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An obsession is a terrible thing to waste. That’s why I indulge myself in it as often as I breathe during the day. Well, quite often anyway.

My mind tends to bombard me on a continual basis about so many things that sometimes the overload causes mental awareness shutdown. What is awareness shutdown?

That’s when a mental question smacks the consciousness so hard that all other considerations, including where the person happens to be located, falls away. The person is left grappling with the various aspects of answering the question. Only that wrestling match exists until a resolution comes forward.

Case in point: Why do people feel the need to run on freshly seeded lawn, leaving gouging footprints behind?

I asked myself that question as I returned this afternoon from the Laundry Room. Do such people fear that they’ll leave behind no other memorable marks on this Earth? Are they trying to copy the “Footprints in the Sand” poster that most people recognize? What is their motivation?

Doesn’t sound very important on the face of it, does it? To someone like me, though, it begs significant consideration, since my obsession is writing. And all things relate to the written word, as all writers, whether of prose or verse, know. Without knowing the character’s motivation, predicting future behavior becomes chancy at best, abysmal at worst. Besides, that simple seeming event could birth a great little story.

For example: Rennie looked back along the line of his footprints. Rennie’s lip curled up at the corner. Deep divots in the freshly seeded lawn showed his progress. He’d wait for his father’s reaction to this before planning his next bit of revenge.

The motivation behind the character’s behavior reveals something about both the inner workings of said character and about his relationship with his father. In other words, dual purpose sentences emerge from one act.

Here’s another stray looking for a home.

A few days ago I watched part of a Food Network show where pastry chefs competed to take the rank of greatest pastry chef alive, or some such title. The episode’s challenge of the day was to create a fantasy masterpiece, capable of flying (the final test of the creation,) and do it with only one major ingredient – sugar. They could use water and food dyes, as well.

For those who don’t know what they were making, it was sugar glass. Sugar glass is that marvelous concoction that looks like glass, colored or clear, that is used in the film and theater industry to simulate the real thing. It’s also used for break-away bottles for bar fights and glass windows that will have people thrown through them, etc. Costs very little to make, can be recycled easily, and doesn’t hurt anyone in the process.

While I watched a few minutes of the process on that show, I began asking myself questions. I know what it’s used for in show business. Anyone with a candy thermometer, plenty of sugar, and patience can make it with practice.

I asked myself about the illusory quality to all things in the everyday world. Given the state of art today around the world, Photoshop capabilities to crop, blend, restructure, etc. the photos we see, and what we’re shown on TV, how much of what we see is actually real? Do we now live in a world of total illusion? Can we trust our eyes with anything shown u

Megan Branch, Intern

Patrick Wright a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and a fellow of the London Consortium.  Wright wrote On Living in An Old Country and its companion, A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London (read an excerpt here). On Living in an Old Country looks at history’s role in shaping identity and everyday life in England. Below is an excerpt about the house of Miss May Alice Savidge. Upon finding out that her pre-Tudor house was scheduled for demolition to make way for road work, Savidge dismantled it, shipped it 100 miles away, and began reassembling the house piece-by-piece.

On Camping out in the Modern World

“History appears as the derailment, the disruption of the everyday…” - Karel Kosik

So far I have not identified the political complexion of the local authority in Ware, not for that matter of the national government when the decision to redevelop Miss Savidge’s home was made. This has not been the result of any reluctance to deal with the political implications of Miss Savidge’s story. On the contrary, my point is that these implications will not be appreciable unless one also grasps the extent to which politics, at least in the traditional frame of the major electoral parties, have become irrelevant to the issues finding expression in this affair.

In a phrase of Habermas’s, the political system is increasingly ‘decoupled’ from the traditional measures of everyday life, and Miss Savidge cannot be adequately defined as the victim of one party as opposed to another. She fell instead (and, of course, rose again) on the common ground of the post-war settlement, a ground which is made up of rationalised procedures and methods of administration as much as of any shared policies about, say, the efficacy of the mixed economy or the legitimacy of the welfare state. Miss Savidge’s house stood in the way of an ethos of development and a practice of social planning and calculation which have formed the procedural basis of the welfare state under both Conservative and Labour administrations. Governments have come and gone (at the behest of an electorate oscillating at a rate which itself reflects the situation), but a professionalised conduct of social administration has persisted throughout.

