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on failure
Friday, January 16th, 2009I utterly adore this one:
Failure is the intrusion of reality into our perception of ourselves
It’s Jackie Danicki paraphrasing Chris Yeh. Two people whose minds and sense-talking I appreciate a lot.
Anyway, what an absolutely perfect and powerful definition! Most definitions of words emphasise one main interpretation- if you look up nearly any word in a [...]
Life lessons from Sartre and de Beauvoir
Sunday, January 11th, 2009I’ve been reading Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley, which was a very interesting and entertaining read, especially considering the rather dry and serious characters of its two famous protagonists. Here are a few of the ideas it sparked for me:
Relationships:
There is no way J-P Sartre could have maintained his “freedom” [...]
thought #2: the internet: people or thing?
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008Why do I care whether the internet is people or a thing?
Obviously it’s both. There’s the mechanisms needed for it to exist, and there’s the messages sent out by the people who use it. The internet is a giant set of connections all working together, getting bigger and transmogrifying into a newer differenter internet [...]
Hugh Macleod’s “crofting” metaphor: thoughts on why & how to do various different jobs at once
Monday, October 20th, 2008I am very interested in Hugh Macleod’s idea about combining multiple career paths, “crofting as a metaphor for the new world of work?” The metaphor describes a way of work that puts life first- independence, doing your own thing, doing what it takes (nb. I’m reading the metaphor here, not Hugh’s mind). It’s about combining [...]
How not to plan your life
Saturday, October 4th, 2008I’m reading (and working through) Martha Beck’s Steering by Starlight, which is a quite new-agey self-help book and lots of fun if you like that sort of thing, which I very much do. This passage made me laugh out loud, and also sums up pretty well what it is I like about Martha’s use of [...]
What’s an intellectual?
Sunday, September 21st, 2008Here’s a little quiz:
1. When did you last see, watch or listen to an opera?
2. What’s your opinion of the last piece of orchestral music you heard?
3. Describe three great things about the work of one of your favourite artists.
4. What work(s) of philosophy influenced your intellectual development?
5. What historical museum would you visit next [...]
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl
Friday, August 29th, 2008Every now and then, I see something or read something bizarre, strange, original and wonderful, and then read the critics, and get this rush of something a bit like anger but really more of a sort of frustrated internal energy power-pack that I can’t think what to do with. If I was Sharkboy, it would [...]
do a scary thing every day
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008I have spent quite a lot of time pondering the adage “Do one scary thing every day”. Not sure where it first originated (ideas?) but most recently it was in my latest self-help book (yes, I am a self-help addict, there are worse things), Martha Beck’s The Joy Diet. Building your Courage Muscle seems to [...]
what he says
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008Jackie posted a bit of this T.S. Eliot poem, The Cocktail Party, and here’s more:
There is another way, if you have the courage.
The first I could describe in familiar terms
Because you have seen it, as we all have seen it,
Illustrated, more or less, in lives of those about us.
The second is unknown, and so [...]
mad housewife tips on getting started
Monday, July 14th, 2008I tend to think my personal little ways of doing things are probably too bizarre and peculiar to be relevant to Other People, who all run their lives according to a sort of clockwork collection of routines and schedules to which they perfectly submit themselves with grace and tranquility. As that is rubbish, however, here [...]
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