The Hot Spring Network: Connecting Idea People to Fashion a Better Future
June 10, 2009 | No Comments
The Hot Spring Network (TheHotSpring.net) is a project of Casavaria Publishing, aiming to connect ‘idea people’ across the world. You can use The Hot Spring Network to connect with friends or to seek out people in your field or in a field of interest, to post links or share ideas, publish your own blog posts or share research, media or information generally.
Tags: discussions > English > networking > online publications > prose > research > science
The Creative Approach: The ‘Other’ Evolving
June 10, 2009 | No Comments
The creative approach to language, the expressive urge, the impact of a whim to let the unseen meaning come to be seen, come into the light: to write creatively, one must know how to think without the limiting slant of convention, and this means to recognize, to fashion, to come upon new forms and counterweights, new allowances, and to effect bold innovations in the way words and sounds and currents of meaning are matched and provided for…
To think about achieving new cosmologies, to think outside the geometry of the known (or presumed) universe, we must first come to the understanding that rule-based thinking is designed to leave us with thoughts that re-affirm the underlying preconceptions, the rules…
Tags: creative writing > English > essay > literature > poetics > prose
Sustainable Use of the Oceans: Overfishing + Pollution ‘Dead Zones’ Depleting Ocean Life (discussion)
June 9, 2009 | No Comments
Overfishing has depleted fish-stocks the world over. Subsidies and lack of enforcement of sustainability measures drive the fishing industry to deplete the very stocks on which its existence depends, while climate interference and global contamination are leaving oceans so hypoxic (oxygen deprived) they cannot support marine life. At least 405 such ‘dead zones’ have been identified across the globe.
According to a NASA report, hypoxia is so extreme in some areas, that total anoxia (zero oxygen availability) can be found, allowing for no animal life to exist. In the Mississippi River delta, feeding into the Gulf of Mexico, it is thought that agricultural waste is creating a glut of nutrients for phytoplankton, which leaves excess organic matter for bottom-dwelling bacteria to feed on.
Tags: dead zones > discussions > ecology > ecosystems > English > prose > resilience > sustainability
Crossing a Distance
June 8, 2009 | No Comments
justice is a caravan
of individuals
their dreams shifting
between confluence & conflict
languages chosen
or accidental
crossing a distance
immeasurable
- Originally published 10 May 2009, at Elindulnék
- To be included in the poetry collection, Abundance
June 1989 Was Not the First Tiananmen Military Crackdown
June 5, 2009 | No Comments
On 8 January 1976, Zhou Enlai died. He had been Chinese premier and was viewed by the Chinese people as a true idealist and “man of the people”, a public servant at odds with the violent radicals who had imposed the reign of terror known as the “Cultural Revolution”. In a spontaneous outpouring of mourning, hundreds of thousands of people began building a memorial altar to Zhou, with wreaths of white flowers, white paper chrysanthemums, and short poems called xiaozibao, which extolled the virtues of the fallen premier.
The memorial activities stretched on for days and weeks, and into the spring. At times, over a million people were gathered, exchanging memories of Zhou Enlai, praising a more civil kind of Communist China, and —unavoidably—
reminding each other that Zhou was not one of the “Gang of Four” radicals who were sowing chaos and violence across China, imposing the harsh, irrational conditions of “reform” known as the Cultural Revolution. The Zhou memorial became a place for dissident poets to gather, and for groups of Chinese citizens to voice their grievances in writing or in conversation, calling for government reforms.
Tags: books > comment > English > prose > reporting > Shen Tong > Tiananmen Square > xiaozibao > Zhou Enlai
China Still Seeks to Hide What Happened at Tiananmen Square 20 Years Ago
June 3, 2009 | No Comments
The Chinese government, in Beijing, controlled by a Communist party that allows no dissent, and no opposition, continues to suppress public awareness, discussion or inquiry, regarding the events of June 1989, in which the Chinese military massacred hundreds of student demonstrators. The term Tiananmen produces filtered results in web searches, and the regime has blocked access to Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, the Huffington Post, LiveJournal, MSN’s Bing, and other sites, in an effort to prevent Chinese internauts from locating any reporting on the massacre of 4 June 1989.
Now, as we mark the 20th anniversary of that tragic day, the Chinese government seeks to prevent any amount of dissent or “unrest” that might stem from public recognition of the crimes committed by government forces on that day. We now know, however, that the decision to launch a violent military assault on the pro-democracy demonstrators, was a deliberate decision taken by the Central Committee of the ruling Communist party, over the objections of its then secretary general Zhao Ziyang. Zhao resigned in protest, tried to warn the demonstrators to disperse for their own safety, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest for his dissent.
Tags: China > English > political repression > prose > reporting > Tiananmen Square
Everyone is Alone, Sometimes
June 3, 2009 | No 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.
We are “social beings” is a common way of saying it. The human being is the “grammatical ape”, a talkative species that uses codified sounds to create and transmit meaning and to build a community of individuals, ideas and voices, in which the individual can benefit from having connections as well. The “human” is an idea, not a fact, another way of looking at things, and so we should not even go as far as to say that the individual is apart from everything else, as we cannot define totally what it is that makes us a group in which that is true, aside from DNA and appearances.
Tags: books > English > essay > existentialism > prose > psychology
New Publishing Models to Speed Best Ideas to Application (discussion forum)
May 31, 2009 | No Comments
Creative writing is part of the work of any writer. Finding the best way to put two words, then three, then four and ten, together, is the basic metabolic process of creating any text. And it requires a vision and an application of that vision.
Publishing models determine which texts are made available to a wide audience, and by what means. New media, like this social network, are providing new opportunities, but the crossover between print and digital media will provide bold new opportunities for making the best new ideas available to the people who can do the most with them.
Tags: discussions > English > hyper-convergence > media > prose > publishing > reporting > web 3.0
The Internet’s Effect on the Human Mind (discussion forum)
May 31, 2009 | No Comments
Any communicative medium allows us to deliver cognitive information into a shared space of consciousness, and ideally, to deliver much of our “known” reality to another mind. Media shape information, decide how it can be delivered, and, how we receive and interpret it.
“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Internet not only shapes itself to the mind but shapes the mind to itself”, writes Ana Menéndez in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine.
Tags: brain development > cognitive science > communications > discussions > English > media > prose > psychology > technology
What Sonia Sotomayor Actually Said in 2001 Lecture
May 27, 2009 | No Comments
In 2001, Sonia Sotomayor delivered a speech to the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, entitled “A Latina Judge’s Voice”. It was published in the Spring 2002 issue of Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, and has been reproduced by The New York Times this month online. A quote taken from that speech has raised controversy, as conservatives alleged Sotomayor declared her willingness to use race as a means of judging the law. In fact, she argued against that sort of bias.
The controversial quote, part of a discussion on the question of whether every wise old judge shares the same specific type of wisdom, is as follows:
First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
Tags: English > judiciary > Obama > prose > race > reporting > Sonia Sotomayor > Supreme Court
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