speck of colour.

new suns [not nuisance] at the end of june.

today the tiniest breath swayed me and i wandered off.

the phrase ‘i haven’t stopped missing you yet’ comes to me again and again.

i smile at this more than anything else.

frumoasa ca o stea…

inspired by masha’s chapter, i was thinking about scale a lot today. i find it intriguing why it is that when writing a thesis in anthropology we are thinking about ’scales’ and what this implies about our perception of the world. walking along in the sun the question occurred to me why, in english, the word is the same to describe the outer shells of a fish and when, later i checked my friend the OED, i had a surprise. the meanings of ’scale’ have varied a lot throughout time, and there are seven entries under the noun ’scale’ in the OED, all covering multiple things and processes.

etymology for beginners (you know i like this kind of crap…)

[a. ON. skál str. fem., bowl, pl. (weighing) scales (Sw. skål, Da. skaal: cf.

SKOAL) = OHG. scâla (MHG. schâle, mod.G. schale):OTeut. *skl, ablaut-var. of *skal, whence OE. scealu shell, hust, drinking cup, weighing scale (see SHALE n.¹), OHG. scala shell, husk (MHG., mod.G. schale); the quantity of the vowel is doubtful in OS. skala cup, and in the ODu. antecedent of MDu. schaleschaal), though it is probable that in Du. as in Ger. two original forms, skâla cup, scales, and sklascealu the inflexion appears to attest the short vowel in all the senses. The WGer. *skla (:OTeut. *skl, skal) passed into OF. as eschale, escale cup (med.L. scala ‘patera’), also husk (mod.F. écale). For the Teut. root *skel-: skal-: skl- to separate, divide, cf. SHALE, SHELL, SKILL. See also SKELE.
Between the first quarter of the 13th c. and the 16th c. the forms (containing the vowel a) represent the northern pronunciation, the forms being midland and southern. In the 16th c., however, the northern scalescale is the prevailing literary form, though scole (with other equivalent spellings) occasionally appears down to the middle of the century.] (Du. husk, shell, have become phonetically coincident. For the OE. seems to have found its way into the London dialect, being used by Palsgrave and later by Spenser and Shakes. In the 17th c.

–> from this the meanings of scale as the apparatus of measure, metaphorical for justice, etc.

[aphetic a. OF. escale (12th c.), mod.F. écale husk, pod, chip of stone:

OTeut. *skal (see SCALE n.¹, SHALE n.). OF. had also escaille (13th c.), mod.F. écaille scale of fish, shell of oyster, etc. = It. scaglia:Romanic (also med.L.) scalia, a. OTeut. *skalj (see SHELL n.) from the same root; this is perh. the source of some of the ME. spellings.]

–> from this the meanings clustering around the scales of fish and other reptiles. entirely different origin and related to nutshell in a nice way

[ad. It. scala or its source L. scla:

prehist. *scansl (scand- + -tl), f. scandre to climb (see SCAND v.). Cf. Pr., Sp., Pg. escala, OF. eschieleéchelle).] (mod.F.

–> a ladder (obsolete), musical scales, and scales as in mathematics, psychology, etc.

[ad. OF. scal(l)e, escal(l)e (mod.F. escale, esp. in phr. faire escale to go ashore) or its source It. scala = Sp., Pg. escala seaport, harbour:

L. scla ladder (see SCALE n.³).]

–> this one is also obsolete but i like it.

a. A landing-place; occas. a custom-house. rare. b. A seaport town; a trading port; a centre of trade or traffic; an emporium.

and it occurred to me that we like stars and find them beautiful because they make us think about scale (besides all the modern romantic connotations we tend to put on them). it is an existential problem, and of being human in a world that is huge.

why do you find stars beautiful?

the naming of plants.

subtitled: the confusion of categories.

You’d think that after 22 years I’d be used to the spin… Now that I am leaving the spin has subsided. My senses work best when I am on the verge of breaking from pain, insomnia, stimulation, excitement, stress, etc. Now, that statement is not meant as an incitement for crude biologism – note that you are still in the esteemed presence (of the virtual kind) of a specimen of the slightly mad, but on the whole innocuous anthro-apprentice to whom you may give other terms of endearment.

I crack open the window but shut out the traffic. A summery scent of jasmine has climbed up the wall and creeps over the window sill. I actually do not know whether it is even jasmine, but that is what it should be called in an anthropologist’s world…;-)

Do you happen to know what the real name of this one is?

Further to being a failed botanist, I am also a failed (wishful) architect-cum-carpenter. I went to the Bartlett degree show, and immensely enjoyed the marvels exhibited there. Now, would you recognise a creative being if it bit you in the calf? [heavily leaning on one of Blackadder’s all-time favourite punchlines ‘you wouldn’t know a joke if it got up and gave you a haircut’] Below the model from a laser cutter that had me wide-eyed.

I forgot to take some photos of those friend-ly faces I had been missing, but take that as a good sign. I did encounter the following instances of beauty.

