Mancini Friday, January 4, 2008
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Brioche à tête and a cup of chocolate--that's it!
I'm making Brioche and this is my first go at a recipe that calls for a one to one ratio of butter to flour. I hope it taste like I imagine. The batter, and this was the first time I've been able to taste the dough like cake batter--its so good.
I just cant wait. Ever since watching 8 Femmes and seeing the sister look at the Brioche, snatch it along with a cup of chocolate and run into her room with it well I was hooked and I knew that I need to make it. Even if just once because this recipe is mortal, I mean a 1:1 flour and butter that can only be made during the holidays. None if this would be possible during the hot heavy months where everything needs to be like and airy and wonderful in its on lazy way. Then the berries and overflowing and the jam is just right for winter and the honey is oozing from the jar floating a piece of comb.
Hemingway's A Movable Feast did what I've always wanted to do in the first few pages. I leafed through it at the library this afternoon and it was great in its usual Hemingway style. Fill of descriptions of Parisian cafes, intellectuals, artist, and writers. Well at least I'll always have AMF to get lost in.
I finished Sostiene Pereira and also my goal to read 40 books this year. I think that I will read the bible next year. that will be the first book I read for the upcoming year. I think it will be good. That is the book that launched a hundred thousand ships and if I intend to read any more, that is go deeper into the literature and even all the other arts, for even if they don't say it they are based and mothered by the Bible and so I think I want to read it and I must read it. Its like my quest to finish Algebra 1/2, because I know that I can do it, and I must finish because of my GED test.
About grad school. I was listening to come economist talk about a possible recession and for just a minute I was thinking that I could not possibly go to grad school because interest rates are so high or will be high during a recession that I contemplated the ramifications of that for a while. That is good, I will not admonish myself, but I need to continue its like telling a high school kid that he cannot go to college because its just too expensive to go even if he wants and that can be the case sometimes but eventually one finds a way in the door if one is tenacious, no this again is bourgeois talk, some people do way these things and actively, so in no way am I going to think about this as a negative on my part. I must continue reading and preparing focusing on one thing at a time. Just follow the prescription outlined yesterday and it will be all right.
I just cant wait. Ever since watching 8 Femmes and seeing the sister look at the Brioche, snatch it along with a cup of chocolate and run into her room with it well I was hooked and I knew that I need to make it. Even if just once because this recipe is mortal, I mean a 1:1 flour and butter that can only be made during the holidays. None if this would be possible during the hot heavy months where everything needs to be like and airy and wonderful in its on lazy way. Then the berries and overflowing and the jam is just right for winter and the honey is oozing from the jar floating a piece of comb.
Hemingway's A Movable Feast did what I've always wanted to do in the first few pages. I leafed through it at the library this afternoon and it was great in its usual Hemingway style. Fill of descriptions of Parisian cafes, intellectuals, artist, and writers. Well at least I'll always have AMF to get lost in.
I finished Sostiene Pereira and also my goal to read 40 books this year. I think that I will read the bible next year. that will be the first book I read for the upcoming year. I think it will be good. That is the book that launched a hundred thousand ships and if I intend to read any more, that is go deeper into the literature and even all the other arts, for even if they don't say it they are based and mothered by the Bible and so I think I want to read it and I must read it. Its like my quest to finish Algebra 1/2, because I know that I can do it, and I must finish because of my GED test.
About grad school. I was listening to come economist talk about a possible recession and for just a minute I was thinking that I could not possibly go to grad school because interest rates are so high or will be high during a recession that I contemplated the ramifications of that for a while. That is good, I will not admonish myself, but I need to continue its like telling a high school kid that he cannot go to college because its just too expensive to go even if he wants and that can be the case sometimes but eventually one finds a way in the door if one is tenacious, no this again is bourgeois talk, some people do way these things and actively, so in no way am I going to think about this as a negative on my part. I must continue reading and preparing focusing on one thing at a time. Just follow the prescription outlined yesterday and it will be all right.
The year ends as I write.
It only ends for us but not for anything else. The day is done and it comes to these last few fragments of the year that came and is now gone like all the other past ghost of seasons gone by and never to return but they do somehow return to this time by building up the past things in life and growing something new out of the world that has has gone. Perhaps not in a long spiral nor in a spear shape nor even a long line but a whisper and a long wind that comes and uncovers a leaf in the ground.
The earth is asleep and we wait its return, it has been whispered. It is a relief to know that only half of it is sleeping or rather the growth is so powerful that it can only be done on one end of the earth and so the other must sleep waiting its turn to grow green again.
I looked at the internet and the news are not "good" as we have known them, or at least what my limited experience has shown me in my 20 odd years of living on this rotating rock suspended by gravity and inertia somewhere in the recondite parts of the universe immense and finite and infinite for it will end somehow.
The killings that are going on in an almost unheard of fashion or perhaps is it that it is now happening in the middle class neighborhoods where are before it only happened in the ghetto "where it should/has always happen." Yes, I concede that it can be happening at the same rate but in a more graphic way. But, if it is not, then it is happening in a more gruesome way and the causes of these things are part of economic concerns, concerns about existence and about belonging in a world where this happens and is happening in an almost constant and monthly fashion.
I then look around and those polar ice caps are receding to an almost unprecedented way with no real way to stop their efflux. And all we can do is watch and all these things, again I concede that they may be part of a natural undulation in the climate, but if it is not then all we can watch as we do this and at the same time no one can control that movement no one can stop the flight. We are powerful enough to cause it but incapable of stopping the very thing that we give life to but are unable to stop, not at least in the way our society is arranged and have arranged through our mutual blind coming and going. I am remind that "one does not judge men by what they think of themselves" and that we do not ask the questions which' answer is not formed or forming within our grasp. So does society, and what ever answer we bring be it mutual destruction (war, bombings, WWIII, etc.), social unrest (riots, strikes, etc.), or other things that are not yet assembled, it is always acceptable because it brings us closer to another answer and that answer may very well be barbarism, or socialism, or something else, but the only thing that counts is humanity answering this question that is brought about by us having brought out this particular question at this particular juncture in this particular space-time.
