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Amor Mundi 1/25/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
What Should Remain Hidden in Private
Dawn Herrera-Helphand draws Arendtian lessons about the meaningfulness of privacy from her experience of giving birth. Writing in The Point, Herrera-Helphand describes the emotional intensity of her natural birth, all of which connected her to pain she did know she could bear and power she did not know she might have. Giving birth was an ecstasy, a standing apart from herself, what she found to be "a liberating intimacy with the immanent force of life." Herrera-Helphand asks: "Could this necessary self-abandon have proceeded if I did not feel sheltered? The body has a sense of fear or safety, precognitive and wholly prior to our rationalizations. To feel vulnerable to the eyes of others, to their designs or interventions, is to want to maintain some semblance of control. The illusion of sovereignty that we cultivate in public is precious, not easily relinquished. The ambition to maintain it is antithetical to the necessary labor of childbirth. Apropos of nothing, my cousin, in her second trimester, told me her fantasy of hiding away to give birth 'like an animal.' It makes sense when you think about it: not wanting a hungry bear to eat the baby, not wanting to be seen so deep in suffering.... Giving birth afforded me a fresh perspective on Arendt's distinction between what should be hidden and what should be shown. This binary of private and public remains deeply problematic regarding questions of domestic work and caregiving. But from another angle, privacy is not so much a question of what is fit for appearance to public eyes as of what cannot fully transpire in view of others. The idea that privacy is proper to the realm of necessity need not be based on shame in the body. Privacy can also shield interests that are literally vital, so as to give them their full weight." It is precisely the power of privacy to give weight and depth to life that makes the loss of privacy in our times so terrifying. Privacy will be the theme of the Hannah Arendt Center's 8th annual conference this October 15-16th. Save the Date.
In an exchange of letters with David Mikics, Mark Greif asks: "What would Arendt do? I've often thought I should make up a WWAD necklace. One certainly would like to know what she would have done, or said, in the face of the present day. But part of her charm is that she was surprising and unpredictable. Not unpredictable because she was inconsistent--rather, I think, because she did insist on thinking things through, in each new situation, all the way to the root. She was an intensely annoying figure to her contemporaries. Lately she has become another 'inspiring' figure and source of sanctimony. I wish there were more room to try to think things down to their roots, and see what itineraries you wind up following, right or wrong, usefully or--sometimes--as mere exploration. People in her circles in the 1940s and 1950s liked to point out, in the face of doctrinaire leftists, that this was the real meaning of radical--at least etymologically--to go 'down to the root.' And then to be prepared to tug up the roots--or defend them and nourish them--rather than keep plucking off leaves...." We at the Arendt Center resist the question of what Arendt would think precisely for the reason Greif offers: that her thought was at once deeply consistent and remarkably surprising. To think radically, down to the roots, means that one looks beyond conventional categories, looks at facts plainly and gathers them together informed by a unique and critical perspective, one informed by tradition and yet not a slave to the past. That is how Arendt thought and it is why she has become such an inspiring figure to many even as others insist on using her, wrongly, to advance their pet political positions. Greif's insistence in these letters is that we think well. The terrorists, he argue, thought poorly: "For the kosher supermarket mass murderer, I think the sequence went something like this: The Israeli state, or all Israelis, are in bloody conflict with nearby Palestinians. Israel is a Jewish state. Palestinians are Muslims. I am Muslim. I guess I too am in a bloody conflict with Israeli Jews. Wait--France has Jews. I ought to kill them. I eat Halal, but they eat Kosher. Therefore I know just where to find them. The universe shouldn't have room--I think Hannah Arendt would point out--for such a lethal mockery of thought, or thoughtlessness. Because it undoes all the distinctions that allow political thinking, political difference, ideas, and legitimate conflict, ever to occur." At the same time, Greif worries that too many responses to the attacks are also plagued by poor thinking: "But I think a corollary of this way of judging relative wrongs--here I'm doing my Arendtian ventriloquism, as I understand it--is that actually too wide, flowing, and unanalytic a sense of identification on 'our' side, lumping together of many different things rather than following out their distinctions and differences, is a bad idea, too. Because we won't think well. We won't be able to follow different effects to different causes; keep several incompatible ideas in mind at once, to judge among them; judge rightly. And one thing I do think Arendt would want us to try to keep straight about, is the question of proximity and distance. Time will tell--and near time, too--how much of a fluke the Charlie Hebdo and supermarket murders were. Should European Jews, and European writers, actually expect attacks--should they change their life on that basis?"
Rosie Gray checks in on The National Front, France's newly popular far-right party, which is in the middle of reinvigorating itself and sanitizing its image: "the image of the National Front is starting to change. Marine Le Pen has largely avoided the kind of forthrightly intolerant comments her father is famous for, and she is a savvy public figure, the Rand Paul to Jean-Marie's Ron. The party has seen some of its positions leaking into the mainstream, and even into the left. For example, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, Socialist politician Jean-Marc Germain said that France must re-examine the Schengen zone--the policy of border-free travel within most of Europe, a position that the Front, which wants to remove France from the Schengen area of border-free travel entirely, has held for years. Le Pen has deftly kept herself in the center of the French political conversation during the crisis, announcing that she would not attend the massive unity rally in Paris after French President François Hollande did not invite her. On Sunday night, the New York Times published an op-ed by her, both in English and French, slamming the French government for what she perceives as its unwillingness to clearly name radical Islam as the reason for the attack. 'Now the French people, as if a single person, must put pressure on their leaders so that these days in January will not have been in vain,' Le Pen wrote. 'From France's tragedy must spring hope for real change.'"
Marilynne Robinson champions the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe: "Poe's mind was by no means commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt--if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which 'radiated' the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe. This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and 'duration' are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series. All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning--therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe's thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry."
Johann Hari has a powerful essay on the unrelenting persecution of Billie Holiday by Harry Anslinger and the FBI. "Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, relaxed, free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. 'It sounded,' his internal memos said, 'like the jungles in the dead of night.' Another memo warned that 'unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected' in this black man's music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, 'reek of filth.'" Driven by racial as well as musical hatred, Anslinger could not crack the intensely insular and loyal Jazz world, but he directed his obsession on one person: Holiday. "One night, in 1939, Billie Holiday stood on stage in New York City and sang a song that was unlike anything anyone had heard before. 'Strange Fruit' was a musical lament against lynching. It imagined black bodies hanging from trees as a dark fruit native to the South. Here was a black woman, before a mixed audience, grieving for the racist murders in the United States. Immediately after, Billie Holiday received her first threat from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics."
Evan Selinger is worried that autocomplete is going to turn us into 'personal cliches,' rendering us dead and unthinking: "by encouraging us not to think too deeply about our words, predictive technology may subtly change how we interact with one another. As communication becomes less of an intentional act, we give others more algorithm and less of ourselves. This is why I argued in Wired last year that automation can be bad for us; it can stop us thinking. When predictive technology learns how we communicate, finds patterns specific to what we're inclined to say, and drills down into the essence of our idiosyncrasies, the result is incessantly generated boilerplate. As the artist Salvador Dali famously quipped: 'The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.' Yet here, the repetition is of ourselves. When algorithms study our conscientious communication and subsequently repeat us back to ourselves, they don't identify the point at which recycling becomes degrading and one-dimensional. (And perversely, frequency of word use seems likely to be given positive weight when algorithms calculate relevance.)"
Günter Figal has resigned his position as the Head of the Martin Heidegger Society. The Daily Nous offers a translation of part of his statement: "As chairman of a society, which is named after a person, one is in certain way a representative of that person. After reading the Schwarze Hefte, especially the antisemitic passages, I do not wish to be such a representative any longer. These statements have not only shocked me, but have turned me around to such an extent that it has become difficult to be a co-representative of this." One can listen to a longer interview with Figal, in German, here. A few thoughts are in order. First, Figal seems to be surprised that Heidegger as a person was an antisemite. Really? How can this have been surprising to him? Second, he makes a series of demarcations. The early Heidegger up through and past Being and Time is clearly not implicated, but the middle Heidegger might very well be. We need to do more research. The late Heidegger may be, too. (It would be helpful to see the later editions of the Schwarze Hefte.) Third, he offers one example of the way Heidegger's philosophy may be racist. He says that Heidegger's account of Rechnung and calculation is developed in his published works out of Greek philosophy from Plato and others. But in the Black Notebooks, in a handful of passages over 8 years, Heidegger mentions that the Jews also fit into this history because of their reputation as money-oriented calculating sly foxes. This suggests to Figal that Heidegger may actually have developed his entire approach to Rechnung and the impact of calculation in our world out of antisemitism and sought to make it presentable by tying it to the Greeks, or that maybe, alternatively, it is founded subconsciously in Heidegger's antisemitsm. Finally, Figal says that as the chief of the Heidegger Society he has to represent not just the philosopher but the man. Here Figal has something right. As the Director of the Hannah Arendt Center, I do have some obligation to respond to irresponsible attacks on Arendt (of which there are many). And I do think it is important that in the end I respect the person of Hannah Arendt and not simply what she wrote. I do. On Heidegger, my opinions have always been different. I have seen, and still see, no evidence that his philosophy is in any way affected by his antisemitism. But on the question of Heidegger himself, I have long thought that he himself was a mean-spirited and resentful man--and a racist. I don't identify as a Heidegger scholar and am not interested in doing so, even though I read Heidegger regularly, teach him regularly, and find his work along with Arendt's some of the only work of the 20th century worth large percentages of my intellectual energy. In short, I am not opposed to Figal's decision to step down; I am only concerned that he was just now surprised to learn of Heidegger's racism and that by reacting so publicly he is fanning the flames of those who would tarnish the thinker with the sins of the man. For more, see my discussion with Peter Trawny, the editor of Heidegger's Black Notebooks, and my account of that discussion here.
