recent literary greats

Still in Bucharest – but an American article bemoaning the “fodder” (as the author put it) which the “urban middle class proletariat” there has been fed with over the past 20 years
encouraged me to review my list of literary greats drawn up in March.
I had noticed then that European writers constituted about half of the list and, on review today, I could add only Amos Oz and Andrew Greig from my recent reading – as well as the catalogue of travelogues. North American writers were represented by only Carol Shields (Canada) and Richard Yates (Saul Bellow should certainly be on the list but I would still resist John Updike). Some of the respondents failed to spot that the author was in fact focussing on the poverty of modern USA writing and suggested, sensibly, that he would be better off with a less parochial reading list which would include Latin American, European, Chinese and middle eastern literature. Their recommendations referred me to writers such as WG Sebald, John Banville and Qiu Xiaolong whose books I have not so far read – and which I have now ordered from Amazon.
On more critical matters, two articles about the difficult scenarios we now face – on such basic respources as waterand food

Visibility and the art market

My first days in Romania were in the dark days (or rather nights – the lighting was appalling) of 1991. When I had a proper base (mid 1990s) I would buy the odd painting for decoration but was hardly a serious connaisseur let alone collector. Paintings only made an impact on me in May 2008 when I stumbled into the Phillippopolis Gallery in Plovdiv on the central plains of Bulgaria. I was bowled over and emerged, after my first visit, with 1940s seascapes by 2 renowned Bulgarian painters (Mario Zhekov and Alexandra Mechkuevska) neither of whom I had ever heard and with rustic scenes by 2 younger unknown painters. A later visit netted another famous seascape artist of the 1940s Alexander Moutafov – this time a river scene. Since then I have become friendly with the owners of several Sofia galleries and have almost 50 Bulgarian paintings – and still collecting. By the standards of the Bulgarian realist school, the Romanian paintings I could see here simply did not compare. And the small galleries in Bucharest are managed in a very different way from Bulgaria. There is little feel here of the passion and interest there – except that of money. And that goes for both the low and high end of the market. The low end clusters around the Matache market not far from the Gara de Nord – and are in fact antique shops with few paintings. Most are dark and primitive. I have not ventured into many of the up-market galleries – since they smack so much of bijou investments and big money. But a visit yesterday to the preliminary viewings for a major auction tomorrow (in the Opera House) by Artmark altered one of my attitudes and confirmed another. I realised first that Romanian painting of the first part of the 20th century (my favourite period) was in fact much better than I had thought – the catalogue which you can download will show you what I mean. It’s simply that it’s rarely on public display - whereas the numerous private galleries in Sofia and the municipal galleries throughout Bulgaria have lots of such work to see. There can be only 2 reasons for their invisibilty in Romania – either that state museums are hoarding them or they have been bought up by individuals and private companies. And my suspicion that art has become a commodity in Romania but not yet in Bulgaria was confirmed first by the prices expected at tomorrow’s auction – 150,000 euros minimum for a painting by Romania's most famous paineter - Grigurescu (In Bulgaria the country's favourites go for a maximum of 15,000 euros). One of Artmark’s Directors actually produced a book we could purchase which plotted the annual price changes of the Romanian imptressionist and post-impressionist painters on auction – and told us that the Raiffesen Bank had a special loan scheme for investing in paintings! He alos told us he expected 1,000 at Thursday's auction - whereas the Viktoria Gallery auctions in the Sheraton never attract more than 100.
All of this says a lot about the two societies.....Viktoria are actually auctioning tomorrow - and at Varna 4 hours' drive away - but it clashes with the Artmark one which is worth visiting as a bit of social observation.

Life again

The British Labour party has a new Leader again – after a 4 month campaign. I found it hard to work up any real enthusiasm for the candidates since all 4 males seemed to have had the same sort of ambitious, tribal, fast-track careers with no experience of real life before they became the Ministers they had all recently been. Andrew Rawnsley always hoovers up the details of political life – and today’s piece and the public comments which follow are a good summary of the challenge which Ed Miliband now faces.
The article looked back at lessons from others who faced such challenges eg Margaret Thatcher when she seemd to face electoral oblivion in 1983 – a commentator put the matter starkly

If this is 1983 again There will be no Faulklands this time to pull you out of the shit; No north sea oil; no public utilities to sell; no miners to blame; no SDP (you already have them); No council houses left to sell.