The professionals of this world are almost bound to see the more traditional forms of self-understanding persisting among the citizenry as merely quaint and eccentric, if not more dismissively as obstructive and inadequate to modern reality. While there is always room for an arrogant contempt to develop here, the most frequent manifestation consists of a resigned and pragmatic realism (the bureaucratic sigh which responds to people’s demands by saying that things are always more complicated than that) with which officials draw out and exhaust the discussion and patience of residents’ associations around the country. That this system of planning is less than perfect goes without saying, and Miss Savidge is well stocked with complaints on this score. For anyone who stops to ask she will talk about the callousness of the officials who turned up the Saturday before Christmas (1953) to look at the buildings which they had already decided to pull down—even though this was the first the residents had heard of it. She will mention inconsiderate rules applying to council tenants (no cat or dog unless you have a family, and so on). She will also talk about a general bureaucratic incompetence which, in her experience, made it possible to get a council grant towards the cost of installing a bathroom in a house which was already up for demolition, and which was also evident in the many changes of plan regarding the road development itself. Is it to be a new road with a roundabout, or can the old road be widened, and which local authority (town or country) is to be responsible?

Bureaucratic procedure may indeed be conducted as if its rationality were contained entirely within its own calculations, and in this respect it may well seem to stand impervious: free from any responsibility to the world in which its works eventually materialise. But whatever the appearance, this is obviously not a matter of rationality alone. The system of planning into which Miss Savidge was well caught up by 1969 is characteristic of a welfare state that was both corporatist in character (public discussion and political negotiation simulated in thoroughly institutionalised forms), and caught in the contradictions of its commodifying pact with private capital. More than this, the welfare state has developed through a period of extensive cultural upheaval, and Miss Savidge’s is therefore a story of the times in its discovery of tradition not just in the lifeworld but also in an apparently hopeless contest with modernity. While the dislocation of traditional self-understanding could indeed prepare the way for better possibilities, Miss Savidge stands there as a testimony to another scenario in which the prevailing atmosphere is one of insecurity which develops when extensive cultural dislocation has occurred without any better, or even reasonably meaningful, future coming into view.

Penelope’s baby has arrived, and her husband Colin introduces us to little Veda over at Penelope’s blog. Congratulations, Penelope and Colin!!

Early today we posted an article about health care reform by Lawrence J. Schneiderman, M.D, a Professor Emeritus at UCSD Medical School and Visiting Scholar in the Program in Medicine and Human Values at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. His new book, Embracing Our Mortality: Hard Choices in an Age of Medical Miracles, looks at end of life decisions from both the medical and philosophical perspectives and advises on how to best make tough decisions. In the excerpt below Schneiderman emphasizes the importance of communicating your end-of-life preferences.

One of my patients, Earl Adams (not his real name), an African-American in his late seventies, was afflicted with severe Parkinsonism. Not only could he no longer play the organ for Sunday church services, he could barely move and relied on his devoted wife for even the most basic needs. She got him out of bed in the morning, helped him to the toilet, bathed him, fed him, kept him upright during the day, and returned him to bed at night. So successful was she at these tasks that whenever she brought him to see me he was always clean-shaven and meticulously dressed, complete with jacket and tie. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

The adverb is an endangered species in Modern English. One should neither wring one’s hands nor weep on hearing this news. In the course of the last thousand years, English has shed most of its ancient endings, so that one more loss does not matter. Some closely related Germanic languages have advanced even further. For example, in German, schnell is both “quick” and “quickly,” and gut means “good” and well,” even though wohl, a cognate of Engl. well, exists. Everybody, at least in American English, says: “Do it real quick.” Outside that phrase, which has become an idiom, adverbs are fine: he is really quick and does everything quickly. During his visit to Minneapolis after the collapse of the bridge, President Bush said: “We want to get this bridge rebuilt as quick as possible.” This is not a Bushism: few people would have used quickly here despite the fact that my computer highlighted the word and suggested the form with -ly. (more…)

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