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November 21, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Through the work of writing, I have learned first and foremost that nothing is what it tells us it is, because there is always another level, another way to play at naming, with reality, to bend untruths to be more true, as medicine, as savior, as demon filtered for taste, as a ritual mark of [...]
October 20, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: No Comment Yet
ewsmax had in recent weeks tried to debunk Keith Olberman’s report that conservative blogs, political action committees and front groups were buying Sarah Palin’s book in massive quantities to rig book sales, by claiming they are doing the opposite, with the following claim: “But the truth is that Newsmax has not purchased one book from Amazon. In fact, we are offering the book both FREE and at an incredible discount to Amazon.”
September 15, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Capitalism is “survival of the fittest”… capitalism is rooted in the idea of merit; everyone should be compensated according to his or her contribution (to the common good?)… capitalism is about the movement of capital; the more it moves, the richer everyone gets… capitalism is an upgraded feudalism, where the capitalist is an overseer of an abstract terrain made up of investments, not of arable lands… capitalism is democracy; the free spirit of an open society requires capitalism to support the liberties of individual citizens, and protect against government overreach… capitalism is virtue… or, capitalism is the absence of virtue…
August 21, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
The Internet Archive is joining with major internet-related firms, such as Yahoo and Amazon, to fight Google’s settlement with the Authors’ Guild, allowing Google Books to publish copyright-protected materials online, if they are out of print, and to compensate authors according to the sales generated by the display of the copyrighted text (possibly 70% going to publishers or copyright holders, including a cut of ad revenues). The Coalition plans to fight the legal settlement on anti-trust grounds.
July 20, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
America’s banks have, over the last decade, entered into a dangerous fictional world of projected automatic wealth in which they expect that all payments they might receive will without fail materialize, regardless of circumstance. They treat the human beings with whom they have major financial relationships as if they were nothing more than endless fonts of easy money. This is the crisis of reasoning and cash flow we are, as a people, as a global society, trying to solve.
July 19, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The Khmer Rouge sought to establish a red Khmer empire in Cambodia, with some ambitions of expansion beyond the nation’s borders, by stamping out any human life or mind that varied from the project, as narrowly conceived by Pol Pot and his murderous regime. The “killing fields” that ensued, with the mass slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million people, were an attempt to establish a new break in time, the time before and the time after the purification —as the regime proposed— of all Cambodia.
June 20, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Taking the ability to reason as the basis for a civilization’s deep resilience, we should emphasize reasoning and knowledge as wealth, as the bases for wealth in the life of every individual. Our education policy needs to work toward methods that do the most to stir the creative process of learning in the widest number of young people possible.
May 14, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
The private memoirs of former Chinese Communist party (CCP) leader Zhao Ziyang are to be published, as we near the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and the massacre that ended them. The diaries will be published this month, under the title Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang.
May 2, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
El taller literario Pinzón Nueve, fundado hace 17 años por el gran poeta chileno Carlos Trujillo (chilote de Chiloé), hoy estrena el primer número de su nueva revista, Naufragios, en colaboración con el Departamento de Lenguas Modernas de Villanova University, en Pennsylvania, EE.UU.
February 27, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Brookdale Community College sold out its Collins Arena, Wednesday night, for ‘An Evening with Maya Angelou’, bringing three thousand people to see the poet, activist and educator speak. She moved the crowd to tears and laughter with personal stories, philosophical messages and a call to take pride and passion in the humanizing capability of learning. The caged bird sings, and beats its wings against the painful limitations of its situation, because it is deprived of opportunities to see, to learn, to explore.
January 31, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
All systems fail, all organized interactions are vulnerable to entropy, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And at best, we are but stardust, a beautiful yet haunting explanation of our origins. Infused with light. Doomed to shadow. Whatever your spiritual beliefs, in the mortal physical realm, entropy is always interfering. The intellect often uses convenient [...]
January 17, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Politics is informed with some of our best intentions, with much of our lust for ‘improvement’ and with all of our fears, petty and grandiose, paranoid and consequential. We have seen a great and resonant turning toward better instincts in the US, with an election that for good reasons inspires hope and may allow us to manifest more than ever those “better angels of our nature”, but we must recongize that in order to manifest the best in ourselves, we must start by overcoming our own habits of fear and division.