The Foley and Jones books I mentioned yesterday are both clever musings about the complexities and contradictions of life – and what people can do to make life bearable if not happy. Foley is a bit academic, amusing if not downright cynical; Jones warmer, more open to the experiences and thoughts of ordinary people while still calling to aid famous writers of the past. Neither, however, looks at the wider happiness industry which has been with us for the past hundred years or so – although Foley does have a good dig at the self-esteem bit of it. One of the books which await me on my shelves is one which apparently savages the positive thinking approach which has become so fashionable in America - Smile or Die.
Ealier this year I decided to see whether the new offerings of positive psychologists had any useful insights and bought Martin Seligman’s hyped Authentic Happinessand Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind.
Perhaps I wasn’t in the mood or just tried to read too quickly but I didn’t find either all that novel or convincing. Like most people, I am interested in these issues – although I find the historical and comparative approach the more acceptable eg the useful summary 50 Self-Help Classics or, much more critically, The Happiness Myth – why what we think is right is wrong by Jennifer Hecht.

But I have to confess that I still find the John Cleese and Robin SkynnerLife - and how to survive it published in 1994 the most useful. A therapist and leading British comic (!) have a Socratic dialogue about the principles of healthy (family) relationships and then use these to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies: and for leadership viz -
• valuing and respecting others
• ability to communicate
• willingness to wield authority firmly but always for the general welfare and with as much consultation as possible while handing power back when the crisis is over)
• capacity to face reality squarely
• flexibility and willingness to change
• belief in values above and beyond the personal or considerations of party.
On the anniversary of my mother's birthday, I have attached a rare picture of my mum, sister and me - in 1948 or so!!!

depression and massacres

The glorious weather has broken – and mist is swirling around the hills. So my thick soup for breakfast. Yesterday the reading was a bit harrowing – picking up Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity – why modern life makes it hard to be happy from where I had left him (a week or so ago) bemoaning the misery which seems to the lot of a lot of Brits, moving on to Utopian Dreams whose author, Tobia Jones, takes the same starting point but then spends some time in some special communities in Italy and England to see if they have any answers to our existential Angst. I finish the day learning for the first time about the events from 1914 which left more than half of Smyrna (Izmir) on the Aegean coast being burned to the ground in September 1922 and unknown thousands of Greeks and Armenians slaughtered either on site or in later forced marches. I knew of the Armenian massacres during the First World War – and of the massive exchange of Greek and Turkish populations which took place after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire but nothing of this particular tragedy brought on by a combination of Lloyd George’s misjudgement and Greek political ambition.
In summer 2002 we saw several of the abandoned Greek villages as we drove around the Aegean and I have on my shelf here a terra cotta vase from the area where, I now learn, at least half a million people were trapped by flames, the sea and Turkish soldiers ninety years earlier. Strange how we are allowed to forget! One of the powerful aspects of the story is how a few individuals could make a difference – on the positive side a Turk,Rahmi Bey Governor of Smyrna from 1914 who protected the majority Christian population from the violence which was occurring elsewhere essentially by ignoring all orders which came from Constantinople. But he was eventually sacked in 1918 by the post-war Turkish government, wrongly imprisoned by the Brits in Malta with other members of the previous government and eventually released to spend his last days in Casablanca. When the Greeks were stupidly allowed (by Llloyd George) into Smyrna, several hundred innocent Turkish citizens were slaughtered by Greek soldiers – but their ringleaders were punished by the new Greek Governor, Aristeidis Stergiadis, who then set out to rule fairly for the various communities. The third person to demonstrate immense courage and convision and show what an individual can achieve when the world is collapsing was an American, Asa Jennings who set out single-handedly (and with no authority) to arrange the rescue of thousands of the trapped – mainly by bullying of 40 Greek captains whose empty ships were sitting useless at a nearby island while people burned.

