Little talk:

A routine which, if I follow, I am somewhat happy with:

1. Wake up

1.5. If anxious to read, eager to work, then work, or read.

2. Exercise - Exercise or some non-exercise equivalent.

3. Rest

4. SEWP - Service, or errands, or work, or prayer.

One way I have gone wrong is getting annoyed and discouraged when some particularly pointless and aggravating errand has gotten in the way of the More Important Things. On reflection, I think even the pointless and aggravating errands should be considered on par with the more exalted forms of work.

George MacDonald: "There are a great many more good things than bad things to do."

5. PLAT - Play or pleasure or prayer. 

Play.

Pleasure.

Prayer.

Play can involve doing the same thing as work, on the principle of the busman's holiday.

6. Sleep

It's perhaps useful to have minimums and maximums for exercise, and SEWP. The minimum should perhaps be easy enough to do, but enough to maintain, and keep your hand and eye in. The maximum should perhaps be cautious enough to avoid overdoing, but enough to improve and accomplish. The minimum for exercise should perhaps be somewhere in the range of 15 to 90 minutes, the maximum perhaps somewhere in the range of 90 to 360 minutes. The minimum for SEWP should perhaps be somewhere in the range of 40 to 240 minutes, the maximum perhaps somewhere in the range of 240 to 960 minutes.

For exercise, the lower numbers in the range are perhaps for those brave souls who exercise efficiently and well. The higher numbers in the range are perhaps for those of us with a strong preference for low-intensity moseying. (A good column by Tony Norman which discusses Speedy and Slowpoke, as well as more sinister stereotypes. The greatest danger of stereotype-based humor and commentary may be that it opens the door to charlatanism, pretending you are generating impact by writing War & Peace, when in fact you are generating impact by finger-painting taboo words with the blood & tears of an innocent.)

In hindsight, this routine seems to have something to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of the appeal of the sporting life:

. . .It was never that he was completely sold on athletic virtuosity as the be-all and end-all of problems; the trouble was that he could find nothing finer. Imagine life conceived as a business of beautiful muscular organization—an arising, an effort, a good break, a sweat, a bath, a meal, a love, a sleep—imagine it achieved; then imagine trying to apply that standard to the horribly complicated mess of living, where nothing, even the greatest conceptions and workings and achievements, is else but messy, spotty, tortuous—and then one can imagine the confusion that Ring faced on coming out of the ball park.

Instead of "an arising, an effort, a good break, a sweat, a bath, a meal, a love, a sleep", we have "an arising, an effort, a good break, a bath, a meal, a desk, a sleep". Fantastic!

What category is politics? If you enjoy it, it can be play. If you don't, it can be an errand. If you do it well, it can be work, or service.

Big talk:

3 podcasts:

J-POD & Seema Chishti, on the Babri Masjid demolition of 1992:

"Seema Chishti: On a personal note, I was of a mixed Hindu and Muslim parentage. . .so I always had this special affinity with something which was part mosque, part temple. So, yes, there was something personal of interest for me, maybe it came into my voice. . .

Krishna Prasad: It very much did. You know, another woman journalist, Ruchira Gupta, who was 24 at that time, has written about how she was molested by the Kar Sevaks on Dec 6. 1992. She in fact goes to LK Advani to ask him to announce on the microphone that journalists should not be attacked, but Mr. Advani apparently says "Forget what has happened. This is a historic day. Celebrate. Eat something sweet." . . .How were journalists in general, and women journalists in particular, treated at that time?

Seema Chishti: I was not with Ruchira, Ruchira is a friend. . .my experience, they didn't seem to be interested in whether I was a woman or a man, it was a very clear attempt to make sure I was not in a position to record events. . .you have a Sadhu telling us "Do not picture this.". . .so they didn't want evidence, and they basically asked us to vamoose, go away, and hit you enough so that you are totally distracted. . .

Krishna Prasad: I am so happy that you use acronyms like CTO, because I think a whole lot of people wouldn't know that it stood for the Central Telegraph Office . . .the camaraderie among the journalists at that time, the sharing of one phone booth, or one fax machine, is something really alien to most journalists of this era.