Joshua Rothman has a few notes on grumbling: "It seems absurd to imagine that people grumble more than they used to: all the evidence points to the fact that people have grumbled throughout history. (That's why the Bible is full of anti-grumbling propaganda.) But it's entirely possible that we're grumbling better. The Internet has made our grumbles more audible; our taste in grumbles has improved. This may be making our grumbling more performative and self-aware--perhaps even more camp--than it has been in the past. And grumbling, as a form of communication, seems to resonate with the part of our contemporary outlook that's repelled by stridency and self-assertion. Even if we're not grumbling more, we could be in a golden age of grumbling."
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #4
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Now Accepting Applications for Post-Doctoral Fellowships!
The Hannah Arendt Center announces three post-doctoral fellowships for the 2015-2016 academic year.
To learn more about the fellowships, including how to apply, click here.
Application Deadline: Thursday, March 5, 2015
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Eyal Press
The Courage To Refuse
Monday, February 9, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, Jeanne van Heeswijk
Monday, February 16, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Angela Maione, our Klemens Von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellow
"Wollstonecraft and the Right to Political Community
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 6:00 - 7:00 pm
Screening of The Decent One and Q&A with Director Vanessa Lapa and Sound Designer Tomer Eliav
The film is based on the newly discovered diaries of Heinrich Himmler. Read more about the film and watch a trailer here.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Charles Snyder, a Hannah Arendt Center Post-Doctoral Fellow
"Natality and its Vicissitudes"
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Monday, March 30, 2015
Manor House Cafe, 6:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Nicholas Tampio discusses the dangers of the Common Core program and appeals to Arendt's concept of natality as a way to help education once again teach students how to think for themselves in the Quote of the Week. Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We appreciate Arendt's copy of Paul Tillich's "The Shaking of the Foundations," which contains a special note, in our Library feature. And we are pleased to share "Arendt and Ricoeur on Ideology and Authority," an article written by a former HAC fellow.
Video Archives – Public Discussion with Roger Berkowitz and Bill Jones (2010)
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010: A Public Conversation - "The Life of the Mind and Floating the Tongue"
- Bill T. Jones -- Co-founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
- Roger Berkowitz -- Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities
In a conversation following a performance of his movement art piece "Floating the Tongue" (performed by Bard faculty member and Member of the Bill T. Jones/Anie Zane Dance Company Leah Cox), Bill T. Jones sat down with Roger Berkowitz to discuss the Arendtian notion of thinking that he explores in his dance.
Lord Byron on Thinking
"For in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour."
--Lord Byron
Steve Jobs on Thinking
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."
-Steve Jobs
Hannah Arendt & the Redemptive Power of Narrative
Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative
Selya Benhabib, Social Research, Vol. 57, No. 1, Philosophy and Politics II (spring 1990), pp. 167-196
Selya Benhabib, Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University, sees Arendt as affirming the modernist move beyond the nation to universal human rights, while at the same time disparaging the social in a way that many critics see as anti-modern. As Roger Berkowitz explains regarding a later work, Benhabib works out this universal aspiration "with and against Arendt." In this 1990 article, Benhabib makes only passing reference to Arendt's famous critical phrase "the right to have rights." Briefly put though, she sees Arendt's concern not as a fundamental challenge but rather as an implicit spur for a broader guarantee of rights.
For Arendt the social, which in large part corresponds to economic activity, no longer remains in its proper place of the household, but emerges to obscure the public space of politics. One might then ask, is Arendt a Romantic proponent of a return to Greek origins, in line with Hölderlin, Hegel, and Heidegger? Benhabib denies this challenge, arguing instead that Arendt's confrontation with National Socialism led her to develop a new idea
of political theory as "storytelling." In light of this conception, her analysis of the decline of the public space cannot be considered a nostalgic Verfallsgeschichte (a history of decline). Rather, it must be viewed as an "exercise" in thought, the chief task of which is to dig under the rubble of history and to recover those "pearls" of past experience, with their sedimented and hidden layers of meaning, so as to cull from them a story that can orient the mind in the future.
The figures of secret "pearls" and covered sediments align in part but not in whole: historians could be seen as describing the hidden layers of ruins that we rarely consider beneath our feet. The idea of finding "pearls," which Benhabib draws from Arendt's longer citation to Shakespeare's Tempest offers the key idea of a particular point of significance that then rearranges other semantic layers.
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange. (The Tempest, act I, scene 2)
Benhabib sees the theorist casting the challenges of history as "rich and strange" stories. One might push this idea further and see the theorist as descending into the depths to inhabit history from the specific place of the dead man, who longer sees naturally, but retains the markers of perception. We might even say that the drowned man offers the right body to connect ourselves to a broken past. Drawing on Heidegger's terminology, Benhabib writes:
If Dasein is in time, narrative is the modality through which time is experienced. Even when the thread of tradition is broken, even when the past is no longer authoritative simply because it has been, it lives within us and we cannot avoid placing ourselves in relation to it. The narrative uniting past and present defines who we are at any point. Narrative then, or, in Arendt's word, storytelling, is a fundamental human activity. There is then a continuum between the attempt of the theorist to understand the past and the need of the acting person to interpret the past as part of a coherent and continuing life story.
Notice that Benhabib sees it as a necessity that we place ourselves in relation to tradition. The distinctive mark of Arendt's storytelling is that it is not purely imaginative in the sense that "anything goes." Instead, it establishes a creative relation to the past.
In the 2004 Tanner lectures, Benhabib argues for human rights based on intersubjective cosmopolitanism rather than a metaphysical universalism. The work on narrative in this earlier article raises the question of the role that narrative plays in creating such a cosmopolitanism. Indeed, in the continuing demand to tell a "coherent" story, perhaps we can see the emergence of an international narrative that does not rely so much on the stability of intersubjectivity as one continually open to the future in action.
-Jeffrey Champlin
Arendt & Auden
"And wonder what you've missed"
- W. H. Auden, as quoted in Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind
At the end of the second-to-last chapter of the Thinking section of The Life of the Mind , Hannah Arendt quotes two stanzas from W. H. Auden's poem As I Walked Out One Evening, the first of which is the following:
O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
Arendt thus ends a chapter containing no prior reference to Auden with two significant quotes by him, offering no further comment of her own. This lies in stark contrast to her treatment of the quote from The Tempest, which directly precedes the Auden quote; she relates Shakespeare's metaphors very clearly to the subject matter of the chapter. Why, then, do Auden and his quotes have free rein?
In her essay "Remembering Wystan H. Auden," written shortly after Auden's death, Arendt describes their relationship as "very good friends but not intimate friends." The rest of her tribute reveals her profound respect for Auden not just as a friend, but also as a writer and thinker. This respect is further indicated by their letter exchanges and the vast collection of Auden's books in Arendt's personal library; and it is reciprocated by Auden, who in 1959 reviewed The Human Condition for the magazine Encounter, describing within it the "jealous possessiveness" he experienced due to the close connection he felt with the book. Years later, Arendt dedicated her lecture Thinking and Moral Considerations to Auden. Shakespeare's presence is to be noted in both this lecture and Auden's essay The Fallen City. Some Reflections on Shakespeare's "Henry IV", upon which Arendt voiced her opinions in a letter to Auden. Arendt's placement of the Shakespeare and Auden quotes in close proximity to each other in The Life of the Mind creates an illumination of each text by the other, as we will see later.
