Thursday 9 January 2020

Book of the Week(end) - Not Working by Josh Cohen




Always a pleasure to come across a new addition to the rapidly growing literature on the subject of "anti-work", and here's the latest: psychoanalyst Josh Cohen's newly released Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. 


"An entire repetoire of moods - boredom, indifference, lassitude, any state of mind that orient us to aimlessness, zoning out, slacking off - is being excluded from the range of permissible inner states. This means the exclusion of a rich and important seam of our humanity.  It can feel sometimes as though inner experience itself is being invalidated, as though only our externally visible and attestable actions had any worth.
Perhaps this explains why we're encouraged to think of depression as an inconvenient obstacle to be dodged past, perhaps with the aid of a few positive thinking exercises and a pill, and why we imagine that a lunchtime mindfulness session squeezed between meetings will remedy our feelings of exhaustion. Rather than sit with what might be ailing us, give some rein to our curiosity about our states of mind, we demand of ourselves and others that we stop navel-gazing and get back to work as quickly as possible. Non-work is a temporary aberration to be got over, not a meaningful dimension of our lives".

Two excellent paragraphs that immediately convinced me to buy and download the book which so far is as eloquent and engaging as the above. Fewer than 30 pages in, and the author has already tackled Freud, Weber, Hesiod, Oscar Wilde, Socrates, and Garfield. 



Oscar Wilde
(the cartoon cat, not the obscure American president).
It's going to be a cracker.

So what are you (not) doing this weekend?






Related posts

The No-Day Working Week
Work, Monotony, and Happiness
A Case of the Mondays
On staring out the window


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Monday 6 January 2020

Duct Tape Wallet, v2.0




If there's one thing you should probably know about me, it's that I'm a massive idiot. A massive, forgetful idiot. Honestly, I forget things all the time.  You know that thing that they say is an sign of dementia where you walk into a room and immediately forget why? I've been doing that my whole life.  I forget what I'm supposed to be doing. Sometimes I forget what I'm supposed to be doing while I'm actually doing it. It's a wonder I can even feed myself. 

The thing I forget to do most of all is not to lose things. Things I need, like my wallet, and my keys. The coat that has the pockets I put them in. I lost all three of these things on my way back over the pennines after Christmas by leaving my coat on the National Express. I took it off, you see, and placed it in the overhead compartment, which to my brain is an immediate signal to erase all memory of that coat ever even existing. Out of sight, out of mind: words my brain lives by. So I disembussed without my coat, intelligently almost stranding myself in the centre of Manchester, with no money, the means to get hold of any more, which I could use to get home, which I wouldn't be able to get inside of once I got there. A winning move.

If it wasn't for my phone being in my trouser pocket, I really would have been buggered. Thankfully, Manchester recently introduced contactless payments on the Metrolink, meaning you can "touch in" as they call it, and out again, as you embark and disembark, with any contactless device, and pay the fare like that, without really having to think about it. Perfect for people like me, who don't really know how to think about things: and thank heaven for Google Pay, and the fact I'd loaded my payment details into my phone, and the fact that I hadn't put my phone in the same coat with my wallet and keys, that was now speeding off along some motorway to some city I never want to see (again) like Birmingham or London. The whole experience made my long a little more for our unlikely cyborg future, where chips embedded in our hands unlock doors and pay the bus fare for us. You can't leave your hands on the National Express.

Another thing about Google pay: when you ring the bank to report a lost card, they cancel your current one and send a new one out in the post, which takes about a week to arrive. But your new card details switch over to Google Pay instantly, which kind of makes me wonder if bank cards themselves, along with cash, will soon go the way of the DVD. Works for me. One less thing to lose. One more corner of our private lives for Google to infiltrate, no doubt with only the noblest of intentions. What a time to be alive.

Anyway, once I was back home having made the necessary and irritating arrangements like getting my locks changed and replacing my bus pass, I resolved never ever to lose my wallet or keys ever again. I resolved to do this really really hard, and then immediately forgot all about it for the next two weeks. Until finally, yesterday, I made this:




Behold, duct tape wallet number 2.  It's packed with one eseential idiot proof feature: a sturdy little tab with a hole it your can fit a keyring onto. What that means is that you can go ahead and invest in one of those wallet chain keyrings - £3.99 at Timpsons - attach one end to the keyring, and the other to the bit that clips onto the belt loop next to your trouser pocket. Wallet and keys: a perfect marriage of unloseable essentials. As long as you remember to clip it to your trousers. And wear your trousers.







Related posts

My Duct Tape Wallet


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Sunday 5 January 2020

Garlic News




Well, here we are in the future.  The twenty-twenties.  We made it.  Hope it isn't shite!  There is, I think, reason to be hopeful because today, pottering back on the allotment, I noticed this:


and this:


I'm not sure which, but I'm confident one of these growths is from the wild garlic I hoped to "seed" after last year's foraging and fermenting experiments with what are also known as "ramsons" for some reason.  Both look garlic-like, and both have emerged around the spot where I planted and dropped the seedy flowers of last year's crop from the woods.

They're an invasive species, apparently, but that's perfectly OK with me.  That means that they'll spread, which is exactly what I want.  My own wild garlic patch.  Here's hoping.

I've various plans for the allotment this year, that I'm really looking forward to telling you about.  This is only one of them.

Happy new year!





Related posts

Wild Garlic Experiments
Fermented Garlic Report
More Fun With Food in Jars


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Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.