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A silent room of my own
I’m both listening to and reading ‘1913: The year before the storm’ – a fascinating account of the era with passing vignettes of people who would make, or destroy the rest of the century from Hitler to Stalin, Kafka to Tito, Cezanne to Picasso and Franz Ferdinand and Trotsky.
The year Ecstacy received its patent and the fully intact Ozone Layer was identified. Then all hell let’s loose in 1914 to sweep away the old.
The line that took me to the book concerned Proust – describing how he created a cage for himself so that he could write, with the light shut out and three layers of curtains to muffle the noise. My quest to find such peace found me on the beach behind a windbreak – the house is in turmoil as various parts of it are pulled out. The alternative is to rent office space – take to sea – though that would be a distraction.
1913: The year before the storm
I’m both listening to and reading ‘1913: The year before the storm’ – a fascinating account of the era with passing vignettes of people who would make, or destroy the rest of the century from Hitler to Stalin, Kafka to Tito, Cezanne to Picasso and Franz Ferdinand and Trotsky.
The year Ecstacy received its patent and the fully intact Ozone Layer was identified. Then all hell let’s loose in 1914 to sweep away the old.
The line that took me to the book converned Proust – describing how he created a cage for himself so thhat ge could write, with the light shut out and three layers of curtains to muffle the noise.
Related articles
- 1913: The Year Before the Storm by Florian Illies – review (guardian.co.uk)
- 1913: The Year Before the Storm by Florian Illies – review (oddonion.com)
Creativity in e-learning
REFERENCE
Andrea Chester & Gillian Gwynne 1998. Online Teaching. Encouraging Collaboration through Anonymity. Department of Intellectual Disability Studies Royal melbourne Institute of Technlogy. JMCM 4 (2) December 1998
Reflection on learning (A personal take)
I am undergoing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. For the last 18 months, initially every two weeks and now every month I see a therapist. I pay for this myself as the NHS could only offer 20 minutes every six weeks and said I was just ‘a bit depressed,’ – ‘like most people.’
Five years ago I was temporarily diagnosed A.D.H.D.
This was turned on its head by specialists in London who couldn’t distract me and found that as the tasks I was giving to do got harder my concentration improved. Ritlan had been fun. My problem was boredom. Always has been. Whenever there is a family gathering should we discuss the first words of various nieces and nephews, let alone the adults, one of my siblings or my mother will say my first word was ‘why?’ and my first phrase was ‘I’m bored.’
I’m still bored and I’m still asking why. I was 49 last week.
I think too much. Rather than thinking less, please can someone put me in a situation where I can think until my brain hurts.
A best moment for me, outside the exam room … a TV programme than was going to go live in 90 mins. The MD pulls the entire theme and my producer looks at me and says let’s do something new from scratch. It was that or waste the expense of presenters, camera crews (live, multi-camera, galley staff, support staff etc: etc No rewrites, no rehearsals, that script was handed out with minutes to go. Unprepared the interviewees were fresh. it worked. I’m good at doing ‘from the top of my head.’
By reflecting on how I behave in certain situations, coming to understand the situations and my upbringing I am changing some of my behaviour – much of the time. This ‘reflection’ has at times been recorded, transcribed and chewed over – just like this. More often I treat the moment, the hour for what it is> I do wonder if I dwelt on it more often, whent back over these discussions if I would embed the change?
My late father when in his mid-twenty to mid-thirties ( I am told and believe) would spend an hour or so with his mother coming home. (That or he was having an affair – more likely?) Something of a matriarch my grand-mother, I could imagine this regular reflection facilitating and guiding my father’s success. Reflection or dictation, being told what to do or coming to yor own decisions? I wonder. It’s value, doubtful beyond building a substantial PLC. In terms of his relationships (catastrophic he went through four marriages). I was staying with him as marriage three collapsed. He was attending Relate. He enjoyed these sessions, admitted he was probably mad and came out of these sessions rationalising who he was without any intention of changing. It gave him an excuse.
If any component of this was reflection, then it was reflection reinforced a modus operandi, rather than changing it.
Wherein lies my issue with reflection and blogging. Is it necessarily something that results in change, or even something for the better?
Didn’t Hitler write Mien Kampf while gaoled? This is narcissistic, self-indulgent reflection that gave him the opportunity to develop self-belief in his warped ideas.
See, reflection can back-fire, bringing the worst out of people, not necessarily the best.
The desired outcome of reflection as a form of thinking in an academic context is to help embed ideas and facts.
It is an aid to a neurological process, by using the information in a variety of ways it comes to matter more, priorities are made, choices taken, you form you own view of what matters and what does not. However, you share this reflection and immediately it is being written for an audience; you reflect and submit this as evidence in an assignment and the first thing you do is to check the requirements of the paper, and how it will be marked and then you adjust, edit and as a consequence contort the truth that reflection should try to uncover.
If reflection has worked then I can see a need to return to live or as-live TV. I thrive on pressure – head pressure.
Hitler
Hitler – Ian Kershaw
29/03/2005
Tuesday 29th March 2005
A head in fug
Dehydrated. A Head cold. I sleep until marauding children become too much for me. I am glad I dressed for winter. Only 150 miles North West of our South Coast home and it is perceptibly colder. The air is damp, the sky leaden, the house, over 400 years old, drafty and dark even with the curtains open. The contrast between this jumble of rooms on three floors set in an acre of garden and our 60s town house by the sea couldn’t be greater.
We live on the second and third floors, the ground floor being nothing more than an entrance, a garage, a study and lavatory. We get light through the house from earliest dawn ’til final dusk. We shut the curtains against the light despite broken pipes and windows that need replacing; it is rarely cold.
I am sitting by a fire, recently lit, in the house of Dr Z A Pelczynski and his wife Denise.
I was up several hours longer than I like seeking answers to ZAP’s life and his understanding of the significant events with in it. This professor of Political Science tutored Bill Clinton on East European politics. There’s a photograph of the two sitting in the oval office of the Whitehouse on the 14th October 1993. Two months later, I married his daughter, which explains my presence here. We take little interest in politics and would not call ourselves academic – though we take an interest in things.
My current interests, fed by the substantial Pelczynski library, hoard of books, magazines and papers that fill the house, its shelves, stacked against walls in corridors, in boxes and bags in piles in ‘spare’ rooms that no longer serve any purpose other than to take in yet more ‘brain fodder.’
I pick up my reading on a biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw that I began at Christmas.
I describe my feelings towards the book as a ‘black bible,’ the life and times of a disturbed, jumped-up, arrogant, know-it-all whose rise to power says as much about the circumstances in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s as it does of some of our worse traits as human beings.
A debate wrangles over whether Hitler ought to be ‘humanised’ in film.
What bothers me is that more has not been done to show how human he was and in so doing making the reasonable point that there need to be systems in place to prevent people like him never attain positions of power again. I am also reading Douglas Coupland (see above) and Virginia Woolf.
Mind Bursts 