In order to unfold the meaning of the quote from As I Walked Out One Evening, however, one should consider the poem in its entirety. As two stanzas excerpted from a 15-stanza whole and presented without context, their meaning appears at first glance to be rather abstract. The poem focuses on humankind's fight against time, explored mostly through a song sung by "a lover," which the speaker of the poem overhears. This bears strong relation to one of the main questions explored by Arendt in her chapter: that of the position of the thinking ego in time, and its constant battle against both the past and the future. However, while Arendt concentrates on temporal freedom within the present realm of thought, which exists in an area bound to but not trapped in the midst of this battle, Auden's focus is on the inevitability of "Time", which is capitalized as such and portrayed as an ever more malignant force of nature. The description of the "crowds upon the pavement" as "fields of harvest wheat" in the first stanza already hints at death, evoking the Grim Reaper and time as a sickle on its way to sever our lives. The first explicit reference to Time appears in the sixth stanza:
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
This context sheds light on the two stanzas quoted by Arendt. Even the exclamation "O" increases in its significance; one hears in the background of one's mind odes from literary practices of centuries past, and ruminates on the continuity of traditions, considering Time's role in it as both a destructive and constructive force, especially in light of Arendt's own ruminations regarding the discontinuity of "the Roman trinity that for thousands of years united religion, authority, and tradition." Her related notion of a "fragmented past" resonates with the second of the two stanzas by Auden: "And the crack in the tea-cup opens/A lane to the land of the dead."
The reiteration of the words "plunge" and "stare" in the first quoted stanza leads one to consider the significance of repetition, a technique that Auden employs throughout the poem, in the context of time. Repetition can be perceived as a loop of time, giving it a plurality (for example, describing the word as being used two times) while also somewhat of a stationary character, since physical time has elapsed but mental time has not, instead revolving around itself and meditating on the same idea in a suspended state. Auden's poem thus offers us another way of approaching Arendt's consideration of time as experienced by the thinking ego.
The physical imagery employed by Auden reveals water to be an especially powerful metaphor for time. The poem concludes with: "The clocks had ceased their chiming,/And the deep river ran on," portraying the constancy of time, ever running, even when our own human efforts to measure or control time have stopped or failed. The eighth stanza also contains a subtle evocation of water: "In headaches and in worry/Vaguely life leaks away"; in this context, our personal lifetime is the water that we cannot imperviously contain. This aids our understanding of the image of water in the basin in the first quoted stanza. Containing water in the basin represents our attempts to control and preserve time in a human construct, but, despite all these efforts, we cannot grasp time in our hands, no matter how deeply we "plunge" our hands into the water. Instead we can only "stare, stare" at our reflection, and "wonder what you've missed". These four words are possibly the key to unlocking the relationship between this poem and The Life of the Mind. The physical reflection of oneself in the basin's water prompts a mental reflection on the passage of time; time is once again suspended as our thinking ego considers our past. But perhaps Time is even more malevolent, in that while we stare at our reflection (the verb "stare" itself having rather stern connotations, in contrast to words such as "look" or "gaze"), physical time is still passing, and we are consequently "miss[ing]" even more of or from our lives as we try to deduce what the past has already robbed from us.
In her interpretation of the Tempest quote preceding the Auden citation, Arendt presents a rather different view of the water-time metaphor. The sea here represents an infinite expanse of time containing "fragments from the past", the "pearls" and "coral" that do not pass away but are modified by the time they spend in the sea. As two stanzas extracted from an entirety of fifteen, Arendt presents Auden's words as "pearls" and invites us to play a part in the continuity of this poem and the thinking ego within it, saving it and treasuring its "sea-change" through the generations.
-Frances Lee
Playafied: From Ritual to Ceremony
Nikita Nelin concludes his report of the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, 8/15/12-9/5/12. You can read his first post here, and his second post here.
Decompression: Before my hands heal I should sit down and find a way to wrap this up. I have been out of the desert (Black Rock City) for over a week now. I am back in the state of 'normalcy,' and yet I cannot help to feel that this 'normal' world is the exception. Have I been bedazzled, indoctrinated by some paganistic ritual? Did the "party" get me?
"Playa hands," or feet, is the term used to describe what happens to ones hands, and feet, when they are overexposed to the conditions of the desert. They begin cracking -- "playafied" -- like the desert floor itself. Moisturizer helps, but the secret is to spray them down with vinegar every morning -- something about alkaline, acidity, etc...
I was out there for almost three weeks. Blood had begun to escape through some of the cracks. Yet, amid the sensory overload that is Burning Man -- coupled with the knowledge that whatever happens in the desert is hyper-transient -- your bodily concerns become secondary to the need to engage the world created for you. You celebrate despite the discomfort, or maybe even in part driven on by it. You don't want to miss anything.
My hands have almost healed, new skin appearing underneath. I miss the damage. I miss what Burning Man proved.
I was moved towards Burning Man by the stories of others. What most attracted me to these stories were the themes of ritual, ceremony, and story telling. What I experienced, as a byproduct of being there, is the stuff I do not want to leave behind -- the concepts of 'intent of environment' (architecture and guiding principles), and 'currency of gratitude.' To feel complete, my new skin must now make space for these.
For this past week I have been needling my brain to pin down the difference between ritual and ceremony. I find it easy to mix them up. Why is there such confusion? Ultimately, I have come to see ritual as a loosely prescribed set of practices, or intentions, while ceremony is the celebration, or interpretation, of the prescribed by the practitioner. Certainly some anthropologists and theologists will find fault with my definitions. Well, I challenge you to bring me another set and if it reveals itself to be an exercise beyond semantics, I will be happy to sacrifice my hard won approximations. But that's the catch, isn't it? Definitions are the products of their society. They move, evolve... disappear. They are 'approximate,' in accordance to the pressure exercised upon them by what I call The Social Body -- our communal practices, beliefs and values, toys (inventions), cultural narratives, and the principles we deduce from the tangible matter of our environment.
Maybe what's most worth exploring in the road towards a definition of ritual and ceremony is the location of the struggle itself: Why do we so struggle in defining them? What does this say about our society, and its practices? In the simplistic thinking somewhat necessary to engage such questions I had hoped to use my time at Burning Man as an aperture into the society at large. I brought my child brain, the one asks to see before judgement -- the one open to signs of proof.
What burning Man provides is a scaffolding of a society, a set of pillars (in its principles and architecture) to be built upon, and filled in by the participants. It is in this movement, from the scaffolding -- from the available structures -- towards the experience, that 'ritual' is made into 'ceremony.' It is where meaning is formed, and body is found. The concept of the 'social body' implies more then mere existence, or survival, more than just the fractals of society; it is a narrative, it is consciousness (a self-aware organism, capable of self correction), it is the accumulation of meaning.
The set of principles for this experimental society (Burning Man) are "Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, Immediacy." To survive, and thrive in the desert, and to feel a part of the experience, one must find their own relationship to these principles, otherwise the experience will be tedious and lonely.
The other part of the scaffolding is the architectural intent. There is the city (its streets), its coordinates measured in the units of time, and thus when you arrive at a place you arrive to a time -- time is appropriated into a location (brings us closer to the definition of 'being here' doesn't it?); there is the Playa floor, a space for various art installations; the camp space, the themes to be supplied by each individual camp, each camp identifying its own purpose; the Man, to be empowered with whatever meaning one finds necessary to bring to it; and the Temple, a spiritual space to be used for remembering loved ones, the execution of weddings, and a creative space for communion. There is also Center Camp, where you will find lectures, performances, coffee (it is in fact the only place where you can "buy" something). A friend of mine described Center Camp as "the heart of Burning Man." Maybe because this is where the exchange of stories, connectivity, takes place.
The scaffolding of ritual is provided (a labor intensive process on the levels of planning, recruiting, development, and construction). In my conversation with Larry Harvey, one of the founders of Burning Man, he summed up the intention behind this social scaffolding like this, "I am, we are, it is." He was not pointing to himself, or to the structure of the Man, rather, the gesture was towards the "participant." No further elaboration is given. Meaning is not handed out here, nor is it imposed. What is implied by this is that the highest level of "participation," is to give meaning. This is "radical inclusivity." No ones experience is void. You can come here for a great party, or to say goodbye to a passed parent. You can have your own vision quest after sunrise, way out in deep playa, or you can don the outfit of a renegade and strap yourself up in the Thunder-Dome, just to see how you feel in the costume of primal power. All experiences are affirmed, accepted. The forms are created for you, and you fill in the space. Two experiences may further elaborate on this.
One night I was warned to wear white. "The white procession," is what I was told. After being out all night, meeting people, seeing art pieces on the playa and dancing, we made our way to the temple for sunrise. After a night of being engulfed in noise and neon lights, we arrived at the wooden, ornate temple. The quiet, a gesture of respect to the space, was hyper-pronounced all around us. People praying, crying, meditating, talking in the open space. There were pictures and poems and notes stapled to every reachable surface of the structure. As the sun began to rise a small ensemble of musicians began to play soft wooden instruments. More and more people showed up, wearing white. Some in intricate feather outfits, some on stilts, some in a simple white shirt and seersucker pants (well, me!) -- the playa was flooded in white. I have been to spiritual spaces from Eastern Europe, to Europe, to the U.S., but the power of that space, its sincerity, was unlike anything I have ever experienced (I have no elegant words for this -- it was really something "I have never experienced").