That is something worth living for, and looking forward to no matter how long one lives whether a day or whether a whole average life time. These questions that are constructed individually and answered communistically no mater how much we think that we are individuals in a desert among the many. If you want dazzling proof just look at prices of commodities: why that price of milk and not another as a great average?
I've finished His Dark Materials and in some ways I agree and in other I do not but it is a story so I'm not fervent although I think that the idea that the heretical book has been published is amazing although a but nearsighted. It does not raise the question as to why if religion is a fiction why does society choose to believe and continue to believe? Their has to be definite societal mechanisms at work that hold it together--we hold it together to put it more plainly. That is the true answer and those that only scoff at God and the Bible have missed the point, its like repeating ad infinitum that "God in fact does not exist," but does not delve any deeper. So again we are at the same place, although a little more winded. We have to understand the underpinnings of society before we can understand this or that detail and choose which prescription works best. A "just don't think about it" has been tried for as long as the Church has been in existence and look where that has brought us: to a bunch of 13-year-olds fearful of masturbation.
The earth is asleep and we wait its return, it has been whispered. It is a relief to know that only half of it is sleeping or rather the growth is so powerful that it can only be done on one end of the earth and so the other must sleep waiting its turn to grow green again.
I looked at the internet and the news are not "good" as we have known them, or at least what my limited experience has shown me in my 20 odd years of living on this rotating rock suspended by gravity and inertia somewhere in the recondite parts of the universe immense and finite and infinite for it will end somehow.
The killings that are going on in an almost unheard of fashion or perhaps is it that it is now happening in the middle class neighborhoods where are before it only happened in the ghetto "where it should/has always happen." Yes, I concede that it can be happening at the same rate but in a more graphic way. But, if it is not, then it is happening in a more gruesome way and the causes of these things are part of economic concerns, concerns about existence and about belonging in a world where this happens and is happening in an almost constant and monthly fashion.
I then look around and those polar ice caps are receding to an almost unprecedented way with no real way to stop their efflux. And all we can do is watch and all these things, again I concede that they may be part of a natural undulation in the climate, but if it is not then all we can watch as we do this and at the same time no one can control that movement no one can stop the flight. We are powerful enough to cause it but incapable of stopping the very thing that we give life to but are unable to stop, not at least in the way our society is arranged and have arranged through our mutual blind coming and going. I am remind that "one does not judge men by what they think of themselves" and that we do not ask the questions which' answer is not formed or forming within our grasp. So does society, and what ever answer we bring be it mutual destruction (war, bombings, WWIII, etc.), social unrest (riots, strikes, etc.), or other things that are not yet assembled, it is always acceptable because it brings us closer to another answer and that answer may very well be barbarism, or socialism, or something else, but the only thing that counts is humanity answering this question that is brought about by us having brought out this particular question at this particular juncture in this particular space-time.
That is something worth living for, and looking forward to no matter how long one lives whether a day or whether a whole average life time. These questions that are constructed individually and answered communistically no mater how much we think that we are individuals in a desert among the many. If you want dazzling proof just look at prices of commodities: why that price of milk and not another as a great average?
I've finished His Dark Materials and in some ways I agree and in other I do not but it is a story so I'm not fervent although I think that the idea that the heretical book has been published is amazing although a but nearsighted. It does not raise the question as to why if religion is a fiction why does society choose to believe and continue to believe? Their has to be definite societal mechanisms at work that hold it together--we hold it together to put it more plainly. That is the true answer and those that only scoff at God and the Bible have missed the point, its like repeating ad infinitum that "God in fact does not exist," but does not delve any deeper. So again we are at the same place, although a little more winded. We have to understand the underpinnings of society before we can understand this or that detail and choose which prescription works best. A "just don't think about it" has been tried for as long as the Church has been in existence and look where that has brought us: to a bunch of 13-year-olds fearful of masturbation.
-O-
I am faced with the question "What am I going to do?" and that is a question that I've been thinking about all year long. And as I read more and more I think that I will go to graduate school. I will try, I will take the first steps and the next and the next. That has begun. It began in January athough I did not know it. I new that I needed to learn math and I am doing that. I know that I need to learn vocabulary and I've done that and I will need to refine my knowledge and I will do a search as to what graduate school I will do, but much more important than that I will see what I am interested in. I can't really talk about it much the important thing because as I've learned this year and underscored by the penultimate book The Amber Spyglass:
I know what I have to do: finish Capital v. III before I take another step. Not because I am afraid of the next, and the next, but because I need to finish this step to go on to the next. Its like cleaning my room, or like making my bed after I get up. Its just that the day has not started whithout these nonsensical rituals that keep the path clear and the sword sharp for the untrod path. This is all done for me and for no one else, not because I'm selfish but because in the end I am the one on this path and I will be on it till I die.
I am faced with the question "What am I going to do?" and that is a question that I've been thinking about all year long. And as I read more and more I think that I will go to graduate school. I will try, I will take the first steps and the next and the next. That has begun. It began in January athough I did not know it. I new that I needed to learn math and I am doing that. I know that I need to learn vocabulary and I've done that and I will need to refine my knowledge and I will do a search as to what graduate school I will do, but much more important than that I will see what I am interested in. I can't really talk about it much the important thing because as I've learned this year and underscored by the penultimate book The Amber Spyglass:
As a mountain keeps still within itself, thus a wise man does not permit his will to stray beyond his situation.
