Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
BlogDay
СЕГОДНЯ 31 Августа мировое интернет-сообщество отмечает День блога (BlogDay). В этот день каждый пользователь публикует у себя ссылки на пять других блогов, отличных по тематике.
BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. The designated date is August 31, because when written 3108, it resembles the word "Blog". On that day, bloggers recommend five new blogs to their visitors, so that readers discover new, previously unknown blogs.
Ну тогда и я скину Вам 5 блогов которые я читаю:
BONUS: FearLess Revolution
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
SUMMER BOOKS
'The Lovers,' by Vendela VidaIt's my favorite read of Summer
Like 2007's "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name," Vida's "The Lovers" follows a woman who travels far from home on an emotional quest. This time, it's Yvonne, a 53-year-old high school history teacher from Vermont; her destination is the coast of Turkey. Yvonne’s story can be seen from the start as an unusual and engrossing exploration of marriage, parenthood and the accidents that can end and reconfigure lives.
We are presented with an American woman abroad who is less interested in her exotic surroundings than in mapping out the equally mysterious terrain of her past.
To begin, Yvonne isn’t sure she raised her children fairly or understandingly enough. She and her son barely know each other, and her daughter has been severely troubled from an early age. Nor can she pinpoint what part of her was lost or subsumed in marriage, or if the relationship was on the whole a success. Underlying these questions is her desire to know whether she’s lived as she should have. As a teacher of history, she would be familiar with Solon’s admonition to Croesus of Lydia — no one’s life can be deemed happy until it is over — which makes her hope for answers equally fascinating and futile.
Vida, who is married to the writer Dave Eggers, is a subtle writer with a spare and authoritative voice, and her third novel is further evidence that she can fashion characters as unpredictable as they are endearing. Although its ending is a little rushed (some situations feel arbitrarily abandoned), the book is a satisfying, often brilliant portrait of a woman searching for relief from things that will not, she discovers at last with something like acceptance, go away. From New York Times Sunday Book Review, July 1st, 2010The book advances itself with echoes and variations on themes. A woman who travels alone will see couples everywhere, and there are an overwhelming number in this book. The owls had mated for life, couples sunbathe on a beach, Yvonne's children are twins, and there is an excessively smug pair on a boat trip that Yvonne takes to Cleopatra's island. Lovers, appropriately for a book of this title, surface often, with the furious menage a trois between the house owner and his wife and mistress, Yvonne's love story with her husband, and, most importantly, the book that Yvonne is reading, Marguerite Duras' stunning short novel, "The Lover."
Duras' book gives a reader a key to the deeper aims of Vida's work. Throughout her life, Duras rewrote, in a number of ways, her autobiographical story of a young girl in French colonial Vietnam who takes an older Chinese lover. There is a small echo of the story in Yvonne and Ahmet's friendship: as innocent as it is to Yvonne, theirs is an unequal relationship based on money, and it does appear sinister to outsiders.
Vida's first novel, "And Now You Can Go," is a swift, funny story about a young woman whose life falls apart after she is held at gunpoint in a park, and how she slowly heals after a volunteer surgical trip to the Philippines. Vida's second, "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name," is about another young woman who flees to Lapland when the man she has always believed was her father dies, leaving her parentless and unsure of her own identity. "The Lovers," Vida's new novel, is the story of yet another woman who, in the aftermath of trauma, travels in order to heal herself.
It is only in light of Duras' lifelong project - to refine her story by retelling it - that we understand that Vida's project over her three novels is quite ambitious, even if her methods are quiet. In the end, by pushing deeper into her refrains of grief and travel, Vida's work becomes clearer and more sophisticated with every book she writes; and "The Lovers" is her best and most disturbing novel yet. From SFGate.com, June 20th, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
HAUNTED at GUGGENHEIM
Like many amateurs I have enthusiastically embraced digital photography because I believe in capturing the moments that are true to my heart. Photography legitimizes important events - graduations, weddings and festivities. It suggests family plots and explores our rituals of remembrance – both our need to remember and the impossibility of actually succeeding. Photographs teach us to recognize ties of blood; they develop sense of belonging and determine our memories of childhood.
Photography constructs memory and our sense of identity. We experience events in real time. In photographs we alternate reality in fictional scenarios. Past returns moments caught on camera to recreate the experienced nostalgic longing for the past and difficulty maintaining elusive memories.
Guggenheim's "Haunted" exhibition explores themes of memory, trauma and return to the past
What I remember from the exhibition most vividly, is the photo of the girl by Gillian Wearing - Self-Portrait at Three Years Old (2004). "Confronting the viewer with her adult gaze through the eyeholes of the toddler’s mask, Wearing plays on the rift between interior and exterior, and raises a multitude of provocative questions about identity, memory, and the veracity of the photographic medium."
