9.25.2022 – bring your whole self to

bring your whole self to
work fully show up ourselves
to be truly seen

According to an article I just read, the latest trend in Human Resources — say that out loud and ask yourself what exactly was wrong with the term, personnel — anyway … the latest trend in HR is Bring Your Whole Self to Work which means being able “to fully show up” and “allow ourselves to be truly seen” in the workplace because it’s “essential” to create a work environment “where people feel safe enough to bring all of who they are to work.”

Thankfully the article, Do Not Bring Your ‘Whole Self’ to Work, a New York Times Opinion piece by Pamela Paul, rejects the concept.

As I understand, the point is to get people excited about being back in a common workplace about almost 3 years of covid and working from home.

Ms. Paul writes, ‘But “bringing your whole self to work” is a cheap benefit — easier for employers to provide than, say, a raise — and one vague enough to be largely meaningless.

Nor is it available to the majority of the American work force.

Nobody is asking a line worker or customer service representative to add more personal vulnerability to the enterprise.

For most gainfully employed people, it’s not work’s job to provide self-fulfillment or self-actualization.

It’s to put food on the table.’

You have to love vague enough to be largely meaningless.

It a way it was almost comforting to learn that after almost 3 years of covid, HR has not moved away from Office Space or Dilbert/

I am human.

I am a resource.

Should be good enough.

9.24.2022 – writers write from pain

writers write from pain
he closed up all wounds, all can
write are these small things

The diaries of Alan Rickman were recently published.

The review I read stated, “Why he kept a diary is unclear. Diarists come in all shapes, and their reasons for recording their lives are similarly diverse.”

My question is, did he know or want them to ever be published.

Historian Edmund Morris wrote that one cannot read the private letters and diary of Theodore Roosevelt with out feeling that TR knew and wanted them to be published to the point that letters were not so much written to any one person as much to posterity.

I cannot say I am much of an Alan Rickman fan and then I think about all the movies I have seen in him and I say my gosh was that Alan Rickman?

Die Hard, Love Actually, one of those Jane Austen period pieces and all those Harry Potter movies that I have never seen made from books that I have never read (there, I said it, I have not read any Harry Potter)

I skimmed through the excerpts of the diaries because of the tag line, “two decades of Rickman’s withering film reviews.“

Few things I enjoy reading more than withering film reviews except maybe the back story behind withering film reviews.

Like Pauline Kael writing that The Sound of Music was “the single most repressive influence on artistic freedom in movies” and getting fired from her job because of writing that.

But this is all digression.

What caught my eye was a comment Mr. Rickman wrote into his diary on December 29, 2000 when he had a four hour conversation with Edna O’Brien.

Josephine Edna O’Brien is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer and Philip Roth described her as “the most gifted woman now writing in English”, all according to wikipedia.

Mr. Rickman quoted Ms. O’Brien commenting on Harold Pinter, the play write.

Just to keep this all straight, I am repeating something Alan Rickman wrote down that he claimed Edna O’Brien said about another person, Harold Pinter.

Got it straight now?

He said that she said that “The trouble is writers write from pain and Harold has closed up all his wounds, so all he can write now are these small things.”

Of late I have been bothered by, OF ALL THINGS, the quality of my haiku.

Not that I am any great poet let alone a poet let alone a writer.

I pretty much set at my keyboard and my fingers ran away which you can tell from typos and grammar all too often.

Still, when I read some of my earlier stuff, I think, this isn’t too bad.

The stuff inspired by a bizarre work environment and daily commutes in and out of Atlanta, Georgia and an extended family situation that was less than settled.

Now I pretty much enjoy my job.

My commute, when I have to go in to the office, if across tidal wetlands on palm tree lined roads.

And my kids, for the most part, are slowly getting their act together (though lots of rough edges remain).

Recently a friend commented that I ‘ … have a charmed life.’

I cannot argue.

Maybe I have closed up all the wounds.

Maybe all I can write are these small things.

If I have to complain, what I complain about is mostly that covid fatigue (along with political fatigue – well this soap opera ever end?)

Can I call those wounds?

Hardly.

I live a charmed life.

I should start acting like I know that.

9.23.2022 – morning light moon light

morning light moon light
everything shines, little words
slowly read story

Breakage by Mary Oliver –

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.
Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

That’s my wish.

And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?

So says Burt Lancaster in the role of Moonlight Graham in the movie, Field of Dreams.

In book, Shoeless Joe, by W.P. Kinsella, Doc Graham says, “That’s what I wish, Ray Kinsella, whoever you are. Is there enough magic floating around out in the night for you to make it come true?”

