Gakked from many friends, most recently seedmoon

[sabrinamari]

* Scan my interest list. List any that seem odd to you.

* I'll explain
it.

* Then you post this in your journal so other people can ask you
about your interests.

Comments

[wild-place-king.livejournal.com]

What is structural violence?

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

Tell me about structural violence and why you find it interesting.

poop

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

somertrey beat me.

[krkhst.livejournal.com]

brian eno

I've never heard of him, so this will be new knowledge for me, and that is always good...

Re: poop

[krkhst.livejournal.com]

"somertrey"

Hee hee, that's funny..

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Definition 1

Taken from Women, Poverty and AIDS: Sex Drugs and Structural Violence, by Paul Farmer, Margaret Connors and Janie Simmons:

Constraints on individual agency that are the result of neither nature nor pure individual will, but of historically given and often economically driven processes and forces (paraphrased from page 23).


Definition 2

Taken from http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~dleighton/svintro.html

"Structural Violence Section Introduction
Draft 6/1/99

By Deborah Du Nann Winter and Dana Leighton

Copyright 1999 Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana Leighton

Direct violence is horrific, but its brutality usually gets our attention: we notice it, and often respond to it. Structural violence, however, is almost always invisible, embedded in ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience. Structural violence occurs whenever people are disadvantaged by political, legal, economic or cultural traditions. Because they are longstanding, structural inequities usually seem ordinary, the way things are and always have been...

Johan Galtung originally framed the term structural violence to refer to any constraint on human potential due to economic and political structures (1969). Unequal access to resources, to political power, to education, to health care, or to legal standing, are forms of structural violence. When inner city children have inadequate schools while others do not, when gays and lesbians are fired for their sexual orientation, when laborers toil in inhumane conditions, when people of color endure environmental toxins in their neighborhoods, structural violence exists. Unfortunately, even those who are victims of structural violence often do not see the systematic ways in which their plight is choreographed by unequal and unfair distribution of societys resources."

[oakleaves.livejournal.com]

Pema Chodron, and why she (?) is so influential for you.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

I find structural violence interesting because I need to do something with my life. In other words, I need causes and reasons that motivate me to go on living. For me, structural violence provides a strong reason to live. It gives me an important goal around which to wrap the contents of my life. I want to contribute significantly to slowing, lessening and/or stopping it in as forms and as many ways that as I can.

This ties in nicely with several other goals that I have for this life: to be a great teacher; to push myself as hard as I can to evolve closer and closer to bhodisattva-form (this is multi-lifetime goal, which is not a problem since I believe in reincarnation) and to help facilitate similar kinds of growth in other people. By definition, the more personal growth is achieved by more persons, the more I succeed in damaging/lessening/slowing the forces of structural violence. I believe that this is so because the ultimate source of structural violence is the cumulative immaturity and underdevelopment of the human race.

That's why I'm interested. I need a lifetime project with which to occupy myself.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Taken from http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/

"Who is Brian Eno?

Perhaps best known as a musician and producer, he's also an artist, professor and thinker. Music-wise, even if you haven't heard any of his own records, you may have heard his production contributions to albums by rock legends U2, David Bowie or James. In other media, his music sometimes appears in films (Trainspotting, Velvet Goldmine, Heat), television programs and commercials, and the Windows 95 start-up sound.


What kind of music does he create?

We've tried all the airy-fairy descriptions we can think of, but it narrows down to this: 1. Songs. 2. Instrumental or ambient pieces. 3. Unclassifiable."

My thoughts: I came to love Brian Eno's music when I was introduced to his album "Music for Airports", a long instrumental piece. It's pretty much undescribable. There are no words. It is like ritual: only accessable by experiencing it. It is sound that creates feeling/sensation/vibration of an intensely calming, centered, aware variety for me.

Eno used to be a member of Roxy Music, but when he quit the band he went on to do something completely different. I recommend that you listen to excerpts of his work online if you are interested.