The purpose of a mask is to send the viewer back to a time before our experiences shaped who we are. In a sense, a person wears their life on their face, and the mask has the ability to conceal that life.
Photography constructs memory and our sense of identity. We experience events in real time. In photographs we alternate reality in fictional scenarios. Past returns moments caught on camera to recreate the experienced nostalgic longing for the past and difficulty maintaining elusive memories.
Guggenheim's "Haunted" exhibition explores themes of memory, trauma and return to the past
What I remember from the exhibition most vividly, is the photo of the girl by Gillian Wearing - Self-Portrait at Three Years Old (2004). "Confronting the viewer with her adult gaze through the eyeholes of the toddler’s mask, Wearing plays on the rift between interior and exterior, and raises a multitude of provocative questions about identity, memory, and the veracity of the photographic medium."
The purpose of a mask is to send the viewer back to a time before our experiences shaped who we are. In a sense, a person wears their life on their face, and the mask has the ability to conceal that life.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Constructing Social Class
Observing how communication is used to construct a class system, and how class identification is obtained in a large hierarchical organization.
In my exploration of the class system I focused on ways the employees are divided into class groups. I examined the practice of annual review – a process used by managers to evaluate the employee performance. From a critical perspective, I looked at how the entire process functions as a control mechanism and contributes to class formation.
Looking at an organization which employs well-specialized engineers and a work force consisting of highly-educated personnel. Those who hold a Ph.D. are engaged in the research and development of advanced technology systems. The remaining staff consists of mechanical engineers and technicians who work in manufacturing and production. These are the employees who work offstage and are rarely seen in the area where the offices and conference rooms are. The office space is split into front and back, giving visibility and higher regard to employees who are in forward positions.
Each employee is expected to set yearly objectives and is responsible for achieving and working towards the set goals. Since the annual performance review is vital for professional advancement, employees often depend on their managers for good ratings. Managers who conduct evaluations of employee performance have seniority and hold higher positions within the organization; they are vice presidents, directors, senior managers and supervisors. These distinctions between levels are evidence of power relationships (p. 99).
Classism occurs when some people have power over the others (p. 98). In an organizational setting, power helps high-status managers to administer their subordinates; it gives them control over the workforce. In this setting, class matters because it affects the organizational system. The powerlessness employees experience leads to consent and subordination. As a result, employees are placed in ranks, and managers with higher status are given the ability to control others’ behavior. This legitimizes the system of domination and maintains the class system that seems very hard to change. Class becomes a product of power relations in the system of hierarchical organization. The workplace is a crucial site of class production and reproduction (p. 108).
In a competitive environment, where employees are driven to exceed expectations, success is seen as a result of “superior” individual effort and employee potential (p. 105). Everyone can advance if they work hard (p. 105). In the process of performance evaluation, however, employees are categorized and classified into groups based on cognitive abilities and skill set. No matter how hard employees work, their ranking is determined by their performance relative to others. Not all employees perform on the same level, especially in relation to each other. Those in business development teams who hold Masters or Bachelor’s Degrees have an advantage over manufacturing and assembly line employees, given their communication skills and capacity for achieving higher rankings. The apparent advantages of business administrators over blue-collar employees can be explained by the differences in cognitive and verbal abilities. In effect, use of performance review marginalizes employees, regardless of their performance capability. By holding employees responsible for their accomplishments, the process ignores the fact that “a person’s starting point can affect success” (p. 99).
Success often depends on social standing, which is determined at birth or earned over a lifetime. There is a difference between the ascribed and achieved status – a status acquired based on merit, skills and abilities. Looking at my own example, the difference in my manager’s and my social status is only the tip of the iceberg. The underwater part of the cultural iceberg is his class identification “based on conditions at birth, race, sex and place of birth” (p. 97). My manager is a white male who was born in the United States and was better positioned to attain resources like social skills and education, whereas I immigrated to America without financial assets and had to rely on my knowledge of language and interpreting skills to obtain my class identification.
Economic factors are not the only determinants of class (p. 98). According to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, people use capital to achieve social status (p. 98). Bourdieu emphasizes three types of capital: “economic capital, which includes financial assets; cultural capital, which consists of specialized skills, education, experience, and knowledge such as linguistic; and social capital, which is networks of connections” (p. 98). Due to my cultural capital – the experiences I gained while traveling and the cultural competencies passed down through my family – I was able to work my way through the labyrinth of hierarchical organization. Unless we acknowledge that the economic, cultural and social capital can tilt the playing field in favor of those who have wealth, knowledge and connections, the hierarchies will not be flattened.
