scything days and the state of universities

The day has dawned idyllic - and no further excuses therefore for avoiding the scything which the tall grass around the house demands! Elsewhere in the village yesterday, the work was getting underway - the occasional sharpening of the blades echoing around the place.
Eurozine is a useful European (electronic?) journal which selects articles and themes from offbeat cultural journals throughout the region and focuses in its latest issue on the discontent which is apparently rife at the moment in European universities - see http://www.eurozine.com/articles/article_2010-07-01-editorial-en.html

what football performance tells us

Don Paskini's blog (http://don-paskini.blogspot.com/) had a powerful point recently about the lessons from the performances of the English and German teams in the World Cup which I reproduce in full.
English football is run in the interests of very wealthy people. Ticket prices are extremely high and unaffordable for many families on middle or lower incomes. There are even regulations which tell football supporters that they are not allowed to stand and watch their team play. Fans of top teams pay huge sums of money to watch live football, money which goes to multi millionaire footballers and owners of football teams. Those who choose instead to watch football on the telly pay hundreds of pounds per year to Rupert Murdoch. Many clubs have seen their budgets for investment slashed, and their revenues spent on servicing the debts which their owners have run up. A tiny fraction of this money trickles down from the millionaires to grassroots football clubs, and clubs at all levels of the game have been caught in a financial crisis, with many threatened by closure.

German football is run in the interests of the supporters. Ticket prices are kept low so that supporters can go and watch, and can even stand if they want. Regulations mean that at least 51% of every football club is owned by the supporters, unless a company can show that it has invested in the club for at least twenty years. Those who choose to watch football on the telly have benefited from the most competitive free TV market in the world. German football clubs made a profit, rather than running up debts, thanks to lower spending on players' wages. In recent years, German clubs have massively increased their investment in youth academies, and the national team has benefited from the liberalisation of the immigration laws in 1999, to the point where they proudly talk about how they are the "multicultural" or "liberation" generation. The Bundesliga is more unpredictable and exciting than the Premier League, and we all know what happened on Sunday.

English society is run in the interests of very wealthy people. The cost of housing, child care and social care is unaffordable for many families on middle or lower incomes. There are all sorts of petty regulations which tell ordinary people what they are and aren't allowed to do. People pay huge sums of money for basic services which goes to multi millionaires. The media is dominated by a small cartel of multi millionaires, most notably Rupert Murdoch. The government is slashing its budgets for investment, and our revenues are spent on servicing the debts which the bankers have run up. A tiny fraction of this money trickles down from the millionaires to grassroots community groups, and charities and small businesses have been caught in a financial crisis, with many threatened by closure.

If we want to improve our chances in the next World Cup and stop many of our clubs from going bankrupt, we could learn a lot from the Germans. We could organise the game around the convenience of fans, rather than the Glazers and other multi millionaire owners. We could slash ticket prices, and scrap petty regulations on supporters. At the same time, we could impose new regulations to stop rich people from buying football clubs in order to asset strip them and stop them from paying their debts by squeezing fans dry. We could break up media cartels and increase the amount we invest in our young people, as well as welcoming people from all around the world who have chosen to come to live and work here.

But it strikes me that these same principles which have made German football better than ours - putting ordinary people first, making sure it is affordable to go and watch a football game, regulating the anti-social activities of rich asset strippers, investing in developing young people and being proud of multiculturalism and tolerance - are also ones which are more generally applicable to how to improve our society.

access at last

A trip into Brasov got me a new laptop (Windows 7 and also extended keyboard which I find a nuisance) - and fast internet connection - as well as garden instruments to help deal with the overgrown grass.
One of the few things I've lost is my collection of photographs - so bear with me while I build up a new stock. I am amazed at how little the PC producers understand about our needs - namely to have the same keyboard configurations! How much it fucks us up to ahve these new elements!!!!
The rainy weather continues - yesterday I consumed poet Gyurgy Faludy's incredible My Happy Days in Hell about his life in pre-war Hungary, France, then Morroco and USA before he returned to Communist Hungary for inevitable torture and imprisonment. A stunning prose poem of the 20th century!

words are important

Great frustration – my windows system won’t open and I have lost the recent material I hadn’t saved on hard disc. Fortunately I noticed some warning signals and had copied individually most of the hundreds of websites I have. And, equally fortunately, we have a spare notebook.
Interesting discussion triggered off by "transparency" - another bit of technical jargon which serves wider political purposes which the foreward to Tony Judt's Reappraisals touches on namely the amnesia which overwhelms current society.
The Compassionate Mind (which I'm struggling through)suggests that, as individuals at any rate, we don't live enough in the present. But, arguably, as a society we live too much in the present and don't try to lean the lessons of the past. "Transparency" covers the issues once covered by participation (1960s); consultation (1970s) and open government (1990s). Why do we need a new word? Partly to pretend that we've just discovered a new issue; to cover up the fact that previous efforts failed; and to make sure that the new efforts will also run into the sand. Here is an example of collusion between elite interests and those of the academic scribblers and technocrats whose specialisations are a form of product differentiation to secure their incomes.

