Cameron Gordon – författare

So what do you do with all that old cardboard left over from boxes of cereal, crackers, chocolates, paper, shoes? I used to throw it out or recycle it but then I got an idea: why not paint on it?  I was already painting as a hobby - mostly abstract and nonrepresentational watercolours. These were more doodles than anything else and I was buying rather expensive watercolour paper to undertake what essentially was a pasttime.  So this use of refuse seemed to be an easy way to transform trash into 'canvas' and save a bit of dough and landfill on the side.  Then, for some reason, I began to hit upon another idea.  Why not move from abstract doodles to words?  But what to say?  It came to me that I wanted to inspire more than anything else.  But did I really need to inspire with new thoughts?  Perhaps the most inspiring things had already been said.  So I drifted towards using sayings that had meaning for me and which had moved me.  In turned out that the act of painting slogans I had heard all my life was somehow especially powerful, transforming words on a page into a personal expression that required me to ponder each letter and each word with each brushstroke.What this book is a selection of some painted slogans for your edification and enjoyment.  Enjoy!

This book is written as a series of daily reflections for the season in the Christian calendar that is referred to as Lent. Lent is a time that commemorates the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist; the subsequent retreat of Jesus to the desert to face his three temptations by the devil; and then Jesus' return to Jerusalem, his death on the Cross (Good Friday) and his Resurrection on Easter Sunday. But what does it really mean to say that Christ is risen, and that he has died no more, nearly two millennium after the fact? How can one follow the teachings of a man who lived in a radically different society, so long ago, in a way that is relevant and meaningful today? The answer is to connect with those events as if they were happening today. That is the real potential power of the liturgical calender. In a superficial sense the calendar commemorates past happenings but it can be used as a daily practice. Living in the day is a way of eliminating time and history. After all, clocks and calendars are social conventions, useful but not fundamental aspects of the nature of reality. God's creation is eternal and past, present and future collapse into this present moment, always. Practicing Lent in one's daily life puts this on a human scale where the truth and reality of eternity can penetrate into daily consciousness. This daily reader is a tool to help with such a practice.

This second Lent reader – as well as the first one, published separately – has grown out of my own Lenten practices and observances over the year. ** This particular edition contains 28 additional paintings and drawings by the author not available in the text-only version of this book. **I wroteboth these readers because I would have found it helpful to have such a reader. I hope you enjoy and find the daily readings contained within helpful. And, of course, I hope your Lenten observations are just what you need them to be. To me Lent is a time of 'wilderness work'. One goes in to one's own darkness and disorder, not to reject it, or deny it, but to sit with it.  It is tremendously uncomfortable, even frightening.  But out of this inner muck grows the soul.NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, the biblical quotations are from the New International Version (NIV) translation and are quoted under fair-use provisions of copyright law. Also, this reader contains daily reflections for all days from Ash Wednesday through to Easter Sunday.  Different Christian traditions and denominations have somewhat slightly differing definitions of the Lenten period, sometimes excluding Sundays, sometimes including them, and often excluding the Holy Weekend containing Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  I have included every day so the reader may include and leave out days to fit their preferred practice.

This second Lent reader – as well as the first one, published separately – has grown out of my own Lenten practices and observances over the year.  I wrote them both because I would have found it helpful to have such a reader. I hope you enjoy and find the daily readings contained within helpful. And, of course, I hope your Lenten observations are just what you need them to be.To me Lent is a time of 'wilderness work'. One goes in to one's own darkness and disorder, not to reject it, or deny it, but to sit with it.  It is tremendously uncomfortable, even frightening.  But out of this inner muck grows the soul.NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, the biblical quotations are from the New International Version (NIV) translation and are quoted under fair-use provisions of copyright law. Also, this reader contains daily reflections for all days from Ash Wednesday through to Easter Sunday.  Different Christian traditions and denominations have somewhat slightly differing definitions of the Lenten period, sometimes excluding Sundays, sometimes including them, and often excluding the Holy Weekend containing Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  I have included every day so the reader may include and leave out days to fit their preferred practice.

