neil young in da house.

in a brilliant song (both music and lyrics) i find this line exceptionally moving: ’singing words between the lines of age’

yeah! listen to it here.

Someone and someone
were down by the pond
Looking for something
to plant in the lawn.
Out in the fields they
were turning the soil
I’m sitting here hoping
this water will boil
When I look through the windows
and out on the road
They’re bringing me presents
and saying hello.

Singing words, words
between the lines of age.
Words, words
between the lines of age.

If I was a junkman
selling you cars,
Washing your windows
and shining your stars,
Thinking your mind
was my own in a dream
What would you wonder
and how would it seem?
Living in castles
a bit at a time
The King started laughing
and talking in rhyme.

Singing words, words
between the lines of age.
Words, words
between the lines of age.

joyful friday.

lots of reasons to be happy. what a ride it’s been this week. been to the depths of sadness and elated, inspired and bored and angry and playful. geeez. evening it all out? nae too sure about that at the moment.

i miss you already and look forward to your return. i hope the mountains are kind to you. i’ll get the burnt rice ready love.

this song accompanies me just now.

connections between people travel across meadows and cities. they’re what matters.

i love my job.

today this email came to my inbox. how cool is that??! a conference on the history of chocolate.

Call for Papers

International workshop on the history of cocoa and chocolate

Date and venue: Chocolate museum Cologne, 28 -29 October 2010

The history of chocolate, its production and consumption is a
fascinating and important part of our modern economic, social and
cultural history. Since the arrival of the cocoa bean in Europe in the
early 16^th century its products have shaped the pattern of consumption
and enjoyment.

Today it is hard to imagine a life without chocolate in the western
world. The industry has acquired a central position in some European
countries. In Germany the chocolate industry had a turn-over of 4.4
billion Euros in 2008 and in Switzerland 1.2 billion Euros. Indeed,
Switzerland has had the highest per capital consumption with 12.4 kg,
closely followed by Belgium, Britain and Germany.

Chocolate is not only a mass product but life-style. Within the last few
decades multiple new products have been created, which on the one hand
draw on the indigenous cultures of America. On the other hand a new
culture of chocolate consumption has emerged which manifests itself in
chocolate festivals, exhibitions and chocolate shops or “chocolateries”.
Medicine has also rediscovered chocolate. Big international research
programmes have been undertaken on the health supporting properties of
the flavanols or polyphenols in the cocoa beans.

While chocolate has become the relish of the masses, the history of
chocolate has been neglected in historical research for a long time.
Only within the last few years a certain change can be seen. A few
publications have come out either on the history of single companies or
on particular aspects.

However, since the arrival of the chocolate in Europe it has experienced
a profound change. It was turned from an Indian hot drink to a solid
chocolate bar and truffles followed by a variety of new product
variations. In the regions of origin it has also had a deep impact on
the production methods and working conditions.

The cultural and economic changes shall be subject of an international
workshop on the history of chocolate. Proposals are invited on any
aspect of research relating to the history of chocolate including the
following themes:

1. Areas of cultivation and production methods

2. Development and organisation of the cocoa trade

3. Technical innovations and product innovation (transition from craft
to industry)

4. cultural innovations specific patterns of chocolate consumption and
rituals, chocolate china etc)

5. Working conditions on the plantations and in the European chocolate
manufactories)

6. Enterprise and marketing

7. Chocolate and health

The conference languages will be English and German

*Deadline* for submission is 31.Oct. 2009

The workshop will be co-organized by the Chocolate Museum Cologne,
Rheinisch-Westfaelisches Wirtschaftsarchiv Cologne and Historisches
Seminar II, University of Duesseldorf

Proposals for papers should include a short (one page) abstract, and a
brief CV. If you have any questions, please contact Margrit Schulte
Beerbuehl at …

buddhist economics.

helping me to write my introduction. acknowledgements to e.f. schumacher, who wrote ’small is beautiful’ and who also said the following, apparently

“Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it.”
sweet.

play.

Pete (to whom I wish all the best and whose departure leaves me sad but hopeful that our paths cross again soon) sent me the link to this article a while ago. Just now getting around to reading it. Wonderful stuff. I wonder why I do not have a tag in my cloud for ‘play’. With a reminder that we all need some play. So go out and get some. Today. Now is the time.

Let us go directly to his definition of play. It is characterized, he says, by the addition of a meta-communicative act, one that stands outside the current level of communication and comments upon it, certainly a “binocular” structure: “These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by these actions which these actions denote. The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (Bateson, 1976: 121).

Bateson immediately draws attention to the fact that play is paradoxical, indicated in his very definition since the word “denote” is used at two levels of abstraction: with two monkeys at play, the action of a nip indicates aggressive attack, but the grin which preceded it denotes that that lower-level denotation does not apply in this instance. This results in two peculiarities of play: “(a) that the messages or signals exchanged in play are in a certain sense untrue or not meant; and (b) that that which is denoted by these signals is non-existent” (Bateson, 1976: 123). A denotation before accepted within an existing communication scheme is subverted by an act of meta-communication which (temporarily) cancels that original scheme.

