time for abstraction

the plants in my back yard and the several beds i work in community gardens run on "event time"...their seasons have approximate lengths ( say ninety or one hundred twenty days for potatoes )...they take as long as they take to do what they do...conversely humans appear to run on "clock time" and i wonder if that isn't a mechanistic abstraction imposed on life...there are scientific and navigational reasons for measuring time exactly but how exact is it? no doubt increments of time can be delineated exactly in a laboratory...then again, "clock time" needs a leap second added every year and a half or so...exact in the micro, changable in the macro...even the calendar needs a "leap day" every four years...time seems inexact...what does "clock time" mean for the bulk of humans who are subject to it? mostly some form of control...time to be at work...time to be at school, to sleep ( that might be a natural rhythm that is disrupted by the previous two items ),"time!" at the end of an exam, time to do the laundry...it means limits, obligations...an abstraction...time zones, in this country, were instituted with the advent of railroads...making the schedules less chaotic...or, moreover, synchronizing the people who used them...and time zones seem fluid...the two northwetern counties of the state of indiana are on central time while the rest of the state is on eastern timre...why? because they are more satellites of chicago than indianapolis...the geographic nature of time zones is inexact...just like the "clock time" they represent...the international date line is an abstraction that runs through the pacific ocean...zig-zagging around contenents and islands...so date seems as arbitrary as time settings...and tomorrow we arrive at daylight savings time again...that twenty-five and twenty-three hour day twice a year abstraction...originally sold as an energy saving device, interests that pandered to the consumer saw it as an extra hour of daylight at the end of the work day in which to consume golf or beer...the uniform time act of 1966 set it at six months of the year...that was changed to seven months when dutch reagan rode high in the saddle on pennsylvaina avenue and to eight months in 2005...one senses a subtle manipulation here...it should come as no surprise that the u.s. chamber of commerce is all for "year round daylight savings time"...so you can have a dark commute to work for more of the year while purveyors of food, drink, and "a good walk ruined" can get more of what you earn for doing that dark commute...i, for one, would rather just keep my hour ( even if the twenty-five and twenty-three hour days are complete abstractions ) and if i cannot because the hegemons decree otherwise ( concerned over my having too much latitude in governing my time..they take after thomas more's utopia in this respect ) i will refusae to be a consumer during that last hour of daylight simply on principle

self actualization

"what changes everything is that in bad faith it is from myself that i am concealing the truth." being and nothingness p.90__________________"consider the cafe waiter. his movements are animated and intent, a bit too precise, a bit too quick, he approaches customers with a bit too much animation, he leans forward a bit too attentively, his voice and his eyes expressing an interest in the customer's order that is a bit too solicitous.finaly, here he is, on his way back, and attenpting in his attitued to imitate the inflexible exactitude of some sort of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness characteristic of a tightrope walker, holding it in a constantly unstable and constantly disrupted equilibrium which he constantly restores with a light movement of his arm and his hand. his behavior strikes us as an act...one does not need to watch him for long to realize he is playing at being a cafe waiter." being and nothingness pp 103-4________________if the waiter was playing at being a waiter, paulie sartre was playing at being a philosopher, and playing at one with little understanding of what the waiter was up to...paulie maintains that," the cafe waiter plays with his condition in order to actualize it. this obligation is imposed on all shopkeepers. their condition is entirely ceremonial and the public demands them to actualize it as a ceremony."...so paulie says they are playing a role conferred on them by social sanction and lying to themselves about what it is they are actually doing...bad faith...the attentiveness of the waiter ( "a bit too solicitous" ) and his adeptness at carrying his tray ( i notice paulie did not mention any spills resulting from tray disequilibrium which the waiter "constantly restores"...perhaps skill is a part of the act )...so sartre, seemingly, in this string of subjective judgements about the waiter's actions and interior life doesn't stop to think that, perhaps, being a waiter isn't "play", but an act of sustenance whose proceeds may be a vehicle to an expression of who the waiter truly is...say a gardener or a writer...we all need to earn a living to subsist and we all need to be who we are...after all spinoza was a lens grinder who philosophized in his off-duty hours...and what about paulie? after he abandoned teaching he convenently made his living writing and philosophizing with his armchair "turned towards history"...so was he "playing" at the social ceremonies conferred on thinkers and philosphers while denying his true self in bad faith and using corydran to keep the words flowing? "caught in his own celebrity, playing a double role, civil and obliging in public, harassed and disillusioned in private, far from adhereing to the impeccable facade he offered to the eyes of the world he was in greater and greater need of turning in upon himself..."[sartre. cohen-solal p.404] who was palying their part more assiduously...paulie or the waiter?

think

"and though they did not yet call themselves ukrainians, the term, unlike the ancient word ukrania, was not widely used until the end of the [19th] century, they knew very well that they were somethlng different from the loathed muscovites, the moskali...the little russians have widely used proverbs such as: 'be freindly with the muscovite but keep a stone under your coat' "_____"it was not until the end of the [19th] century that he stared thinking of himself as a 'ukrainian'. asked his identity, he probably would have replied that he was a muzhik, a peasant, or 'orthodox', or simply one of the the tuteshni, the 'people from here' ". anna reid "borderland" a journey through the history of ukraine"______________""the carpathian mountains marked the border in the southwest, but the gentle forests and fields in the northwest part of the country could not stop invading armies and neither would the wide open steppes in the east."___"more to the point, russia relied on ukraine's sugar, grain, and coal..."anne applebaum. "red famine: stalin's war on ukraine"___"little russians were always a tribe and never a people and much less a state" vissarion belinsky____________this isn't the first time ukraine has been invaded and ukrainians have ample reason to dislike and distrust poles, gremans,russians, hungarians, austrians, swedes,certainly georgians, and americans as well...geography alone hasn't been the reason they have had so much difficulty in establishing nationhood....the land and its resources have always tempted outsiders...from "russia relied" to the violent exceptionalism of the germans, the ukrainians have paid a huge price...ukraine is much in the news these days...

