Queercents

While deciding which books to make accessible for easy reading while traveling back to the U.S. this past week, I came across one I’ve used for posts in the past and decided it might be interesting to revisit it. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R.H. Tawney, an economic lecturer in the 1920s, deals with religion’s impact up through the 1700s on the development of that creature that now rules the world, capitalism.

Rightly or wrongly, with wisdom or with its opposite…not only in one denomination but among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Nonconformists, an attempt is being made to restate the practical implications of the social implications of the social ethics of the Christian faith, in a form sufficiently comprehensive to provide a standard by which to judge the collective actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere of international politics and of social organization. It is being made today.

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About a year ago, a friend of mine told me that she was freelance writing for work. I was as well, but my friend was working full-time at it; I was not. We started discussing project sources and ran through many of the Internet options available for the hunt: craigslist.com, various message boards, gumtree.com for the UK, and several like this essay writing one. She said, however, that the majority of her projects came from guru.com.

Since then, I’ve come to agree that it might be the best place to get freelance jobs, and that’s not just for writers. Guru has job forums for most forms of legalized freelance work available. From marketing to web design, accounting to photography, and computer programming to architecture, if you’ve got a marketable skill set, chances are guru has a job for you. The first time I punched in my writing credentials, almost 800 jobs popped up for perusal. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. It’s my birthday this month, and I was wondering if you could send me a gift. I’d like your collection of essays titled Can Poetry Matter? The entire thing looks really great, but I’m mostly interested in the essay “Business and Poetry.” I asked your secretary at the National Endowment for the Arts about it, but she suggested that I have a virtual conversation with Amazon.com. I will undoubtedly have that conversation, but I thought I’d try you first.

Some months ago (on Nina’s suggestion) I downloaded your Knowledge@Wharton interview, “The Close Connection between Business and Poetry,” from iTunes U, and I’ve read the corresponding essay excerpts on your website. These were fascinating and helpful, but there’s one question that remains unanswered for me. How does a poet keep from becoming incredibly miserable in the world of business management? You say it can be done. You draw some convincing links between management and creativity as well as between the poet and the linguistic experience of business. You’ve obviously done it yourself. Some of my other favorite poets, like Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, made it happen. When I worked in management, however, my poetry suffered and even slipped temporarily into non-existence, my creativity was squashed into tiny blocks the size and shape of the corporate logo; and by the end of my eight years there, despite my decent 401k and class A stock bundle, I wanted to die. Read the rest of this entry »

Technically, things are warming up. The earth’s temperature climbed somewhere around one degree Fahrenheit over the 20th century and all of those glacier makeover pictures provide the senses with the multi-media evidence that statistics fall short of. But what actually is happening? One scientist, Andrew Watson, who I interviewed for an article a few months ago, suggested that possibly a “natural oscillation” in climate is occurring alongside human influence. He certainly hasn’t put on the Al Gore freak-out face but instead posits:

What happens if we take no action? We will see a warming as great as that which has occurred since the middle of the last ice age (when there was a 2 kilometer thick ice sheet where Birmingham is today for instance) but happening much more quickly. I don’t think that all life on the planet is in danger (the world has been that warm before, albeit a very long time ago). But the natural world as we know it is going to pass away, and billions of people will be displaced.

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Since returning from travel in Central Europe and reminiscing on my David Černý sculpture hunt, I’ve been thinking a lot about the complexity of looking at (broadly categorized) anti-communist (and I’m not talking about propaganda here) art through the eyes of a remorseful (but definitely not repentant) capitalist.

Money is a good thing. Free markets are a wonderful thing. David Černý and others sharing his ethos remind us of this with their work as mouthpiece for a region engaging the capitalist’s life relatively recently.

For the train from Prague to Krakow, I got a hold of the most recent Umelec, an international art and culture publication, and found that the editorial by Ivan Mecl was addressing something in the neighborhood of this aforementioned complexity. He begins, Read the rest of this entry »

Today in Prague, I went on a David Černý sculpture hunt. My first sighting of the Czech sculptor’s work and probably the most visible of all of his publicly displayed and acknowledged works was the arrangement of giant babies with coin slots for faces affixed to the city’s TV tower. My Lonely Planet guide describes the piece as ”Creepy, giant, slot-faced babies crawling all over a TV transmitter tower; something to do with consumerism and the media, methinks.”

So, with admiration for his brain if not all of his work in hand, I circled the tower and its Babies, considering two of my most cherished topics: consumerism and the media. Equally as interesting as the Babies is the work in its geographical context (which gives it more points). The tower sits on the site of an old cemetary, the headstones cramped and arranged in an almost ampitheater-style seating arrangement to the tower. It’s a violent, organic contrast to the tower and its synthetic parasites. Er, the Babies and theirs? Read the rest of this entry »

Ethical investing. Faith-based funds. Socially Responsible Investment funds. To what extent do your ethics impact where you stash your cash?

“I care about these people’s spiritual lives” says Bolt Moore, an American pastor currently based in Budapest, “but I know they live in the real world. I believe that doing business is a part of life and that there’s an ethical way of doing business that’s compatible with one’s spiritual beliefs.”

Really? Read the rest of this entry »

I recently got back in the boxing ring after almost three years of casual to no working out. My first few painful weeks back into the routine of training for a fight have reminded me that this sport works a body like none other. And I’m not talking about getting beaten up. Of course, there is that element if desired, but boxing training is primarily other than that. I’ve been a runner, a college basketball player, done weights and all of the other gimmicky machines that come along with a gym membership (and found many useful); but nothing does what boxing does.

What sets the particular fitness routine apart from other workouts is that it actually doesn’t require a gym membership or a trainer. It doesn’t really even require any equipment at all. It is, of course, really helpful to go to an official boxing gym and work with a trainer if one really wants to learn how to punch, but the fitness (and body) itself can be completely free. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sleeping with a straight. Well, okay, like my former lover in San Francisco wrote to me in an email recently: “Newsflash, if she’s sleeping with you, she’s not so straight.” And, to everyone’s surprise, it turns out that she’s not. My point, however, is not to graph an unhelpful hierarchy of straightness for this post. It’s to talk about my recent bout with homophobia. My own homophobia.

I’ve never really been into public displays of affection. Some might argue that this is a tactic often used to keep options open, but I’m genuinely not into it. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s annoying and dramatic. I didn’t enjoy it when I lived in what I call the “vacuum” queer communities like Seattle’s Capital Hill, or various San Francisco neighborhoods, or West Hollywood, places where one can almost forget that straights still rule most of the world. So, the fact that I still don’t like PDA can’t be entirely attributed to the fact that my present home is a small city with a nearly invisible and geographically scattered queer community in which I’m generally the only visibly queer person around. I simply just haven’t changed.

My new lover, however, is obsessed with her newfound identity. She wants to make-out in inconvenient places, to hold hands and other parts everywhere, to embrace in the grocery store. It’s not my thing, but I have to admit that my discomfort has alerted me to something else that’s going on. Read the rest of this entry »

Stuart Jeffries and Stephen Moss of the UK’s Guardian Unlimited addressed who would welcome a recession and who would be hurt by one. They interviewed several religious leaders and got an interesting variety of responses on the Church(es) position on the potential for a recession.

As Lent begins, the church would have us stress simplicity and abstemiousness, purgation and renewal. Might clerics see a recession as an opportunity for people to stop worshipping at the shrine of money and start thinking about what really matters? “There is no wealth but life,” as Ruskin put it. Read the rest of this entry »