What Ray thinks of is something Joe Jackson said to him.

This is the kind of place where anything can happen, isn’t it?”

They were thinking of Iowa.

I am thinking of the beach.

I love to sit and watch and begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Anything can happen.

9.22.2022 – mystics of the fact

mystics of the fact
and a mystic can’t judge: can
only bless or hate

Based in the essay Character, by Antonio Gramsci, in Il Grido del Popolo, March 3, 1917;

Our adversaries don’t worry themselves with judging the attitude of socialists in the same way as they do principles and methods that the socialists have always professed and followed. Doing do this would mean truly considering them and doing something concrete. They don’t even attempt this judgment, being incapable of it.

They lose their way when placed before men of character, grope about in the darkness, giving up all hope in the blind alleys of gossip, of slander, of defamation. They don’t understand a straightforward, strictly coherent demeanor. They are hypnotized by facts, by current events. They don’t understand the man of character, who weighs and judges facts not in and of themselves as much as in their relationship with the past and the future; that facts are thus judged primarily for their effect, their eternal nature. They are mystics of the fact. And a mystic can’t judge: he can only bless or hate.

But this is the strength of Italian socialists. To have preserved character. To have succeeded in defeating sentimentality, to have succeeded in throttling the throbbing of the heart as a stimulus to action, as a stimulus to the manifestations of collective life. In this period of history the Italian Socialists have realized for historic ends humanity in its most perfect form. A humanity that doesn’t fall into the easy traps of illusion. A humanity that has rejected as useless and harmful the inferior forms of spiritual life: the impulses of the tender heart and sentimentality.

They have rejected this consciously. Because they knew how to assimilate the teachings of their greatest teachers, as well as the teachings that are spontaneously produced by bourgeois reality, bitten into by the reagents of socialist criticism. The Italian Socialists have remained steadfast in their ranks determined by the demands of the social class. As a collective they are not disturbed by the painful spectacles that are presented to them. As a collective they don’t faint when the still breathing corpse of a murdered child is thrown at their feet. The commotion that every individual has felt, the heartache, the sympathy that every individual has felt hasn’t scratched the granite-like compactness of the class.

If every individual has a heart, the class, as such, does not have a heart in the sense that feeble humanism usually gives it. The class has a will, the class has a character. All of its life is molded by this determination, this character, with nothing left over. As a class it can have no other form of solidarity than that of class, no other form of struggle than that of class, no other nation than the class, that is, the International. Its heart is nothing but the consciousness of its class being, the consciousness of its ends, the consciousness of its future. Of the future that is its alone, for which it demands the solidarity and collaboration of no one, for which it doesn’t desire the throbbing of anyone’s heart. There only throbs, in its immense dynamic and creative potential, its tenacious determination, implacable towards all who are foreign to it.

Our adversaries don’t understand this. In Italy character is not understood. And this is the only thing in which the Socialists can benefit and have benefited Italianness. They have given Italy that which it has lacked up till the present moment: A living and dramatically throbbing example of an adamantine and superbly proud character.

Antonio Francesco Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy. (Wikipedia)

9.21.2022 – and treated him as

and treated him as
if he was a halfwit – most
people do these days

I DO like how Brit’s can turn a phrase in the same manner in which they might turn a knife into someone’s rib cage.

Consider this paragraph:

Miliband treated Rees-Mogg as if he was a halfwit. Most people do these days. Long gone are the times when MPs were impressed by his faux politeness and smug self-confidence, squeezed into an oversized undertaker’s suit. Now people see him for the needy fraud that he is.

this is the half-wit himself – Mr. Rees-Mogg does have that Barney Fife/Gomer Pyle look doesn’t he?

The article, Tories usher in their brave new world of half-arsed fantasy by John Crace, got better.

Maybe we need to introduced half-arsed into our lexicon.

Consider again these paragraphs (I can feel the fun as Mr. Crace’s fingers typed them out.)

But she has at least chosen her new health secretary wisely. Because when you’ve got no ideas, who better than Thérèse Coffey? A woman of no imagination and no great brain. But someone who can be relied to come up with some nonsense on the back of a cigar packet.

Sure enough, Coffey did not disappoint, coming up with – in the absence of a plan – a memory game. A was for Ambulance. B was for Backlog. C was for Care. D was for Doctor. And E was for total fucking Eejit. Poor Thérèse. She didn’t realise how shabby and half-arsed her ideas were.

The sad part, as in all political commentary, is the writing is about people who are making the decisions, the real decisions, that really do affect us all.

As Mr. Crace concluded his writing, “Truly we are screwed”.