Bateson notes that play can sometimes fail because the clue to the meta-communication (in the above case, the playful grin) is not observed, or, for some other reason, is disregarded or deliberately ignored. He mentions a ritual common in the Andaman Islands in which leaders of warring tribes meeting in a peace parley were ceremonially allowed “to go through the motions,” as we say, of striking each other: there were occasions on which the meta-communicative aspect failed and the blow was responded to on the lower level, so that actual fighting broke out (ibid.: 122). One recalls the white man in America’s South who, during a performance of Shakespeare’s Othello, rushed up out of the audience onto the stage to stop the black actor suffocating the white actress taking the part of Desdemona. There are occasions when student “initiation ceremonies” take a sadistic turn. There are many people who, for unconscious reasons, are quite unable to act a part upon the stage, or even to adopt a change of voice to improve a joke. While watching a 3-D film, we might not be able to resist ducking as a spear is thrown at the camera. The gap between the two levels of communication and meta-communication is fraught with tension, and there is a reason for this, to which we shall return.

economics, and why it’s forgotten history.

Came across the following in my wrestling with the Introduction. Geoffrey Hodgson seems to be doing interesting and timely work. However, as an economist (not that it matters in the aim for critical scholarship) I feel that he should read more anthropology. Hehe.

Disciplinary fences, again…

thoughtful saturday.

the future is a thing of the past.

instead of writing my introduction which has been giving me headaches for about a week, i want to ask you whether what i am going to relate to you here makes any sense to you or whether it is just me reading too much about environmental and socio-economic catastrophe and being in aberdeen, where the weather is gloomy and stormy.

i am an optimist, not because i want to be (i want at least to sustain my well-honed image of grumpiness ), but this is how i am. i wake up in the morning and i am generally happy. i am slow to wake up but there is a sense of contentment in me every morning when i wake up. i guess my sleep is a little like erasing everything that has been bad about the previous day, which is the kind of amnesia that some of you may recognise in your interactions with me.

lately though, i’ve been worried. not about what will become of me, as i think those fears are very different now than, say, last year (this may surprise grueni most of all i would expect).

the most striking thing about writing the thesis and coming to conclude is that i have to concede that my findings point to relatively gloomy prospects in terms of where the world is headed. this is not because i am a biased leftie (which i am less and less – politics just sucks) but because this is where my ethnography leads me.

- complexity of the world and unsuitability of models of economic science and politics to understand and change things

- incongruence between understanding of the world in terms of media reports and more long-term crises (e.g. swine flu versus food crisis, ever new governmental fixes versus structural inequalities, progress thinking unshaken)

and i wonder whether this conjuncture of economic depression, environmental finiteness and structural inequality will propel people to do something. most likely not, if they still want to play the game, and make money, and feed their families and so forth. alternatives are radical, and they look more and more like one needs to abandon the comforting abodes capitalism has to offer. anarchy could be nasty, but i don’t see things working out with governments or international organisations modelled on state-structures.

during the last weeks, images of children of men have been flashing in front of my eyes and sometimes i catch a glimpse of something i need to counteract urgently. someone mentioned the four riders of the apocalypse on fb (where else in these times!) and laughed it off. my laughter was one of those that got stuck in my throat.

probably i read too much dystopia, is the thought that keeps my heart from racing.

robert graves.

Just came across Robert Graves. Fascinating man. I love this poem. More of the sort here.

TO AN UNGENTLE CRITIC

The great sun sinks behind the town
Through a red mist of Volnay wine….
But what’s the use of setting down
That glorious blaze behind the town?
You’ll only skip the page, you’ll look
For newer pictures in this book;
You’ve read of sunsets rich as mine.

A fresh wind fills the evening air
With horrid crying of night birds….
But what reads new or curious there
When cold winds fly across the air?
You’ll only frown; you’ll turn the page,
But find no glimpse of your “New Age
Of Poetry” in my worn-out words.

Must winds that cut like blades of steel
And sunsets swimming in Volnay,
The holiest, cruellest pains I feel,
Die stillborn, because old men squeal
For something new: “Write something new:
We’ve read this poem—that one too,
And twelve more like ‘em yesterday”?

No, no! my chicken, I shall scrawl
Just what I fancy as I strike it,
Fairies and Fusiliers, and all
Old broken knock-kneed thought will crawl
Across my verse in the classic way.
And, sir, be careful what you say;
There are old-fashioned folk still like it.

40 years this month.

no woman ever walked here. image rippled from the guardian.

creating.

i wonder sometimes whether being happier makes me less creating-explosive-jittery-productive. partner mentioned, on various occasions now, that i don’t pay so much attention to this blog now, that i stop working earlier, that i don’t get so many grey hair/week from worrying.

he didn’t really point out the last thing, but it’s true nonetheless.:P

so a few factors seem to converge:

1. i am working less, because i actually have a life, surprise surprise, although most of my colleagues seem to be packing up and leaving which makes me sad and slightly panicky

2. i am in the consolidation phase of the thesis: not the writing down loose, surprising and funky new ideas counts just now but making the thing i have cohere by rigging, shaking and proofing, occasionally (stress on OCCASIONALLY) adding a tiny bit here and there

3. i have a different Lebensgefühl at the moment than in the winter for instance. i am not sure what it is just yet, but it’s got to do something with being slightly bored of academia, and making up my mind whether this is really the way to go.

4. the question is how to combine things in my life so it keeps me going. my lofty side that gets bored easily and that is seeking the next mind-and-body-stimulating puzzle is, sometimes, these days, sitting down with a cup of coffee with my grounded side and they actually talk… they talk about the orchard, kids, mainland europe concerns, and journeys of intellectual/spiritual discovery. they want to make the orchard so that it is not asphyxiating. i wonder whether they do not dream too big.

[for some reason nabokov and chekhov were on my mind as you can feel...]