He's looking at all the examples in the arts that relate to the fact of the future, and what we do in our fantasy life and in our very structured plans for utopias i.e. the imagination of a perfect world. He uses examples in literature and in music to elaborate what he means by human endeavors to explore and discuss the possibilities of hope in great detail; he refers to philosophers like Marx and other great philosophers such as Plato; and also relates these ideas to modern psychological theories. He wrote this very long original book as a refugee from Nazi Germany while living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is my town. He found a safe haven, where he could work out his ideas for this book: That in itself is an example of hope fulfilled. Copyright by Nicholas H. Van Vactor 2010.
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Monday 27 December 2010
Thursday 21 October 2010
Saturday 20 March 2010
CNN; Last week on Israel: Old News
In the last few days there has been some disagreement over how the Israelis regard Obama. People are saying he can't be trusted. Others say they like him. The Israelis thought that the announcement of the 1600 settlement buildings in East Jerusalem being built was bad PR during VP Biden's visit over a week ago. People were writing in, responding to "Cafferty: Time for U.S. to get tougher with Israel?" CNN's Jack Cafferty's blog, expressing negative opinion on the US giving two and a half billion $ a year in aid. In other words, the US should use that money as leverage to make Isael back away from more settlements and ease up on Palestine, specifically with regard to trade restrictions and needed outside aid coming in, and allow Palestinians more self-determination.
Tuesday 2 March 2010
Bersani's New Book: Panned
DECONSTRUCTED SELF by Leo Bersani. It's about Flaubert, the author of Madam Bovary. I couldn't finish it, it was so badly written. I expected it to be better, considering Bersani is a friend of David Ferry, a poet who won the National Book Award for his translation of Gilgamesh, a mythological Persian poem, but I found it impossible! I should have known not to trust a man's name that sounds like a spreadable cheese that's not real cheese.
The Impending Greek Default
In the second paragraph of The New York Times article printed Thursday, February 25, 2010 we read a lugubrious reminder, "Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers."
Does this sound familiar? When you buy mortgages that are below prime and they're owned by people who don't have sufficient income, and the price of their houses upon which the mortgage is based goes down, in other words, assets that are not backed up with value--Then people buy these swaps, which is like a form of insurance; but the trouble with these insurance policies is they're not regulated, so whether the insurance companies will actually pay the people who buy the policies is unlikely because they're not regulated by State or Federal Regulatory Agencies. It's like buying health insurance from a company that can't deliver when you get really sick.
Credit-Default swaps are a form of unregulated insurance. People are betting on a negative outcome. If Greece goes down so will the euro--And that's bad for American businessmen--therefore the dollar will go up and that will hurt American Exports, but it may help European Exports.
Does this sound familiar? When you buy mortgages that are below prime and they're owned by people who don't have sufficient income, and the price of their houses upon which the mortgage is based goes down, in other words, assets that are not backed up with value--Then people buy these swaps, which is like a form of insurance; but the trouble with these insurance policies is they're not regulated, so whether the insurance companies will actually pay the people who buy the policies is unlikely because they're not regulated by State or Federal Regulatory Agencies. It's like buying health insurance from a company that can't deliver when you get really sick.
Credit-Default swaps are a form of unregulated insurance. People are betting on a negative outcome. If Greece goes down so will the euro--And that's bad for American businessmen--therefore the dollar will go up and that will hurt American Exports, but it may help European Exports.
An earthquake in Chile in 1945; Professario Extrordinario
(The picture above is of David L. Van Vactor, my father, the composer's son) In 1945, during WWII, my grandfather David G. Van Vactor, 1906-1994, was sent to Santiago de Chile and other South American capitals by the US State Department to the National University of Chile ( see, www.rogerrhodesmusic.com/dvv_bio.htm ). He was flown down with a woodwind quintet. They were composers as well as musicians. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, after playing Solemn Variations written by my grandfather, received fourteen curtain calls. He spoke fluent Spanish and very good German and was on the radio there. He gave ten flute recitals of Baroque music and conducted a lot of symphony orchestras. (below is a picture of my grandfather, David G. Van Vactor, the composer)
David G. Van Vactor was repeatedly invited to conduct the symphony orchestra of Chile and had numerous pieces of his own composition played by the orchestra. The Chileans called him the "Professario Extrordinario." He had a significant influence on a lot of younger Chilean composers whose pieces he critiqued and discussed with them. My grandfather's great friend Domingo Santa Cruz ran all the music in Chile, and he was also a composer. When I say, all the music in Chile, I mean the opera, symphony and orchestra and the music department in the university.
In Chile my grandfather went to the top, the furthest north called la Serena and then to the furthest south called Puerto Mont and he also conducted a piece in La Concepcion, which is 70 miles away from where the epicenter of this most recent earthquake struck. A lot of Germans settled in la Concepcion, so my grandfather who spoke German could speak German to the orchestra.
When my father was seven years old with his older sister in a movie theatre watching King Kong in Chile, having been just dropped off by his parents, the movie screen moved suddenly, he said to me today, "we thought it was part of the movie. And then everybody in the theatre started to get out, to be ready to run out in case the building collapsed, but it didn't." This earthquake in 1945 was pretty tame in comparison to more recent ones. The really big one was in 1960, 9.5 on the Richter Scale.