I know what I have to do: finish Capital v. III before I take another step. Not because I am afraid of the next, and the next, but because I need to finish this step to go on to the next. Its like cleaning my room, or like making my bed after I get up. Its just that the day has not started whithout these nonsensical rituals that keep the path clear and the sword sharp for the untrod path. This is all done for me and for no one else, not because I'm selfish but because in the end I am the one on this path and I will be on it till I die.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Don't we all need a 5lb. box of money for Christmas?
Day two of the family over for the holidays. I did not convive with them for the the better part of the day. I did eat dinner with them when they got home from the casinos. My grandma' is addicted to gabbling, oh I mean 'gaming'. I guess that it takes me a while to warm up to family that I have never really known. although, I am more at ease with abue than the other people.
I finished "The Golden Compass" today. I really like the book, although the end was disappointing. Lyra traveled all that way for Roger's sake and then when they used him as a jumper battery she barely batted and eye. I think other less important characters where threated with a better eulogy than Roger. Heck that Tony kid was lauded while poor Roger was just laid down and forgotten. It does make you wonder that while killing children is awful they idea that other beings where being killed in order to save this one child is interesting from the philosophical stand. One has to wonder why other deaths of post-pubescent beings are not treated as so disgusting almost to the point of taking them for granted, 'of course you can kill them, they are grown-ups.'
-O-
The end of the year is near. I've been out of work for almost a year now, but I don't feel depressed as I did at the beginning of the year. I mean that depression from teaching or stress as Clift likes to say was overbearing. I could not function and the dark days laster almost throughout out the summer, never really being over until I went in for the checkup in August. I know I've written this before but I feel like after I finish Capital III, a levee will break inside me. I can feel the levy inside almost bursting. I can feel it when I know that I'm going to have a day reading or exploring the internet for political, economic, or literary news and facts. I can feel that although I don't have anything figured out we all have to improvised, and that is the fun in life. Not knowing what is going to happen, and that is also the source of all our pain and sorrow sometimes. That same question of "What am I going to feed my children tonight?" springs the same "I love him, but will he love me back, and will I still love him, but I'm crazy for him right now." All of that comes from the same place and it is really lovely and frightening for some and for all at various times in life. I know that I need to finish certain things this year to feel like it's complete in a way. The forty book project along with my Algebra 1/2 that has been going along all this time, I put it down for almost four months when I started reading Capital and I should have not, but learning economics has been as rewarding as practicing math. No knowledge can be above another, it's just differently stimulation, of course math has a special "higher place" in the cannon. After reading all those books I feel like my spelling, never a pretty site, has remarkably improved and while I'm not out winning spelling bees I think that before this year I have always been on very shaky ground but after these books I can picture the words in my head. I've also learned that I think in pictures. I need to make a note to explore this knowledge that I know to to be true. I think that is why I'm attracted to poetry and photographs ( I particularly am partial to black and white.) Something about descriptions that expound on little details and the little cartoons with the intricate details that reward that the careful observer are fascinating. I was walking along Shelby Farms and the most wonderful pictorial poem popped in my head. I don't know I could picture the words falling off the trees and the leaves on the ground had meaning that I could read. I'm going to write it out this poem that was given to me by the trees in fall.
I'm sure nothing profound will happen after I finish 1/2 and capital but I think something internal will happen. As I don't believe in God or anything else I don't know what that means, I do know that following the Feuerbach theses I understand that things like that have no meaning, but I am inclined to keep such thoughts from the point of view of the ranger in "The Book of Lost Things" by Connolly. Rituals that have no meaning are worthless, but humans keep rituals that are useful like going out and clearing the paths of the old forest and sharpening axes, etc, those are rituals that keep us here in this world of man, and I'm paraphrasing. I know what I want to do, go to grad school and study psychology, but as I told that and I am being honest, I am trying to survey these decisions and surmise an answer and I have to answer at least as far as the first steps.
I finished "The Golden Compass" today. I really like the book, although the end was disappointing. Lyra traveled all that way for Roger's sake and then when they used him as a jumper battery she barely batted and eye. I think other less important characters where threated with a better eulogy than Roger. Heck that Tony kid was lauded while poor Roger was just laid down and forgotten. It does make you wonder that while killing children is awful they idea that other beings where being killed in order to save this one child is interesting from the philosophical stand. One has to wonder why other deaths of post-pubescent beings are not treated as so disgusting almost to the point of taking them for granted, 'of course you can kill them, they are grown-ups.'
-O-
The end of the year is near. I've been out of work for almost a year now, but I don't feel depressed as I did at the beginning of the year. I mean that depression from teaching or stress as Clift likes to say was overbearing. I could not function and the dark days laster almost throughout out the summer, never really being over until I went in for the checkup in August. I know I've written this before but I feel like after I finish Capital III, a levee will break inside me. I can feel the levy inside almost bursting. I can feel it when I know that I'm going to have a day reading or exploring the internet for political, economic, or literary news and facts. I can feel that although I don't have anything figured out we all have to improvised, and that is the fun in life. Not knowing what is going to happen, and that is also the source of all our pain and sorrow sometimes. That same question of "What am I going to feed my children tonight?" springs the same "I love him, but will he love me back, and will I still love him, but I'm crazy for him right now." All of that comes from the same place and it is really lovely and frightening for some and for all at various times in life. I know that I need to finish certain things this year to feel like it's complete in a way. The forty book project along with my Algebra 1/2 that has been going along all this time, I put it down for almost four months when I started reading Capital and I should have not, but learning economics has been as rewarding as practicing math. No knowledge can be above another, it's just differently stimulation, of course math has a special "higher place" in the cannon. After reading all those books I feel like my spelling, never a pretty site, has remarkably improved and while I'm not out winning spelling bees I think that before this year I have always been on very shaky ground but after these books I can picture the words in my head. I've also learned that I think in pictures. I need to make a note to explore this knowledge that I know to to be true. I think that is why I'm attracted to poetry and photographs ( I particularly am partial to black and white.) Something about descriptions that expound on little details and the little cartoons with the intricate details that reward that the careful observer are fascinating. I was walking along Shelby Farms and the most wonderful pictorial poem popped in my head. I don't know I could picture the words falling off the trees and the leaves on the ground had meaning that I could read. I'm going to write it out this poem that was given to me by the trees in fall.