Ohne Worte. King’s Cross St Pancras Hotel, under heavy renovation. New Cross Street Scene. The pub with the strange pandas on the side is called ‘Take Courage’, which I found hilarious.

Europe? Democracy? Political?

ON THE DOWN SIDE.

I wonder what our Prime Minister is up to when he says that the Irish made a wrong choice, and when even the British Parliament look to ways of pushing through the ratification of the Lisbon treaty using an endless string of euphemisms and lies.

Yes, of course the way the EU works needs reform, even though that is a stretchable term.

I can already hear some people say, oh you’re such a populist, whoever ‘the people’ are, they’ve been wrong before, and they are just not as enlightened as they should be. I beg to differ.

As if JCJ’s interest still lay, now, with ‘the people’. Jeejee, géi dach wech! Quetschen och! This would be like saying that GB has a long-standing, idealistic interest in EU construction enthusiastically shared by its average citizen. Ha! Bordering on the absurd now.

I think the European project of integration the way it is run today has nothing to do with how its foundational fathers imagined it. They would probably be turning in their graves, if they knew or cared about the monster that it has become.

Let me get it out there, for those new to this forum:

Experience shows me, everyday, all the things that are wrong with capitalism’s neoliberal version, as it spins in ever more unequal spheres.

I have also come to think representational democracy is a scam, albeit a brilliant one with a long-standing cultural history of optical illusion.

Yet you can hopefully also sense that I will probably never abandon concern with politics and effective social action bringing about positive change.

My political compass is definitely skewed though, especially since fieldwork. I would not even be able to say anymore, and of this I was so sure when I was younger, whether I am left or right.

To me none of that makes much sense, although I consider myself a highly political animal.

I hope I make politically the right decisions in my life and my work. Along with whoever (I forget) made the difference between ‘un homme politique’ and ‘un politicien’, I think that today’s rulers rather crowd into the second, ultimately self-serving, category.

C’est dommage, mais c’est un début!

 

ONE THE PLUS SIDE….

I had a lovely surprise.

In January, when I was home, I concocted a dossier of readings, largely inspired by Greenpeace’s action on implementing GMO Free Regions, in response to repressive (in terms of the possibility of organic “co-existence” of non-GM plants) legislation being passed in Brussels. I submitted this to my local Council in the village I grew up in.

A few weeks later, my parents got a phone call from one of the councillors asking whether I could come in to give a presentation about the issue.

Being stuck in the Deen, this proved impossible to me, but I remember being chuffed that they had, at least, taken note of the dossier.

About a week ago, my parents got a letter sent in the post stating that they had unanimously voted, in the council meeting, that this initiative I suggest in the dossier, be taken up.

Yeah! We need more encouraging examples.

I feel very drawn to the research area(s) of progressive politics, direct democratic procedures that effect positive social change. Anyone for any more concrete ideas? And I do not really mean Switzerland by this.

time.

m d jackson, anthropologist at the divinity school at harvard, musters an eloquence almost unmatched to speak about things existential and oh-so-human.

During my first few weeks in the village, I found myself so captivated by the things I heard and saw around me that it was all too easy to believe I intuitively understood them. But understanding is never born of enchantment, any more than initiation is consummated in newness alone. Understanding comes of separation and pain. To understand is to suffer the eclipse of everything you know, all that you have, and all that you are. It is, as the Kuranko say, like the gown you put on when you are initiated. To don this gown you must first be divested of your old garb, stripped clean, and reduced to nothingness.

not just once, but a thousand times over… and each time, rekindle the courage to keep going, and know that it does not all depend on you, despite repeated pleas to the contrary, in moments of despair.

In those first weeks of fieldwork in Firawa, the seeds of almost all the ideas that would shape my thinking over the next thirty years were planted. I was now convinced that the justification of anthropology lay not in its potential to explain social phenomena on the basis of antecedent causes or underlying laws – evolutionary, structural, or psychological – but in its capacity to explore, in a variety of contexts, the ways in which people struggle, with whatever inner or worldly resources they possess, to manage the immediate imperatives of existence. Though worldviews differ radically from society to society and epoch to epoch, our everyday priorities, as well as our notions of what makes us quintessentially human, are remarkably similar wherever one goes. To participate in the lives of others, in another society, is to discover the crossing-points where one’s own experience connects with theirs – the points at which sameness subsumes difference. It may be that this savoir-faire, more than abstract ideas, promises the best basis for practical coexistence in a plural world.

retrospective must be a great angle to enjoy things from. time is not my foe.

(photo: sighisoara, transylvania)

speculation.

enlightening article here. quote:

What made the oil market speculation possible was legislation passed in the waning days of the Clinton administration. At the behest of energy-trading companies like Enron, a shadow electronic trading system was created that allowed speculators to trade oil futures contracts beyond the regulatory oversight of the Commodities Future Trading Commission. The CFTC is empowered to establish trading limits ‘‘as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent” the “burden” arising from speculation. Because the CFTC can’t track much of the oil trading now, it can’t stop the speculation. A U.S. Senate subcommittee report from June 2006 squarely blamed speculators for much of the rise in oil prices, estimating more than $60 billion had poured into the markets at that point.