FROM THE PLAY:Robert McNamara: (Visibly stunned, his mouth slightly gaping.) Speer? Albert Speer? The Nazi?Albert Speer: (A bit discomfited.) A Nazi? I am a member of the National Socialist Party, yes. As an official of government and in my capacity I am bound to be. But a 'Nazi', that is a term you Americans use. In Germany this is a vulgarism. I can assure you that I am not a vulgar man.Robert McNamara: (Suddenly angry.) You dirty Communist bastard! I see your filthy propaganda game. Do you think there is any comparison between myself and the mission of the United States Armed Forces, and the war machine and jackboot government of Nazi Germany? You Communists are a clever bunch. I'll tell you this technique won't work on me!----Two men, managers, respectively, of the Vietnam War (US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara) and Albert Speer (Armaments Minister under Hitler) find themselves together and trapped in a waiting room of a ghostly netherworld station. They are forced to face their respective pasts and the broader issues of lending their considerable technocratic expertise to morally dubious enterprises of war. Bombings, talking dolls, crackling televisions announcing wartime disasters are among the twists and turns thrown their way. Will they discern the purpose of their strange exile before it is too late -- for them, and for us?----The theme explored in this play is how technocracy and war make strange, and contradictory, bedfellows. War is one of the most non-rational of human enterprises. Yet the industrial and technological scale of modern war requires critical masses of expertise and managerial skill which are based on a premise that the world is linear, rational, and manageable. Albert Speer and Robert McNamara were quintessential technocratic managers who believed in the power of numbers and high-concept thinking to prosecute their wars 'efficiently' and 'successfully'. This approach, however, got their countries into deep practical, moral and ethical trouble. This play is a study of this dilemma, raising questions more generally about the nature and meaning of the modern technocracy and the technocratic types it creates and requires.This play has a had a dramatic reading in New York. It is copyrighted but allows for royalty-free amateur and educational performances. The book also contains a detailed history of its development from idea to script to staging, with selected notes about the performance. Thus it can also be useful for the study of dramaturgy and script writing.

This collection of six short stories begins with "e;Blackout-o-three,"e; an account of one person's experience of the power failure in New York City in 2003 and the strange social unraveling that took place during its short interval. Five other stories, all set in New York, herald the gritty mystery of that City in a series of poignant, funny and moving vignettes and slices of life. The five other stories are titled (in order): Chinatown. Subway preacher. A distant murder. Bus along Fifth Avenue. What if they gave a fiftieth birthday party and nobody came?

"e;The beauty of futility"e; is a collection of eight stories about people whose lives are strange, and fantastic and ordinary, all at the same time. The titles give some sense of the range: Cursus caninus: emperor of the dogs; Confessions of a champ'een pie eater; A perfect human being; The transmigration of souls; Artificial light; Order of Merit; Father, father, quite contrary; Collective unconscious. Enter into a familiar world that is never quite what it seems - or all that it seems if you look at it in the right way.

Regrets. I've had a few… Maybe too few to mention. Or maybe too many to live with. Or maybe you get over them. This collection of six stories covers the gamut of these possibilities as expressed in ordinary lives that, in the end, are not so ordinary at all. The story titles are: Pillar of salt. They were so little when we got them. Ceaușescu. A wing off the family house. Up, up and away. Communin' w' gawd.

This is a collection of 50 haiku, organised under loose and broad thematic descriptions. The headings are suggestive and meant to be a bit playful. Each haiku stands alone, but the thematic ordering I hope adds some additional colour. The themes are: THE LINGERING OF PAST INTO PRESENTTHE DOORS OF PERCEPTION AND MISPERCEPTIONTHE MIND MAKES IT ALL UPTHE BODY DOESN'T LIECITY 'VERMIN'A BREAK IN THE ACTIONEVERYDAY OBJECTSHAIKU FOR END TIMES These English-language haiku are all written in the "e;standard"e; 5-7-5 form put forward by the Haiku Society of America in 1968: each haiku here has three lines of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables respectively. As is often remarked this tends to be considerably longer than haiku in Japanese which generally have lines of fewer syllables. But it is a common standard and the one that I have found convenient to use.

This volume contains the proceedings of a conference celebrating the work of Steven Boyer, held from June 2-8, 2018, at Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Boyer's contributions to research in low-dimensional geometry and topology, and to the Canadian mathematical community, were recognized during the conference. The articles cover a broad range of topics related, but not limited, to the topology and geometry of 3-manifolds, properties of their fundamental groups and associated representation varieties.

This book provides a crosscutting interdisciplinary account of how the disintegrated, global subsistence economy circa 1800 has transformed into a global complex delivering unprecedented levels of material production and consumption. Applying major findings from economics, history/historiography, and sociology (as well as from anthropology, psychology, politics, and environmental studies), the analysis tracks the ways in which changes in ‘society’ (including social structures, values, and forces) have changed ‘individuals’ (including conceptions of race, gender, and identity) and vice versa. These changes have simultaneously homogenised and diversified societies and individuals in distinct but sometimes contradictory ways, opening up many possible worlds from an individual and group perspective. Yet, the scale and pace of change has also led to increasing existential challenges.  The narrative consists of 30 chapters organized into 10 subsetsof 3: one chapter on a relevant core idea; one chapter focused on historical narrative and titled after a representative year; and one chapter on a relevant associated crosscutting theme. Major regional and topical discussions are provided, with special attention paid to business and organisational change and developing world scholarship. Small discussion ‘boxes’ focusing on illustrative cases and details are presented throughout the book. The last chapter contains over-arching conclusions.