Endless Knots

Roland's on the 2009 Dublin Int'l Literary Award long list

Great news: Roland Merullo's Breakfast with Buddha has put him among the nominees for the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, announced on Nov 10 by Eibhlin Byrne, Lord Mayor of Dublin. With its 100,000 euro prize, it's "the world's most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English and is a Dublin City Council initiative, in partnership with IMPAC." (IMPAC, an international productivity implementation firm sponsors a number of literary awards - go, IMPAC!):

...Dublin City Council will announce the shortlist on 2nd April 2009 and the winning novel will be revealed by the Lord Mayor on 11th June 2009.

Also on the list are Doris Lessing for The Cleft; Junot Diaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; and Mario Vargars Llosa for The Bad Girl.

The 156 authors hail from 41 countries.  The books span 18 languages, 29 of which are translated from languages such as Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Slovenian and Hebrew. 19 of them are first novels. "These are books that might not otherwise come to the attention of Irish readers”, says Deirdre Ellis-King, Dublin City Librarian.  “The spread of languages and the number of books in translation continues to grow”. 

It's lovely to learn that nominations come from "157 libraries in 117 cities," in Roland's case, one situated in South Carolina. What an honor! And what a book. It's wonderful. And extremely funny. And deep. Roland-ish. Great gift, by the way. I couldn't resist snipping the portion of the nominee list where Roland's name appears along with these great literary lights:

Engage with grace: The one slide project

Many bloggers (see "Talking turkey about death" by Kay Lazar in Nov 26, '08 Boston Globe) are staging a "blog rally" today to encourage conversation about a very difficult topic: how we want to die. What follows is the same text that appears on many other blogs (see backstory here). Please pick this up and pass along to fellow bloggers, asking them too to post, and to use Thanksgiving as a time to talk about something uncomfortable but oh-so-at-the-heart-of-it-all. This touches me deeply. My mother wanted to die at home. She did not. I know the same is true for many reading and this is one tiny way we all can help redress ancient and possible future hurts. Here also is the single slide, described and linked below:

We make choices throughout our lives - where we want to live, what types of activities will fill our days, with whom we spend our time. These choices are often a balance between our desires and our means, but at the end of the day, they are decisions made with intent. But when it comes to how we want to be treated at the end our lives, often we don't express our intent or tell our loved ones about it.

This has real consequences. 73% of Americans would prefer to die at home, but up to 50% die in hospital. More than 80% of Californians say their loved ones "know exactly" or have a "good idea" of what their wishes would be if they were in a persistent coma, but only 50% say they've talked to them about their preferences.But our end of life experiences are about a lot more than statistics. They're about all of us.

So the first thing we need to do is start talking. Engage with Grace:The One Slide Project was designed with one simple goal: to help get the conversation about end of life experience started. The idea is simple: Create a tool to help get people talking. One Slide, with just five questions on it. Five questions designed to help get us talking with each other, with our loved ones, about our preferences. And we're asking people to share this One Slide - wherever and whenever they can--at a presentation, at dinner, at their book club. Just One Slide, just five questions.

Let's start a global discussion that, until now, most of us haven't had. Here is what we are asking you: Download The One Slide and share it at any opportunity - with colleagues, family, friends. Think of the slide as currency and donate just two minutes whenever you can. Commit to being able to answer these five questions about end of life experience for yourself, and for your loved ones. Then commit to helping others do the same. Get this conversation started.

Let's start a viral movement driven by the change we as individuals can effect...and the incredibly positive impact we could have collectively. Help ensure that all of us - and the people we care for - can end our lives in the same purposeful way we live them. Just One Slide, just one goal. Think of the enormous difference we can make together.

(To learn more please go to Engage with Grace. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team)

Thanksgiving 2008

As we look ahead to Thursday, I'm continuing the tradition of posting our family menu. Due to pressures all around the fam, we decided to go for a different approach this year. Normally, we have our tried-and-true recipes but they can be very time-consuming, for example, my very popular Harvest Soup or a particularly spectacular stuffed mushroom recipe.

So we're doing something we've never done before - choose a relatively simple menu that comes straight out of one of our fave magazines, Fine Cooking. Its recipes are dependable and easy to compile shopping lists from - and the pictures are so inviting that it's hard not to want to make the food.

While this menu may sound complicated, any real cook reading the recipes will recognize that they are pretty straightforward to prepare - and, having done the shopping already, amazingly inexpensive. Turkey, even the kind we all should be buying, meaning without antibiotics, grain-fed, free-range and all those other hyphenated things, is just a couple of dollars a pound in these parts ($2.19 to be precise). So enjoy.

Check out the recipes linked here. And, we're adding one more recipe from another good food rag, Gourmet, as a special treat for our vegetarian.

