Protests in Greece...

This evening in front of the Arch of Hadrian.

In Athens, at a meeting at the National & Kopodistrian University of Athens, one of the oldest "modern" institutes of learning in Greece.  We meet daily in the main building which dates to the early 19th century.  Its front plaza, the propylaeum, has been the historical center of social protest for decades (centuries?).  Graffiti is all over Athens, angry graffiti....on historical buildings, statues, stores, houses.....the city is suffering.  And yes, the venal Goldman Sachs had something to do with it (here).

Please follow this link...Morris I know you are listening.  Yiannis Billris, your photographs are amazing.

"Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit."

Steve Jobs, the William Morris of our time

In Calcutta's The Telegraph, an article written by Mukul Kesavan argues that Steve Jobs was the William Morris of our time.  It is a fascinating read...it would appear that the only thing that stood between WM and total world domination was his conscience with regards to worker's rights.  And if you want to know more about that, or are an Apple devotee of any sort, I highly recommend the play "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs".

"Comparisons across great spans of time and space are always absurd but if you are going to look for an earlier incarnation of Jobsness, you could do worse than William Morris. In this silly season for over-the-top obituaries, I’m saying that Jobs was a latter-day William Morris and that Apple is the lineal descendant of the Kelmscott Press."

read the rest...

The Corporate State

A friend sent me this youtube link that captures, more than anything else I've seen/read, what the Occupy Wall St movement is protesting against.  The bit about the Berlin wall is very interesting.

As any card-carrying Morris fan knows, in the 1880s our William was one of the founding members of the British socialist movement.  In the extract below from "How I Became a Socialist" Morris shares his views on the link between the welfare of the working class and the vitality of art.

"A last word or two. Perhaps some of our friends will say, what have we to do with these matters of history and art? We want by means of Social-Democracy to win a decent livelihood, we want in some sort to live, and that at once. Surely any one who professes to think that the question of art and cultivation must go before that of the knife and fork (and there are some who do propose that) does not understand what art means, or how that its roots must have a soil of a thriving and unanxious life. Yet it must be remembered that civilization has reduced the workman to such a skinny and pitiful existence, that he scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life much better than that which he now endures perforce. It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life before him, a life to which the perception and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to be as necessary to man as his daily bread, and that no man, and no set of men, can be deprived of this except by mere opposition, which should be resisted to the utmost."

You can read the entire essay here.

Occupy Wall St.

....a Tea Party for the rest of us.  The spirit of William Morris, tireless crusader for the working class, is in Zuccotti Park this month.

 tried to fact-check this but couldn't find the data....

Jalani, 16 yr old with a 4.0 GPA, sleeps in park with his grandma (click here).

Snowflake House, Deerfield Massachusetts

I saw this cool old house in Deerfield, Massachusetts, this past weekend.  How did such a house come to pass?  Did the future owner say to the builder "I'd like to have a circle of snowflakes around the entire house.  Can you do that?"  (Pan to builder rolling his eyes.)  Or maybe this was one of four homes in some early version of a planned development (Quail Hollow Estates?  Running Brook Farms?) and the other three seasons burned down---maybe robin, flower, and leaf?  It would certainly be a perfect house for Snowflake Bentley.  The colors are lovely, especially the red sashes, and the front bay window must look wonderful from the inside.

And speaking of snow, there was a nice essay posted the other day about the evolution of Morris's socialist philosophy by a blogger named "Snowball".  The blog's subtitle is "Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution," a quote by Georg Lukacs, the founder of western Marxism.  Now I can't say I understand this quote at all, or even know what western Marxism is --- in fact, historical materialism sounds more like the life philosophy of a certain class of serial renovators, people possibly also obsessed with "bungalow style".   Snowball, in his post, quotes Fiona MacCarthy: "Early in 1883 Morris crossed the "river of fire" and became a revolutionary socialist........This final transformation of the cosseted son of the capitalist classes, whose family fortunes derived from copper mining in the valley of the Tamar, was described by EP Thompson, the historian of the English working classes, as "among the great conversions of the world"."

William Morris was so frigging great at everything he did!

Arts and Craft Carpets from Afghanistan

I found the above picture in a home magazine recently.  It is a hand-knotted wool carpet from Afghanistan woven in Morris's Pimpernel pattern.  The scan doesn't do the tan, baby blue and brown colors of this carpet justice.  It is being sold by Landry&Arcari, local rug merchants, for $11,000 (9ftx12ft).

The fact that it is made in Afghanistan got me thinking about Morris's vehement protest of imperialism during his lifetime including, no doubt, the Anglo-Afghan war in 1878.  His hatred of aggressive nationalism was what first roused him to political action in 1877 when he protested Disraeli's foreign policy in the near East.  In his "A Note on Morris and Imperialism" Peter Faulkner writes "Morris was, as one would expect, particularly concerned about the effects of imperial expansion on the cultures of the colonized peoples.  In "The Art of the People" in 1879 he drew his audience's attention to the poignant fact that while the developing interest in decorative art had led pattern-designers to look to the East for inspiration, the very art that they admired was being destroyed by "the advance of Western conquest and commerce"."

Thus were the seeds planted of Morris's ultimate vision of a Utopian world in "News From Nowhere" and of his transformation into a leading Socialist philosopher.  On Landry&Acari's website there is a very interesting photo gallery that explains the entire rug making process  -- it is almost all by hand.  The company is a member of GoodWeave, an international nonprofit organization devoted to building schools, programs and opportunities that give children back their childhoods by ending child labor in the handmade carpet industry in South Asia.

Would all of this meet with Morris's socialist approval?  This is where I step far out of my area of expertise but am happy to stand in awe of Morris's powerful and continuing influence on socialism past and present.  Indeed, if I lived near London I would go to the event below later this month, where I'd no doubt learn much of interest.

Instead, I'll ponder this essay about William Morris by Adam Buick, a socialist leader and (see comments :-) writer who is giving the above lecture.  Here is a short excerpt (I hope Buick doesn't mind--if he does, I'll take it down).

"Although the task of toning down Morris's socialism for the benefit of his wealthy admirers began almost as soon as he was dead, in Marxian circles his reputation as a 'revolutionary socialist' survived. His 'News From Nowhere' which leaves no doubt as to where he stood on this issue had a very wide circulation. It was quickly translated into German (by the wife of the pioneer German socialist, Wilhelm Liebknecht) and distributed by the Social Democratic Party.

At the end of his life Morris's political position was more or less that of the SDF (Socialist Democratic Federation) and it was this organisation which first kept alive his reputation. The Twentieth Century Press which was at the service, if not under the democratic control of the SDF, reprinted a number of Morris's writings: some of the pamphlets he had written for the Socialist League, an article How I became a Socialist. The anarchists too reprinted some of the Socialist League pamphlets. Besides these pamphlets, articles and lectures Morris's books Signs of Change and Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (written with Belfort Bax) were also available. So that at the turn of the century, when the reform-revolution problem was re-opened, socialists could have had access to a fair number of Morris's socialist works. After the turn of the century yet more of his works became available. In 1903 the Fabian Society published a lecture of his on Communism. In 1907 the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which had broken away from the SDF in 1904, brought out another lecture 'Art under Plutocracy' as a pamphlet entitled Art, Labour and Socialism. In 1913 the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. in Chicago which specialised in popular editions of Marxist works reprinted Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome."