Archive | February, 2009

How to explain the credit crunch to a five-year-old

8 February 2009 · Thinking · Comments { 0 }

1.  The government promised Mummy and Daddy they would be happy if they spent their lives working to make someone else rich. 2.  Mummy and Daddy did what they were told, but ended up with jack shit. 3.  The rich people told Mummy and Daddy to borrow lots and lots of money, so that they [...]

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“Prisons we choose to live inside” by Doris Lessing

4 February 2009 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

A clear-sighted, well-argued plea for individuality of thought in an age of mass emotions and social conditioning. Doris Lessing has faith in the power of writers to stay detached from these mass emotions and “enable us to see ourselves as others see us.” I like the image she gives of writers as a collective organism, [...]

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Food crisis

3 February 2009 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

Wonderful article in the December New Internationalist about the global food crisis. As the magazine points out, we hear a lot about the financial crisis, but comparatively little about the food crisis which pushed 100 million people into situations of life-threatening malnutrition last year. What makes it worse was that at the height of the [...]

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Quote for the day

2 February 2009 · Thinking · Comments { 0 }

Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. Paulo Freire

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“The Steep Approach to Garbadale” by Iain Banks

1 February 2009 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

I particularly liked that although most of the story is told from Alban’s point of view, he is described at first from the outside, first from his cousin Fielding’s perspective, then from that of Tango, the man he is staying with in Perth. It immediately creates the sense of Alban as a slightly mysterious, unknowable character, and this feeling persists through the rest of the book, even as we are told much more about him and given access to his thoughts. It’s a clever device, and the book is full of similar effects. If the clues to the ending had been a little less heavy-handed, this would have been an excellent book.

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