appreciative inquiry

The World Bank is actually beginning to produce readable documents! Some time ago, they started a newssheet called People, Spaces, Deliberation which is sent out bi-weekly. It aims to explore the link between public opinion and governance issues – and its publications look in detail at the communications process. Most often it is outsider practitioners who contribute. Today’s issue has a piece on appreciative inquiry on which I had downloaded recently a couple of google books – but to which I had not paid proper attention. I found a good short summary of the AI approach in this paper -
I hadn’t appreciated that it rejects the “problem-orientation” approach – choosing to identify and work on the positives of an organisation. This took me back to discussions we had in the late 1970s when those of who developed Strathclyde Regions’s deprivation strategy anguished that our selection of areas of multiple deprivation could compound the negative forces at work.
Google scholar actually gave me a 300 page book Locating the energy for change – an introduction to appreciative inquiry; Charles Elliott (1999). Incidentally you can sign on to the WB newssheet by writing to commgap@worldbank.org

I've chosen this photo of one of our sessions in 2006 in Atbashi, north Kyrgyzstan - partly as a homage to those who are suffering in that country at the moment and partly as an illustration of the process of dialogue and change.

weather for reading

gloomy mist all around the house at my 1,300 metre level. At 07.00 the light is so poor that I need the lamp to read Andrew Robert's The Story of war - a new history of the second world war. I'm also dipping into one of the early Le Carre novels - and staring Tony Judt's Reappraisals. An earlier blog referred to historian Judt's latest book (Ill fares the Land). This one is a collection of the trenchant essays he has written on various European figures such as Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Eric Hobsbawm, Kennedy, Kissinger, Arthur Koestler and Edward Said. His theme is the role of ideas - and our forgetfulness....A wonderful writer - and his Post-war Europe remains not only one of the few treatments of this subject which includes central europe (Garton Ash is the only other historian who has done central europe justice) but the most eloquent and passionate.
So far this morning, the find has been a prolific EU Think Tank which focusses on the neglected field of the EU's democracy programme. Ive downloaded interesting papers on its strategy in Central Asia, for exampe.

obituaries, catalogues and stocktaking

Its a sign of my advancing years that every day seems to bring sad news of the death of a writer who has been significant for me. Yesterday brought news of Norman McCrae's demise. He had long been associated with The Economist journal - and wrote prescient essays on debureaucratisation and the end of communism in the early/mid 1980s - see here for a good obituary. The weather continues damp and overcast - a good excuse for sitting at the desk with the excellent Romanian classic music channel in the background and catching up with my internet. Trying to do a quick-save of the hundred of favourite website and blogs as recommended on yahoo answers gives me less than half the sites I have - so I decide to go through each and save manually. Its a ueful stocktaking - particuarly of the blogs.
Trying to track down some Slovak painters of the mid 20th century made me realise what a good buy the Bulgarian painters of that period are. I see that I missed a Victoria auction at Sofia's Serdica Hotel on 1 June (see their site in the list of my favourites) and must try to get down to the next one.

The picture is one of the sketches I bought in Sofia of Marco Behar's.
Found yesterday a rare example of commentary (in English) on Bulgarian painting -
And have just ordered from Amazon (amongst other delights such as a collection of Updike essays) the 4th volume (400 pages) of an early 20th century history of European painting (by country) by one Richard Muther.
I showed the French artist the 2 volumes (covering the letter P) I have of the Romanian national gallery's Catalogue - he was fascinated and asked if my job involved painting! I have the Belgian and Bulgarian Catalogues. They are a delightful thing to collect!

Murder in the mediterranean and Osh

With the travel and visits in the past 2 months, and only fleeting access to the internet, I have not been able to make any comments about what’s happening in the world – particularly in the waters off Gaza and in southern Kyrgyzstan. On the murders of Turk humanitarians by SAS people, all I can say in response to the pathetic rationalisation of the murderers is how do the Israelis expect people to behave when they launch an attack on a defenceless ship? A few days later I read of how the Nazis had treated the residents of a village whose men-folk had dared defend themselves against their attack in the early 1940s. They massacred the women and children – just like the Israelis. How quickly do the victims become the perpetrators!
We all knew in Bishkek in 2005 just how many guns there were in the Osh area – but horrifying how quickly they have been used to institute ethnic killings on a Yugoslav scale. And Putin’s Russia just stands by and watches – as they did on the edge of Warsaw in 1945. When will we ever learn? For the human aspects of the situation there read this Spiegel piece-


And I was stunned to learn of the death of Fred Halliday who wrote so eloquently about the middle east.Open Democracy has a tribute which gives a good sense of what we have lost see -