matthew henry john bartlett

Make an Alanis Morissette song

Of the world’s top 100 economies, 51 are transnationals, while only 49 are actual countries. Taking the top 20 economies in year 2000, nine were transnationals, the highest-ranking being General Motors at number eight. Unsurprisingly the good ol’ USA was numero uno. The 12th largest economy was Wal-Mart, which generated an annual revenue greater than that of 161 countries including New Zealand, Israel, Poland and Greece. The cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris, which operates in 170 countries but does not even rank in the top 100 companies, is itself bigger than New Zealand. The combined sales of the world’s top 200 corporations accounted for more than a quarter of the world’s economic activity, and, with more than 40,000 of them worldwide, the balance of economic-political power appears to be inevitably shifting in their favour. Yet in Lotto we glimpse how nation-states and transnational corporations can resolve their potential conflicts and work together to support each other’s ideals.

[from Peter Howland's essay The name of THE GAME is Lotto, in his book Lotto, Long-drops & Lolly scrambles]

I went to the World Press 2004 exhibition. Quite horrible, mostly. This set of photos stood out for me. Outside Shed 11 there was a sign. It had an arrow point towards the exhibition: ← World Press 2004, and one away from it: Comfort Zone →.

IBM songs

Leonard Cohen: Ballad of the Absent Mare

Said Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them… Listening can be a greater service than speaking… One who cannot listen long and patiently will presently be talking beside the point and be never really speaking to others. Anyone who thinks his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies… We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.

Brother William says:

Live every day as if every person you meet is going to die tomorrow.

This week EPR reminded me I must get a drum kit again before too long. This week I got my last salary pay. This week I finished Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House and Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder. This week I laid out my first book of (someone else’s) poetry. This week an old sailor told me to acheive something with my life. I asked him if he had any ideas about what I should acheive. He said, “Have children and grandchildren. They’re a pain in the neck sometimes, but you get real joy from them too.” This night I read this poem by Cameron Hockly:

and maybe after all this time./ all these e
 pidemics of losing friends/losing lovers/lo
 sing our favourite red shoes/ our glasses/

 we may have to face the fact that/we can
  lose things within us/ things we thought we
  re firmly secured/ places we called home/ m
   emories we could only go so long without /
    referring back to./

and if we have to face the reality of this
/then we can quit pretending that we have/
 never been the lost child/ never missed a t
 rain/ or disappeared from everything that w
e knew familiar./

but the thing is-/ we are all so slow to a
cknow;edge this loss/ and it's not until we
 have walked / back through warm doorways /
or put on worn out clothes that we can admi
t/ and even then- only very quietly/

          that we have been far, far away //

Writes Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus [via musicologyman]

While I was out, my kind flatmates rearranged the two front rooms. Now when I work at home, I can see the sea without turning my head. No doubt the various seafarers will be grateful for my constant vigilance. This room also has Tim’s and Richard’s computers in it too, so it is now Productivity Central. We rearranged the main lounge so that it’s Relaxation Central, with three couches in a U-shape, the black and white teev and bookcase to the side, and our mighty mighty chess arena (coffee table) in the middle.

Lately when I go to bed at night I can’t wait to finish sleeping so that I can get up and back into it. I feel like my life is coordinated from off-stage and I am along to enjoy the ride.

We had a nice party yesterday evening: the calm before the rugby storm but people got bored and came home early, (“I’m not going to lie to you, I’m in a pretty chill mood right now”). Scrumpy was just the ticket for this intrepid sojourner in wheat-free land, (“Turn it up”). Vying vying and some new faces — new to here that is — and the new layout working cordial wonders of conviviality.

It came to me as from on high that maybe there is a niche, a cleft in the frequency rock for a new radio station — Radio Alt-dot-Easy-Listening, playing your softly spoken un-mainstream favourites. It would be like RadioActive sans the hiphop & DnB. You could put it on in the evening and eat dinner or talk quietly with a lowkey stranger without fear of reprisals.

A year ago today I took a photo of myself:

Here’s one from today:

David Lange’s 1985 Oxford Union debate speech

1. In a lecture Rod Wilson at Regent told me that when we speak we speak around one hundred and fify words a minute. When we think we think around four hundred words a minute. Conversation can easily become a free-association game, waiting impatiently for one’s turn, trading tangental anecdotes. Listening is rarer than rare.
2. I was listening to a speaker today at the WIT Symposium and my mind wandered for a moment or ten. Having missed breakfast I was hungry. Being hungry I was thinking about food. Thinking about food I was thinking about wheat, wondering if this reduced-wheat thing is working. It is, I think. Tiredness is a creeping dull greyness behind my eyes. After fewer-than-normal hours sleep last night I felt 90%, where until recently on the best days I would feel 80%.
3. I heard a Catholic teacher say today “… of course it all begins with faith — faith as gift, all of grace. Whatever else we might say about Augustine, he got that right.”

One reason I trust the Gospel of John: It twists subverts Judaism so thoroughly, pulling each of its major symbols onto Jesus — Torah, the feasts, the sacrifices, Wisdom, shepherd, Messiah. Judaism dies with Jesus and is resurrected as Christianity. No Jew could possibly accept that radical reconfiguration, those otherwise-arrogant devolutions unless Something outside the symbols shattered their paradigm: the miracles, finally the Resurrection.