January 10, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
libertad aquella musa
aquel ritual de autodesconcepción
el reto que guía o confunde
siguiendo líneas que no vemos
finos hilos de ópalo y vapor
matriz y desvergüenza…
January 6, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Es un paisaje de relevancias inesperadamente centrales e imprescindibles que he descubierto en volver a pisar este territorio almado, sentido, visceral, es una geología de acontecimientos inmersos en el espíritu, confesiones casi imposibles, miradas que lo explican todo tan abierta como cautelosamente, un oleaje de necesidades que por suerte son también gustos y lujos, intermitencias y alas que nos llevan a algo más duradero…
December 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Distrust is not a mood or emotional state, it is not a reaction to misfortune; it is a doctrine, and there is a diverse and dispersed sect of believers who propagate it with passion. This sect is comprised of people who openly proclaim their faith in distrust, as a cosmology or a lifestyle choice, a poisonous logic against which little can be done, because its power is rooted in the total decisiveness of its community of believers about living systematically in a state of distrust, trusting until the last in there being no more intelligent way to live.
November 28, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Faultlines are lifegivers, places where deep primordial energy comes up to the surface of the living world and makes more world; flaws in the perfectly smooth terrain are landmarks and give meaning to the surrounding landscape, become nameable places and so exist at the root of language… we are wrong to want to ‘get beyond’ or even ’smooth over’ the imperfect, because that separation between one thing and another, even between ideal and actual, is what gives the constellation of difference in which we all come to be, in which all human relations situate both the core and the outer limits of their reason for being…
November 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Poetry is the frontier where language in use comes in contact with future meaning, and in the process, when best executed, brings a wealth of transcendent truths into the present. Poetry is relevant to all uses of language, though there may be trends that suggest popular culture is looking to new forms of poetic activity to replace specific old models: many musical artists now play the role of mythic historian or wandering troubadour, but poetry is not confined to these purposes.
November 16, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.
November 13, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Complexity is not an outlandish tendency of troubled souls and pretentious intellects; it is the basic state of nature as we know it. The more we discover, the more certain we can be of this: even elemental particles are less solid than they seem, behaving like tightly bound arrangements of spherical bodies —irreducible monads—, they apparently achieve this physics by behaving like something they are not (now widely accepted in particle physics, “string theory” proposes that elemental particles are actually 2-dimensional vibrating “strings” whose vibration causes them to interact as if they were not strings at all).
November 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.
November 3, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
It is often lamented that the United States suffers from a culture that plays to the “lowest common denominator”, even as it gathers its collective urges to proclaim the loftiest of philosophical aspirations. So we are forced, as citizens, as intellectuals, as free spirits —as followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson or of Kerouac, Jerry Springer or Madonna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.— to grapple with the argument that American culture is inherently “anti-intellectual”, and therefore unable to deal with overtly complex thought patterns, or convoluted, multiply parenthetical (or as Woody Allen might say it, polymorphously nested) sorts of syntax.
September 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
I want to write about hope, about the nature of optimism and how closely linked the quality of imagination is to our ability to conceive of, work for and see through meaningful improvements to the human condition. I want to write about it because it is such a vital commodity in our times, such a spiritual enigma and a challenge to our political systems, but then one glaring fact becomes clear that seems to limit what can be said about hope: that vital spiritual resource does not stand alone, but is linked in every case to human specifics, inseparable from what we seek to apply to it, and so hope is different to all people, even in its most essential manifestations.
August 26, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler symbols. What is a man but nature’s finer success in self-explication? What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape than the horizon figures, — nature’s eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love of painting, love of nature, but a still finer success? all the weary miles and tons of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of it contracted into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the pencil?
August 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
New York is a place where everything is just a little off kilter, pushed and angled by unwavering momentum, but there is flow and the hope of flow working in the depths of personal metaphysical craft, there is the dewy first light of possibility and the wisdom of the tempest-tossed, if —as Kipling says it— “you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”.
August 4, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 7 Comments
Everyone is alone in the world, separate from all else, at all times, and never truly capable of saying with certainty that things could be otherwise. This is both a fundamental existential problem and a flawed way of looking at human relationships. It is true: each individual is separated from the world by his or her perceptions, but: there is a reason why human beings cooperate, why we integrate ourselves into larger social fabrics, why we maintain relationships from birth to death, or for as long as possible.