Through the ongoing practice of employee evaluation the stratification of employees is created and perpetuated. These types of company policies and processes grant control to managers who are subordinating members of their staff by rating employees into categories of high, basic and low contributors. Subordination of employees is a form of power. This process reinforces the class system; it secures status for employees in higher ranks and deprives those in lower ranks of power.
Moreover, classism is continually reproduced by communication practices and daily interactions. Social status is reflected in ways we communicate; it is apparent in employee conduct and determines a set of behaviors and expectations. We perform class through our choices of clothing, speech style, manners and food preference (p. 108). Our appearance signals status in the organization and helps us maintain a certain image (p. 108). Although people rarely admit how great a part of life is dependent on socioeconomic status (SES), which is determined by the combination of income, education and occupation, many of us throughout life and career strive to achieve status and privilege (p.100).
References
Allen, B. J. (2004) Difference Matters: Communicating Social Identity. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Tomas & Teresa
See THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
As Kundera explains in The Art of the Novel, existence means being in the world, and as the world changes, existence – being-in-the-world – changes as well (Kundera 36). To understand the characters we need to understand their world and the public events. The events that occur in Prague merge with the lives of Tomas and Teresa in a way that changes their existence. The world they live in becomes an entrapment for both of them.
Teresa works in a bar where she meets an engineer and decides to make love to him to experience physical love through her body alone, without involving her soul, to confirm what Tomas told her time and again – that love and sexuality had nothing in common. Teresa’s risky sexual affair with the engineer, who may or may not be an agent of the secret police, becomes her trap. Recalling the smallest details, she realizes that it may have been a predesigned scenario – a trap set for purposes of future blackmail by the government (Banerjee 233). That is the trap, real or not, that she imagines for herself as she thinks of the possibility that the engineer had been sent by the police (Kundera 24).
Teresa examines the entire event “in search for her offense” (Kundera 108). She remembers the radio series of private talks between the Czech novelist Jan Prochazka and a friend of his. The recorded conversations were produced by the secret police to broadcast the sequences in which Prochazka made fun of Dubcek and slandered his friends. In The Art of the Novel, Kundera writes about an extreme version of totalitarian society in which the boundary between the public and the private is abolished and the lives of citizens become entirely transparent (Kundera 110). Teresa realizes that she too, just like Procahzka, lives in a concentration camp, where privacy ceased to exist (Kundera 167). She retreats to a village to escape the trap and lives in isolation with Tomas. Here Kundera underlines the impact and significance of political events for individuals who are obliged to live under a Communist regime (Kundera 37).
Meanwhile, the article Tomas wrote on Oedipus in the spring of 1968 comes back to haunt him. Using the example of Oedipus, who enacts self-indictment by which he acknowledges the actions he committed in ignorance, the article attacks political leaders who refuse to admit responsibility for their actions, because they did not know and were not completely aware of the wrongdoings and the consequences (Banerjee 240). In his article, Tomas uses the Oedipus analogy to hold responsible the Communist leaders for the country’s misfortunes and for its loss of independence: “If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!” (Kundera 177). When Tomas is pressured to make public retractions of his past statements, he gives up his job as a surgeon and goes to work in a country clinic.
When he is visited by a man from the Ministry of the Interior, he is trapped into something even worse. As Tomas realizes he is under interrogation, he falsifies his answers and inadvertently informs on someone else, on a different editor. His fear and paranoia that the police would make public a false statement over his signature, lead him to lose his profession – something so much a part of him (Kundera 194). As a result of these events, Tomas abruptly resigns from his medical post. He escapes the trap by descending the ladder and becoming a window washer. “Once he had reached the lowest rung on the ladder, they would no longer be interested in him” (Kundera 192).
As Tomas refuses to compromise and to comply, he makes heavy go light (Kundera 196). He embarks on a grand holiday and returns to his bachelor existence. By refusing to sign a note stating that he has nothing against the regime, Tomas is released from “his weighty duty” (Kundera 196). The key words for Tomas’s existential code are lightness and weight. His existential problem is the lightness of being in a world where there is no eternal return (Kundera 32). He fails to see that what he chooses as an honorable decision for him is the most horrible thing possible for Teresa. Faced with personal fulfillment on one hand, and with historical and socio-political circumstances on the other, he rejects his life’s external and internal imperatives. Kundera studies Tomas’s attitudes in these situations by tying the individual to the historical and political events, and looking at how private life is balanced with the larger terrors of life in a police state. Tomas is constantly going back and forth between lightness and weight. As Kundera explains, “that was the ‘Es muss sein!’ rooted deep inside him” (Kundera 194).