I can tell you more of that morning, the conversations, the white anonymous mask I had carried with me, the umbrella we found, the way this umbrella became empowered through a dance, through the power of movement and intention, when an art-car showed up with a music group called the Human Experience, how that empowerment became an opportunity for someone to say goodbye to her mother who had passed two years ago. How the anonymous mask, as more people in white arrived, as people celebrated the space and the new day, was endowed with personality of the dancers behind it. But I will simply say that 'we filled the space,' and allow you to unpack this meaning. Did my scientifically educated mind attempt to balk at this scene? I am trained to bring skepticism, but skepticism is only useful in service to a greater goal -- to seek out what is true in the arena of living. Otherwise it becomes a defense against its initial intention. To be disarmed, to be taken-in by a communal experience, to sense the meaning of the practice, is to be a living part of the 'social body.'
Another morning we had wondered out to deep playa, where the installations are few and far in between. There we stumbled upon a smaller temple (about 20 feet high) made of diamond shaped wooden pods -- a hive. Inside sat a man with a hot stove and four people joining him in a circle. On a low table before him were five glass ramekins filled with tea. As we approached he took two more out of his bag and added them to the already existing ones, making the pattern of a diamond on the table, now reflecting the shape of the pods. We accepted the invitation. On a cold desert morning a hot cup of tea is the power of the sunrise. Soon my partner took out a ceremonial orchid fragrance and offered it up to the others. We sat there in the quiet, warmed up and without hurry, without any knowledge of the time. Tea, orchid fragrances, tarot cards, all become an invitation to converse -- to join, to exchange, to fill-in the space. We sat for two hours and the tea master told us of his camp and how it was their mission to keep tea in this space, and his fiance and work with a non-profit music space on the West coast. There were individual pods about forty yards off to one side of the structure, the side that faced the central playa and the camp spaces. Later I found similar pods scattered throughout the playa, including inside the base of The Man. Call it metaphysics, call it the construction of myth, but after the tea experience, every time I saw one of the pods, I could not help but to feel the transmission of that experience. The space of ritual became empowered through the formation of our ceremony, and the experience felt transmitted through association from portal to portal. Is that not the fabric of culture and meaning? Is that not how we once created a society worth participating in? Practices, intention, invitation, and room for interpretation, is that not the scaffolding of purpose and faith?
If I had to mold that space into a single definition I would call it an 'intentional space holder.' The camp, committed to keep a tea going in that structure, held space for participants -- for the arrival of stories (the people that bring them, and the articles that facilitate them). And this is another crucial memento that I carry from Burning Man. How often do we sit down and create a story between us? How versed are we today in exchanging myth? We exchange information at a rapid pace, having now been conditioned to advertise ourselves at every opportunity. We lobby the enterprise of self, and self today is an entity that is simply trying to survive -- survive in a plethora of other voices. We seek "hits," and, "tweets," attention to a carefully crafted mask. With painful detail we foster an identify that can "sell" and we update its status in a witty, seemingly effortless, "I have nothing to hide" fashion, so that we become "liked," so that our circle of "network connections" can explode. We, each, becoming conditioned to present a face on a book, but without dimensions to it. How are we known? Do we now even know what to be known is? How many, or how few, of our actions are intentioned with the creation of meaning? How much in our repertoire of communication comes from a departure from the the practice of being seen, a false conditioning to define ourselves through the limiting shapes of business, career, education, 'appropriate' culture defined beliefs -- assimilation? Assimilation, but to what? Have we each become a corporation of isolated creatures -- human inc.? And have we fallen into the practice of survival (holding ground) rather then the practice of exploration (creating space)? These are lofty questions, I know. And yet, is not our struggle in defining "story telling" and "connectivity" similar to the struggle in defining "ritual" and "community?" Could this struggle of definitions point towards us having taken for granted the initial pillars of community forming? Having moved away from something essential, could we have paralyzed the 'social body?'
I have no clear answers to these questions. Only the sense that some of what I experienced at Burning Man helps to redirect my personal exploration of these subjects back to an older mode, to a practice that I had already sensed absent, yet one which when I am faced with, I recognize as essential. In part, this rerouting is somehow centered in the principles behind the event.
For those looking for more tangible examples to the power of "participant," consider this: Burning Man, for a week the third largest city in Nevada, has almost no crime rate. It is a city that literally leaves nothing behind in trash, or MOOP (Matter Out Of Place) as it is called here. Everyone brings their own trash bags and collects MOOP while on the playa. In fact, when a group of Nevada policy makers came to examine Burning Man their collective surprise was centered on the absence of both public trash receptacles, and trash. Participants take pride in their society -- there is ownership of the 'social body.'
Finally, I move to "intent of environment" and "currency of gratitude." Once I left Black Rock CIty, and drove back into "our" society, I experienced a sense of vertigo. At each new scene I encountered my mind worked to solve the riddle of intention. At a starbucks, I wanted to ask the barista, what is the theme of your camp? What experience are you charged to awake in me? When I order one of your "luxurious hot chocolate beverages for the sophisticated palate" what am I inviting? What are the articles of facilitation within this camp? At a strip-mall outside of Reno I asked, what is the purpose of this installation? What does this space inspire? What psychic and creative pressure does it exercise on me? I had become sensitive to these questions.
We float from one "must do" to another, from one operational space to the next. Our practice has become 'to-accomplish,' 'to-get-done,' a checklist of survival before we come back to the safety of homes and return to sleep. We know a thing by what it does, by what it does for us, but not what it does to us or what it 'impresses' upon us. We have become too busy in the ritual of 'getting-by' to examine this question. No wonder the irony of Frank Gehry having been tapped to design the new Facebook campus speaks so loudly to us (even if we're not sure of the words): An abstractionist tapped to give tangible form to the institution that most clearly provides us with the venue through which we can best abstract the condition of being. The questions our our being are finally visible in the structures which surround us -- that's the irony we now interact with. Arthur Koestler, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and others, had predicted and observed this movement -- the emergence of space that comments on the loss of self. And now we live within this triangle -- self, our physical structures, our virtual structures -- uncertain which is the commentary, which is the creator, and which is in service of which.
Lastly I want to comment on the major form of currency at Burning Man. As mentioned earlier the exchange of money is extremely rare. Yet, there is exchange. Millions of dollars are spent yearly by individuals and groups, just to create an experience. I talked to a computer engineer who had been coming to Burning Man for five years. "It changed my life," he said. "How?" "It made me want to give more, without asking for anything in return." Such a cliche, right? You give without asking for anything in return, and you receive the gift of gratitude. Such a cliche, right..? And yet, this is the most obvious currency at Black Rock City. Each person is provided with an opportunity to form an experience for another. From the grand structures that hold space for everyone, to the theme camps that invite you to join them and pour gifts upon you -- from drinks to ice cream, to food, to conversation, to workshops, to tarot readings, to music, to showers and espresso, costumes, to confessionals, to the Thunder-Dome, to tea ceremonies, to trinkets and bracelets and other handcrafted articles of remembrance, to the extent of the human imagination. Such a cliche? Right? No competition, no "one-upmanship." 'You are invited,' they say. You, are enough.
It is in the examination of such cliches that maybe we can begin a return to that place where we lost meaning. When did we decide that we are too busy, too smart, to be truly humanist? What made us this? The humanist tradition asks us to examine our being on every level -- the concentric circles of community (world, culture, self -- it, we, I). To use the full spectrum of our gifts in examining the state of being. To not hold "contempt prior to investigation" because such a state can lead one to loose the trail, and a skill once in service (skepticism) becomes a master -- a true state of purposelessness. Maybe it's time to stop and reexamine our society, to allow for our deepest and most personal, and maybe most essential questions and concerns on the state of being, to catch up to the gifts of our inventions.
The creating of space: I cannot get away from this idea. This is what Burning Man does. It creates a space (a space for meeting, for discovery, serendipity, a space for creating) and I, pressurized (or inspired) by this space -- its subtle intentions, architecture and principles -- am left to empower this space with meaning, to fill in the forms. I am endowed with the magic of meaning making. From ritual to ceremony I make matter -- I make this time (this space) matter.
Left to my own devices I perform the rituals of living, but without the movements of meaning. I struggle to empower the mask.
We have passed to the end of the existential age. Someone declared God to be dead. Science, with all its promise and discovery, has too failed in filling in the shapes of existence. Consumerism, the god of the 20th century, has also, ultimately, failed to provide us with the kind of purpose that leads to a greater belonging, or safety. The internet age, having initially promised to connect us, is now making us even more isolated. The onus is placed on us. On the individual. In this age of the spectator (internet, TV, emotional removal from the immediacy of our world) we are left to create a ceremony of our existence, to question our rituals, to define the space of our community, and our coordinates within it -- to become participants. To bring the social body back to a state of being.
-Nikita Nelin
The Meaning of Life
Three weeks into my seminar on Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," I am once again at that moment when the students are simultaneously exasperated and thrilled by the audacity of Heidegger's thinking. There is the confusion caused by Heidegger's re-fashioning of words and his insistence that basic concepts like "person" and "essence" are the products of a stale metaphysical language that hide more than they conceal. One senses as well, the joyful anticipation in the first glimpses of the power of sentences like: Being "is" not, and the being (Sein) of beings (Seiendes) is not itself a being (Seiende.).