In Utopian Dreams Jones undertakes a series of sojourns inside ‘modern, self contained communities’ in order to ‘cross-examine the values by which we, in the so-called “real world”, live’. Jones’s pilgrimage is a journey of existential exploration, a genuine attempt to discover a way of life that will answer a personal desire for something better – a desire sparked by a sense of dissatisfaction with several (apparently disparate but actually linked) aspects of contemporary life in the ‘real world’. Jones outlines the problem with modern life, explores a series of proposed solutions lived out in community and, to his evident surprise, discovers one such solution that he can embrace for himself.

More than half of my friends or relatives have been on anti-depressants. Me too. Many still have blips and have on-off relationships with their therapists years after the initial darkness descended . . . Everyone seems caught up in a vortex of debonair desperation. We’re all yearning for perfect relationships at the same time as insisting that rootedness and belonging are alien to our vaunted autonomy.

Jones diagnoses ‘the real world’ as suffering symptoms caused by a philosophical disease, a linked combination of ideas that underpin contemporary western culture but which have disastrous consequences. Principle among these disastrous ideas, for Jones, is the idea that freedom of choice is an unqualified and absolute good:

We’re miserable despite enjoying a freedom which is unprecedented in human history . . . it’s deeply unfashionable to offend those twin objects of modern desire, choice and rights. But they have become millstones around our neck, hindering our ability to raise our voices to other virtues. I want to get back on the road not to contradict rights and choice, but to find the complementary virtues they require to remain themselves virtuous.

Foley’s book balances the profound and the profane. Drawing on philosophy, religion, history, psychology and neuroscience, he explores the things that modern culture is either rejecting or driving us away from:

Responsibility – we are entitled to succeed and be happy, so someone/thing else must be to blame when we are not
• Difficulty – we believe we deserve an easy life, and worship the effortless and anything that avoids struggle (as Foley points out, this extends even to eating oranges: sales are falling as peeling them is now seen as too demanding and just so, you know, yesterday …)
• Understanding – a related point, as understanding requires effort, but where we once expected decision-making to involve rationality, we moved through emotion to intuition (usually reliable) and – more worryingly – impulse (usually unreliable), a tendency that Foley sees as explaining the appeal of fundamentalism (“which sheds the burden of freedom and eliminates the struggle to establish truth and meaning and all the anxiety of doubt. There is no solution as satisfactory and reassuring as God.”)
• Detachment – we benefit from concentration, autonomy and privacy, but life demands immersion, distraction, collaboration and company; by confusing self-esteem (essentially external and concerned with our image to others) with self-respect (essentially internal and concerned with our self-image), we further fuel our sense of entitlement – and our depression, frustration and rage when we don’t get what we ‘deserve’
• Experience – captivated by the heightened colour, speed, and drama of an edited on-screen life, our attention span is falling and ‘attention’ (at least in the West) is something we pay passively rather than actively and mindfully

anthropological approach to public admin

Cloudless skies for the past few days – and so many books piling up for attention. Two UPS packages from Amazon in the past 2 days - and at least two more on the way. I’m still trying to finish Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry and Philip Blond’s Red Tory and am well into Paradise Lost; Smyrna 1922 The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance - one of 3 books I have recently bought about the horrific massacres and ethnic cleansings which affected Turks, Greeks and Armenians in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire. It was, however, Andrew Greig’s novel In Another Light which seduced me from the very moment I pulled it from the package.
Here is a writer (Scottish) who crafts his words and sentences with sheer poetry. His writing gives a sense of the fragility of life and therefore the momentousness of what we do. The narrative switches in time between the 1920s and the present and in place between Penang and the Orkneys as a son tries to trace aspects of his long dead father’s life. Despite the unusual slowness with which I read the book, I finished it in the day.
In between, I ploughed through a couple of the many academic articles I am presently able to download from the Sage journals (particularly American Review of Public Administration and International Journal of Administrative Sciences) to which free access is possible until mid-October. Ploughing is the word for the denseness of the prose. One (on the experience of strategic management in the public sector) by a writer I normally admire (John Brysen) turned out to have been poisoned by post-modernist pesticide. The other (by RAW Rhodes) had a promising topic and title - Everyday Live in a Minstry – Public Administration as anthropology but was also ultimately disappointing for both its ethnographical theorising and pawny results. It told us no more than we already knew from such TV series as The Thick of It and Yes Minister - namely how very shallow and cynical what passes for policy-making in government actually is.
On my various foreign assignments, I have always tried to get into the skin of my client – asking for their appointment diaries, for example, arranging to shadow them, inviting them to give me some examples of the cases they handled in a particular week. Such an approach is, sadly, not encouraged by the rigidity which the project management approach has inflicted on Technical Assistance. The best critique of this is Lucy Earle’s Lost in the Logframe paper – which you will find as paper 8 on my website

