Matthew Henry John Bartlett

homage to Clive James, critic [via fundypost]

(What would I tell you about if I made the time? Maybe about that perhaps-window on what-is-god, maybe the weather washing over the house like we were at the bottom of the sea last night, or the books I’ve read recently and the way they make me feel about being here, or that Inuit word that KSR says means “unusually intense pleasure in being alive”, or having the friends back in town, or a list of reasons to care about a species (maybe a very small bird) we’ve never heard about going extinct (little (genetic, instinctive) library on a locale, red light (we best slow down), precious to god), or good work done now, though apparently defeated, being the seed of the future.)

fun in the House around s.59 yesterday

A meta-project I have started today is to see if I can get my book projects printed on FSC-certified paper.

Paul Hawken’s diary of the WTO’s big day in Seattle. It’s quite a read:

One by one, our heads were jerked back from the rear, and pepper was sprayed directly into each eye. It was very professional. Like hair spray from a stylist. Sssst. Sssst.

…

What makes life worthy and allows civilizations to endure are all the things that have “bad” payback under commercial rules: infrastructure, universities, temples, poetry, choirs, literature, language, museums, terraced fields, long marriages, line dancing, and art. Most everything we hold valuable is slow to develop, slow to learn, and slow to change. Commerce requires the governance of politics, art, culture, and nature, to slow it down, to make it heedful, to make it pay attention to people and place. It has never done this on its own. The extirpation of languages, cultures, forests, and fisheries is occurring worldwide in the name of speeding up business.

My notes from tonight’s NZCTU forum with Nicky Hager, Therese Arseneau and Andrew Geddis [small PDF]

a sermon from me, for the fifth Sunday in Lent [30K PDF]
Sealord don’t give a shit about sea stewardship [via Joel C]
Judge Cherie Booth (Tony Blair’s wife) on restorative justice [via John S on CD]

Good and bad sheet music typography [via 37signals]
open source world: the Open Architecture Network launches

Bill McKibbon rallies the Christian troops for mass demos April 14 [via w-berry list]

Paul Hawken’s list: Adrian Rich, Alice Walker, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, David James Duncan, Emerson, Thoreau, Pankaj Mishra, Kenny Ausubel, Nina Simons, WS Merwin, Janine Benyus, Gandhi, Van Jones.

Aotearoa Students Environmental Conference 7–8 April

Events today:
  Peter Howland talk on reflexive wine consumption and the metro-rural
  The Roger Award Ceremony
  Blah blah blah (open mic poetry/music)

…which all feature on the brand new domain wellingtoncalendar.co.nz. Email me if you’d like to be able to add events.

Sometimes I get trapped in a flickr slideshow, and tonight I was, looking at billboards, trying to find out what we want, and this is what I found: happiness, independence, speed/freedom, fitness, style, control in a mess, cleanliness in a dump, respect, sex with hot people, self-expression, escape, a peaceful mind, transcendence, simplicity, cool friends, sophistication, understanding of things most don’t get, passive or unconsciously alluring women, confidence, seduction (ours or theirs), amusement, and lots and lots of holy Objects. And then of a sudden I thought about the stars, the saints who most perfectly realise our desires, and I suppose that is why icons of Brangelina are everywhere.

From Kathy: It doesn’t seem that long ago it was Summer Solstice but here we go again… we are having a party to celebrate the Autumn Equinox next Wednesday 21st March. It’s a pot luck sort of affair, with some kind of outdoor fire and maybe some mulled wine and magic. It’ll start late afternoon and finish late evening, bring yourselves and some food/drink to share x x

16 Russell Tce Newtown (that’s the #23 bus)

RSVP if you feel like it, otherwise just hope for good weather and show up.

Mr Scruff. Dancing to Mr Scruff, in the rain, with siblings, friends and ladies. Running into people. Clean toilets. Warm rain. Huun Huur Tu throat singers’ Siberian forest animal noises. Gotan Project’s old and new tango. Staying dry in the station wagon. Don McGlashan’s Miracle Sun.

Stanley Hauerwas & John Berkman on Christians and the other animals
Geek activism fights EU evil farm subsidies

According to Paul Hawken, sustainable businesses:

• replace nationally and internationally produced items with products created locally and regionally
• take responsibility for the effects they have on the natural world
• do not require exotic sources of capital in order to develop and grow
• engage in production processes that are human, worthy, dignified, and intrinsically satisfying
• create objects of durability and long-term utility whose ultimate use or disposition will not be harmful to future generations
• change consumer to customers through education

[from Spyglass Green Marketing]

Laziness, environmentalism and a power meter that reads in dollars & cents
A great review of the Mars trilogy

In a recent interview with SCI FI Weekly, Kim Stanley Robinson said:

I wanted to suggest that there is a spiritual aspect to science, that it is a kind of religion in some senses, that the world it investigates is constantly revealed as miraculous through and through, and that the practice of science could be seen as a kind of worship or devotion, and that this is a good thing. I was also interested in the ways Buddhism could be said to be scientific, or science said to be similar to Buddhism, in basic philosophical ways. I wanted the two to collide and illuminate each other, maybe to become one larger thing.