Heidegger focuses relentlessly on human being, the being who can ask the question: "Who am I?" At our most vigorous, we human beings are characterized by our ability to think about ourselves in relation to the meaningfulness of our truth, to the truth understood not as one particular truth, but as that which gathers and calls us to be whom we most properly are. He does not tell us what we most properly are. Rather, he shows us that we are the beings who can live meaningfully in the world. We can give our existence and our world meaning.
Nietzsche had said that all human suffering is bearable if we can believe it has meaning. Religion gives suffering meaning by claiming that suffering faithfully in this world will bring us to heaven. Science gives suffering meaning, in its insistence that there is nothing that happens without a reason—so that all things, even the most awful—are part of the reason of the cosmos (secularly speaking). Mankind can endure all sufferings, so long as he believes it has meaning. The great danger of nihilism—the loss of belief in the highest values—is that we lose faith in either religion or science as guarantors of the meaningfulness of human suffering.
The political danger of nihilism is that human life loses its meaning. All sorts of killings, suicide bombings, and genocides are thereby justifiable in the service of any political project. Without a living sense of meaning, life is cheap, and human destruction can be sought in the name of any and every political or economic goal.
As the dominant contemporary response to the dangers of nihilism, human rights holds that human beings have dignity as living beings. Above all, we must be kept alive. But what is more, we must be treated with a certain basic dignity. Just like chickens, we should neither be killed nor penned up and force-fed. Like dogs we deserve basic health and love. And like dolphins and whales, we should not be indiscriminately killed.
Heidegger, like his student Hannah Arendt, insists that the response to nihilism that insists on the rights of human beings to live well with a certain basic dignity makes the tragic mistake of blurring the difference between humans and animals. The human rights community focuses on the right to life and the right to be fed and be clothed. It sometimes even insists on the right to housing and the right to a job. But all of these human rights are directed at our animality, the fact that the human being is a kind of living animal. This is of course true. And yet, human rights are the rights of man as animals. These rights do not name or protect human beings. The fight for human rights can, therefore, turn our attention towards preserving humans in their animality even as it covers over what is most meaningful about human being itself.
So what is the meaningfulness of human life? Heidegger develops his answer over his writing life, but his first effort to do so is in Being and Time, the most influential and important book of philosophy written during the 20th century. Being and Time is a difficult book. It is also unfinished. And Heidegger abandoned its ultimate project shortly after it was published. And yet, it remains one of the greatest works in the history of thinking.
Many commentaries have sought to help students through Being and Time. But Simon Critchley has done something no one else even thought possible. He has given a clear and simple account of the impact of Being and Time in five short columns for the British newspaper, The Guardian. While these columns are necessarily pithy, they are in my mind the best introduction to Being and Time.
In his first column, Critchley writes:
That said, the basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time. That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. Being is time and time is finite, it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls "being-towards-death".
Such brevity will lead, no doubt to compromises. In this quote, for example, Being is used in multiple senses, but what is really at issue in Being and Time is the being of human being. In Heidegger's later work, that focus on the being of human being will come eventually to turn human beings away from human beings and towards being itself. That strikes many as anti-human. But as Heidegger insists, it is not inhuman, and it is driven by a profound humanity.
For one seeking a way into Heidegger's greatest book, Critchley's five-part introduction is a great place to start. You can read the first part of Critchley's account here.
Prisoner of Time
Adam Gopnik's piece in the January 30th edition of The New Yorker, "The Caging of America," offers sober and sobering commentary on our country's predilection for mass incarceration. Gopnik passionately denounces the indifference if not callous disregard that many Americans exhibit toward prisons and prisoners, and he unsettles some of the rigid certainties that dog run-of-the-mill discussions of criminal justice. And yet my appreciation is also mixed with a degree of unease, in no small part because his rendering of the experience of incarceration strikes me as one-sided. This one-sidedness in turn has implications for how we might conduct public conversations about this vital facet of contemporary American life.
Full disclosure: I am not a prison activist or expert, and I have never been imprisoned. I instead write as an anthropologist and educator with the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), a program that offers a rigorous liberal arts education to incarcerated students in five New York prisons.
This work affords me a measure of insight into the social dynamics of American incarceration, but my angle of vision is also (inevitably) limited and partial. I therefore approach this topic with considerable humility, but as shall become clear, such humility is precisely my point.
Many of us tend to think of imprisonment first and foremost in terms of physical confinement, but one of the real strengths of Gopnik's article is his attention to the centrality of time. Indeed, the nature of American prison life gives new meaning to the "empty, homogeneous time" that Walter Benjamin diagnosed as a hallmark of modern existence. In Gopnik's words:
"It isn't the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates…. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock."
My own experience with BPI certainly attests to this tyranny of time. Two of my students once asked if they could remove the clock from the classroom wall so that they would not have to look at it. They explained that time would pass faster this way, and making the time pass, in whatever way possible, was one of their chief concerns.
Yet even as inmates recognize the heavy weight of carceral time, many insist that they are not powerless in the face of it. As another of my students noted, inmates urge one another to take control of their situation to the extent that they are able. "You do the time," the common injunction apparently goes. "Don't let the time do you." That is to say, many inmates aspire to endure and even exert a measure of autonomy, despite the regimentation, dreariness, and pain that often pervade their existence.
Gopnik says too little for my taste about this dimension of incarceration. I sympathize with his claim that "the scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life." And he is right to emphasize the anxiety, boredom and fear that so often suffuse prison life, just as he is to note the frequency of physical violence, including rape, committed by and against prisoners. But we do a disservice to inmates if we believe that they are entirely at the mercy of the institutions in which they reside—and that the time they serve is merely (to paraphrase Gopnik) "something being done to them." Most of the inmates I know through BPI seek actively to give shape and direction to the time during and after their imprisonment. They are not defeated and destroyed by their current circumstances, but acutely reflective and articulate about them.
We would do well not merely to hold incarcerated men and women accountable for the offenses they have committed, but also to include their perspectives in necessary public deliberation over the ongoing epidemic of incarceration. They have inhabited and negotiated social worlds that many Americans cannot readily imagine, and they could contribute a great deal to debates where glib self-assurance and easy moralizing are far too common.
There is a pressing need for a more nuanced and democratic conversation about the state of American prisons, particularly when the poor and people of color bear the brunt of incarceration. But such a conversation will not happen if we disqualify current and former inmates from public discussion, either because we believe we know what prison is like and can therefore speak for them, or because we believe that they are not worthy or capable of participating.
-Jeff Jurgens


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GRANTS PASS, Ore.– The group working towards getting a public safety levy on the May ballot in Josephine County turned in signatures this week. Community United for Safety is the political action committee behind the effort. Representatives from Securing our Safety said it could be verified and official as soon as this week. Several organizations … Continue reading »
Gold Hill to Discuss Public Safety
GOLD HILL, Ore.– Gold Hill City Council leaders said they are still discussing the future of public safety. County leaders are meeting tonight to decide if a tax levy to fund a police officer should be added to the May ballot. If an officer is hired for Gold Hill, resourced will not be pulled from … Continue reading »
Josephine County: Jail Operations Levy
GRANTS PASS, Ore.– Josephine County voters are once again faced with the decision to pay property taxes in order to fund the jail and youth detention services. Measure 17-59 will tax residents $1.19 per $1,000 in assessed property value for five years. Josephine County has been struggling to fund public safety since the government reduced … Continue reading »
Gold Hill Wants Public Safety Officer
GOLD HILL, Ore. — Seven years after Gold Hill gave up on trying to run its own Police Department, the City is now reaching out to the Jackson County Sheriff's office for more help. The City has relied on the Sheriff's office for routine patrol protection and backup, but now it's asking for a little … Continue reading »
Law Enforcement Levy Fails
GRANTS PASS, Ore. — For the second time, a tax measure to restore public safety in Josephine County failed to win voter approval. The unofficial results show 49 percent voted yes and 51 percent voted no. Around 400 votes separate the two sides as of 9:50 p.m. Measure 17-49 proposed a property tax of $1.48 … Continue reading »
Grants Pass Holds Safety Awareness Day
GRANTS PASS, Ore. – Saturday was Safety Awareness Day in Grants Pass. Residents young and old came down to the Grants Pass shopping center for the town's safety day event. Visitors climbed aboard equipment and vehicles from Grants Pass Fire and Josephine County Search and Rescue. The Caveman Kiwanis club fitted people for free bike … Continue reading »

subset: commoncrawl


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We were there from 28.-30.11.14 for a weekend in Buenos Aires. We choose the hotel because of the neighborhood, which is really great. But the hotel itself is definitely not recommendable. We booked a Junior Suite (we checked the pictures and the details of that room on the hotel webpage), but what we got was only a poor standard room.... More
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We stayed at this property on November 26. Not only was the room exceptional, but the service was impeccable and the staff extremely helpful. The building was from, the 1700 on a quite street. There were priceless painting hanging all over the vast rooms. We will definitely stay there again!