The report noted that even as oil prices were rising, so were oil inventories because suppliers were gambling they could get more money down the road. The same exact thing occurred earlier this year. Crude oil prices zoomed nearly $20 a barrel in January and February. But in eight of nine weeks, U.S. oil inventories increased to multi-year highs. Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, explains how it works: “You’ve got hundreds of parties entering into an electronic format to exchange massive volumes of crude oil and gasoline and natural gas and electric power and coal and ethanol and whatever else they want to do. And it’s all unregulated.” The players, says Slocum, include, “Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and a huge host of hedge funds. Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, UBS—all the big investment banks. The big oil companies that are traders are BP, Shell, and Marathon. Exxon Mobil really is not a big trader.”

There are some “legitimate supply-demand issues that are driving prices up,” he says. But “supply and demand does not justify the level of prices that we are seeing right now. I think that has to do with the increased level of trading volume, volatility and speculation that is represented by a lot of these new players.” Slocum adds that because we “lack any effective transparency…that marketplace has an invitation to engage in anti-competitive behavior—colluding, rigging bets, price fixing.”

It’s hard to say if agricultural commodities markets are being manipulated, but there appears to be naked profiteering. For one, at the Chicago Board of Trade, there has been a big leap in electronic trading. The volume of wheat and oat contracts in the electronic arena (as opposed to the classic “open pit” where traders physically meet) has increased by more than 130 percent in 2008 so far, while rice contracts have ballooned by 219 percent. Patel says he thinks that “hedge funds and grain-trading divisions of the large agribusinesses are making a ton of cash, like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.”

edward steichen. beauty.

The actress Gloria Swanson (1924) captured by Edward Steichen. What is on her mind?

More images here.

the edgar allen poe cipher.

do you have too much time on your hands and would like an extensive problem-solving ritual?

thought so.

see here and here.

sometimes i miss being a role player geekie type with all this seriousness of making a livelihood. *grins*

sea-change.

at times, it takes just the tiniest part of a conversation to make one look at things in a new light.

today, i found my courage back to write and, maybe even go on with research (living with the unlikely assumption that life after the phd exists) and apply for postdocs. even writing that word makes me uneasy… 

so even though i feel ambivalent at best about my current research, it will be better to have some continuity. 

strategy: 

- keep writing the thesis

- get published

- learn that new language with lovely diminutives

- think about shifting the focus in such a way that it makes sense as a continuous progression of research interests

and, no, rest assured, i am not expecting any miracles. i know it will be an uphill struggle, în continuare. 

Haide, nutshell, spor la treaba… 

to melt, verb.

[A merging of two distinct words: (i) (represented by the alpha forms) an Old English strong verb of Class III (orig. intransitive), cognate with an unattested early Scandinavian verb to be inferred from a surviving past participial adjective (cf. Icelandic moltinn soft, mouldering (18th cent.), Norwegian (Nynorsk) molten soft, mouldering, Old Swedish multin rotten (Swedish multen), Danish regional multen rotten); cf. also (with a different Germanic ablaut grade) Old High German malz soft, melting, dissolving (Middle High German malz melting, powerless), Icelandic maltur soft, mouldering (16th cent.), Swedish regional malt mouldering; and (ii) (represented by the forms) an Old English weak verb (causative of the former, and orig. transitive), cognate with Old Icelandic melta to digest, dissolve, and an unattested Gothic verb to be inferred from Gothic gamalteins (verbal noun) dissolution (translating ancient and Hellenistic Greek 2 Timothy 4:6: see ANALYSIS n.); both ult. < an extended form of the Indo-European base of MEAL n.¹ Cf. also Sanskrit mdu soft, ancient Greek to melt, classical Latin mollis soft, Welsh blydd soft, juicy, Old Church Slavonic mlad young, fresh, and the Germanic cognate forms with s- prefix cited s.v. SMELT v. Cf. MALT n.¹, MILT n.
The forms represent later reflexes of the Old English and forms. The two words were prob. already confused in Old English; and by the Middle English period the strong and weak inflections were used indiscriminately, the former becoming gradually less frequent (the appearance of such mixed forms as moltid (past tense), melten (past participle) indicates a complete confusion of forms). The strong past tense (esp. in the forms molt, molte, moult, moulte by analogy with the past participle) continued in use in the early modern period, albeit infrequently and chiefly in poetry. The weak past participle melted is now the usual form, with the strong form molten chiefly confined to poetic use (cf. MOLTEN adj.).
In Old English the prefixed forms gemeltan (cf. forms above) and gemieltan (cf. forms above) are also attested; some of the past participle forms with ge- cited above may represent these verbs.]

[brought to you by the OED, a source of infinite wisdom...]

yours verbally-logorrheatically but as ever unapologetically,

nutshell-sisyphus [il faut imaginer sisyphe heureux et nutshell heureuse].