dry leaves dancing-
fallen fellows flip and skate,
last waltz of autumn

About two months ago I began looking for new volunteer jobs. I wanted positions that would offer a personal challenge as well as being socially useful. I find my semi-retirement to be somewhat boring, a first-world problem I know, but one which requires a solution. Golf, lawn bowls or card games are not that solution. So I have been searching volunteer sites and from the hundreds of jobs that I looked at, two popped out at me.

At the present I am in the beginning phase, getting to know the ropes, being mentored and discovering how I might harness those talents that I have to best effect. I applied for a research job with a radio station that offers a reading service to those people who cannot access printed material, such as newspapers, magazines and so forth. I have also successfully auditioned for a reader position at the same place which I think is an exciting prospect.

My other volunteer position is with a maritime museum in Darling Harbour, ostensibly as a guide on board their floating display. There is a steep learning curve as the details about each vessel need to be studied. I will also need to develop my own patter, which should not be too difficult.

Lately also I have been reading Karl Marx. No I am not a Marxist but, since Marx is still relevant in many academic circles (he seems to be a lens for viewing social structures and conditions), I wanted to become more familiar with his theory. Not being an economist either, I find a lot of material hard-going and dry, but push on, I do.

One aspect that I find compelling is Marx's take on alienation. He argued that the modern worker, set as he or she is in a workplace in which he is merely a wage earner, divorced by the intrinsic processes of his work from the product he is making, becomes alienated from his job. It becomes mere drudgery, eight or more hours a day.

I was lucky enough to have a job as a teacher that engaged me intellectually and socially. Moreover, it had a noble purpose. But so many jobs lack that kind of motivating raison d'etre and are essentially just a pay packet. I am thinking especially of white collar jobs - people stuck in offices and cubicles, selling products or entering data or maybe doing very little at all. And blue collar ones where people clean up after others. And what for, I wonder? To make the money to pay the bills and consume products? To visit the shopping cathedrals and come face to face with the alienated, bored workers on the other side of the counter?

there are still leaves
at the foot of the old urinal
from autumn last

I have been revisiting some of my old postmodern haunts lately. This was motivated by one Dr Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist who, amongst other things, has been highly critical of the manner in which (he supposes) postmodern ideas have permeated tertiary institutions. This infiltration has lead to a wholesale sacking of the Western tradition and it's replacement with systems of discourse which radical questions all truths, traditions, narratives and authorities.

In some sense this is correct. The verities thrown up by The Enlightenment and which worked their way through into modernity, assumptions upon which so many disciplines were built, have been under an assault in the last 30 years. The Bachelor of Arts that I did in the late 1970's was a rigorous and classical one (though no Greek or Latin), in which novels, plays, poems and the like could be studied in their own right, experts could be trusted and one could proceed as if there were truths or knowledge that could be counted on. When I look back on the Bachelor of Communications that my ex did in the late 1990's, and which I confess I had a hand in completing for her, one can see an entirely different philosophy at work. A whole new layer of jargon had been added to explain a radical scepticism towards knowledge and knowing. Courses reflected this new relativism and scepticism. I really enjoyed myself but I thanked my lucky stars that I had that earlier BA (and an MA) under my belt. Without them, I would have been lost at sea as far as rational, critical thinking was concerned.

Which brings me to Jean Baudrillard. I was re-reading a summary of some of his most important ideas. On a simplified level Baudrillard argued that representation (by which he meant all manner of media, advertising, TV, radio, internet, newspapers, magazines, cameras, packaging and so forth) had so saturated reality that experience can only occur at one remove from it. We experience the world through a filter of preconceptions and expectations fabricated in advance by a world swamped with images. He wrote this before the advent of the smart phone, social media and augmented reality, all of which only feed into his thesis. While walking through the city yesterday, I was thinking about Baudrillard and how, despite the hyperbole in some of his writing, he was probably correct on some level. No matter where I looked, people were absorbed by brands, advertising or were staring into their phones. Their activities were likely already socialised by previous experience, perhaps many times over. What is original or authentic in such a world?

So Dr Peterson, I urge you not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are elements of the postmodern project that are interesting, challenging and valid. PoMo is a many-headed beast and not every head needs a-chopping.

through glass panes-
high in the gritty May sky,
a dog-nosed cloud

I spend quite a lot of time wandering the streets of the CBD in Sydney. I have my preferred patterns, places that I like to sit, buy coffee, reflect upon the metropolis. In as much as cities are lively, with decades and sometimes centuries of livings etched upon a collective memory, they are tiring. Strolling along a busy thoroughfare often involves a kind of urban gymnastics, with all manner of obstacles presented. People are sometimes engrossed in telephony (you know what I mean!) or sprawled four-abreast across the pavement, like the swells who walk up the avenue in the old song. There are couriers doing deliveries, baby strollers the size of small SUV's, homeless folks begging in all manner of postures and those annoying spruikers with ipads who are trying to sign you up to this or that charity. I am always happy to part with loose change but not sign up to a monthly plan!

Wynyard Station has been undergoing a facelift in recent months, a long-overdue improvement for such a busy entry and exit point to the CBD. Gone are the old wooden grooved elevators and rabbit-warren passages. Elements of the former have been incorporated into a smart hanging art installation, as if the old runners leapt from their tracks and clung to the ceiling in desperation. There is a clever audio-visual wall with thoughtful and quirky presentations, not unlike those seen in an art gallery. On occasions I have descended and reascended the adjacent elevators just to watch the projections again. You know that I have a certain fixation with finding meaning and this is no different, except for the location. Art in busy public spaces is intriguing and here is a spot where fast-moving commuters have no choice but to pass by art. How many think about it?

There is an interesting billboard-photograph that sits above the new elevators, paying homage, to the old set that now grace the ceiling. It forms the basis of a haiku from two posts ago. There is something about old photographs, of people and place and time, that is arresting, that demands further thought.