ARTICULATING PAIN

During this morning's walk, came across the following written, in chalk, on the pavement:

"R7,
  You said
  you 'sucked
 @ walking away',
   But I have not 
   seen you walk
   by, I have
  not seen you
  walk up.
               M5"

There is a lot of pain in East Rock!

KAIZEN, OR CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT

Hirishi Mikitani, Market Place 3.0: Rewriting the Rules of Borderless Business (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) ("In general, people have quite a bit of room for improvement. Most people are not working at full capacity. Most have a store of undeveloped skills. Perhaps they have never been pushed or encouraged to explore their limits. Perhaps it never occurred to them to try. Many people are satisfied if they meet the standards set for them by their teachers, their families, or their work supervisors. Many assume that once they have graduated from school and secured a job, their efforts have paid off. But what if they undertook an attitude of kaizen? What if each individual looked within himself and made a commitment to constant improvement?" "This is a concept that really excites me, because I believe there is so much untapped potential in people. Asking someone to become a genius overnight is not reasonable. But if you told that person, 'Improve a little bit every day,' what would those results look like over the course of a year? Ten years? An entire career? The difference is staggering." "You can look at this from a mathematical point of view. Calculate a daily increase of 1 percent for one year: 1.01 to the 365th power. The answer is 37.78. Even if you could only achieve 1 percent improvement each day--1 percent kaizen per day--at the end of one year, your result is over thirty-seven times better than when you started." "I once heard this story: A man in search of wisdom opened a book from a sword-fighting school of the Edo Period (1603-1868). Inside, there was just one phrase: 'Myself of today will triumph over myself of yesterday.' This is a beautifully distilled vision of kaizen. The goal is not to be great overnight, but to be better each day, knowing that this accumulation of improvements is the path to success." Id. at 106-107. I once worked in banking. On the operations side there was considerable data-entry work, e.g., keypunching data from payments received in customers' lockboxes. A form of kaizen was practiced there: The goal was not to eliminate all keypunching errors  in data entry. Rather the goal was to move from 1 error per 1,000 keystroke, to 1 error per, say, 1,100 keystrokes. Once that was accomplished, the goal was to move from 1 error per 1,100 keystrokes to 1 error per 1,200 keystrokes. The goal was not perfection, no errors period; rather the goal was a smaller percentage of errors.).

LOUISE GLUCK

Louise Gluck, Poems 1962-2012 (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux/ Ecco, 2012) (From "Child Crying Out": "The soul is silent / If it speaks at all / it speaks in dreams." Id. at 232, 232.).

IS AMERICA'S DECLINE THE RESULT, IN PART, OF HAVING SPARTA, NOT ATHENS, AS ITS UTOPIAN MODEL?

Paul Cartledge, The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece (Woodstock & New York: Overlook Press, 2003) ("Sparta was the original utopia (Thomas More, who coined the word Utopia in 1516, had Sparta very centrally in mind), but it was an authoritarian , hierarchical and repressive utopia, not a utopia of liberal creativity and free expression. The principal focus of the community was the use of war for self-preservation and the domination of others. Unlike other Greek cities, which satisfied there hunger for land by exporting population to form new 'colonial' cities among non-Greek 'natives', the Spartans attacked, subdued or enslaved their fellow-Greek neighbors in the southern Peloponnese." "The image or mirage of Sparta is therefore at least ambivalent and double-faceted. Against the positive image of the Spartans' uplifting warrior ideal of collective self-sacrifice, emblematized in the Thermophlae story, had to be pitted their lack of high cultural achievement, their refusal for the most part of open government, both at home and abroad, and their brutally efficient suppression for several centuries of a whole enslaved Greek people." Id. at 24-25. Think of all the war-metaphors federal, state and local governments, plus the so-called intellectual class, use: war on drugs, war on crime, war on poverty, fight again (war on) obesity, fight against (war on cancer, heart disease, aging, or whatever, cultural wars, gender wars, class war, economic warfare, trade wars, etc.).

THE GREAT UNRAVELING OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

Charles LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013) ("Once the nation's richest city, Detroit is now its poorest. It is the country's illiteracy and dropout capital, where children must leave their books at school and bring toilet paper from home. It is the unemployment capital, where half the adult population does not work at a consistent job. There are firemen with no boots, cops with no cars, teachers with no pencils, city council members with telephones tapped by the FBI, and too many grandmothers with no tears left to give." But Detroit can no longer be ignored, because what happened here is happening out there. Neighborhoods from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Miami are blighted with empty homes and people with idle hands. Americans are swimming in debt, and the prospects of servicing the debt grows slimmer by the day as good-paying jobs continue to evaporate or relocate to foreign lands. Economists talk about the inevitable turnaround. But standing here in Michigan, it seems to me that the fundamentals are no longer there to make the good life." "Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself." "In cities and towns across the country, whole factories are auctioned off. Men with trucks haul away tool-and-die machines, aluminum siding, hoists, drinking fountains. It is the ripping out of the country's mechanical heart right before our eyes." "A newly hired autoworker will earn $14 an hour. This, adjusted for inflation, is three cents less than what Henry Ford was paying in 1914 when he announced the $5 day. And, of course, Ford isn't hiring. Come to Detroit, drive the empty, shattered boulevard, and the decrepitude of the place all rolls out in a numb, continuous fact. After enough hours staring into it, it starts to appear normal. Average. Everyday." Id. at 5-6. Yes, this is the New Normal. The New America!).