Thursday 25 February 2010
Hollywood Cooper Meets Intellectual Rose
Over a month has passed since the earthquake in Haiti. People continue to suffer and die from the after-affects, but isn’t this old news? Still, new questions arise: Could the relief effort have gone better and if continued how to sustain it? Do we need the help of Hollywood to keep people glued to the TV?
A couple of comments from Anderson Cooper to Charlie Rose come to mind (from “Update on Haiti” with Robert Maguire, Dean Lorich, Anderson Cooper and Louisdon Pierre in Current Affairs); What really upset Anderson Cooper, who seems more a part of the entertainment industry than a proper journalist, was when someone in the park in front of the Presidential Palace, which had been destroyed, yelling out, “sunami, sunami,” which caused people to stampede, running for their lives, thinking a huge title wave was coming as a result of the earthquake, dropping all their belongings, so the cowardly person who yelled sunami could steel people’s belongings. In the Charlie Rose interview, Anderson Cooper was giving an eyewitness account—
Cooper was appalled by that behavior. I’m sure he saw, when food and water finally arrived, people fighting for it and pushing others out of the way so they couldn’t get what they desperately needed.
At one point Charlie Rose asked Cooper, “What about electricity?” Cooper responded that, there were certain places like the hotel he was staying in that ran a generator, but could only run it for a limited time. And he also commented on how scary it was when darkness fell, and city fell into total darkness. And one could understand that, what Cooper meant was how vulnerable people were to the thieves who were roaming the streets, dead bodies being piled on top of each other in the streets, the horror of the devastation. The cries of people who were buried under rubble, waiting for help, a woman who had her foot torn off, waiting for eighteen hours for medical attention, and how hard these horrible sights were to the people who had to report on it.
One may speculate that the Haitians did not welcome the arrival of the U.S. Marines to protect them, desperate as they were for help, because they must have been reminded of the years of U.S. occupation of Haiti.
Even when planes with supplies had landed they couldn’t get into Port au Prince with needed water, food and medical supplies because the roads were so covered in rubble.
The most important problem is how to rebuild the country and rebuild the buildings so they’re not vulnerable to earthquakes and to establish an agricultural basis so Haitians are economically self-sufficient, which also includes re-forestation, because they’ve cut down all the trees on the island.
Millions of dollars have been raised and even higher amounts have been pledged around the world and Haiti will need every penny of it. The question is: Once the media attention shifts to other crisis points, which it already has, will the public which responded by giving millions of dollars for aid, will this concern continue, and how to sustain that level of concern, and assure that the money that was raised will be spent in the way it was intended and not end up in the pockets of corrupt Haitian officials.
So what can you do?
A couple of comments from Anderson Cooper to Charlie Rose come to mind (from “Update on Haiti” with Robert Maguire, Dean Lorich, Anderson Cooper and Louisdon Pierre in Current Affairs); What really upset Anderson Cooper, who seems more a part of the entertainment industry than a proper journalist, was when someone in the park in front of the Presidential Palace, which had been destroyed, yelling out, “sunami, sunami,” which caused people to stampede, running for their lives, thinking a huge title wave was coming as a result of the earthquake, dropping all their belongings, so the cowardly person who yelled sunami could steel people’s belongings. In the Charlie Rose interview, Anderson Cooper was giving an eyewitness account—
Cooper was appalled by that behavior. I’m sure he saw, when food and water finally arrived, people fighting for it and pushing others out of the way so they couldn’t get what they desperately needed.
At one point Charlie Rose asked Cooper, “What about electricity?” Cooper responded that, there were certain places like the hotel he was staying in that ran a generator, but could only run it for a limited time. And he also commented on how scary it was when darkness fell, and city fell into total darkness. And one could understand that, what Cooper meant was how vulnerable people were to the thieves who were roaming the streets, dead bodies being piled on top of each other in the streets, the horror of the devastation. The cries of people who were buried under rubble, waiting for help, a woman who had her foot torn off, waiting for eighteen hours for medical attention, and how hard these horrible sights were to the people who had to report on it.
One may speculate that the Haitians did not welcome the arrival of the U.S. Marines to protect them, desperate as they were for help, because they must have been reminded of the years of U.S. occupation of Haiti.
Even when planes with supplies had landed they couldn’t get into Port au Prince with needed water, food and medical supplies because the roads were so covered in rubble.
The most important problem is how to rebuild the country and rebuild the buildings so they’re not vulnerable to earthquakes and to establish an agricultural basis so Haitians are economically self-sufficient, which also includes re-forestation, because they’ve cut down all the trees on the island.
Millions of dollars have been raised and even higher amounts have been pledged around the world and Haiti will need every penny of it. The question is: Once the media attention shifts to other crisis points, which it already has, will the public which responded by giving millions of dollars for aid, will this concern continue, and how to sustain that level of concern, and assure that the money that was raised will be spent in the way it was intended and not end up in the pockets of corrupt Haitian officials.
So what can you do?
Saturday 23 January 2010
Saturday 9 January 2010
Friday 8 January 2010
Thursday 7 January 2010
Wednesday 6 January 2010
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