I'm sure nothing profound will happen after I finish 1/2 and capital but I think something internal will happen. As I don't believe in God or anything else I don't know what that means, I do know that following the Feuerbach theses I understand that things like that have no meaning, but I am inclined to keep such thoughts from the point of view of the ranger in "The Book of Lost Things" by Connolly. Rituals that have no meaning are worthless, but humans keep rituals that are useful like going out and clearing the paths of the old forest and sharpening axes, etc, those are rituals that keep us here in this world of man, and I'm paraphrasing. I know what I want to do, go to grad school and study psychology, but as I told that and I am being honest, I am trying to survey these decisions and surmise an answer and I have to answer at least as far as the first steps.
-O-
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Internet: communial property within capitalist framework
When you can get something like the intelligence of the so called first world at your fingertip. When you listen to a new artist and within a few minutes have it to listen on your iPod, what is that if not communal property within capitalism, but always fettered by the very system that formed it.
Brother and I had been arguing about how homosexuals injured or not their children when they came out as gay to them and separated. Of course I maintained that God was punishing us for talking openly about homosexuals :)
My dad, the responsible one, said that they truck that I had called out was not coming so ever so slowly. Ever incessantly he kept the van moving never going as fast as 10 miles per hour. We creped along for almost two hours from 10 until finally getting home at midnight, a trip that usually takes about fifteen minutes when everything is working fine.
My brother, dad and I talked about our realization uncovered by what my brother calls "anomalies in the system." i think that our talks are affecting my brother in ways that I did not think could affect him. I always thought of him as a little more conservative than dad and I but it was a revelation for me to hear him articulate his feelings towards analyzing the world as dad and I have done for our time together. Goes back to the thesis my dad has about understanding in that we understand for ourselves and not for others. This is our perspective and it is good to tell and teach others, but one should not feel that because one knows "the truth" one should go around trying to convince others. In fact, he would say, that is a fools errand.
I understand that. This last Engels meeting was a kind of test tube. You find people that understand and sometimes, but almost always the exception, you may get someone that comes over from the other side. To me Marx was not terribly exciting until a few months ago. Now I can't get enough.
My mom's side of the family is here for the Holidays. I need to talk to them more than I've done these few hours that they have been here.
I've started reading "The Golden Compass" it's good I'm about half way through it. I finished Anna Karenina! I'm Done.
-O-
I took my family to one of the best Chinese restaurants in the city. I mean not in terms of service or even luxury but of taste. The where reluctant mostly because they were weary of eating something that is usually served as leftovers of massed produced gelatinous, saccharine, oily buffet. This was another story all together. It all started almost alarmingly like a bad date. Mom was all over the place and of course they have two menus one traditional Chinese and the other a list of those reproductions of the buffets that one usually encounters. So of course my parent's where confused and the lady at taking our order did not help much. Then everything fell into place. I convinced the lady to leave us be. Everything we ordered was amazing and even more because we've been accustomed to vegetable dinners now that we are eating less and less meat. Then came the kicker. As we where driving home the transmission on my mom's soccer mom van failed about half way home.Brother and I had been arguing about how homosexuals injured or not their children when they came out as gay to them and separated. Of course I maintained that God was punishing us for talking openly about homosexuals :)
My dad, the responsible one, said that they truck that I had called out was not coming so ever so slowly. Ever incessantly he kept the van moving never going as fast as 10 miles per hour. We creped along for almost two hours from 10 until finally getting home at midnight, a trip that usually takes about fifteen minutes when everything is working fine.
My brother, dad and I talked about our realization uncovered by what my brother calls "anomalies in the system." i think that our talks are affecting my brother in ways that I did not think could affect him. I always thought of him as a little more conservative than dad and I but it was a revelation for me to hear him articulate his feelings towards analyzing the world as dad and I have done for our time together. Goes back to the thesis my dad has about understanding in that we understand for ourselves and not for others. This is our perspective and it is good to tell and teach others, but one should not feel that because one knows "the truth" one should go around trying to convince others. In fact, he would say, that is a fools errand.
I understand that. This last Engels meeting was a kind of test tube. You find people that understand and sometimes, but almost always the exception, you may get someone that comes over from the other side. To me Marx was not terribly exciting until a few months ago. Now I can't get enough.
My mom's side of the family is here for the Holidays. I need to talk to them more than I've done these few hours that they have been here.
I've started reading "The Golden Compass" it's good I'm about half way through it. I finished Anna Karenina! I'm Done.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Photo: Kenro Izu
Perhaps in keeping with Buddhist philosophy, the exhibition does not have a specific entry point. The landscapes are a
good place to begin. The most prominent, an immense vista taken from
Bhutan’s 7300-meter-high Mount Jomolhari, shows the ruins of a
fortress silhouetted against the blindingly white peaks of Tibet’s
Mount Kailash. A striated gray sky is the only clue to the film’s long
exposure time. The altitude is palpable. “I felt I captured the sacred
mountain’s form in a radiant halo of light,” Mr. Izu writes.
good place to begin. The most prominent, an immense vista taken from
Bhutan’s 7300-meter-high Mount Jomolhari, shows the ruins of a
fortress silhouetted against the blindingly white peaks of Tibet’s
Mount Kailash. A striated gray sky is the only clue to the film’s long
exposure time. The altitude is palpable. “I felt I captured the sacred
mountain’s form in a radiant halo of light,” Mr. Izu writes.