- Reservation Options:
- TripAdvisor is proud to partner with Hotels.com, Booking.com, Expedia, Priceline, TripOnline SA and Odigeo so you can book your Chambres D'hotes Hotel Verhaegen reservations with confidence. We help millions of travelers each month to find the perfect hotel for both vacation and business trips, always with the best discounts and special offers.


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Gearing up for the October 26th release date, Paramount Pictures has just leaked sixteen new stills from "Fun Size."
Starring Victoria Justice, Thomas Mann, Thomas McDonell, Thomas Middleditch, and Chelsea Handler, the forthcoming flick promises to be a wild ride.
Selected to front the publication's latest installment, Chelsea Handler graces the cover of the September 2012 issue of Marie Claire@Work magazine.
The 37-year-old comedian/talk show host stylish in a ladies' suit for the front page shot while dishing about everything from her 'sever ADD' to her desire to address more important issues on her E! show.
Upfronts are officially kicking off tomorrow, but NBC has already switched a few things up as they revealed their fall schedule on Sunday (May 13).
So just what kind of changes can fans expect to see? Well, fan favorite "The Voice" is getting it's shot at staying on air this fall and even next spring while another network returnee, "Community," will now be showing Friday nights at 8:30 pm following the sexy comedy, "Whitney."
Bringing together some of the world's most influential people in one room, the eighth annual TIME 100 Gala got underway on Tuesday night (April 24) just before the publication officially releases the honorable list on Wednesday.
It's no secret that she's not a fan of Angelina Jolie, and Chelsea Handler had more choice words about the "Changeling" chick in her interview with More magazine's May 2012 issue.
Fresh off of a pair of panel appearances at WonderCon, Charlize Theron got glammed up before arriving for The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Los Angeles Gala on Saturday night (March 17).
The Oscar-winning actress worked the arrivals area in an elegant black Acne frock as she joined "Hardball" host Chris Matthews and Marriott International, Inc. Executive VP Kathleen Matthews as the ceremony's Ally for Equality Award winners.
She may not always seem like the relationship type, but comedian Chelsea Handler is rumored to be back in on the love scene.
According to a report from Us Weekly, the "Chelsea Lately" star is once again getting cozy with former flame Andre Balazs.
Bringing his latest cinematic offering to the big screen, director McG's "This Means War" was released into theaters today (February 17).
The action/comedy flick stars quite the cast, as Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, Tom Hardy and Chelsea Handler are all named to its roster.


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Judy Hannah Bui
Kate HartMakeup Artist Female Sydney, New South Wales, Australia My MM URL: http://www.modelmayhem.com/beyond_face
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About MeI am a creative and enthusiastic make-up artist from Sydney Australia. I obtained my Diploma of Makeup and Special Effects in 2010 from the Sydney College of Makeup Art.I am looking to collaborate with models and photographers to add some interesting pieces to my portfolio. My focus is bridal, high fashion, glamour and publications. Friends |


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Gunners supremo Peter Hill-Wood claims to be unaware of any consortium bidding to become a majority shareholder at the Emirates and sees the issue as a "waste of time"
Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood claims to be unaware of any potential takeover by a Middle Eastern consortium.Rumours of a supposed £1.5 billion takeover surfaced last weekend, but the Gunners board member does not expect majority shareholders Stan Kroenke and Alisher Usmanov to be keen to sell their stakes in the club.
22/1 | Arsenal are 22/1 to beat Bayern Munich 2-1 with bet365 |
The American currently owns 66.83 per cent of shares in the north London club, while 29.96% of the shares belong to Uzbek billionaire Usmanov.
However, according to Hill-Wood neither wish to sell their stakes in the club and any approach made will be a waste of time.
He told reporters: "I have heard nothing and I don't think anybody knows anything about it at the club.
"It all seems a bit of a waste of time.
"If there is this consortium, they can't make any progress unless they attempt to get in touch.
"So I can't say if there is anything to it or not. But even if they did make an approach, my understanding is our two major shareholders do not want to sell."


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Edge in the News
Natural scientists are now and are daring to study one of the last fields to have eluded them for so long: faith itself. This, of course, threatens faith and philosophy's hold on the definition of man and his place in the world. This is a main reason why Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett are debated so fervently.
The Third Culture in Süddeutsche Zeitung
Is religion a destructive force? The debate over Fundamentalism and the new Atheists overshadows the scientific research on faith.
By Andrian Kreye, Editor, the Feuilleton, Süddeutsche Zeitung
ANDRIAN KREYE, from 1987 to 2006, was the US cultural correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung (currently the largest German-language daily). At the end of 2006, he moved from New York to Germany, where he took over the Feuilleton section of the newspaper (part Arts & Ideas, part Op-Ed section). He is also an Edge contributor.
Intellectual impresario John Brockman puts his annual Edge question to leading thinkers...
Intellectual impresario John Brockman puts his annual Edge question to leading thinkers... more»
Each year, John Brockman's EDGE asks a single question for the new year, and publishes the responses online. For 2007: ...
Respondents include many whose work has appeared on Boing Boing before, including: J. Craig Venter, Sherry Turkle, Danny Hillis, Jaron Lanier, Rodney Brooks, David Gelernter, Kevin Kelly, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, Rudy Rucker, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Clay Shirky, Ray Kurzweil, and Clifford Pickover.
Link to index.
Several of us from BoingBoing participated: here's Cory's response ("Copying Is What Bits Are For"), here's Pesco's ("We're Recognizing That the World Is a Wunderkammer"), here's mine (" Truth Prevails. Sometimes, Technology Helps.").
NEW YORK The Edge of Computation Science Prize endowed with a hundred housand dollars goes at David Deutsch, the pioneer of quantum computer research. The honor is aimed at scientists, who advance the "computatrional idea" in the past ten years with their work. Deutsch, born in Israel and trained in Oxford and Cambridge, is credited with the development of a set of algorithms on which the theoretical conditions for a recent revolution in computation are based. The Edge Prize, named after the virtual Internet salon Edge, in which an international avant-garde of researchers and philosophers meet, was organized by John Brockman, the New York Guru of the third culture.
The Prize was initiated by the investor Jeffrey Epstein, an inspired promoter of science, who also donated the Prize money. Among the other nominees were researchers such as Tim Berners Lee, Noam Chomsky, David Gelernter, Larry Smarr and J. Craig Venter.
Book, nonfiction: "What We Believe but Cannot Prove," edited by John Brockman. The editor, who also runs the very influential Web site Edge (http://www.edge.org), asks some of the most brilliant people in the world one heck of a good question.
A New Take on Atheism: Armed with evolutionary psychology and inflamed by the 9/11 attacks, these authors--Richard Dawkins, left, Sam Harris, center, and Daniel C. Dennett--treat belief in God as a superstition the modern world can no longer afford
...On the science Web site Edge.org, the astronomer Carolyn Porco offers the subversive suggestion that science itself should attempt to supplant God in Western culture, by providing the benefits and comforts people find in religion: community, ceremony and a sense of awe. "Imagine congregations raising their voices in tribute to gravity, the force that binds us all to the Earth, and the Earth to the Sun, and the Sun to the Milky Way," she writes. Porco, who is deeply involved in the Cassini mission to Saturn, finds spiritual fulfillment in exploring the cosmos. But will that work for the rest of the world—for "the people who want to know that they're going to live forever and meet Mom and Dad in heaven? We can't offer that." If Dawkins, Dennett and Harris are right, the five-century-long competition between science and religion is sharpening. People are choosing sides. And when that happens, people get hurt.
Digital Maoism
Karl Marx famously predicted that industrial capitalism's individualist ethos would engender its opposite: a new collective consciousness that would ultimately fuel the socialist revolution. But the old dialectician would probably have been shocked to see how much collectivism has flowered in the hypercapitalist Internet economy of late. First there was open-source software — large-scale digital engineering projects miraculously executed by groups of programmers contributing their intellectual labor for the sheer reward of participation. Then Google took on the seemingly insurmountable problem of organizing the Web's information by tapping the collective wisdom embedded in the links between Web sites. Then Wikipedia applied the open-source model to encyclopedia production, and — against all odds — built a genuine challenger to Britannica in four short years.
But all the hype over the powers of the so-called hive mind was bound to provoke a reaction, and in May of this year, it arrived in the form of a thoughtful — though controversial — essay by the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier. "What we are witnessing today," Lanier wrote on Edge.org, "is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments and major universities have all gotten the bug." Lanier dubbed this newthink "digital Maoism." Against this collectivist mythos, Lanier tried to carve out a crucial space for the insight and creativity of the individual mind.
Unlike most counterrevolutionary manifestoes, however, Lanier's essay aimed not so much to topple the dominant regime as to limit its application. "There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an individual," he wrote. "When a government bureaucrat sets a price, for instance, the result is often inferior to the answer that would come from a reasonably informed collective. . . . But when a collective designs a product, you get design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason."