Roasted Turkey a la me (but the Fine Cooking Juniper-Ginger Butter looks great)
Rustic Bread Stuffing with Dried Cranberries, Hazelnuts & Oyster Mushrooms
Mashed Potatoes with Caramelized Shallots
Maple-Tangerine Cranberry Sauce
Cauliflower with Brown Butter, Pears, Sage & Hazelnuts
Green Beans with Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette & Parmesan Breadcrumbs

And from Gourmet:
Wild Mushroom Bundles

And coming via relatives:
Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream
Apple Pie with French Vanilla Ice Cream

Transparency and the new administration

Beginning last week and continuing over the next few months, we all have ringside seats as something quite remarkable happens: the organization with the most power on our precious planet is populating its org chart.

Thanks to our President-elect, names are popping into boxes, and, as we've been doing with the work of the Treasury department, we're following along and filling in the ever-expanding picture of the new US administration as it takes shape via OrgScope.

At risk of having to change a name here and there later, we're including everyone who's rumored to be involved, once that rumor is repeated repeatedly, as in the case of our probable new Secretary of State. You'll note that where such names are yet to be formally announced, we've marked them "unofficial."

So far, we've filled out three departments down to at least five levels--Treasury, State, and Defense, which is particularly interesting and deeply complicated (i.e. all of the branches of the military hang off of it). For Treasury and Defense, we've gone even deeper.

To understand what I'm saying, click here to "Run US Gov Map," wait a sec as the OrgScope map loads, then use your mouse to zoom around. Pull a box into the middle of the screen and see what's beneath it expand. To change the view, go to the top of the screen and, from the menu, select whether you want to see it by Organization, Position (for job title), or Person, in which case you'll see some (soon-to-be) familiar faces.

For example, let's start with the Executive Branch, represented by the picture of the White House. Choose Position and up comes President-Elect of the US; choose Person, and who do we see?

Please note also that if you click over to the Treasury Department, you'll once again find yourself swimming in the detail of the economic mess, as previously reported here in Update 4, 3, 2, 1...liftoff!

Why are we doing this? Because it's really important to understand the government - and we have so few tools for being able to do so. Eighth grade social studies/civics class is ancient history for most of us; for those abroad whose lives are so affected by the US government, ours is really arcane. And, classic org charts - meaning wire-and-box charts typically represented department by department - are static, disconnected, and lacking in their ability to represent the big picture.

Which brings me to this point: The terrible situation we're in may have a bright spot. For the first time ever, we are learning how the economy really works. Of course, we wouldn't have chosen to do it this way. Likewise, because we have a new administration that is rolling out very quickly, we have the chance to understand how *it* really works. This is our contribution to that understanding.

The slow blogging movement

This one's for all the mad bloggers: a new trend, captured in today's NY Times, and causing me to bolt from the table to the keyboard, which of course is precisely what the article would warn against: "Blogging at a snail's pace" by Sharon Otterman:

The practice is inspired by the slow food movement, which says that fast food is destroying local traditions and healthy eating habits. Slow food advocates, like the chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., believe that food should be local, organic and seasonal; slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants — great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the long haul.

A Slow Blog Manifesto, written in 2006 by Todd Sieling, a technology consultant from Vancouver, British Columbia, laid out the movement’s tenets. “Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy,” he wrote. “It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly.” (Nor, because of a lack of traffic, is Mr. Sieling writing this blog at all these days.) Ms. [Barbara] Ganley [the focus of the article], who recently left her job as a writing instructor at Middlebury College, compares slow blogging to meditation. It’s “being quiet for a moment before you write,” she said, “and not having what you write be the first thing that comes out of your head.”

And then there's this note of caution from famous blogger Andrew Sullivan who wrote "Why I Blog" for this month's Atlantic, whereby he recounts what happens when he takes a break:

When he took two days off to make sense of “the whole Sarah Palin thing,” his audience flipped, thinking he was dead or silenced.“You can’t stop,” Mr. Sullivan said in the online interview. “The readers act as if you’ve cut off their oxygen supply, and they just flap around like a goldfish out of water until you plop them back in.”

Engage with grace beginning Nov 26

Dear friends,

I'd be hard put to list all the causes and groups I'm asked to join, both on Facebook and via that old method, email. Something's come through in the past few days that makes me want to "join," in the fullest sense of the word.

Engage with Grace: The One Slide Project is an astonishingly simple idea that literally touches everyone. Alexandra ("Alex") Drane, whose sister-in-law almost died in the hospital (had her family been less attentive - and at age 32 of glioblastoma* seven months post diagnosis - grab your tissues and see the backstory) has set in motion a talking/blogging/thinking campaign to get us to deeply consider how we want to die.

