Dispatches from the New World of Work: Comments

Comment on "Goodbye Cathy"

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:47:30 -0500

Cathy,
Your contribution has been massive and I will miss you so much!
Rick

- Richard King

Comment on "Goodbye Cathy"

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:19:15 -0500

Hear, hear Cathy,

Many thanks for all your support and encouragement.

Peter Cook

- Peter Cook

Comment on "Goodbye Cathy"

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:17:18 -0500

Cathy

What a wonderful job you have done here. Thank you

Wishing you all the best for the future

Paul

- PaulH

Comment on "Goodbye Cathy"

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 07:35:21 -0500

Cathy,

Thanks again for all your responses to my questions and suggestions. God speed.

Tom N

- Tom N

Comment on "Closing Comments"

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:17:23 -0500

Damn.

- Terry Ransbury

Comment on "Closing Comments"

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:41:40 -0500

Thanks David! Wonderful to hear from you. It's been far too long. Hope all is well.

- Shelley Dolley

Comment on "Closing Comments"

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:05:53 -0500

Tom, Shelley et al at TPC

Wishing you all the best in continuing the conversations in a different format.

There is an incredible community with a lot of history that ties back to you and TPC. Heather Schultz and I were marveling last week about the community and connections over the years.

Wishing you good health and best wishes.

David P

- David Parks

Comment on "Tweets+"

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:56:51 -0500

Amazing to see how few hits are generated by searching TDC or Thinly Disguised Contempt (for customers,employees, for coworkers). TDC does not even show up in Wikipedia, but it seems to be alive and well in the business world!
At least a few of us still remember,Tom!

Recently saw a good example of TDC for customers at an unnamed upscale National hotel chain that sports a decidedly European Feel.
The three best parking spaces in their lot are marked "Hybrid Vehicles Only".
Almost all of their customers are business travelers driving whatever non-hybrid vehicle the car rental company at the airport issued them, and they now have the opportunity to slog 50 yards in a torrential rainstorm past three perfect and empty parking next to the door in order to prove that the hotel cares more about saving the planet than it does about it's customers!
Talk about contemt not even thinly disguised!

Keep up the Good Work!

- Stan

Comment on "Goodbye Cathy"

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:47:43 -0500

Cathy...

Wish u all the best in all your future endeavors and my sincere thanks to you from one of the dots of www.tompeters.com

- Dhivakar S

Comment on "Goodbye Cathy"

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:35:21 -0500

Thank you for your help ! Cathy, all the best for your new adventure.
- Ujwal

- ujwal

Comment on "Closing Comments"

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:49:17 -0500

Tom A - cheers to you too my friend - you don�t think you�re gonna get rid of me that easily do you? - You still owe me a pint of real English Ale when you are over :-)

- Trevor Gay

Comment on "Closing Comments"

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:13:03 -0500

Let me say a huge "THANK YOU FOR TRANSFORMING MY LIFE" before the line stops humming :)

Jay, Bangalore

- Jayakumar Hariharan

Comment on "Closing Comments"

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:47:15 -0500

Arrgh, I always get a wistful pang when a favorite website performance or event comes to an end. Although I never chimed in, the conversation here was a valuable aspect of the site. But of course, noisy spam pollutes the conversation, and degrades it. So let me just add my thanks to everyone who contributed in the past, and I look forward to reading, seeing, and hearing more of TP in the future.

- Dirk Brandts

Comment on "Closing Comments"

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:17:33 -0500

Oh, Tom A, goodbye. Now, why did you have to go and say all of those goodbyes? Deep sigh... I've been rather sad all day. Take heart, Judith. Take heart!

- Judith Ellis

Comment on "George Eliot"

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:01:58 -0500

I guess I will just include my favorite two passages from her last full novel, "Daniel Deronda," the "hot" novel of her in lit crit for the last 15 yrs..

Chapter 19:

To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervour which made him easily find poetry and romance a ong the events of everyday life. And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in the railway carriages: what banishes them is the vaccum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth , from the fathest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near."

Eliot is often discussed in terms of the old critical terms metaphor, but in the last decades there have been people , following Roman Jakobson, who talk more about metonymy, a kind of contiguity which bears on her understanding of skepticism, the problem of other mind, the verification and knowledge of a consciousness beyond one's own. Here is a fertile place to think of such questions, the distant to the near and back again... And of course she mentions her greatest theme of all here, sympathy.. Fellowship as she often calls it, or early in Adam Bede, just "fellow feeling."

There is another one which bears on her sense of fiction as a kind of moral philosophy, anticipating the great moral fiction of Henry James, who met GE twice and thought of her as a goddess in every way... Some do not realize how successful she was a translator of David Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, as well as Feuerbach, in his Hegelian Christological work, Essence of Christianity. To grasp his ideas, one must have a very working intimate knowledge of Scripture...

The epigraph to Chapter 11, the first of the second book, with a title also bearing on skepticism ("Meeting Streams") is also wonderful: "The beginning of an acquaintance with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance." It has a Kantian flavor, in that liminal space between the knowable and the unknowable, for Kant, the phenomenal and the noumenal, and like all Eliot epigraphs, has a great deal to tell us about the narrative that follows.

And it is hard not to love the saucy, spoiled Gwendolen's ode to riding...
"Yes, indeed: I never like my life so well as when I am on a horseback, having a great gallop. I think of nothin I only feel myself strong and happy." So rarely does she have a true sense of her moral personhood, in the words of the great Cavellian critic, Richard Eldridge in his book devoted to the subject (Univ of CHicago, 1988 or so...)

- victoria ordin

Comment on "Goodbye Cathy"

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:54:01 -0500

Best wishes on your path forward.

- J.D. Meier

Comment on "Closing Comments"

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:24:38 -0500

Thanks to Tom and all contributors - I've appreciated so much the ideas and books discussed here. I'll also remember my surprise when I found out that my favorite book on color and design was written by Tom's wife. That was a LOL moment! I'll still be checking in weekly. Thank you!

- Ginnie

Comment on "Goodbye Cathy"

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:14:22 -0500

Cathy,

I wish you well! Any time I've contacted you with a question or request, you've always responded with phenomenal speed, accuracy and grace. You are a classy lady and a wonderful model for all of us.

May God richly bless you on this next leg of the journey!

Bruce

- Bruce D Johnson

Comment on "Goodbye Cathy"

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:32:55 -0500

Good luck! You're infected with passion and excellence (courtesy of Tom)sospread the illness wherever you go. Even though I had never posted anything, I have been following you for years.I'll miss you.

- Josafat Medina

Comment on "Goodbye Cathy"

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:30:15 -0500

All the best Cathy! Looking forward to your next moves!

- Mitch Joel - Twist Image