together in closer interdependence.

Works Cited

Boothroyd, Peter and Davis, Craig. “Community Economic Development: Three Approaches”. Journal of Planning Education and Research. 12 (1993): 230-240.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970.

* Sigh... I can't seem to be able to find the link to this blog post.
** Wow, this paper looks so short now that it's posted on my blog. Blogging is growing the tendency within my character to be excessively verbose.....

exercises in cynicism and hope (3)

2008-10-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

Today is Tuesday October 14th. The era of the large investment banks and excessive trading and easy credit is coming to an end. Our banks are getting partially nationalized. Senator Obama is ahead in the polls.*

Just as the Great Depression marked the acceptance of Keynesian economics and the economic stagflation of the 70s ushered in several decades of deregulation and trickle-down economics, this year’s economic crisis will shift the prevailing economic and social policies of this country.

By no means do I want nationalization of major industries** or excessive redistribution of income, but I do hope for a new era of politics that does not confer disproportionate power to large corporations, but rather encourages appropriate government regulation, and more equitable and socially responsible economic growth.

Today, I’m feeling a bit more hopeful.
(Oh, and the Phillies are one win away from being in the World Series.)

* Sorry, Palin sealed the deal. My respect for McCain has only gone down since then.
** Though I do want universal health care coverage. (I'm still Canadian!)

exercises in cynicism and hope (2)

2008-10-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

sometimes I wonder whether deep down at the core of my being, I am just cynical -- that I superficially espouse all these nice sounding platitudes about how all these all these great organizations and groups are doing all this great world in the world in order to cope with the fact that I actually believe that all these institutions are corrupt at the core and no true change will ever come of them. (we are just in survival mode. the least common denominator).

or whether I really do believe that good is possible and that hope is real and that we can create a more whole, in the sense of shalom, way of living in this world, and that anyone can be an agent of this change.

exercises in cynicism and hope (1)

2008-10-05T15:55:00.000-07:00

Let’s forget whether or not the hordes of Ivy League graduates who went off to work on Wall Street are actually responsible for the current crisis. And let’s leave aside the question of whether it is possible to change the system from within or whether we are truly following God’s will when we work for a large corporation.

Could we instead imagine what this country (or this world) would be like had we all done something different than what was simply expected of us? What if many of us had gone off to start fair trade and worker-owned companies?* What if others of us went into government to try and establish and implement policies that would encourage wealth creation in our cities and countryside? What if more of us went full-time into teaching in underserved areas?

Maybe now that there are not as many Wall Street jobs, perhaps more of us will take the road less traveled.

* Some in fact have opted to do this with positive results. A former Penn student and some others from Harvard have started a fair trade yarn exporting company in China. And to give credit, many do work for a large corporation for a few years before pursuing something different like this.
** On a side note, for those of you who commented a while ago on my blog-- I've posted my replies. I am trying my best to respond to comments but sometimes it takes me awhile :) Thanks for taking the time to write them though! I do appreciate them.