I got as far as a draft Preface – but the harder I thought about the posts and how the issues they raised might be pulled together in a coherent conclusion, the more depressed I became about the impossible task I had set myself. To pretend that one person has anything original to add to the thousands of scribblers whose writings so learnedly analyse the world’s ills……..!!
It
was Duncan
Green’s blog which brought me back to earth – in a post about the limited
use academics make of social media - by reminding me that -
a blog is a ‘web log’, i.e. an online diary. Regular blogging builds up a handy, time-saving archive. I’ve been blogging daily since 2008. OK, that’s a little excessive, but what that means is that essentially I have a download of my brain activity over the last 7 years – almost every book and papers I’ve read, conversations and debates. Whenever anyone wants to consult me, I have a set of links I can send (which saves huge amounts of time). And raw material for the next presentation, paper or book.
In
the past 18 months I’ve taken to raiding my posts in order to compose what are
now ten E-books. I have to confess, however, that none of them attempted an overview.....
Green is spot on about the help a blog like mine offers in finding old material...you just type in the keyword and the relevant post with its quotes and hyperlinks generally appear immediately – a record of your brain activity that
particular morning. I also have a file of more than 150 pages (for each
year) with raw text and several thousand hyperlinks which didn’t make it to the
blog……an amazing archive of months of brain activity which, of course, needs a
bit more time to access……
The problem, of course, is when your brain switches off – as mine seems to have in the past couple of months!! Only 3-4 books have engaged my interest – eg Theodor Zeldin’s The Hidden Pleasures of Life; and, more recently, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything – a writer, I must confess, whose celebrity status had until now discouraged me from reading her stuff… This review explains why her new book is so well worth reading. But I have not been encouraged to excerpt either of these books….. nor to comment on the surprising victory of an old leftist in Labour’s leadership contest. Somehow I have lost my capacity to believe in the possibility of “change for the better”…..
The problem, of course, is when your brain switches off – as mine seems to have in the past couple of months!! Only 3-4 books have engaged my interest – eg Theodor Zeldin’s The Hidden Pleasures of Life; and, more recently, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything – a writer, I must confess, whose celebrity status had until now discouraged me from reading her stuff… This review explains why her new book is so well worth reading. But I have not been encouraged to excerpt either of these books….. nor to comment on the surprising victory of an old leftist in Labour’s leadership contest. Somehow I have lost my capacity to believe in the possibility of “change for the better”…..
I
have, in the past decade, become increasingly sceptical of the writings
in my own professional field about the possibilities
of “reform” efforts actually improving public affairs and services for the
better - but I had still been a bit shocked this year by the pessimistic tone
of some of the post-mortems which key political science figures have been
delivering on their retirements after
some 40 years of analysis and exhortations…..
If
that’s how the key figures feel about their work, what hope is there for the
rest of us?
I
hope shortly to upload an early version of the 2015 E-book and share some of my
preliminary thoughts about the task I set myself……
The photo is one of series I have of marvellous Uzbek terra cotta figures which I acquired in Tashkent in the 3 years I spent there from 1999
The photo is one of series I have of marvellous Uzbek terra cotta figures which I acquired in Tashkent in the 3 years I spent there from 1999
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