tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post5841737270407243089..comments2024-03-27T18:45:16.950-07:00Comments on Fickle Ears: Career Designs: Relative and Absolute Privilege, and the Even KeelStefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-44640352919096308592022-09-13T06:44:02.964-07:002022-09-13T06:44:02.964-07:00Helena de Groot
Political Rites:
The passion of Pa...Helena de Groot<br /><a href="https://van-magazine.com/mag/pablo-casals-and-politics/" rel="nofollow">Political Rites:<br />The passion of Pablo Casals</a><br /><br /><i>""For the past 80 years, I have started each day in the same manner,” Pablo Casals told his biographer when he was 93. “It is a sort of benediction to the house. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach.” Then, Casals would stretch his legs, admire the dew on the spiderwebs in the garden, or trace the shoreline near his house. Finally, he would pick up the cello and begin his practice.<br /><br />...<br /><br />"Only once, when he was in his early 20s, did Casals experience an inner rebellion. He had gone mountain climbing in the Bay Area with a group of friends, his first time in America. It was 1901. He was already quite famous in Europe: besides working as the soloist for the Madrid Symphony, he toured the continent with pianist Harold Bauer, played for Queen Victoria and befriended and secured the patronage of the Spanish royal family. Now, they were on their way down from Mount Tamalpais when suddenly a boulder came hurtling straight towards him. He jerked his head out of the way. The rock missed his skull but smashed his left hand: a cellist’s fingering hand. His friends were horrified. Casals described having “a strangely different reaction” when looking at his mangled fingers. “Thank God, I’ll never have to play the cello again!”<br /><br />"Instead, a surgeon set the bone, a wealthy admirer offered him two months rest in his San Francisco apartment, and Casals went back to his daily studies, continuing to practice, perform and teach for at least another 70 years. Later, he explained his moment of mutiny by saying that the life of a dedicated musician “does involve a sort of enslavement.”"</i>Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-42942085104108512292022-09-12T11:48:38.167-07:002022-09-12T11:48:38.167-07:00Torill Elvira Mortensen
Comparing Privilege - or l...Torill Elvira Mortensen<br /><a href="http://torillsin.blogspot.com/2020/01/comparing-privilege-or-lack-of.html" rel="nofollow">Comparing Privilege - or lack of</a><br /><br /><i>"While being aware of privilege is extremely important, we need to acknowledge that like the struggle of complex lives, privilege is also relative and varied, and should not be a simple and automatic stamp. And that is what bothered me with the demand to leave class behind when discussing inequality, because class is as important as ethnicity or gender in this arithmetic of privilege. And this is what makes call-out culture and the emphasis on being "woke" such a problem to translate, because both practices focus on relatively narrow understandings of privilege and inequality."</i>Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-83283064725116798142021-04-18T10:55:01.590-07:002021-04-18T10:55:01.590-07:00Richard Sennett
The Culture of the New Capitalism
...Richard Sennett<br /><i>The Culture of the New Capitalism</i><br />(2006)<br /><br /><i>"I also got wrong the investment of middle-class men in the substance of their work. A number of studies in the early 1980s showed there was little difference between manual laborers and non-professional white-collar workers in the desire for job satisfaction. Seniority and titles counted for people who worked with paper in much the same way as for people who worked with their hands. I'd mistaken the world of the professional elite for that of the larger middle class.<br /><br />"What I had got right was the importance of the organizations themselves. The pyramids had relatively clear and stable identities, and this mattered to workers in their sense of themselves."</i><br />(pp. 73-74)<br /><br /><i>"A child of privilege can afford strategic confusion, a child of the masses cannot. Chance opportunities are likely to come to the child of privilege because of family background and educational networks; privilege diminishes the need to strategize. Strong, extensive human networks allow those at the top to dwell in the present; the networks constitute a safety net which diminishes the need for long-term strategic planning. ... The mass, however, has a thinner network of informal contact and support, and so remains more institution-dependent."</i><br />(p. 80)<br /><br /><i>"In general, the lower down in an organization, the thinner one's network, the more a person's survival requires formal strategic thinking, and formal strategic thinking requires a legible social map."</i><br />(p. 81)Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com