Refracted Input

Clare O’Farrell’s blog on books, TV, films, Michel Foucault, universities etc. etc.

C.S. Lewis on writing

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

March 29, 2024

This quotation from C.S. Lewis has been doing the rounds of both the writers’ and fountain pen communities. I quite like it – even if I find some of Lewis’s other output a bit too unbearably pompous for modern tastes. It appears on the back dust jacket of a recent collection edited by David C. Downing: C. S. Lewis, On Writing (and Writers), A Miscellany of Advice and Opinions, Harper One, 2022.

“Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.”

Originally from The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 30 May, 1916

Cactus collectors

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

December 2, 2023

I’m endlessly interested by the surprising enthusiasms people engage in and the lengths they will go to pursue them. This book on cactus collectors looks like a fascinating read. I’ve added it to my to read list.

Jared D. Margulies, The Cactus Hunters. Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade, Minnesota University Press, 2023

Jared Margulies In Conversation With Samantha Walton. Podcast, 14 November 2023

An exploration of the explosive illegal trade in succulents and the passion that drives it.

Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, Jared D. Margulies explores the mystery of why ardent lovers of these plants engage in their illicit trade—even at the risk of driving some species to extinction. A heady blend of international intrigue, social theory, botanical lore, and ecological study, The Cactus Hunters offers complex insight into species extinction, conservation, and more-than-human care.

Cacti and succulents are phenomenally popular worldwide among plant enthusiasts, despite being among the world’s most threatened species. The fervor driving the illegal trade in succulents might also be driving some species to extinction. Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, The Cactus Hunters takes us to the heart of this conundrum: the mystery of how and why ardent lovers of these plants engage in their illicit trade. This is a world of alluring desires, where collectors and conservationists alike are animated by passions that at times exceed the limits of law.

What inspires the desire for a plant? What kind of satisfaction does it promise? The answer, Jared D. Margulies suspects, might be traced through the roots and workings of the illegal succulent trade—an exploration that traverses the fields of botany and criminology, political ecology and human geography, and psychoanalysis. His globe-spanning inquiry leads Margulies from a spectacular series of succulent heists on a small island off the coast of Mexico to California law enforcement agents infiltrating a smuggling ring in South Korea, from scientists racing to discover new and rare species before poachers find them to a notorious Czech “cacto-explorer” who helped turn a landlocked European country into the epicenter of the illegal succulent trade.

A heady blend of international intrigue, social theory, botanical lore, and ecological study, The Cactus Hunters offers complex insight into species extinction, conservation, and more-than-human care.

Jared D. Margulies is assistant professor of political ecology in the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama. His work has been published in leading academic journals across the fields of social, cultural, and political geography; political ecology; the conservation social sciences; and environmental humanities.

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this reference

New fountain pen: Wancher Japan Red

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

November 29, 2023

Recently, I have been taking a deep dive into the surprisingly flourishing global subculture of fountain pens. I was introduced to fountain pens at school and in 1980 settled on a Targa by Sheaffer in Brushed Stainless Steel with a steel nib (model 1001) powered by Parker Quink black ink. I have been writing with this combination ever since.

It is only recently I have discovered fountain pens have revived with an absolute cornucopia of pen, ink and paper choices out there. Another new realisation: one can actually own more than one “good pen” (biros, rollerballs, felt tips etc don’t count).

With these realisations in hand, I launched out and ordered a Wancher Japan Red fountain pen from Japan. This is built on a Sailor Professional Gear base. Sailor, I have learned, is a top end Japanese pen brand with an interesting history. The company was founded in 1911 in Japan by the engineer Kyugoro Sakata who was inspired by an English fountain pen shown to him by a visiting sailor.

I inked up my new arrival today with a matching red ink – one of a set of sample inks I ordered online. The pen is an absolute pleasure to write with. It’s actually better than my now ancient Sheaffer Targa.

It’s always a risk buying online without seeing or testing – even if a product has a really good reputation – so that’s a relief!

My next purchase will be a relatively cheap pen that apparently works well with shimmer and sheen inks which can potentially clog pens. TWSBI – a Taiwanese brand – is often cited in the fountain pen community as up to the job. At the same time, I will buy a small collection of sheen and shimmer inks and use them just with this dedicated pen. The particular model I have my eye on has a cap and piston knob that glow in the dark. It has to be done!

Reviews of the Japan blue
Review on the fountain pen network Note: the Red version has a 21k gold nib.

