Friday, October 26, 2007
Putting Life First
by David Korten
If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires building economies with heart.
"No other novelist cuts so incisively to the heart of contemporary ennui"
The boring brilliance of JG Ballard
Lee Rourke
25 Oct 2007
Who is Britain's greatest living novelist? If pressed, I would have to say JG Ballard. No other contemporary writer, in my opinion, has engaged with modernity and our urban environment quite like Ballard. And with Crash, his startling novel of 1973, he tackles the evident intersection of our prevailing psychological, philosophical, sexual and technological violence - so engrained is it in our modern age - in a way that nobody else has managed.Crash is the definitive novel of technocentrism: where the blurring of our technologies and functionality is evoked through a cultural and political desert in the urban environment, revealing a society governed by the car and the - mostly sexual - violence we are left with. A crumbling world where we are dwarfed by a new machine age that has no real need for us - a world we are ill-equipped to understand as it leaves us standing - forcing us to worship its gleaming by-products and ignoring its manipulation of us. To put it simply: Ballard understands that modernity has left us to our own basal needs - and we're not coping too well.
Interwoven through this dazzling narrative is the palpable, all too human, presence of boredom. It is the glue that binds the sequence of events in Crash together: behind its synthesis of crumpled fenders, chrome headlights, semen, brake fluid and oil, Crash is a book about boring people who are simply bored; these people cling to the one thing they can control. The car is the symbol of a limited body, and through the motorcar - through its actual prostheses and a series of repeated collisions - these bored individuals can begin to understand the things ordinarily beyond their own control: sexual urges, the realisation of death, violence and desire.
Crash serves to remind us that we can never fully grasp the meaning of modernity. We are ruthlessly exposed as limited vessels in its presence. For me it is the most telling and damning novel of our age: in a world that is devoid of all meaning it is extremism that dominates as the prevailing alternative to the collective ennui that binds us together.
"Judges impose secrecy on remake of ethics rules"
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — As the federal judiciary embarks on a historic revision of its rules against judicial misconduct, the panel of judges that's overseeing the drafting of new regulations refuses to disclose the public comments that could help shape the overhaul.
After requesting public comments about the proposed rules, the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability refuses to say how many responses it received, who commented or what was said.
"I have never heard of public comments being made confidentially," said Abner Mikva, a retired chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. "I'm trying to think of an explanation, but this strikes me as very strange."
What's known is that several chief circuit judges across the country are among those who weighed in, sparking speculation that the judiciary is debating the merits of the proposed rules, which would impose unprecedented oversight over how federal courts handle complaints.
Legal experts said they weren't surprised by the reticence to release the information. By tradition and necessity, the federal judiciary often weighs some of its most important decisions behind closed doors and without public input...
image from http://www.spitting-image.net