George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("After almost a decade in politics, [Jeff Connaughton] was thirty-six and broke, renting a modest apartment in Virginia. In December 1995, he took a job as a junior associate with Covington & Burling, a top Washington law firm. If he made partner, he'd become a millionaire." "He hated the work. A minute ago he'd been briefing the president and battling Congress, and now he was literally on his knees, sifting through fifty boxes of documents one page at a time doing an attorney-client privilege review, or stuck at his desk, writing memos on behalf of a a silver mine that was polluting groundwater in Idaho. As far as Connaughton was concerned, the firm was just churning the client for billable hours. He did research on another case in which the plaintiff had been moving bottles of acid with a forklift, accidentally broke some bottles, and burned most of his body as he repeatedly slipped into the acid. Covington was representing the company." ''I hope you're asking me to research whether there's enough money in the world to compensate this man,' Connaughtion told the partner who gave him the assignment. 'No, I'm not,' the partner replied." Id. at 118. From the bookjacket: "American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George packer . . . tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. [] The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date." Before reading Packer's latest, I had been reflecting on the unraveling of the so-called "American Dream." Take a look around! Who delivers your newspaper in the morning? Once upon a time a neighborhood kid, a paperboy--and sometimes a papergirl--would walk around the neighborhood delivering the newspapers. Now it is some grownup, driving a car. Who cuts your grass, weeds your garden, rake the leaves in the fall, washes your windows, and performs minor chores around your house? You don't do these. Your own kids don't do these. Rather, you have a lawn care service to mow, weed, and rake your 200-square-feet patch of grass. Professional window washers now clean your windows. When adults have as their professions performing tasks that teenagers use to do, call it what you will, but don't call it progress and don't deny the unraveling of the American Dream. What remains is a dimmer dream, a reduced America.).

Lisa Prevost, Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "Towns with strict zoning are the best towns, aren't they? They're all about preserving local 'character,' protecting the natural environment, and maintaining attractive neighborhoods. Right?" "In this bold challenge to conventional wisdom, Lisa Prevost strips away the quaint facades of these desirable towns to reveal the uglier impulses behind their proud allegiance to local control. These eye-opening stories illustrate the outrageous lengths to which town leaders and affluent residents will go to prohibit housing that might attract the 'wrong' sort of people. Prevost takes readers to a rural second-home community that is so restrictive that its celebrity residents may soon outnumber its children, to a struggling fishing village as it rises up against farmworker housing open to Latino immigrants, and to a northern lake community that brazenly deems itself out of bounds to apartment dwellers. From blueberry barrens of Down East to the Gold Coast of Connecticut, these stories show how communities have seemingly cast aside the all-American credo of 'opportunity for all' in favor of 'I was here first.'" "Prevost links this 'every town for itself' mentality to a host of regional afflictions, including a shrinking population of young adults, ugly sprawl, unbearable highway congestion, and widening disparities in income and educational achievement. Snob Zones warns that this pattern of exclusion is unsustainable and raises thought-provoking questions about what it means to be a community in post-recession America.").

Roxana Robinson, Sparta: A Novel (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("They lived right on the edge, those lawn guys. It was like being in a revolution, coming here illegally. No language, no green cards, always at risk, in fear but determined to work. People claimed they were taking jobs from Americans, but that was bullshit. Americans wouldn't take those jobs. Those jobs were too menial for people living the American dream, which they did by playing video games and drinking beer. Americans hired these guys to mow their lawns and then complained abut illegal aliens. He thought of Ali and the grimy men lined up in the clearing room." Id. at 335.).

AUSTER AND COETZEE

Paul Auster & J. M. Coetzee, Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (New York: Viking, 2013) (Auster to Coetzee, January 10, 2009: "What I am saying, I suppose, is that there are things that happen to us in the real world that resemble fiction. And if fiction turns out to be real, then perhaps we have to rethink out definition of reality." Id. at 35, 36. Auster to Coetzee, September 29, 2009: "We live in an age of endless writing workshops, graduate writing programs (imagine getting a degree in writing), there  are more poets per square inch than ever before, more poetry magazines, more books of poetry (99% of them published by microscopic small presses), poetry slams, performance poets, cowboy poets--and yet, for all this activity, little of note is being written. The burning ideas that fueled the innovations of the early modernists seems to have been extinguished. No one believes that poetry (or art) can change the world anymore. No one is on a holy mission. Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other." Id. at 89, 90-91. Coetzee to Auster, October 14, 2009: "Something happened, it seems to me, in the late 1970s or early 1980s as a result of which the arts yielded up their leading role in our inner life. I am quite prepared to give heed to diagnoses of what happened between then and now that have a political or economics or even world-historical character; but I do nevertheless feel that there was a general failure among writers and artists to resist the challenge to their leading role, and that we are poorer today for that failure." Id. at 96, 98. Auster to Coetzee, November 12, 2010: "The 'mean vision' you talk about has been with us a lot longer than since 1970, I'm afraid. And contrary to the view I held when I was young--that people vote out of economic self-interest--I have now come to feel that many voters' choices are entirely irrational--or ideological, even if that ideology goes against their economic well-being. In 1984, during the Reagan's reelection campaign, I was going somewhere in a Brooklyn car service. The driver, who had been a welder at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, had lost his job when the union he belonged to was crushed by management. I said to him: ''You can thank Reagan for that--the greatest union-busting president in history.' And he replied" 'Maybe so, but I'm voting for him anyway.' 'Why in the world would you do that?' I asked. His answer: Because I don't want to see the fucking Commies take over South America.' An indelible moment in my political education. It was men like this, I imagine, who voted Hitler into power in 1933." Id. at 195, 196-197.).

I don't think he is going to make it as a third-storey guy.

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