Photo: Kenro Izu
-O-
Haggard but firm over the world
Unbeknownst to us but never further than a trip
Upside down they look like edges
Right-side up majestic pensives
Crescent moons like diamonds in an otherwise fertile field
-Copyright http://traverselifebreathlessly.blogspot.com/
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Longs Hairs Hippies Funks with a Bit of Poetry Night
Attended my month Engels meeting and I must say that I found a pocket of Memphis that I had not explored, I mean aside from the occasional run in with the Memphis hippies I've never really been in close contact with them.
The night started out all right, with the Engels meeting I found a member there that was obnoxious, but the redeeming quality was that she was there. I said to myself, at least she is trying to understand even though she gets in the way of herself it is not really her fault that she cannot listen to other people, she is searching just like we are searching although she did very little listening. The main thing is that she is here.
Then Engels meeting went well. I found that my studies are great but I need to be able to connect with the group. One of the points of rupture is that I've not read the polemics that are widely read like Trotsky or the like so I'm coming from a theoretical understanding of economy and they are coming from communist polemics and while we are a compliment I find that their eyes gloss over. I find that I need to ask more questions because they will be more willing to share their understanding and they will listen to me when I tell them that it not only has superficial reasons but also hard economic laws that reign along with the polemics, they are like a mirror that reflect surface but one cannot know the underlying reasons just from observation.
I'm doing everything on the internet now. I've even been writing on line now. It's going to take me a little to get used to this although I think that it will make me a faster typer. So I meet this guy at this Engels meeting I don't think that he's gay but I think that I like him as a friend or I'd like to explore the possibility of becoming friends. I don't know I think this is the first time that I've meet a person that it into Engels as much as I am. Who knows well It was fun need to talk to him more.
As I talk to more and more people I find that I have the willingness to study psychology more and more. I find that I can rise to the challenge of studying and even become a good one.
MMM...waffles!
The night started out all right, with the Engels meeting I found a member there that was obnoxious, but the redeeming quality was that she was there. I said to myself, at least she is trying to understand even though she gets in the way of herself it is not really her fault that she cannot listen to other people, she is searching just like we are searching although she did very little listening. The main thing is that she is here.
Then Engels meeting went well. I found that my studies are great but I need to be able to connect with the group. One of the points of rupture is that I've not read the polemics that are widely read like Trotsky or the like so I'm coming from a theoretical understanding of economy and they are coming from communist polemics and while we are a compliment I find that their eyes gloss over. I find that I need to ask more questions because they will be more willing to share their understanding and they will listen to me when I tell them that it not only has superficial reasons but also hard economic laws that reign along with the polemics, they are like a mirror that reflect surface but one cannot know the underlying reasons just from observation.
I'm doing everything on the internet now. I've even been writing on line now. It's going to take me a little to get used to this although I think that it will make me a faster typer. So I meet this guy at this Engels meeting I don't think that he's gay but I think that I like him as a friend or I'd like to explore the possibility of becoming friends. I don't know I think this is the first time that I've meet a person that it into Engels as much as I am. Who knows well It was fun need to talk to him more.
As I talk to more and more people I find that I have the willingness to study psychology more and more. I find that I can rise to the challenge of studying and even become a good one.
MMM...waffles!
Letter to the Writer of
Inflation surge hits consumers, compounds global banking crisis
by Barry Grey
by Barry Grey
Dear Mr. Grey,
Thank you for your articles on the health of the economy specifically on credit. I support your point of view, but I wish to offer a broader panorama.
I assume you are basing your analysis on Marx's Das Kapital. Please, as Marx warns us in Volume III, don't just look at currency the most superficial form of capital as the “vulgar economist” so love to do. There is a definite boom in
This devaluation of money-capital had the effect of easing the money market and thus a great real-estate swindle could and did happen all throughout the better part of this decade. These were great speculative soap-bubbles. To only look at banking-capital is a great mistake and could mislead readers into further fetishizing the money-form and not breaking free of this fetish as your website hopes its readers will do. Please remember that
Finally, as to the question of rising commodity prices this is a classic example of how Marx describes booms. A rise in the value of commodities and sometimes a rise in wages is the height of the boom, but these are not the symptoms of a crisis. A lowering of commodity prices and a lowering of salaries are symptoms of crises.
In summary, please do not look only to the money-form to explain to WSWS readers that we are in the middle of a devaluation crisis; this only perpetuates the currency fetish. The reason why banks around the world could swindle people by loaning them money was that the money market eased greatly due to the boom in
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Yes, I got up out of bed to write.
IN these cold and warm days of December when the weather does not want to decide, I have to day that's one of those SAD seasons. I don't know I've been dealing with feeling very tired. I think that it's the old fears again, but I remind myself that I've tested negative for a year, and I've been going to get tested for all this time and every time it has come out negative so I need to get it out of my head that it's HIV.
My fears really come from fears that have passed away but they have left scars. I can still fall into the meandering maze of my old fears but I have to remind myself that I'm over it, that I even wrote about it and that I have gone to get tested and plus it is very very rare to get HIV from oral sex reception.
Well, this scare has brought me closer to developing a more mature outlook about relationships and about sex, although I have always prided myself on being open minded and even advanced in sexual knowledge about sex. So I've been looking at a lot porn recently and again mixed with my new outlook about sex I realize that for me, at least, sex is extremely intimate act. None of this "I've just known you let's have anal sex." No, for me at least it's the challenge of finding a man that is into me and I into him. That is at least how my outlook is shaping my actions. I realize that through the Internet and hookup sites it is very easy to find sex, to have sex, and lots of sex at that. It is not so easy to find a person that is into you "sex-love" as Engels writes, and this is where the challenge comes in:find a guy who is all of this and I feel comfortable enough to have sex. Sex, is important, but not the first thing on my mind when it comes to a relationship.
All this to introduce my experiment. I've been sleeping with the windows open to be woken up by the sun and on this second day I've woken up at noon. I had a great start on the first day I woke up at 7 am and it felt like the longest day I've had in a long time.