You may or may not have noticed that another of my beefs is the disregard and disrespect for the past which our worship of the contemporary carries. That’s why I always enjoy when a book’s birthday is marked. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd made a mark on me in the 1960s (although it’s not in the list of significant books I compiled almost a year ago) – and is celebrated in the thoughtful Chronicle of Higher Education
Finally a useful piece in Der Spiegel about the costs of green power.

Fleeing the enemy

Few people blog seriously on a daily basis. You simply run out of thoughts – or get diverted by life or novels. And my excuse for the silence of the past few days is that Ive been hooked on the atmosphere and characters of Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy - which covers the travails of a British Council staffer and his new wife in Bucharest in the months before the German troops arrived in 1940, their escape to Athens and the intrigues and dangers they face there too. The sense of transience and uncertainty is well caught – with Harriet and Guy Pringle embodying such different views of people and life – Guy the gullible, sociable left-winger; Harriet the romantic realist. I’d no sooner finished thatbook than I was fleeing the Bolsheviks with Lev Nussimbaum – the amazing character born in Baku in 1905 or so to a rich jewish family (with a communist mother who commited suicide)which was twice chased out of the city by uprisings. During the first communist soviet, they went east across the Caspian to what we now know as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and back via Iran; in 1917 when the Russians took over, the father and son escaped separately north to Georgia, then west across the Black Sea to Istanbul. From these and other fantastic pre-war experiences (reconstructed from notebooks discovered by Tom Reiss in The Orientalist - in search of a man caught between east and west), Nussenbaum wrote books under various names – mostly socio-econmomic (one about Stalin with whom he claimns to have conversed at his Baku home when young). But his most famous is his great love story Ali and Nina – which is a celebration of life in Baku before the killings and published under another of his pseudonyms, Kurban Said. Reiss’s book is quite riveting – and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Caucasus.

Anyway I’ve discovered one original and tireless voice amongst the bloggers to whom I can turn for both information and provocation – Boffy’s blog. He had a good post recently on one option for the current British economic problems
And also his interesting thoughts on pension funds.

Finally a booklet from the Institute of Development Studies which addresses the issue I;ve been wrestling with for some years about the inappropriateness of much instituion-building in fragile states.

If building best-practice institutions in poor countries is not a short-term option, and if relationships between private investors and public authority are likely to remain highly personalised and informal in the medium term, the question becomes in what circumstances might such relationships lead to productive investment rather than crony capitalism? That is the issue addressed by this stream of the CFS research.

a few words in favour of anarchism

The priest’s singing was echoing around the hills the last 2 days – the new priest has had a broadcasting system fitted so that we are all involved in the services. The call to worship starts with what sounds like a wooden drumbeat which quickens to merge into the peel of bells. It’s actually a long wooden instrument called a Toaca which is struck against wood. The last 2 days have apparently been celebrating The Elevation of the Venerable Cross – on Tuesday I came across my neighbour reading a bible as his wife was at church. But village ways continued – as his 2 sheep were slaughtered in his yard on Wednesday. Coincidentally this morning, Valentin Mandache’s posting was about village life here – and is worth a look.
Yesterday was busy – with the sawing removal of the branches I had cut last week which were threatening our electricity line (yes we do have electricity!); varnishing of the terrace; and erection of a lamp for the terrace. Daniela was very proud of her first piece of electrical work! We duly toasted her success with the local Palinka in the twilight.
I don’t think the word “anarchism” has yet appeared on this blog – and yet it is a strand of thinking to which I have always been drawn. And I have to recognise that my recent interest in systems thinking and my more long-standing revulsion against construction and many aspects of modernity is rooted in that approach. The villages here are fairly self-sufficient. Some other blogs have also been musing on this – first the blog which is devoted to complexity and development. Then one of my favourite blogs
And finally an article about one of the guys who first disposed me in the direction of anarachism – Ivan Illich

