Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Category web log

  • Loneliness

    THIS MORNING, A MATCHED pair of posts about loneliness, by Amba Azaad in The New Inquiry and Chris Dillow.

    Azaad:

    Because straight white men refuse to recognize their own unpalatability, they come up with solutions to loneliness that appropriate the rhetoric of justice- and freedom-based ideologies without actually engaging in any rigorous structural analyses of their culpability in oppression. They don’t want revolutionary change but merely a polite tolerance that would make them more bearable. And this selfishness renders them incompetent to address the structures of loneliness as a social ill.

    Dillow:

    And this has been my experience too. My grammar school was on the other side of town and it played rugby, the function of which was not so much to produce rugby players as to signal to people like me that we didn’t belong. And then I went to Oxford which was chocka with charmless dullards from “nice” middle-class backgrounds*. All along there were cues that I didn’t fit in.
    Of course, the ruling class rarely gave overt outright messages of class hatred, just as Ms Hirsch rarely encountered crude racism. It likes to think of itself as open and tolerant. But this is self-regarding bullshit which rests upon a denial of the real lived experience of the tens of thousands of black, mixed-race or working-class people: Michael Henderson’s “review” in the Times is a wonderful example of this.

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  • There are more important issues

    ONE OF THE RHETORICAL tricks I’ve noticed becoming increasingly common (though I may just have been sensitized to it) is opposition to some proposal, based on the claim that “there are more important issues to discuss”.

    John Quiggin on the ‘why won’t the x talk about y’ phenomenon.

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  • Voting

    VOTING IS FULL OF ironies. It’s a social activity of selection and choice between alternatives, a functional process so totemic that it’s often confused for democracy itself. When we vote we express a value anonymously in such a way that no one person’s vote is any more worthy than anyone else’s. But it’s not the same as power.

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  • Pirates!

    What we admire in pirates—at least our fictional pirates—is that they so enjoy their villainy. They’re not sly or covert or subtle. Everything about them is over-the-top, histrionic: they glory in their infamy. While most of us drag ourselves through the daily dullness of our lives, they swagger, they pirouette, and, in the case of Captain Hook, even dance a tarantella. Like the trailblazer and the gunslinger, the pirate represents a New World ideal of freedom—a proud renegade living by his wits and his daring.

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  • Excellent Bones

    ELIZABETH FARRELLY, A MASTER of her art, wrote these sentences with apparent sincerity.

    Newcastle has excellent bones. Its pretty, gridded sandstone core drapes over a headland set between river and ocean. Sure, the surrounding sprawl is ugly, but rail lets you ignore all that, popping up like a meerkat right in its heart. Newcastle is as close to a European-style town as you’ll find in this country.

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  • Student housing in The Saturday Paper

    BECAUSE THIS BLOG EXISTS, AND because I get to choose what I do with it, I’m going to start putting up excerpts and links to things on the internet that I have read that I think you, reader, would also enjoy. I understand that’s the original definition of ‘web log’. But what’s historicisation of technologies between web-‘social’ acquaintances in a relationship mediated by marketing? Call this post the first in a beginning form of adaptive re-use.

    There’s increasing discussion about the role of the public sector in setting standards that mandate design quality in housing. Projects such as this remind us that authorities have another potent form of intervention at their disposal. With deep institutional knowledge and a desire to chase more than the bottom line, they are well placed to lead the development of innovative and life-affirming housing models. Wielded strategically, by a range of authorities across metropolitan areas, projects of this type could visibly lift the bar of housing quality for all of us.

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