Seema Chishti: What I take pride in, Krishna, is that a whole lot of journalists had to be beaten up, in order to stop them from telling the story. . .when today there is so much refusal to say it as it is, at least, then, it took sticks and stones and a lot of thwacking and thumping for us to be shut up. . .it was not as if everybody was of one persuasion, there were all kinds of journalists in a group there, but this was clearly a case of vandalism, we were watching a momentous, terrifying, huge event, and we wanted to be around to tell that story and to bear witness to it. . .I think this whole demand for a Hindu nation, that if Pakistan is Muslim, why isn't India Hindu, this seed has been there since before Independence, Advani is a very proud bearer of that. . .if I'm a supporter of media and secular India, then I would say that he dealt a blow to the idea that India belongs to everyone. . ."

Fifth & Mission: Civil rights attorney John Burris:

"John Burris: I grew up in Vallejo, kind of a semi-segregated town . . .I didn't walk away with any kind of deep-seated bias or animosity. . .I will say this, though. . .we didn't seem to have the presence of police around us . . .we didn't have, that I recall, beatings, the kind of stuff that we have now, shootings, that just wasn't part of life. . ."

Into America: Into Black Trans Liberation:

"Raquel Willis: Well, you know what is interesting is we've gotta get out of this space of thinking that transgender people are having some kind of magically different gender experience. Honey, I promise you, I'm not. Like, we all carry insecurities about our gender, about who we are and who we're supposed to be in the world.

Perhaps you could say that trans people may have a more drastic experience, but it's so connected to the ways that boys and men in general are told that they can't have a certain well of emotion, that they can't be intimate and have other ways of moving through the world that don't involve control and domination.

It's not entirely different from how women and girls of all experiences face not being seen as competent, intelligent, brilliant, and capable of leadership. And it also of course extends to folks who are nonbinary or gender nonconforming who straddle all of these struggles. And so we've got to understand that."

One lunch:

Wole Soyinka & David Pilling:

"Few leaders — politicians, generals or the religious zealots behind Boko Haram — have escaped his contempt. Of the latter, he says: “For the first time, I began to accept the existence of the theological concept called ‘evil’. Of course the foot soldiers in any cause are usually obtained from the disenfranchised. But the real initiators of this kind of violence are not. They believe in power.”. . .

. . .Soyinka has spent much time in the US, where he has taught at a number of universities. “My life has been involved with the diaspora on a very personal and visceral level,” he says of his interaction with prominent African-Americans. Donald Trump’s election marked an end to his US sojourn. In what has become known among Nigerians as “Wolexit”, he cut up his Green Card."

[The function of noise] is to prevent thought and conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude. The radio is already consciously used for this purpose by innumerable people. In very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out of it. I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought.

In the end, though, the show - the speakers and the videos and the repetitive feeds of selected average Joes (or Juans) from Canton or Los Angeles or Little Rock - didn't matter much. . .

What was important to me was what I saw when the camera panned the delegates - black and white and every shade in between, male and female, gay and straight, young and old, union guys from Cleveland and lesbian couples from San Francisco, Irish pols from Boston and Hispanic pols from East L.A. Asian American businessmen from Seattle and African American teachers from Harlem.

God knows that's not the full picture of the Democratic Party - not even close. I'm sure there was no shortage of vile hacks and corporate fat cats in the audience. And when it comes to actual policies, it's pretty clear the party has about as much progressive backbone as a bowl of corn meal mush. . .

But. . .It may not be my party, but those are my people. . .I wish I could be there with them.

"Do you know, when I think of some of the dreams I had as a young man, and the obstacles that stood in their way, they seemed so enormous at the time, but looking back, of course, they were all surmountable. . .I can't allow myself to tread on anyone else's dreams with anything but the softest of footfalls. We spend a lot of our life looking for the way home, James, and the thing is, we don't have the aptitude for it that cats do. . ."

Next post: 1-21-21