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about an investigation of being and existence. It is a political novel, but the description of the politico-historical events or the role of the Communist institutions does not interest Kundera. He places his novel in a world provoked by political events that transform the world, to investigate the human condition and a way of being. He looks at the relationship between the events and real life – the regulation of private situations where the individuals are dominated in totalitarian ways, the resulting depersonalization of the individual, the violation and the lack of certain kinds of freedoms, the danger of losing privacy. According to Kundera, “the novel is an investigation of the essence of human situations” (Kundera 32).
As Kundera explains in The Art of the Novel, existence means being in the world, and as the world changes, existence – being-in-the-world – changes as well (Kundera 36). To understand the characters we need to understand their world and the public events. The events that occur in Prague merge with the lives of Tomas and Teresa in a way that changes their existence. The world they live in becomes an entrapment for both of them.
Teresa works in a bar where she meets an engineer and decides to make love to him to experience physical love through her body alone, without involving her soul, to confirm what Tomas told her time and again – that love and sexuality had nothing in common. Teresa’s risky sexual affair with the engineer, who may or may not be an agent of the secret police, becomes her trap. Recalling the smallest details, she realizes that it may have been a predesigned scenario – a trap set for purposes of future blackmail by the government (Banerjee 233). That is the trap, real or not, that she imagines for herself as she thinks of the possibility that the engineer had been sent by the police (Kundera 24).
Teresa examines the entire event “in search for her offense” (Kundera 108). She remembers the radio series of private talks between the Czech novelist Jan Prochazka and a friend of his. The recorded conversations were produced by the secret police to broadcast the sequences in which Prochazka made fun of Dubcek and slandered his friends. In The Art of the Novel, Kundera writes about an extreme version of totalitarian society in which the boundary between the public and the private is abolished and the lives of citizens become entirely transparent (Kundera 110). Teresa realizes that she too, just like Procahzka, lives in a concentration camp, where privacy ceased to exist (Kundera 167). She retreats to a village to escape the trap and lives in isolation with Tomas. Here Kundera underlines the impact and significance of political events for individuals who are obliged to live under a Communist regime (Kundera 37).
Meanwhile, the article Tomas wrote on Oedipus in the spring of 1968 comes back to haunt him. Using the example of Oedipus, who enacts self-indictment by which he acknowledges the actions he committed in ignorance, the article attacks political leaders who refuse to admit responsibility for their actions, because they did not know and were not completely aware of the wrongdoings and the consequences (Banerjee 240). In his article, Tomas uses the Oedipus analogy to hold responsible the Communist leaders for the country’s misfortunes and for its loss of independence: “If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!” (Kundera 177). When Tomas is pressured to make public retractions of his past statements, he gives up his job as a surgeon and goes to work in a country clinic.
When he is visited by a man from the Ministry of the Interior, he is trapped into something even worse. As Tomas realizes he is under interrogation, he falsifies his answers and inadvertently informs on someone else, on a different editor. His fear and paranoia that the police would make public a false statement over his signature, lead him to lose his profession – something so much a part of him (Kundera 194). As a result of these events, Tomas abruptly resigns from his medical post. He escapes the trap by descending the ladder and becoming a window washer. “Once he had reached the lowest rung on the ladder, they would no longer be interested in him” (Kundera 192).
As Tomas refuses to compromise and to comply, he makes heavy go light (Kundera 196). He embarks on a grand holiday and returns to his bachelor existence. By refusing to sign a note stating that he has nothing against the regime, Tomas is released from “his weighty duty” (Kundera 196). The key words for Tomas’s existential code are lightness and weight. His existential problem is the lightness of being in a world where there is no eternal return (Kundera 32). He fails to see that what he chooses as an honorable decision for him is the most horrible thing possible for Teresa. Faced with personal fulfillment on one hand, and with historical and socio-political circumstances on the other, he rejects his life’s external and internal imperatives. Kundera studies Tomas’s attitudes in these situations by tying the individual to the historical and political events, and looking at how private life is balanced with the larger terrors of life in a police state. Tomas is constantly going back and forth between lightness and weight. As Kundera explains, “that was the ‘Es muss sein!’ rooted deep inside him” (Kundera 194).
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about an investigation of being and existence. It is a political novel, but the description of the politico-historical events or the role of the Communist institutions does not interest Kundera. He places his novel in a world provoked by political events that transform the world, to investigate the human condition and a way of being. He looks at the relationship between the events and real life – the regulation of private situations where the individuals are dominated in totalitarian ways, the resulting depersonalization of the individual, the violation and the lack of certain kinds of freedoms, the danger of losing privacy. According to Kundera, “the novel is an investigation of the essence of human situations” (Kundera 32).
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