July 1, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The historic and landscape canvases of J.M.W. Turner have invaded the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a bath of vibrant color and the artist’s characteristic ability to paint the energy of forces converging in space and time. The exhibit is more than a mere retrospective; it will deliver to many visitors their first real taste of the pioneering British painter’s ambitious experiments with light, scale and texture, and it illustrates how his work informs many of the innovations that would later come in imrpessionist and avant-garde movements.
June 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The ‘hard truths’ are those that make us cringe, that give us pause and drive us to worry that we must ignore the truth or conceal it or find the most adequate disguise, even before our most intimate relations. They are a powerful driver of human behavior, and they often come into everyday conversations about the need to deal with problems or to assimilate a difficult emotional burden. The problem is: they don’t exist.
June 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
There is a more than notable tendency among human beings to adopt profound attachments to other human faces, even if those faces are known not as flesh but only as patterns of light. In the much-seen, or much-envisaged, visage, there comes an air of the familiar, almost the attachment of identity. The face celebrated either by adoration or by derision can have the effect of assisting in a psychology whereby the individual sees him or herself in the face of another.
March 28, 2008 :: admin :: Comments Off
EXCERPT FROM PLAN B 3.0, CH. 9: “FEEDING 8 BILLION WELL”
Lester Brown, EPI :: One of the questions I am most often asked is, “How many peo-ple can the earth support?” I answer with another question: “Atwhat level of food consumption?” Using round numbers, at theU.S. level of 800 kilograms of grain per person annually [...]
December 5, 2007 :: admin :: Comments Off
A morass of hope and upheaval circumscribes the human experience, the fact of living in the world, at odds with the world, in contention for a patch of sunlight amid overturned ambitions and frustrated ideals. Most severe human conflict emerges from the complexity of such contention. One method of surviving, emotionally, as an intellect, as a human being refusing to give up on humanity, is the resort to beauty.
October 31, 2007 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
máscara de matiz y de vidrio
r e m o t a i n c i s i v a t r i s t e y a p t a
te matizamos queriendo ir más allá
entre las angustias —y soberbias— y humildades
más implacables
con pies que no andan
que son glándulas de mitología
de esmeraldas que cerebrales nievan
s o b r e n i e v e s s i n f i n . . .
October 13, 2007 :: admin :: Comments Off
Lester R. Brown, EPI :: Peak oil is described as the point where oil production stops rising and begins its inevitable long-term decline. In the face of fast-growing demand, this means rising oil prices. But even if oil production growth simply slows or plateaus, the resulting tightening in supplies will still drive the price of [...]
September 26, 2007 :: staff :: Comments Off
Lester R. Brown, EPI :: As land and water become scarce and as competition for these vital resources intensifies, we can expect mounting social tensions within societies, particularly between those who are poor and dispossessed and those who are wealthy, as well as among ethnic and religious groups. Population growth brings with it a steady [...]
May 1, 2007 :: admin :: Comments Off
El segundo libro de poesía en castellano, publicado por el autor y editor Joseph Robertson. Esta obra consta de una serie de obras en verso que forman “rezos” y meditaciones, exploraciones del amor y de la naturaleza de la existencia tal como la desea establecer el ser humano.
Es una carta afectuosa a los seres [...]
March 5, 2007 :: admin :: Comments Off
El 6 de marzo del 2007, se presenta en Ràdio Ohm el libro Cuentos afrocubanos (Patakines), editado por Linkgua ediciones; la obra será presentada por su editor/autor. Seleccionados y redactados por Radamés Molina Montes, los patakines son un conjunto de narraciones orales de origen africano, que han sido transcritas al castellano en los rituales de [...]
February 16, 2007 :: admin :: Comments Off
Arsenio Rodríguez Quintana presentará la segunda edición de su antología poética, Síndrome de Ulises, el día 22 de febrero del 2007, en el Ràdio Ohm.
La poesía de Arsenio Rodríguez Quintana aborda en esta colección la experiencia íntima y espiritual del exiliado, del individuo que se enfrenta a la problemática de vivir en otro mundo, desarraigado [...]
February 10, 2003 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
It was the last night of the year, and we were visiting the belly of the whale: old shimmering Menäting, the Island Place. We sought the center of a culture of collective insight, a distillation of plunder and purchase, lend and lease, ache and expansion. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: temporary exhibit: Richard Avedon, Portraits (in black and white): floating above Fifth Avenue: visions out of time: an artful pillage of posture and concealment. It was a display of selfhood in multiple manifestation… an array of recorded vessels of suffering, suffrage, denial, awareness, harbors for history.
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