Dive into the archives.
- On Culture: How E. Bowen Illuminates S. Beckett
Augie March was a Chicagoan, born and bred. But Saul Bellow was born in Canada. Looking at the world from a window on the Upper West Side, I think of my own little piece of globalization. Two generations through Brooklyn and then Manhattan, from the Russo-Polish Pale; and I was looking, last week, at real [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Q&A
Q: “Okay, I’ve read the writeup, seen the “movie” and might come on November 3. But what’s the real deal here?” A: The Working Knowledge Initiative will begin its Manhattan, Community-Wide program on November 3 under the sponsorship of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun and the Accord Advisory Group. The current recession has caused much anguish and [...]
- Learning From Cases: 1. Emotional Learning as Value
Recent consultations with clients have converged in an exciting empirical finding. Focusing upon significant emotional and vocational transitions at midlife, we have often inventoried both material assets and knowledge assets at different life stages. With the financial markets bubbling up 50% above their recent lows, clients seemed curious about looking back over adulthood and quantifying [...]
- On Learning How
A great “Aha!” in the history of psychotherapy came with the recognition (roughly 50 years ago) that the “lifting” or resolution of emotional disturbance did not mean a necessary turn toward emotional well-being. The effect of the original disturbance had blocked learning. If well-being was to be achieved, productive and healthy experiential learning was essential. [...]
- Introducing the NYC Cooperative Building as a Multi-Family Business
The New York City Cooperative is a multi-family business. Assets from multiple families are invested into shares, bought and sold in a competitive market, and allocated for shareholder use, into discrete apartment units, represented by share holdings of varied size. The purpose of the Cooperative is to furnish a home for its shareholders. Secondarily, it [...]
- The Ghost of a Former Family Business
Business developments expand and contract in harmony with economic developments. From this vantage, the current recession might be likened not so much to the Great Depression, but to more generalized periods of economic contraction. Yet, just as the ghost of the Great Depression has become a media favorite with which all of us must now [...]
- Them were Us, Yesterday: Not Coping With Recession’s Realities
Long ago, in another era, I worked as a volunteer following the 9/11 attacks. I began my work serving on a telephone information bank, manned by mental health workers, for the purpose of identifying 9/11 survivors. Working there, I noted an increasing kind of desperation. For example, on that first night (9/12), one of our [...]
- Bartleby and the Avoidant Personality
I woke up one morning last week, thinking about Bartleby the Scrivener. It was a few days after my last posting, which had related to Bartleby via two Welsh Academics and one Slavic Lacanian, which is an oblique route to Herman Melville, and Bartelby— who worked, as it happens, in an establishment very close to [...]
- On Zizek’s Melville, Freud, and Meaning in the Downturn
I’m not sure if I understand correctly, but a recent article on Zizek’s “Bartelby” politics, named after Melville’s scribe whose preference is “not to”, aims at turning from the meaninglessness of societies predicated upon the empty non-deliverables of enjoyment or pleasure, and opening up a “space” from which we might critique the aimlessness of social [...]
- Dynamics of My Emerging Blog Relationships
I have been observing how the development of blog relationships closely parallels other relational forms from business exchanges to friendships and mutual support. What begins in the offering of a personal statement finds either a receptive or non-receptive hearing in another’s interest. In the instance of this receptive hearing, my reader selects a dimension of [...]