In the essay, Lanier grouped everything from his personal Wikipedia entry to "American Idol" under the umbrella of digital Maoism, and many of the responses to the article by assorted Internet luminaries observed that Lanier had elided important differences between these systems to make his point. The entirety of Wikipedia, for instance, is most certainly a collective undertaking, but many articles are written and edited by small numbers of individuals. Wikipedia may be not too far from the historical reality of Maoism itself: a system propagandized with the language of collectivism that was, in practice, actually run by a small power elite.
In any case, culture and technology are increasingly reliant on the hive mind — and whatever its faults, Lanier's broadside helps us consider the consequences of this momentous development. A swarm of connected human minds is a fantastic resource for tracking down software bugs or discovering obscure gems on the Web. But if you want to come up with a good idea, or a sophisticated argument, or a work of art, you're still better off going solo.
The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, it is said, had a good-luck horseshoe hanging in his office. "You don't believe in that nonsense, do you?" a visitor once asked, to which Bohr replied, "No, but they say it works whether you believe in it or not."
If one thing emerged from the "Beyond Belief" conference at the Salk Institute in LaJolla, Calif. it's that religion doesn't work the same way. Some 30 scientists—one of the greatest collections of religious skeptics ever assembled in one place since Voltaire dined alone—examined faith from the evolutionary, neurological and philosophical points of view, and they concluded that some things only work if you do believe in them. Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist and author of the best-selling book "The God Delusion," said he couldn't have a spiritual experience even when he tried. After another panelist, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, explained that temporal-lobe seizures of the brain create profound spiritual and out-of-body experiences, Dawkins disclosed that he had participated in an experiment that was supposed to mimic such seizures—and even then he didn't feel a thing.
Dawkins obviously feels this loss is a small price to pay for freedom from superstition. But even physicist Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and an outspoken atheist, acknowledged that science is a poor substitute for the role religion plays in most peoples' lives. It's hard, he said, to live in a world in which one's highest emotions can be understood in biochemical and evolutionary terms, rather than a gift from God. Instead of the big, comforting certainties promoted by religion, science can offer only "a lot of little truths" and the austere pleasures of intellectual honesty. Much as Weinberg would like to see civilization emerge from the tyranny of religion, when it happens, "I think we will miss it, like a crazy old aunt who tells lies and causes us all kinds of trouble, but was beautiful once and was with us a long time."
To which Dawkins retorted, "I won't miss her at all." Only in the most extreme circumstances would he deign to take account of the consolations offered by religion. He would not, for instance, try to talk a Christian on his deathbed out of a belief in Heaven. He didn't say what he would do if he were the one near death, but it's unlikely he would be calling for a priest. The atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett had been expected to attend, but two weeks earlier had been rushed to the hospital with a near-fatal aortic rupture. At the conference, people handed around copies of Dennett's essay entitled "Thank Goodness," posted on the science Web site Edge.org, in which he described how annoying it was to hear from friends that they had been praying for his recovery. "I have resisted the temptation," he wrote, "to respond, 'Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?'"
To Lanier, the 'wisdom of crowds' delivers a reflection of the lowest common denominator.
By Steven Levy
Jaron Lanier is a man of many talents—virtual-reality pioneer, New Age composer, visual artist and artificial-intelligence scientist. Now Lanier has taken on another role: dyspeptic critic of the surging trend of digital collectivism, an ethic that celebrates and exploits the ability of the Web to aggregate the preferences and behaviors of millions of people. In a recent essay posted on the Web site Edge.org, Lanier disparages the recent spate of efforts that rely on conscious collaboration (like the anyone-can-participate online reference work Wikipedia) or passive polling (the so-called meta sites like Digg, which draw on user response to rank news articles and blog postings). To Lanier, these represent an alarming decision—rejecting individual expression and creativity to become part of a faceless mob. To emphasize the enormity of this movement, Lanier titled his essay with a fearsome moniker: "Digital Maoism." ...
...Neil H. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, writes of the way living things emerged from the seas and describes the recently discovered fossil specimen of that first terrestrial explorer. Paleontologist Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, lays out the forensic evidence of pre-human descent. Nicholas Humphrey, a professor at the Center for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics, muses on how natural selection might have produced human consciousness. Steven Pinker, the Harvard University cognitive neuroscientist, holds forth on the evolution of ethics. Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser discusses the proper role of evolution in the science curriculum.
Several essayists worry that the passions stirred by the intelligent design debate go well beyond the natural tension between science and religion. They suspect that baser political motives are at work in a strategy crafted to discredit science itself as an independent auditor of political claims about global warming, stem-cell research, pollution and high-tech military systems. ...
In the book's universe, however, Albert Einstein, thinker extraordinaire, still lives. As, indeed, these essays prove he does.
The reader is transported to a space-time continuum much like our own in "My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-Four of the World's Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy," edited by John Brockman Pantheon, $25,In the book's universe, however, Albert Einstein, thinker extraordinaire, still lives. As, indeed, these essays prove he does.These essays prove why, as editor John Brockman writes, "Einstein was clearly the most important person of the 20th century."
...More recently I found "Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement," fascinating brief essays by leading evolutionists and edited by John Brockman.
... Each side of the evolution versus intelligent design debate has tended to draw me similarly, yet there is a winner. I am persuaded that the evolutionists have far the better case. In an essay titled"Unintelligent Design," Scott Atran, in the last volume noted above, points out that "no scientific theory can ever be proved true, but states that "scientific theories are validated when their surprising predictions are confirmed ..." ... (Grael Gannon, of Bismarck, is a teacher at Shiloh Christian School.)
The kind of hard-right thinking found in conservative pundit Ann Coulter's book "Godless: The Church of Liberalism" amazes Bammel, he said. "It drives me up the wall. Evidence is being produced almost day by day in favor of evolution. That to me says it's factual, the way thing happened. How anyone can come along and deny it, it just numbs my mind."
The talk Bammel will give Monday is a distillation of material he used in a course he taught at West Virginia University about the conflicts between science and religion. It will be followed by a question-and-answer session. He said he doesn't necessarily expect to change minds, but he does want to present some facts.
"There's a lot of intelligent people in the Vail Valley, really well-read people," he said. "There are so many good books put out on this topic in the past 10 years, and part of my purpose is to just people to get back to these and examine the evidence out there."
Two books Bammel recommends are "Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement" edited by John Brockman and "By Design: Science and the Search for God" by Larry Witham.
Free registration required [...continue]
If you are interested in education, and what draws different people to different disciplines, you may want to read Curious Minds: How a child becomes a scientist. Edited by John Brockman, this is a collection of reminiscences by prominent scientists of how they came to science through experiences during childhood. It's amazing what triggers an interest in science. It could be a family friend with an interest in both science and children, the impetus from imagination stirred by a childhood novel, the special interest of a teacher, or a child's cleaning job in a butcher shop.
My Einstein is a gem of a book that celebrates not only Einstein the scientist but also Einstein the man, even though it is a collection of essays written by scientific figures ... The result is a remarkably well-rounded figure.
If you want to learn more about how Intelligent Design relates to science, get the small 2006 paperback book, "Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement," edited by John Brockman ...
...And the key to our preeminence is education. The study of evolution has practical benefits: It is the basis for breeding food crops, choosing animal models that can be used to treat human disorders, conserving species and their habitats, predicting which vaccines should be made to prepare for epidemics like avian flu and manufacturing those vaccines.
Science education that incorporates unscientific issues like ID is a sure path to America's failure against competing countries. Conversely, given its importance for biology and for science in general, evolution deserves to be properly taught in American classrooms.
John Brockman, escritor, editor y animador cultural de la élite científica, ha formulado a un centenar de investigadores la pregunta: "¿En qué cree usted aunque no pueda probarlo?". Las respuestas ya están colgadas en su revista electrónica Edge(www.edge.org), y tienen un morbo indudable: son justo las ideas que los científicos no pueden confesar en sus publicaciones técnicas.
Martin Rees: "La vida inteligente es exclusiva de la Tierra, pero se extenderá por toda la galaxia"
Lynn Margulis: "Todos los sentidos humanos proceden de una bacteria llamada espiroqueta"
Craig Venter: "La vida en nuestro planeta ha evolucionado a partir de microbios llegados del espacio"
Desde el Big Bang, la materia se ha ido organizando en partículas, átomos, estrellas, planetas, moléculas orgánicas y (al menos en la Tierra) bacterias, animales y cerebros conscientes. Eso es lo que los científicos consideran probado. Pero sus creencias no probadas cuentan otra historia, o muchas otras.
"Dudo que el Big Bang sea el principio del tiempo; tengo la fuerte sospecha de que nuestra historia se extiende mucho más atrás", escribe en Edge el físico teórico Lee Smolin. No puede probarlo, pero lo cree. Como cree su colega Lawrence Krauss, también sin pruebas, que "hay un número enorme, tal vez infinito de universos, y algunos pueden estar experimentando Big Bangs en este momento".