Now the challenge is to go to bet at or before midnight. I will do it today, I've taken care of everything I need to take care just, just got up to write. So I got scared that I've feeling really tired and unusually tired but I will continue to do this for seven day at least to get my biorhythm on balance and in tune with the earth. The solstice is coming up and so I need to get ready for short days as are happening now. So after seven day, once my body goes through it's moods and cycles and gets in sync I'm not putting nay great judgement on anything my body does in terms of sleepiness, stress, tiredness, etc. Then I'll see how this all plays out. Which reminds me I need to get an HIV check again, although I have not been sexually active almost all year long, and going further than kissing it has been longer yet.
My fears really come from fears that have passed away but they have left scars. I can still fall into the meandering maze of my old fears but I have to remind myself that I'm over it, that I even wrote about it and that I have gone to get tested and plus it is very very rare to get HIV from oral sex reception.
Well, this scare has brought me closer to developing a more mature outlook about relationships and about sex, although I have always prided myself on being open minded and even advanced in sexual knowledge about sex. So I've been looking at a lot porn recently and again mixed with my new outlook about sex I realize that for me, at least, sex is extremely intimate act. None of this "I've just known you let's have anal sex." No, for me at least it's the challenge of finding a man that is into me and I into him. That is at least how my outlook is shaping my actions. I realize that through the Internet and hookup sites it is very easy to find sex, to have sex, and lots of sex at that. It is not so easy to find a person that is into you "sex-love" as Engels writes, and this is where the challenge comes in:find a guy who is all of this and I feel comfortable enough to have sex. Sex, is important, but not the first thing on my mind when it comes to a relationship.
All this to introduce my experiment. I've been sleeping with the windows open to be woken up by the sun and on this second day I've woken up at noon. I had a great start on the first day I woke up at 7 am and it felt like the longest day I've had in a long time.
Now the challenge is to go to bet at or before midnight. I will do it today, I've taken care of everything I need to take care just, just got up to write. So I got scared that I've feeling really tired and unusually tired but I will continue to do this for seven day at least to get my biorhythm on balance and in tune with the earth. The solstice is coming up and so I need to get ready for short days as are happening now. So after seven day, once my body goes through it's moods and cycles and gets in sync I'm not putting nay great judgement on anything my body does in terms of sleepiness, stress, tiredness, etc. Then I'll see how this all plays out. Which reminds me I need to get an HIV check again, although I have not been sexually active almost all year long, and going further than kissing it has been longer yet.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
On the Implications of finding a "calling" in this world.
“Being is not a general concept which canbe separated from things. It is identical with the things thatexist.... Being is posited by essence. What my essence is, is my being.The fish is in the water, but its essence cannot be separated from thisbeing. Even language identifies being and essence. It is only in humanlife that being is divorced from essence — but only in exceptional, unfortunate case— only there is it possible that a person’s essence is not in the placewhere he is, but it is precisely because of this division that hisspirit is not truly in the place where his body actually is. Only whereyour heart is, there you are. But all things — apart from abnormal cases — like to be in the place where they are, and like to be what they are” (p. 47).
A fine panegyric upon the existing state of things! Apart from abnormalcases, a few exceptional cases, you like to work from your seventh year as a door-keeper in a coal-mine, remaining alone in the dark forfourteen hours a day, and because it is your being therefore it is also your essence. The same applies to a piecer at a self-actor.a It is your “essence” to be subservient to a branch of labour. Cf. Das Wesen des Glaubens, p. 11, “unsatisfied hunger” ..."
This from Theses on Feuerbach by Marx and Engels (M&E) sets up real difficulty for all those people trying to find "their true calling" or that one career that is their essence and passion. Could it just be that the idea of the one true job is a decedent of the "idea" of the being as having a "true" or "natural" place among this society.
This is a critique of those people trying to find themselves among the rank and file of the coal-mine door keeper opportunities confronting a human that is not "one" thing but many, a human that is desperately trying to find how to fit into the dictates of capital instead of self-developing.
Monday, December 17, 2007
The ham was Cold and the casserole hot.
Sometime in the near I will meet a man who is alive today and for all intents and purposes will not even now of my excistance untill that day we meet on that cool day in the many personalities of the years to come. Ready for the adventure of what six months, six years, sixty days--shit I'd settle for six days.
In the hallway of uncertanty I'd come up against the most devastating defeats and some uncompromising blocks that make me stumble upon the the daily rhythm of days. Nights gone wild in the many blue and wondering ponds of recesses pondered in the late night. The mazes of the mind are most active at night and most devastating of all late, late during the night. The thoughts of the days are heavy on the midnight blue and thoughts of tomorrow come lazily and incessantly, when the mind is weakest to advances of the heart, health, not ready to contemplate or endure the barrage of incompletely thoughts of the lazy night.
So I did went trough my 43things and found this year's goals to have already been accomplished. There were many that just needed to be clicked on and instantly would be completed because really I had completed them a long time ago. Not ready to say yes to the machine the records my thoughts and actions of the heart.
In this day of the Internet we are so ready to quantify what we do. We are ready to hold on the the many things that are quotidian recording and even trying to find people to read the every day minutiae of our lives. Have them comment and read and track our solitary details like out soup eating habits that we are immune to the daily wonders of our every day lives. Perhaps we are, in fact, so enamored with the every day because that is the real world the real world of facts and figures and of sending out the post on time so our payment is not delayed that we rejoice and want other people to rejoice in those trifling details. Those details that are not even significant enough for us to remember the next day and by this I mean that our brain does not even bother to record these details and the Internet is the great storage bin of small and insignificant details. Of course, I'm not one to judge.