This post was composed on a keyboard.

Time in an immobile place

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

November 27, 2023

This post is a reminder to myself to get hold of and read Grafton Tanner’s new book. I don’t know if he refers to Foucault, but I can’t help but think of Foucault’s notions of heterotopia when I read the book description.

…the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general
archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms,
all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside
of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this
way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an
immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity (Foucault,
1967/1998).

Michel Foucault, Of other spaces, Trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, Spring 1986. (Original work published 1967), p.26

Book details below. And also a link to an interesting discussion with the author
Nostalgia’s Empire: A conversation with Grafton Tanner and Johny Pitts, Public Books, 6 August 2023

Grafton Tanner, Foreverism, Polity, November 2023

What do cinematic “universes,” cloud archiving, and voice cloning have in common? They’re in the business of foreverizing – the process of revitalizing things that have degraded, failed, or disappeared so that they can remain active in the present. To foreverize something is to reanimate it, to enclose and protect it from time and the elements, and to eradicate the feeling of nostalgia that accompanies loss. Foreverizing is a bulwark against instability, but it isn’t an infallible enterprise. That which is promised to last forever often does not, and that which is disposed of can sometimes last, disturbingly, forever.

In this groundbreaking book, American philosopher Grafton Tanner develops his theory of foreverism: an anti-nostalgic discourse that promises growth without change and life without loss. Engaging with pressing issues from the ecological impact of data storage to the rise of reboot culture, Tanner tracks the implications of a society averse to nostalgia and reveals the new weapons we have for eliminating it.

I will survive. Version by Cake (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

March 26, 2023

I proposed the notion of song covers as palimpsest earlier on this blog. This version and video of ‘I will survive’ by Cake forms a wonderful palimpsest on the famous Gloria Gaynor song from 1978 which became a number one hit in 1979. It went on to became an anthem in Disco Culture of the late 1970s and early 80s which took on the song to represent the empowerment of women, the African American and the gay communities. In 2016, the Library of Congress selected the song for preservation as culturally and aesthetically significant in the US National Recording Registry.

Cake’s version strips the song of its accrued historical glamour and takes it literally onto the streets into the most mundane and despised of jobs. We see a parking inspector who engages in his job without favour or discrimination driving a decidedly prosaic and faintly ridiculous electric cart. No-one is safe from his impersonal ticket writing. The dream of something beyond nonetheless shines through in the small glass figurines which appear briefly at intervals throughout the song – modest trophies of the tickets written, of a job well done. This story is intercut with the musicians playing on the go in a street between urban highrises. The mundanity is reinforced by the driver’s barebones but felt, diegetic performance of the song on the job rather than having the music take place off screen as a backdrop to the action.

The ending is reminiscent of the ending of Holy Motors – which sees limousines return to a depot, but in Cake’s version this return to the depot at the end of the day is stripped down to the ordinary, the industrialism of logistics, in contrast to the dark surreal ambiguity of Leos Carrax’s film. This creates another interesting palimpsest, more intertextuality inviting dream and reflection.

More than human cultural geographies

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

November 13, 2022

I’ve been interested for a while in challenging notions of human exceptionalism and the nature/human civilization divide. A definitional paper I’ve come across.

Carlos Roberto Bernardes de Souza Júnior, “More-than-human cultural geographies towards co-dwelling on earth.” Mercator – Revista de Geografia da UFC 20, no. (2021):1-10. Redalyc, https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=273665153007

Abstract:
Established as a counterpoint to culture-nature dualisms, the concept of more-than-human refers to the worlds of the different beings co-dwelling on Earth, including and surpassing human societies. Based on this notion and coming from different philosophical perspectives, including post-phenomenology, non-representational theory, eco-feminism, and post-humanism, cultural geographers have sought to broaden their interpretations to decipher the spatial multiplicities of living in the Anthropocene. This essay characterizes the more-than-human Cultural Geographies of Anglophone countries, which use artistic, literary, narrative, and experimental inter and transdisciplinary practices. ?ese approaches facilitate artistic, narrative, and creative geographical practices that create opportunities for immersion in and expression of shared worlds. Cultural geographers employ vital, atmospheric, affective, and corporeal studies to reveal complex multi-species arrangements of co-vulnerability and reciprocity experienced in modern-day places of tension. Understanding these earth-dwelling tessituras enables us to decipher terrestrial writings that contrapose hegemonic human exceptionalism.