Einstein dijo que "Dios no juega a los dados", pero Alexander Vilenkin cree que jugaba demasiado: "Hay buenas razones para pensar que el universo es infinito, luego ha de haber infinitas regiones con historias idénticas a la nuestra". Gregory Benford prefiere creer en una gran cadena ontológica: "Si los seres vivos pueden crear nuevos universos con mejores leyes, nosotros somos una consecuencia inevitable del universo, un eco de inteligencias anteriores que eligieron deliberadamente crear un orden más sostenible".
He aquí lo que cree Craig Venter, el ex contendiente privado en la carrera del genoma: "La vida en la Tierra es con toda probabilidad el resultado de un suceso panespérmico". En la jerga, eso quiere decir que no surgió aquí, sino que llegó del espacio exterior. Venter ha estado últimamente secuenciando los genes de miles de organismos desconocidos y ha concluido que "un número finito de temas se usan una y otra vez y podrían fácilmente haber evolucionado a partir de unos pocos microbios llegados en un meteorito o en el polvo galáctico".
El físico Paul Davies también cree que la vida bulle en el universo, aunque por razones más bien místicas: "La vida es capaz de conectarse con los mecanismos básicos del cosmos, de resonar con el orden matemático oculto que lo hace funcionar".
Pero, si el universo existe para que haya matemáticos que lo entiendan, ¿quién garantiza que la evolución produzca matemáticos? La bióloga Lynn Margulis aporta una idea: que todos los sentidos humanos provienen de una bacteria llamada espiroqueta. Es la parte de su teoría simbiótica de la evolución que (todavía) no ha podido demostrar.
El lingüista John McWhorter ha hallado en una isla de Indonesia los dos lenguajes más simples del mundo, el Keo y el Ngada. Carecen de prefijos, sufijos, tonos y otras complicaciones. La isla se llama Flores. Hace unos meses, cuando McWhorter leyó sobre el diminuto Homo floresiensis, no pudo evitar que le asaltara una creencia: que los humanos de la isla habían simplificado su lenguaje para entenderse con los hobbits. No ha podido probarlo, pero lo cree.
"Creo que la vida inteligente es exclusiva de la Tierra, pero que tiene el potencial de extenderse por toda la galaxia", afirma el cosmólogo Martin Rees. "La idea es un sustituto de la religión, y espero que sea cierta".
¿Significa lo mismo el verbo creer para científicos y creyentes? Este diario le planteó la pregunta a Brockman, y él se la rebotó a cinco estrellas de su elenco. He aquí sus respuestas.
"No", responde el filósofo Daniel Dennett, de la Universidad de Tufts. "Los científicos pueden apoyarse en fórmulas que no comprenden si se convencen de que otros expertos las comprenden. Los creyentes se proclaman incapaces de comprender aquello que creen".
"Los científicos comparten la creencia de Einstein de que 'la naturaleza es sutil pero no maliciosa', y de que podemos usar nuestro poder de razonamiento para descubrir pautas y leyes en el mundo", añade Martin Rees, el Astrónomo Real del Reino Unido. "Pero algunos añaden creencias más peculiares, por ejemplo que las leyes naturales han sido diseñadas por un Creador, o que no podemos comprender la consciencia".
"Yo diría que, en general, el científico dice creo que en el sentido de pienso que, y no en el sentido de tengo fe en", puntualiza el gran evolucionista Robert Trivers, de la Universidad de Rutgers.
Y, curiosamente, dos de los más brillantes psicólogos del mundo discrepan entre sí:
"De ningún modo significa lo mismo", dice Steven Pinker, de Harvard. "En el lenguaje ordinario creer puede significar 'albergar un pensamiento' o 'tener fe en algo'. La primera acepción se usa en vez de saber cuando el hablante tiene dudas".
"No es tan diferente", opina Nicholas Humphrey, de la London School of Economics. "Decir creo es admitir que los fundamentos de la creencia son emocionales además de racionales, que la creencia suena bien estética, moral e incluso espiritualmente. Pero la gran diferencia es que el científico la ve como un desafío para seguir adelante, y el religioso como una señal de que ya ha llegado".
But could anybody who absorbed the Sermon on the Mount write, as she does of Richard Dawkins, "I defy any of my coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell"? Well, I wouldn't want Coulter to roast (there's not much meat there anyway), but I wish she'd shut up and learn something about evolution. Her case for ID involves the same stupid arguments that fundamentalists have made for a hundred years. They're about as convincing as the blonde hair that gets her so much attention. By their roots shall ye know them.


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Sen. Paul on David Barron Nomination
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) speaks in opposition to the nomination of David Barron to be a United States circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit over legal opinions Barron wrote on the use of drones against U.S. citizens.
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- Dick Durbin U.S. Senator [D] Illinois
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High bank waterfront with beautiful Sassafras River waterfront. Wooded with cleared area for homesite. Existing dock and garage with finished area above - very private- deep water. Forest Stewardship plan, Health Dept. info, survey on file - perc test complete.  KE8271632  Listing Broker: Powell REALTORS |
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Nice waterfront lot awaits your dream home. Price includes two parcels - 2nd parcel map 74, grid 15, parcel 49, Lot 2B - Tax ID# 10-11002544 - lot size taxes shown reflect both parcels. Covenants restrictions and plat on file.  DO8299575  Listing Broker: Powell REALTORS |
READY TO BUILD ON PRIVATE LOT LOCATED ON INDIAN CREEK WITH 80 PIER IN PLACE AND 1-3 WATER DEPTH; CLOSELY LOCATED TO THE HYATT REGENCY CHESAPEAKE BAY RESORT. BUILDING PAD ALREADY ESTABLISHED WITH DRIVEWAY, TEMPORARY ELECTRIC AND SEPTIC DRAINFIELDS IN PLACE. COVENANTS RESTRICTIONS, PLAT AND HEALTH DEPARTMENT STATUS. REPORT ON FILE. **BUYER TO PAY ALL DOC TRANSFER CHARGES.  DO5167938  Listing Broker: Powell REALTORS |
Close to public park boat ramp. Kitchen has track lighting. CAC downstairs; 3 window AC units for upstairs. Downstairs bedroom could also be a den/family room. Property is located in the Cambridge Historic District.  DO8296802  Listing Broker: Powell REALTORS |
Grand, well built home with lots of space. One owner home. No city taxes. Double lot - recent heat pump. Two fireplaces sunroom. Needs updating - but great bones!  DO8395044  Listing Broker: Powell REALTORS |


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Manchester United May Join Chase for Cahill, Sun Says: Roundup
Jan. 5 (Bloomberg) -- The following is a roundup of soccer stories from U.K. newspapers, with clickable links to the Web.
Cahill Chase
Manchester United may join the chase for Gary Cahill, who's failed to work out a contract with Chelsea, the Sun said.
Bolton agreed to a 7 million-pound fee ($11 million) with Chelsea last week for the England defender, who is seeking a salary of 100,000 pounds per week, 30,000 pounds more than the Blues are offering, the Sun said.
United manager Alex Ferguson has said he won't spend in this month's transfer period unless the right player becomes available, but may make a move with his defense hit by injury, the newspaper said.
Samba Boost
Tottenham's pursuit of Blackburn defender Christopher Samba has been bolstered by the news that Rovers manager Steve Kean must sell to finance any moves, the Daily Express said.
Spurs manager Harry Redknapp plans to offer 8 million pounds, as well as considering offers for Sebastien Bassong, the Express said. Kean may cash in on Samba, Junior Hoilett and Steven Nzonzi to help his relegation fight, the newspaper said.
Tomkins Bid
Newcastle has made a 4 million-pound offer for West Ham defender James Tomkins, the Daily Star said.
Magpies manager Alan Pardew has already had two bids, including one for 2.5 million pounds, rejected and his hopes were raised yesterday after Tomkins told West Ham he wants to leave, the Star said.
Two Defenders
Queens Park Rangers has made offers for defenders James Collins and Nedum Onuoha, the Daily Mirror said.
QPR manager Neil Warnock made a 3 million-pound bid for Aston Villa's Collins and offered 2.5 million pounds for Manchester City's Onuoha, the Mirror said.
Scouting Cavani
Chelsea has sent scouts to watch Napoli striker Edinson Cavani at least five times as the club seeks a potential replacement for Didier Drogba, the Daily Mail said.
Representatives of the 24-year-old Uruguayan, who is rated at 35 million pounds, have made inquiries to the Premier League's big clubs to gauge their interest in a summer move, the Mail said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Bob Bensch in London at email@example.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christopher Elser at firstname.lastname@example.com.


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I stayed at the Horned Dorset for a few nights in January 2015. I have to say that I've been fortunate enough to stay in some very nice resorts and the Horned Dorset is right up there. The rooms are very special with beautiful decor. Thank u to Mr. Davies for being so accommodating and Alejandro for being so attentive... More
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