Conorthoughts

EU Commissioner Margot Wallström's blog

Margot Wallström, EU Commissioner for Institutional Relations & Communication, started a blog at the beginning of the year. She is the first EU Commissioner to do so.

I plan to keep my hand in in the area of political communications, in which I worked until recently (as a media relations officer at the Irish National Forum on Europe) in part by watching how this blog develops.

Here are some quick comments.

Commissioner Wallström is, I don't doubt, writing the text of her blog, which is appearing once a week. But I wonder whether she is inputting it i.e. whether, when she goes 'Save', it is instantly posted or whether it is first sent to someone else who posts it. I suspect the latter.

If it is the latter, this is a problem. Part of blogging is the experience of closeness to possible readers, especially to other bloggers. You write on a keyboard, save 'As Published' and people can, thanks to RSS, be instantly alerted, read what you've written and can reply straight away, either directly to you or by posting elsewhere. Wherever they post, thanks to TrackBack, you can immediately see their replies.

So, there is something quite intimate about blogging as a form of communication. There is something direct and unconstrained about it. It is not possible to experience this ie. to really blog until replies come in and you then reply, on your blog, to at least one of them. Blogging has something of a conversation in public about it. More than two people can take part in the conversation but it take at least two to blog, as it does to converse.

A blog is a dialogue, and like Plato's dialogues, it is in public.

Commissioner Wallström has not so far replied on her blog to any of the comments that have been posted. She is clearly emailing some replies but that is not to blog, emailing being typically one-to-one, in private.

A good number of comments on the blogs are being posted but there is a moderator deciding which ones are suitable for publication. The moderator is intervening in the comment section so there is a dialogue in public of sorts going on ... but this is supposed to be the Commissioner's blog!                              

Anselm Kiefer

Before writing some things on art here, I want to post a selection of old writings. This is going to be a labour of love - self-love - as almost all the files containing these articles have been corrupted, so, to post them, I will have to re-type them.

Here, to begin with, is the only article on art I've written that I've found online. It is a French translation of 'Ducks and Rabbits. On the work of Anselm Kiefer'. It appeared in the Parisian review Futur Antérieur in 1993 (The Italian political philosopher and anarchist Antonio Negri, co-author with Michael Hardt of the important book Empire is a regular contributor to the review. Indeed, to an extent, Futur Antérieur has become a sort of Negri 'fan mag' of an 'intello' Parisian kind.).

The article is difficult and obscure, perhaps incomprehensible. I try to use Wittgenstein on aspect perception to make sense of Kiefer. I cannot recommend the article. But it does begin with what are, I think, two nice stories.   

My book 'Carl Einstein in Documents'

I'm killing two birds with one stone here, and bringing a third into being while I'm at it.

I want to make a quick first post in the Categories Art and Philosophy, to get them going.

My book 'Carl Einstein and Documents' is partly about art but also has a philosophy dimension.

The third bird is a new Category, Literature: Einstein and the other person that the book is mainly about, Georges Bataille, were writers including of novels.

Here is a page on the book. I am not marketing it, of course! 

Budapest residential property - overseas buyers beware

A quick post to put something in one of my empty initial Categories, in order to start making them all visible.

The first thing I notice about my Category Finance is that it is too specific. I need to change it to Business & Finance. (I can re-divide this new Category up later.)

Attached is an article I published last July (2004), on Budapest residential property, written from an Irish angle. It appeared in The Sunday Tribune newspaper, under the title 'Hungary for a bargain? Make your money work in Budapest' with sub-title 'A trip to Budapest gave Conor Joyce a clear perspective of what's on offer for Irish investors'. I hasten to add that the tired title was not written by me!

The Sunday Tribune, based in Dublin, isn't online so I attach the article in the imageless Word doc. form in which I submitted it.      

I plan to use this site to market myself as a journalist and writer in London, so need to start posting articles here, beginning with this one.   

Download budapest_res_property_june_2004.doc

Flat-hunting in London

I went flat-hunting in London last week. I found it tough. I have done plenty of it before, mainly in London, but not for some time. It  brought back memories of previous searches and of places where I lived during my previous period in London (1986-97), mainly undistinguished places. At least, I have a better budget this time. I found it difficult to stick to the task and did not strike lucky. Enough said perhaps.         

I've just added a new category 'Day-to-day life events' so as to have a home for this post (Homes are on my mind).

It's odd how I thought that I could "give form to the monad that I already am" (See my only previous post, March 2 2005) with the categories which I started off: Online communication, Art, Comparative themes, Finance, Philosophy and Politics.

A desiccated monad?  Do I need a life? A new flat would do, for starters.

First love, first post

This is my first post, and I'm categorising it under 'Online communication'. My other categories are, to begin with, Art, Comparative themes, Finance, Philosophy and Politics.

I'm not too old - 46 - to start to write and think online. I would like to bring together here the main areas of my writing.

I'm keen to get going on this before moving from Dublin to London, which I'll be doing this month.

I feel torn in different directions, by my different interests which are like different parts of my personality. I would like to breathe a degree of unity into them here, expressing the person that I am as one person.

I have never read Leibniz' Monadology but I would like to use the blog to give form to the monad that I already am. I sense that, in a fragmenting world, the blog form has monadological potential. But I will have to read Leibniz and return to this!   

Art, Comparative themes, Finance, Philosophy and Politics. I write on art, or at least have done a good deal. Ditto for finance. I've worked in politics. I studied philosophy, and still do. I want to write beyond philosophy - a Western thing - moving into something broader, of a more comparative kind. I am short of comparative tools, though.

I plan to start uploading here articles and essays that I have written, to use it as a library. I also plan to attach the blog somehow to a wiki version of a book that I have written, on a French art magazine Documents  (1929-30). I would like to work in it further in wiki form, but only if I can find interested parties.            

This first post is a statement of intentions, written for myself as much as for anyone who might read it.