Alex's one slide has five conversation-starter questions about dying, really simple stuff like: given the choice, do you want to die at home or in the hospital; do you want medical intervention or not...etc (see below) - and then she did the networking thing. Now bloggers have agreed to post her message about the campaign as a Thanksgiving project. We're all posting the same message - with a lead-in of our choosing on Nov 26 - and leaving it up throughout the holiday weekend (yay! an enforced break from blogging - my family will be so happy).

There's also a great short video (as in a minute) with Alex explaining how she used the very best of networking principles to keep this really really simple.

I have lots of blogger friends reading here, more than I know about, and you've got lots of friends so...please direct them to the group on Facebook and/or ask them to contact me and I'll send the note that we're all posting.

Finally, why does this touch me when I let so much else pass by without really "joining?" My mother died in the hospital, which she did not want to do, her "Do Not Resuscitate" order was not enforced...and my best friend, Linda, who wanted to die at home, also died in the hospital...and, as many of my close friends here know, her husband died of *glioblastoma eighteen months later. So I connect in that beating, pulsating, deepest place with what Alex is doing.

Love,

Jessica

Transparency and the you-name-it crisis - Update 4

Or perhaps it should be transparency.

We're keeping up as best we can with the expenditures on our behalf but, frankly, it's becoming tougher and tougher to follow the money. Soldiering on, we've added more info to the OrgScope maps of the government's spending since Congress passed the $700 billion package. And we're tracking the research of others, including such excellent articles as Ross Kerber and Rob Weisman's November 13, '08, Boston Globe piece, "Bailout retooled to boost lending."

To follow, you need a very sharp pencil, as it turns out that considerably more than $700 billion has flowed into "the markets," approximately three times that amount. We've taken the information from the chart accompanying the article and combined it with information from the Treasury Department to give a composite view of about $2.3 trillion.

Three pots of money have gone out the door--or are/were supposed to: the original $700B authorized by Congress for use by the Treasury, of which almost half has been allocated and is mostly spent/invested; another $1.5 trillion in lending out of the Federal Reserve; and a further $693 billion, which the Kerber-Weisman piece lumps under "other spending."

When Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was questioned by the House Financial Services Committee last week (Treasury Sec Henry Paulsen had his turn on the hot seat too) about the failure to disclose the recipients of so much Fed lending, he argued that the recipients only agreed to take the money if they could do so without revealing who they were. Bloomberg News asked for "details of the Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure," according to "Fed Defies Transparency Aim in Refusal to Disclose," a Nov 10, 2008, article by Mark Pittman, Bob Ivry and Alison Fitzgerald.

We've added the additional players and spending amounts to our OrgScope map - scroll to right, then drill down into Treasury for the $700B and into Federal Agencies, then the Federal Reserve for the $1.5 trillion. We've tagged each of the loans and equity investments by recipient (and where not available, by group, as per the Globe lumpings, i.e. Securities Dealers = $80 billion; Money Markets = $100 billion; Commercial Paper = $230 billion), hanging each one off the agency that was the conduit for the money. We've added two more contract awards by the Office of Financial Stability as well, each for about $5.5 million, for legal advice services around the investments (Squires, Sanders & Demps contract here and Hughes, Hubbard, & Reed contract here).

OK. So none of that is what we hoped for with the bailout. Not much transparency, little visible results. But change is coming, and we are also tracing the government-elect as it forms. So click on the White House and then follow the new appointments there. We'll have a new post on mapping the transition shortly. (Click on the image to go right to the map, then zoom around the government. Enjoy.)

This little piggy went to market

 

Wait long enough in these interwebbed times and you'll find everyone you've ever known, including those people you really liked but fell out of touch with. Facebook brought back such a one this past week, the cartographer/artist/photographer/college-classmate Louis Jaffe. Louis was a phenome at Antioch--and remains such if his recent work is any indication. I love this image that he made for the charcuterie booth at the Slow Food 2008 extravaganza in San Francisco, 4X10 feet in the original. Wish I could see the real thing. Thanks, Louis, for allowing me to publish it here. Any time you're looking for a venue for your work, this "gallery" is open.

Telecommuters, get comfy with your new name

Plantronics, the headset company, just ran a contest to rename the apparently outdated term teleworker. If you're one of them, you're now a cloudworker. I dunno about this. Kinda too, well, in the clouds for me, since most of the people I know, love, and work with still need telecommuter explained to them. Should you be one of them, here's the explanation of the cloud, which, if clicking is too much for you, can loosely pass for the Internet itself. Means, roughly, distributed computing. Roughly. (Thanks, again, Stella.)

Brrrrr

Just that. Feels like January here in Boston. How do I know? I had to put on my parka just to run out to get the paper! I miss my garden! Come back soon, planties.

(Note to Typepad users: Testing the new Quick Post feature actually - very clever and easy)