Arlene Goldbard's Blog
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May.12.2013
Dear Readers: I’d love to see you at my upcoming book launches in New York at 6 pm on Thursday, 23 May and Berkeley at 2 pm on Sunday, 2 June.
What comes to mind when I write that someone has used words as blunt instruments? Insults or arguments maybe, the kind of...
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May.02.2013
Where have I been, people keep asking. Right here, it turns out, giving birth to two books I’ve been incubating for many months. If you’re on my e-list, you received a notice yesterday that my two new books, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The...
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Apr.03.2013
I was on the tarmac in Las Vegas, gazing from my window seat at the dusty prospect below. Ten yards away, three robust men in fluorescent pink-and-green vests and orange jumpsuits crouched in the shade made by the roof of an empty luggage-wagon, resting between loads.
The youngest jumped up...
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Mar.14.2013
After dinner the other night, a friend who’d recounted the rather impressive incompetence of the powers-that-be at his workplace said that he tried not to think about how messed up things are in the larger world beyond his 9 to 5, because when he got in touch with all that could go wrong, it...
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Feb.12.2013
It all comes down to this: no matter how you parse it—art, politics, spirit, planet; body, mind, heart, and soul—the realms that are reckoned separate in the official version of our current reality are in truth a unity, and recognizing that is the path to wholeness. When we violate—ignore,...
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Feb.01.2013
If you stick around long enough writing books and essays and giving talks, people come to you for advice.Very often, the requests I get turn on choices between alternate futures. Graduating students, youngish artists and activists, members of an older generation considering “encore” careers or...
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Jan.27.2013
It’s been one of those times when the pace of events—both interior and exterior—accelerates almost beyond reckoning. Granted, these days I get much of my news from “The Daily Show,” but still: Inauguration! Republican vote-rigging! Somalia! Egypt! I had a birthday with all the attendant thrill...
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Jan.05.2013
I had a conversation last week with someone who gave up making films to start a business he hopes will earn enough money to finance major social-change organizing projects. He condemned progressives for their illusions, saying they that think if they’ve watched a hard-hitting film, they’ve...
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Dec.30.2012
One feature of the history of ideas is a persistent belief in progress that isn’t disrupted by learning that trendy ideas often turn out to be as flawed as the silliest old ones. Part of the problem has got to be a deficit of reality-testing: how often do you go back to reality-check your...
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Dec.25.2012
These are tender times. The usual end-of-the-year retrospective ache has been amplified in the aftermath of so many storms, inner and outer. It’s often hard to know whether an ambient mood is the aggregate of personal response to the brokenness we are perceiving in world events or the opposite...
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Dec.16.2012
Of this I have no doubt: the U.S. urgently needs meaningful gun control. I support the four-point platform of theLaw Center To Prevent Gun Violence shared in Benjamin Van Houten’s Yes Magazine piece (written after Representative Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting in 2011)....
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Dec.02.2012
It’s that time of the year again, when my inner voices have an unending argument that may even sound a little like some families’ Christmas-dinner conversation writ large: You don’t understand how I feel! The whole world isn’t about you! Why do I have to play by your rules?
The word for today...
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Nov.26.2012
As I write this, my plane has just taken off from Heathrow, seven hours after its scheduled departure. I spent six of them on the tarmac, trying to soothe the part of my brain that was spinning a story about British Airways’ incompetence. That was fairly challenging: during the previous hour,...
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Nov.12.2012
Few things make me as happy as discovering a way of seeing the world that illuminates both large political events and my own inner voices. I’m happy right now, because I’m ready to add another name to my list of uncolonized minds—the thinkers who have most inspired me through their willingess...
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Nov.05.2012
In English, we say “Shhh” to mean “Quiet down.” In Yiddish, it’s “Sha.” If a nightmare sent me into inconsolable sobs, my grandmother would say, “Sha, sha, bubeleh, don’t scare yourself, it’s only a dream,” and that gave me some comfort. My grandmother was a tiny, ruthless person with biceps...
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In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.”
—Frank O'Hara
About Arlene
Arlene Goldbard is a writer and speaker whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded from her Web site.
She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. She now lives in Richmond...
Causes Arlene Goldbard Supports
Thousand Kites http://www.thousandkites.org/
The...