however i am disinclined to follow the times' advice on thinking...

since they want to influence ( if not control ) how i approach this...i would rather pick up a number of books...

and try to muddle though on my own...but i have more than books to go on...my maternal grandfather was born in uzhgorod in western ukraine and came to the united states as an adult ( my maternal grand mother was also born in eastern europe and shared my grandfather's ethnicty...we are just getting to that )...he was born in ukraine but wouldn't have identified himself as "ukrainian"...he was carpatho-rusyn and would have called himself "hutsul"...anna reid's "colorful mountain shepards" and spoke a dialect different from ukrainian...those invasions developed a variable population which didn't really help unity any more than what my great uncle called the more important divide between catholic and orthodox...my grandparents were orthodox and read and wrote ( peasants and shepards they may have been but they were literate ) in the cyrilic alphabet...other than the russians the bulk of the invaders who controlled ukraine were catholic...religion didn't help here...except for very brief intervals ukraine has only been an independent state since 1991 and, it would appear, that is at an end as russia reasserts its control over what it considers the breakaway province of southwest russia ( and let's not forget that vlad the impaler was kgb...paranoid spookworld weirdness in control of the state apparatus )...go back ninety or so years...read anne applebaum's book and you will have just one line of evidence concerning the ukrainian desire for independence...geography, ethnicity, and economic resources have seemingly always united to defeat that desire...call me "kulak" if you like, my sympathies are with ukraine...with or without the times' meddling...vlad wants to be stalin...the world is a miserable place and the dialectic grinds on...human cognition cannot grasp all the variables in contingency and there are always consequences.

call me svoloch

inflated fashion?

the infallible media tell me that inflation is at its worst level since ducth reagan rode high in the white house saddle ( economic woes under the adminsitration of the "best president ever"? nancy wouldn't like that )...and this may actually be true...lines of evidence are increasing daily...the price of hot dogs is up...

and even the faux surrealist pretention of the cover of last sunday's new york times "style" magazine's "women's fashion" issue can't divert attention from significant differences in presentation...and those differences would be in the communication of the cost of haute couture...as i leafed through the glossy color pages of the non-elitist times signature piece of consumerist propaganda i could not help but notice both the dearth of quoted fashion prices and the daunting number of "price upon request" captions...sticker shock comes to fashion...( and the time's elitist slip is showing..they need to be called on this in perpetuity )...still...

that is $203030 of clothing no self-respecting maid or matron of the upper crust should be forced to do without...there is a reason for fashion...the wealthy know this and have a keen eye for subtle displays of their superior social standing...why else would they covet a $6500 shirt ( it's allegedly in there somewhere ) and, as something of a poke in the eye of the economically oppressed, a $6150 scarf...no one said style was cheap.

"mile-high"

"who will build the ark" is an essay by mike davis built on the premise of a "self-debate" on the prospects of human surviving climate change...the first part presents a negative view of that possibility and in it he maintains that "meeting koyoto-type accords" necessitates that "wind-fall profits" (from fossil fuels) not being, among other things, "wasted on mile-high skyscrapers"...clearly he has no faith in "voluntary" cuts in carbon emisions or the willingnes of wealth to cooperate in anything that limits their preogatives...the second part is a presentation of the positive which is centered around urban living...cities as the most efficient way to distribute resources...however to achieve this cities need to overcome a number of things,"first among these is massive horizontal sprawl which combines the degradation of natural services, aquifiers, watersheds, truck farms, forests, coastal eco-systems, with the hugh costs of providing infrastructure to the sprawl." that "expansion" is favelas, shanty-towns, slums...to be efficient cities will need to shrink...greater mexico city covers 573 square miles with a population of 21,804,515 ( all total population figures are 2020 estimates ) using the united nation's figure of 31.6% of urban populations living in slums there are 6,890,226 slum dwellers there...greater lima peru covers 1088 square miles with a population of 10,882,572 meaning 3,438,949 living in slums...greater lagos nigeria covers 452 square miles and a population of 23,000,000 leaves 7,268,000 mired in shanty-towns...greater los angeles covers 501 square miles and has a population of 13,200,999 which should put 4,171,515 in slums, or rather homeless encampments...that may seem an over-estimate to some...you never know...who has counted recently?...if urban areas are going to shrink to habitable, efficient, walkable/public transport accomodating places vertical is the only way to go...you will need those "mile-high skyscrapers" to achieve that...the question then becomes how much of those "windfall profits" will be used to mitigate ( read bunker/walled comunity surrounded by private armies ) the impact of climate change on those of wealth rather than post-modern insulae for the "horizontal speawl".

obfuscation: addendum

just another line of evidence that they are all in the same ideological faction with different routes to the same destination ( the preservation and expansion of the prerogatives of wealth ) this is from an article in today's n y times that inadvertently ( they are the mouthpiece of the east coast elite ifestyle class ) highlights the sameness...sometimes facts leak through.