The historical mission of your class and that is to say the proletariat (for even if you are upper middle class you are still in the middle and in fact very much a worker and a house slave at that) hour historical mission is to find that we can do things by our own. Our lives are so important, that cold soup wasting away in the dark nooks of the trash bin because so and so did not like it or was too cold or hot or just not right--that is the real things we need to be focusing on. Their will come a time when we understand, just like the capitalist class, that we must conserve not on a individual basis, we need to control production not on a individual basis but on a world basis. In this case I when i say individual I mean great capitalistic firms because in this system the individual firm may be conserving their may be ten firms all wasting the minimum but since their is of course just these then their is ten times all the waste that ever needs to be wasted. In fact their is 90 percent more waist that their needs to be in order to carry out that or this enterprise.
Soup Kitchen
I volunteer at a soup kitchen and this day marks the 12th time I've gone this year and probably marks more than that. Well it's one for people with terminable viruses. They are both my reminder as a gay man to be very careful and a rejoice in my humanity that their are people with such things that still laugh and have fun and eat and love to live as any other human. People are undeterred by anything not this or that that would seem as if it where about the last thing on earth we could ever live with. the last thing that ever can become a quotidian thing like that soup on that other person's blog.
They keep me sharp. They keep me on my toes to remind myself that no matter how young, old, funny or not people that would never strike one as having things like that do. They keep me on alert and at the same time I thank them. I love them.
In the hallway of uncertanty I'd come up against the most devastating defeats and some uncompromising blocks that make me stumble upon the the daily rhythm of days. Nights gone wild in the many blue and wondering ponds of recesses pondered in the late night. The mazes of the mind are most active at night and most devastating of all late, late during the night. The thoughts of the days are heavy on the midnight blue and thoughts of tomorrow come lazily and incessantly, when the mind is weakest to advances of the heart, health, not ready to contemplate or endure the barrage of incompletely thoughts of the lazy night.
So I did went trough my 43things and found this year's goals to have already been accomplished. There were many that just needed to be clicked on and instantly would be completed because really I had completed them a long time ago. Not ready to say yes to the machine the records my thoughts and actions of the heart.
In this day of the Internet we are so ready to quantify what we do. We are ready to hold on the the many things that are quotidian recording and even trying to find people to read the every day minutiae of our lives. Have them comment and read and track our solitary details like out soup eating habits that we are immune to the daily wonders of our every day lives. Perhaps we are, in fact, so enamored with the every day because that is the real world the real world of facts and figures and of sending out the post on time so our payment is not delayed that we rejoice and want other people to rejoice in those trifling details. Those details that are not even significant enough for us to remember the next day and by this I mean that our brain does not even bother to record these details and the Internet is the great storage bin of small and insignificant details. Of course, I'm not one to judge.
The historical mission of your class and that is to say the proletariat (for even if you are upper middle class you are still in the middle and in fact very much a worker and a house slave at that) hour historical mission is to find that we can do things by our own. Our lives are so important, that cold soup wasting away in the dark nooks of the trash bin because so and so did not like it or was too cold or hot or just not right--that is the real things we need to be focusing on. Their will come a time when we understand, just like the capitalist class, that we must conserve not on a individual basis, we need to control production not on a individual basis but on a world basis. In this case I when i say individual I mean great capitalistic firms because in this system the individual firm may be conserving their may be ten firms all wasting the minimum but since their is of course just these then their is ten times all the waste that ever needs to be wasted. In fact their is 90 percent more waist that their needs to be in order to carry out that or this enterprise.
Soup Kitchen
I volunteer at a soup kitchen and this day marks the 12th time I've gone this year and probably marks more than that. Well it's one for people with terminable viruses. They are both my reminder as a gay man to be very careful and a rejoice in my humanity that their are people with such things that still laugh and have fun and eat and love to live as any other human. People are undeterred by anything not this or that that would seem as if it where about the last thing on earth we could ever live with. the last thing that ever can become a quotidian thing like that soup on that other person's blog.
They keep me sharp. They keep me on my toes to remind myself that no matter how young, old, funny or not people that would never strike one as having things like that do. They keep me on alert and at the same time I thank them. I love them.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
This of course is the beginning
This, like so many other things in life is a start. One that is very hard to do because I've been writing in a paper journal for so many years that it is with great regret that I try to give it up. In search for a more perfect and advanced way of doing things.
Friends always say "Get yourself on the computer, then their will no excuse not to type out your stories and things--get them published," and so with great challenge I'm trying to give up my paper and quill.
I'm of course publishing this anonymously and it will rightly be so if I am going to write the things that I usually write in my journal. Not because I'm worried that people will--oh no for heaven sakes! find out what goes on in my head. No, rather like my journal I will not have to worry what it thinks. Like wise, I will not worry about what this journal thinks regardless if someone reads it or not. I'm not delusional enough to really think that people will read and much less care what some guy is writing about.
(Oh what? you jerk off, and you wrote about it? Oh please get in line with the rest of us and get on with life with the rest of us bud.)
So nothing people write will be of shock, not now, not ever, not in the past when the Greeks were writing about Ganymede and Whitman writing about manly love in Leaves of Grass. Even the way we react to news about pedophilia, rape, incest, slavery etc are not so much different than they way humanity reacts to that occasional book that manages to raise a few eyebrows in the hallway of conservative senators and thinkers.
Often when I'm surfing the Internet with Wiki., dictionaries, translators, and Project Gutenberg and things like that I wonder how Marx would react to the Internet. I mean I've been reading Das Kapital for the latter half of this year and the wealth of information that he shows off as having read in the London Library or Hall of Records is staggering. Not to mention his juggling of complex and oftentimes lengthy economic material and moreover finding humor in the inane comments on economy the 'vulgar economist' repeat.