Keywords: More-than-human Worlds, Anthropocene, Dwelling

Open plan offices in 2022

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

November 8, 2022

All the warnings of pre-pandemic researchers about open plan offices have of course come home to roost. The article below links to a new edition of a much awarded book by Joseph G. Allen and John D. Macomber titled Healthy Buildings first published in 2020 and updated in October 2022 with additional research conducted during the pandemic. Given the expense of the enactment of the open plan ideology pre-pandemic and the resistance of workers in returning to these buildings, it will be interesting to see at what rate any physical change occurs.

Warning: most of this article is behind a paywall but there is enough to give you the idea.

The healthiest way to design an office post-COVID means a lot of companies will need a complete overhaul
by L’Oreal Thompson Payton, Yahoo Finance. Tue, November 8, 2022 at 7:45 AM

Modern offices are in dire need of a makeover. The once-omnipresent open-plan offices of the early 2000s are now seeing a decline in popularity due to COVID and the rise in hybrid work settings. An op/ed from New York Times lambasted open-plan offices for their noise and damage to morale and productivity, as well as overall health.

“For 40 years, we’ve been in the sick building era,” says Joseph G. Allen, director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program and associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We have not designed, maintained or operated our buildings with health as the North Star. This has been well documented. But now with COVID, it became obvious that the way you operated your building determined whether people got sick or not and for many businesses determined whether they could stay open.”

As a result, Allen believes that healthy buildings have to become a core business strategy, so much so that he wrote a book about it with John D. Macomber, senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School. In their book, Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity, Allen and Macomber share The 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building:

The article above links to an excellent opinion piece by David Brooks in The New York Times titled: The Immortal Awfulness of Open Plan Workplaces

Oscar Wilde is said to have quipped that “God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.” Our species is capable of folly on a grand scale. Exhibit No. 4,000 in this litany of woe is the continued existence of open plan workplaces.

For decades, research has found that open plan offices are bad for companies, bad for workers, bad for health and bad for morale. And yet they just won’t die. Human beings, if they are to thrive, need a bit of privacy — walls and a door. And yet employers, decade after decade, neglect to give workers what they need, refuse to do what’s in their own self-interest.

read more

Twitter overload

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

October 23, 2022

I’ve found that recently I have been spending far too much time reading Twitter. As everyone knows the interfaces of various social media are deliberately designed to be addictive and the infinite scroll and chaotic ordering on Twitter was playing havoc with my researcher brain, trained over the years to find all the information and then put it in some kind of order.

So after having a look around for a solution, I found that I already had one on tap in another software program, namely Feedly, an RSS reader I have been using for many years. All I needed to do was upgrade my subscription to take advantage of its feature which allows the user to subscribe to specific Twitter accounts as RSS feeds. What this means is that I can now view the Twitter accounts in Feedly in separate chronological order under each individual account. I can also organise how they appear (titles, full article, magazine format, card format etc.) in my feed. In the screenshot below, I have organised them in title form which allows me to quickly scan to check if anything is of interest and then mark as read, which then hides them from my view. No infinite scroll, no chaotic ordering and once read, no more appearances in my current interface.

Helen Sword, ‘Write every day!’: a mantra dismantled (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

October 12, 2022

Reassuring findings for numerous academics – and other writers!

Helen Sword (2016) ‘Write every day!’: a mantra dismantled, International Journal for Academic Development, 21:4, 312-322,
DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2016.1210153

Abstract
Numerous books, blogs, and articles on research productivity exhort academics to ‘write every day’ even during the busiest of teaching times. Ironically, however, this research-boosting advice hangs from a perilously thin research thread. This article scrutinises the key findings of Robert Boice, whose pioneering studies of ‘professors as writers’ in the 1980s and 1990s are still widely cited today, and offers new empirical evidence to suggest that the writing practices of successful academics are in fact far more varied and individualistic than has generally been acknowledged in the literature.

Keywords: Academic writing, scholarly writing, research productivity, Robert Boice

History as story

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

June 16, 2022

I am currently watching an entertaining and well made Young Adult TV series – Dwight in Shining Armor. In one episode a random character, a history teacher, declares, “History is the story we tell about the events we have chosen to remember”. A nicely succinct formulation. No doubt a script writer who was dying to get this observation onto screen somehow!

Foucault, of course, made this point continuously throughout all his works.

Categories: TV•

Blog at WordPress.com.