Week 3: June 9 – Edward Carpenter and GM

Today was a fun but tough walk. Over lunch, I speed walked from my office to the SF Symphony and back. I wanted to get tickets to a concert and safe the $9 fee charged when ordering online. I walked the 1.6 miles in about 25 minutes using music to keep my speed. The songs are between 90 and 130 bpm, which roughly corresponds to the steps per minute I take. So, when I headed out the door to walk home, I still had the music queued up, which set me up for a fast pace (both are around 90 bpm): One of my favorite songs – Dana – and another favorite – Amore Contrariadu – set the pace for my walk (
To play the music, click the link to start the song. Click it again to stop the music. You can fast-forward or go back using the little timer box)). Of course I had to slow down once I hit the first hill but I kept walking at a pretty good clip even after I switched to podcasts.

I listened to an Against the Grain interview with Sheila Rowbotham who wrote a book about Edward Carpenter (among other books). It turned out to be a rather fascinating interview! Carpenter lived from 1844 to 1929 in Britain. He was an activist hard to put into a category, though he had clear left-leaning interests from anarchism to socialism. Apparently, his left compatriots got occasionally frustrated with him because he wasn’t to be pigeon-holed. He also was interested in the suffrage movement because he observed how his own sisters had only two options: to become married or to be old maids. Nothing in between and nothing that would affirm their own selves. Carpenter was also considered one of the first gay activists, influencing among others Harry Hay who had discovered Carpenter’s “The Intermediate Sex” as a youngster in a library and managed to get his hands on the copy.

Carpenter also advocated simple living with a fruit & nut based diet. After his death this brought him the scorn of people like George Orwell who shook his head over ‘every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer and sex maniac’ who ended up drawn to socialism. While Orwell felt misgivings over someone who synthesized various strands of philosophy and critiques of capitalism, he was not the only one to dismiss Carpenter. After his death, most young leftists ignored Carpenter’s work because it seemed too utopian. Only when the gay rights movement dug out his work again did Carpenter’s ideas make a re-emergence. The Edward Carpenter Archive now makes many of Carpenter’s books available online. They might be worth a read!

Closing in on Park Presidio Blvd, I switched gears in my listening yet again by catching up with the Planet Money podcasts. In the episode I listened to, GM had just entered the bankruptcy proceedings (yeah, I know that was last week…). It sounds like we taxpayers again got a bad deal…

To go back to my weekly updates please click here where you also can find out what all this walking is about…

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