I when went out today. I know that I need to get out more often, the library, the coffeehouse even if just like el bañista who daringly goes into the water and slowly plunges into the cool depths of the pond. Although, I'm much better than the even a few months ago, and even better than a year ago today. When I do stay home, which is more and more these days, I think that if I do want to leave and go to another city to study sociology, psychology (I still don't know!) I will have to keep going like this for a few more months because my goal is to take the GRE and go to graduate school. Well, for that I need to study laboriously and excitedly for my own sake. If you have never done math outside of school then I implore you to study on your own. Sometimes, as I have found out about myself, the way school sets up the incomprehensible grading system (IGS) --from a learning point of view-- is counterproductive to learning the subject any subject especially Math. No nitpicking allowed if you are to really learn it, and the IGS is anything but logical. To lean a language, and math is one, you must make mistakes but not deducted for from the get go. Got that? Their is so many people that are discouraged to learn a language because they are made fun, or so severely corrected from the start that ultimately resolve, and their cannot be any other conclusion for some, that they cannot speak and in this case 'do math' or that they 'hate math'. You, and I'm speaking to Math teachers, would to if you where constantly told that upon trying to learn foreign language that this particular syllable that you have pronounced a` is really pronounced a' and that his other one is not i but a guttural sounding i, etc., before even learning how to say hello and goodbye.
Finally, back to the coffeehouse.
I've been video conferencing with queens I don't know and don't really care to know. It has really been quite the experience. I realize that most people on North American and European chat rooms are under the impression that people on line are all white suburban people that are homogeneric and other non-whites that are looking for whites. I came to the conclusion that I'm Hispanic and that I will have to meet a real life guy to likes the way I look. I mean I know I don't look Teutonic and I cannot even try, I will not try, and to try would be a form of hate on my part, and I don't hate myself at all. Now my dad has said over and over again that I should get braces and fix this or that or make my jaw line look more like this or that, and I could. My orthodontist on the other hand who was handling my case said that he tried to make people look like themselves just with straight teeth not try to make all Hispanic, Blacks, etc., in to white profiles something that back then I took in another sense. Now, I thank him for that, and in the hands of another doctor I would not have looked like myself, I would not have this face and now I've had this for so long that I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror without thinking that I gave up my features because I wanted to "erase ethnicity" as the dominant culture thinks of it's collective features the 'non-ethnic' or the 'non-race'.
Friends always say "Get yourself on the computer, then their will no excuse not to type out your stories and things--get them published," and so with great challenge I'm trying to give up my paper and quill.
I'm of course publishing this anonymously and it will rightly be so if I am going to write the things that I usually write in my journal. Not because I'm worried that people will--oh no for heaven sakes! find out what goes on in my head. No, rather like my journal I will not have to worry what it thinks. Like wise, I will not worry about what this journal thinks regardless if someone reads it or not. I'm not delusional enough to really think that people will read and much less care what some guy is writing about.
(Oh what? you jerk off, and you wrote about it? Oh please get in line with the rest of us and get on with life with the rest of us bud.)
So nothing people write will be of shock, not now, not ever, not in the past when the Greeks were writing about Ganymede and Whitman writing about manly love in Leaves of Grass. Even the way we react to news about pedophilia, rape, incest, slavery etc are not so much different than they way humanity reacts to that occasional book that manages to raise a few eyebrows in the hallway of conservative senators and thinkers.
Often when I'm surfing the Internet with Wiki., dictionaries, translators, and Project Gutenberg and things like that I wonder how Marx would react to the Internet. I mean I've been reading Das Kapital for the latter half of this year and the wealth of information that he shows off as having read in the London Library or Hall of Records is staggering. Not to mention his juggling of complex and oftentimes lengthy economic material and moreover finding humor in the inane comments on economy the 'vulgar economist' repeat.
I when went out today. I know that I need to get out more often, the library, the coffeehouse even if just like el bañista who daringly goes into the water and slowly plunges into the cool depths of the pond. Although, I'm much better than the even a few months ago, and even better than a year ago today. When I do stay home, which is more and more these days, I think that if I do want to leave and go to another city to study sociology, psychology (I still don't know!) I will have to keep going like this for a few more months because my goal is to take the GRE and go to graduate school. Well, for that I need to study laboriously and excitedly for my own sake. If you have never done math outside of school then I implore you to study on your own. Sometimes, as I have found out about myself, the way school sets up the incomprehensible grading system (IGS) --from a learning point of view-- is counterproductive to learning the subject any subject especially Math. No nitpicking allowed if you are to really learn it, and the IGS is anything but logical. To lean a language, and math is one, you must make mistakes but not deducted for from the get go. Got that? Their is so many people that are discouraged to learn a language because they are made fun, or so severely corrected from the start that ultimately resolve, and their cannot be any other conclusion for some, that they cannot speak and in this case 'do math' or that they 'hate math'. You, and I'm speaking to Math teachers, would to if you where constantly told that upon trying to learn foreign language that this particular syllable that you have pronounced a` is really pronounced a' and that his other one is not i but a guttural sounding i, etc., before even learning how to say hello and goodbye.
Finally, back to the coffeehouse.
I've been video conferencing with queens I don't know and don't really care to know. It has really been quite the experience. I realize that most people on North American and European chat rooms are under the impression that people on line are all white suburban people that are homogeneric and other non-whites that are looking for whites. I came to the conclusion that I'm Hispanic and that I will have to meet a real life guy to likes the way I look. I mean I know I don't look Teutonic and I cannot even try, I will not try, and to try would be a form of hate on my part, and I don't hate myself at all. Now my dad has said over and over again that I should get braces and fix this or that or make my jaw line look more like this or that, and I could. My orthodontist on the other hand who was handling my case said that he tried to make people look like themselves just with straight teeth not try to make all Hispanic, Blacks, etc., in to white profiles something that back then I took in another sense. Now, I thank him for that, and in the hands of another doctor I would not have looked like myself, I would not have this face and now I've had this for so long that I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror without thinking that I gave up my features because I wanted to "erase ethnicity" as the dominant culture thinks of it's collective features the 'non-ethnic' or the 'non-race'.
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