Paraphrasing a discussion on the forum for my linguistics paper:

It deons’t mtater waht odrer the leetrts are isndie a wrod. All taht’s reirequd is taht the frist and lsat letetr be creorct, and for msot of the innteral lterets to be trhee smeoewhre. Tath’s ptrety ntify, I rkecon.

Lyrics: Mecury Rev/Nite and Fog
Some quotes on the Prostitution Law Reform Act 2003 [20k PDF]

Yesterday evening we went to Chow on Tory St. I can highly recommend it. All the food was very good and the staff were choice too. Mondays are 1+1=1 nights, so we ate for $9.50 each + drinks.

And when I wake I wait
for birds to tell me it’s OK to get up.

Today I am being paid to learn NZ geography and listen to NT Wright talk about the Resurrection. The sun is out again.

Daniel Silliman on Derrida, close-up

I am listening to Hail to the Thief for the first time for ages this morning. Man it’s flash. “Go to Sleep” is a ripping cut. “Punch Up At A Wedding” is the only bum note.

Today at the busstop I finished the best book I have read this year — Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I cannot find the best quote, but here is this:

I live in tranquility and trembling. Sometimes I dream. I am interested in Alice mainly when she eats the cookie that makes her smaller. I would pare myself or be pared that I too might pass through the merest crack, a gap I know is there in the sky. I am looking just now for the cookie. Sometimes I open, pried like a fruit. Or I am porous as old bone, or translucent, a tinted condensation of the air like a watercolour wash, and I gaze around me in bewilderment, fancying I cast no shadow. Sometimes I ride a bucking faith while one hand grips and the other flails the air, and like any daredevil I gouge with my heels for blood, for a wilder ride, for more.
   There is not a guarantee in the world. O your needs are guaranteed, your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you catch it it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you’ll come back, for you will come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for—dribbling and crazed. The waters of separation, however lightly sprinkled, leave indelible stains. Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no. Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. You see the needs of you own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone. You have finally understood that you’re dealing with a maniac.
   I think that the dying pray not at the last “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomly secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.

First Things, October 2004 edition

As is traditional, this coming Sunday afternoon some of us want to head out to Castlepoint and stay the night on the beach. Castlepoint is the pinnacle of God’s good earth. You’re welcome to join us.

The idea of a compliation CD made of what RCNZ people were listening to this year emerged yesterday. I’d like to have a go at this, and gather suggestions for inclusion on this page over here. I’m thinking ideally things that came out this year, or at least that were ‘discovered’ this year.

Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev opens with a quote from Picasso —

Art is a lie which makes us realise the truth.

The whole shebang in one sentence, from Tim McKenzie’s The Idea of Revelation in a Post-Modern Culture [160k PDF]:

This is the story of how God made the world in love, identified with the world in suffering, and restores the world through his presence in those he has called to recognise the world’s destiny as a world remade.

I know this will get all you one-eyed Wellingtonians up in arms… I wouldn’t be surprised if Rueben Thorne gets picked for the All Blacks squad to tour Europe. He has had a very solid NPC and played well in the final. His replacement in the All Blacks last year, Jono Gibbes, has not had a great season. I think Thorne would be a good back up for Jerry Collins who has to be the number one blindside flanker in NZ right now.

There are times when I remember you
At the beach by the pier
In a broken down summer
That stretched on for years
I remember the laughter
I remember the waves
And I wish that I could just
Cut it away

Tsunami has washed me
Past the breakers
That broke me
Now I am alone at sea
With memories for company

— Matthew Baird

N T Wright: My Pilgrimage in Theology
NASA’s planet gallery

This was in an ‘NPC souvenir’ edition of The Press

Music on the gold-plated LP onboard the Voyager
A Protestant conversion to Roman Catholicism

In my world, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” doesn’t mean, “Dear Lord, please wind up this whole show as soon as possible, it’s too hard here.” Instead I think it means, “Dear Lord, please renew this place and these people, and make me an active agent of that renewal.”

I always enjoy Russell Brown’s program Mediawatch on National Radio when I manage to catch it. I was pleased to come across his blog yesterday. His post about Destiny Church is worthwhile reading.

UPDATE: A commenter below linked to this interesting video featuring MLK’s daughter at a Destiny Church conference.

Tim McKenzie’s review of The Passion of the Christ

Every time I see an Eminem video for the first time it always grabs me, stirs me and I don’t know why. I don’t even necessarily ‘like’ the particular song. This morning I came across the video for his song “Mosh” [QT] at Russell Brown’s site, and it induced the same effect. Eminem really really wants people to vote Bush out. I’m often suprised at the amount of trust in the political process Americans display, as if a well thought out vote was a magic bullet.

Ian G on the death of value judgements
Richard John Neuhaus on Kiekergaard

— from Veils and veiling in Muslim countries, which I became interested in after reading a post of Aaron’s. Here is a somewhat-related article from Naomi Wolf which I first came across a year ago today.