Feb. 21st, 2014

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Today i will be in the local town a few miles away. A visit to the Office and a mystery shop at the British Heart Foundation shop. There is two of them in the town but it will be the furthest one away from the centre of the town.

I am happy that the weather is more stable now but next week it will be colder. As long as it stays dry we need a period of dryness to alleviate the very wet ground in flood plain areas.

Picked up five books yesterday for a mere quid from a table top sale

Wireless by Charles StrossReading In the Dark by Seamus DeaneMan, Morals and Society by J.C. FlugelPolyphony, Volume 3 by Deborah LayneTheorizing Classical Sociology by Ray

Gone AWOL?

Feb. 21st, 2014 11:29 am
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So you come into the Office for a meeting and the guy you are meant to see doesn't turn up because he is on holiday,even though you made arrangements a few days ago,  and  other staff members have to apologise for him absenteeism is not on. It is a lovely sunny day out there and i would rather be outside than stuck in here doing admin work. I shall log my time and go midday.

Meanwhile, need a puff on the pipe outside. 

My tweets

Feb. 21st, 2014 12:07 pm
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jazzy_dave: (Default)
So after the non-meeting I went into town to do another mystery shop at the British Heart Foundation shop, that is the furthest one which sells mostly furniture and electrical goods. . Then had a snack lunch and a pint of foaming ale at Wetherspoons. Strange, whilst in the  pub we had a quick short shower. Ni=ow it is sunny again.

Shortly will be going home to listen to some music purchases.
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James Naughtie "The Making Of Music" (John Murray)





This paperback was given to me by my brother in a massive clear out of books from his library sometime last year and it has been an enjoyable book to dip into to.

If you are a listener to either BBC Radio 3 or Classic FM and wish to have a splendid introduction to Classical music over the centuries and to read about how composers added to the scope of musical invention then this is a book well worth buying and then listening with a new understanding.

Unfortunately, he does not mention much in the way of modern compositions and for me is of less interest, but please do not let this caveat put you off reading it. It is a good read albeit a personal one by Mr. Naughtie.
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Michel Foucault "The Will To Knowledge" (Penguin)




A difficult infuriating book that is beset with a confused writing style. The bad news is that the most interesting stuff in the book is exactly *not* to do with sexuality, but that most of the book is, in fact, about the history of (the discourse of) sexuality. That history is kind of tiresome: in the nineteenth century, people came up with new and inventive ways to talk about sex. Rinse and repeat for hundreds of examples of people you've never heard of.
The interesting bits are more general and more abstract: in 'objective' and 'method,' Foucault comes as close as he ever did to actually defining what he means by power, with a nice discussion of how it relates to other political theories of sovereignty. In 'Right of Death' you get some tentative steps towards the concept of bio-politics or bio-power, which people are making such a big deal about these days, and, it must be said, it's pretty intriguing.

The major and unavoidable flaw, as you may already know, is that Foucault is deeply ambivalent when it comes to the function 'power' plays in his own thought. On the one hand, he wants it to be an almost universal analytic tool: power can be productive, power is used just as much by the resistance as it is by the oppressors and so on. On the other, power is something to be negotiated around and, if not avoided, at least confronted and undermined. It's just possible that the concept is meant to split the difference between these two hands, but if so, I'm not sure how - he certainly doesn't spell out a case for it here, or in anything else of his I've read. My preference would be to give up the 'let's subvert power' aspects of his work, take him as a descriptive theorist of modernity, and look for values elsewhere: which aspects of power need to be criticized and, if possible eliminated? Which should we support? The other option leads, both in my personal experience and in theory, to a pretty silly politics of opposing Them and The Man and The Law... ad infinitum.

In summary then, he is showing the relationship between sex and power, not power on in a personal relationship but power in a larger political, sociological sense. What was an interesting idea that i gleamed form this book , is that Foucault believes we could under an honest approach to sexuality understand existence at a deeper level.

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