I love ambient music in general----ambient music is a term given to largely instrumental music (voices may be used, but as intstruments, not as producers of words)that has as its goal the creation of mood as a background to other kinds of experience, or that opens one to perceiving other experiences in a particular way.

You might like ambient music if you like the Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance.



What Eno albums would you recommend?

Always a tricky question, this one, as answers are highly subjective. EnoWeb reckons that there are two "benchmark" albums which give a good indication of the rest of Brian's output. One is Another Green World, which has songs and instrumentals. The other is Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, which has a selection of ambient pieces.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Oh my gods, how do I answer this in a single little post?

The short answer: last year I started going to a Shambhala mediattion group in order to learn to meditate. The group was reading an ancient text and watching a series of videos that were commentary on that text (ancient texts are an expoerience in entering into a totaly alien cultural context; good cultural brokers/ translators are critical!. These videos were simple: they were tapes of a well-know American Buddhist nun talking about what each section of the text meant. This nun, I was told, was known for her ability to explain the key concepts of Tibetan Buddhist thought in an a way that was extremely accessable to Americans. She was a gifted teacher. I knew nothing else of her at the time.

Then I sat down and the first video started to run.

For almost the first time, I saw a woman who I knew *immediately* was what we call an Elder. Not just a wise, kind, experienced older spiritual teacher....a true Elder. I was captivated. She was a master teacher, able to translate ancient phrases and awkward translations into immediate, utterly alive personal experience with ease and grace. She spoke into the camera and I felt certain that she was speaking directly to me. She spoke to me of my life, my daily existence, and the lessons that were unfolding right at that moment around me. She gave me the beginnings of the tools that have helped me move with whatever grace I possess through this separation and divorce. I learned more in that 60 minutes than I have learned from any teacher of any variety for a very, very long time. Maybe ever.

For me, it has always been critically important for me to see real-life examples of where I am going before I get there. For much of my adult life, I have been searching for examples of the stages and places to which I want to go and/or bring other people: First Degree, Second Degree, Third Degree. I have wanted to find living, breathing examples of each that exemplified what each stage meant, what was its best expression, *where* I was trying to help people to go. Explicit textual descriptions were also good, when I could find them. One problem that I had yet to tackle at that time was this one: what does an Elder actually look like?

Not just any Elder, but a superior Elder. A role model Elder. An Elder who can model for me the very best of what I can become as an Elder myself.

So finding Pema was a breath-taking experience for me, because she was an answer to this question that I have had all along...what kind of Elder am I going to be?

The answer is very simple:

Pema Chodron. Pema Chodron. Pema Chodron.

http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

P.S. The photo on the linked website lies. She wears Harry Potter glasses.

[oakleaves.livejournal.com]

Sounds like we've been asking a number of similar questions to ourselves. Perhaps I should explore Pema as well...

[faelandarach.livejournal.com]

Magical realism...not quite sure what that is...

Trent
ps Hi Sabrina. :)

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Hi Trent!

Magical realism refers to both a style of painting and a genre of literature. I love both, mostly because of the way that they combine surrealism with everyday events, people and objects.

Modern examples of magical realism include HBO's mini series, Carnivale and some parts of Six Feet Under.

Charles de Lint's Newport novels are also an example...the genre seamlessly interweaves myth and fantasy with actual history or pseudo-history and pragmatic, every day events. Here are a few other definitions:


Taken from http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_mr.html:

"Like many Latin American writers, Gabriel García Márquez has been inextricably linked to a style of literature known as "magical realism." Literature of this type is usually characterized by elements of the fantastic woven into the story with a deadpan sense of presentation."


"The following is an adaptation from M.H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1993) as cited by Dr. Robert P. Fletcher of West Chester University.


The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England.  These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales.  Robert Scholes has popularized metafiction as an overall term for the large and growing class of novels which depart drastically from the traditional categories either of realism or romance, and also the term fabulation for the current mode of free-wheeling narrative invention.  These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic -- and sometimes highly effective -- experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic."

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

There's lots of good insight in her work; it's worth exploring.