limits of political power

When policies, institutions or leaders fail, they are quickly replaced by others. I have often wondered about how few people pose the simple question “Why should we believe it will be any better with this?” In the 1970s, academics gave a lot of attention to policy failure and problems of implementation. Indeed it was an important intellectual strand in the breakdown of the post-war consensus allowing the rise of neo-liberalism. And the Cabinet Office of the new Labour Government of 1997 recognised that implementation issues needed as much attention as policies themselves. Those who think in linear fashion credit leaders, managers, institutions and policies with power they simply do not have. System thinkers and marxists in their very different ways recognise this. Systems thinkers would urge experimentation and decentralisation. I am less ceratin of the practical steps Marxists would suggest for our various social and economic ills.
These thoughts were sparked off by a good essay on the Open Democracy site by Jeremy Gilbert about the current Labour leadership contest which poses a basic question no one has really posed - How did Blair, the advocate of a communitarian politics,
weakly informed by the traditions of Christian socialism and Catholic social teaching, become Blair the fanatical advocate of merciless market liberalisation? And why on earth should we imagine that the next Leader will not also betray the promises of the campaign?

There is a simple answer to this question available, which is to say that in any society dominated by liberal capitalism, political opposition from either right or left will inevitably find itself having to make communitarian noises, because the lack of community is the most obvious failing of a competitive market society and one which most of its inhabitants will keenly feel. Isn’t this what ‘The Big Society’ is all about, along with ideas of ‘Red Tory’ Philip Blond?
Just as with New Labour, but in a shorter time frame, we’ve witnessed an opposition come to power speaking a language of community and fairness, only to see it bow to the demands of the financial markets and the Whitehall monetarists by promising a historic assault on the remaining institutions of social democracy.
We must then assume that the story was similar, if slower, for Blair: pressure from elites in the City, the Civil Service and the media, gradually winning him over to the cause of full-blown neoliberalism. David Miliband and Jon Cruddas would probably argue - with some justification - that Blair’s personal commitment to communitarianism had never been run very deep, and that their own is far more serious. But this is really beside the point. Whatever his personal convictions or lack of them, Blair was elected leader of the party on a prospectus almost identical to that which they now propose, but within 5 years was trying to drive a programme informed by an almost diametrically opposite set of principles; and the party was apparently powerless to stop him.

The question which this leaves open for all of the Labour leadership contenders, or their supporters is: why should we believe that their leadership will be any different? How will they react when their civil seravnts and their friends with the yachts and the hedge funds and the influential newspapers, tell them that, no matter what they might once have believed, what they have to do now is to cut taxes and privatise public services?
Will they have put in place institutions and a movement which enables them to resist such pressure better than New Labour - bereft of any real political or social base after its deliberate evisceration of the party’s democratic structures - was able to? Should we trust any of them to resist the seductive pressure to defend the interest of the elite of which they have themselves become a member? Most importantly of all: will they at least acknowledge that such pressure will inevitably be brought to bear, and will reveal genuine conflicts of interest within our society between the rich and the poor, the employers and the employees, the upper-band tax-payers and the low-paid hospital cleaners?

Right now, there are at least two possible futures implicit in the forms and symbols of modernisation which we can see all around us: an world of vicious competition, new forms of authoritarianism and a dreadful narrowing of personal and collective aspirations; a YouTube world in which the authority of centralised media and corporate capital is severely weakened by the power of decentralised democracy and collective creativity. The latter is a real possibility, immanent to the most transformatory tendencies of our age, but it will prove unrealisable without a programme of institutional and democratic transformation far more radical than anything envisaged even in the days of Labour’s halting half-conversion to the cause of constituional reformin 1992.

Of course, we know which world all of the Labour contenders would say they want to lead us to. But then the question comes back round again, almost unchanged: will they recognise that there are powerful forces which will try to stop them, to push them in the other direction, to ensure that it is only Murdoch’s version of modernity that can possibly triumph, and that ‘community’ becomes just an alibi for the decimation of public services? Will they tell us what they plan to do about it when such pressure is brought to bear? Until they do, I’m reluctant to vote for any of them