Wednesday, 6 December 2017
Support makers, craft, and the handmade!
Support this amazing organization dedicated to promoting craft, makers, and the handmade!
Donate today!
https://www.canadahelps.org/en/dn/10848
They also have an online shop!
https://www.craftontarioshop.com/
Or visit in person!
1106 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON, Canada
M6J 1H9
T 416 921 1721
E shop@craftontario.com
Morrisian Spotlight: Katrín Jakobsdóttir
Photograph:
Katrin Jakobsdottir centre, with current and former Society chairs Martin Stott
and Ruth Levitas in a pub in Reykjavik
Morrisian elected as Icelandic Prime
Minister!
Katrin Jakobsdottir, leader of Vinstri Graen (RedGreen), has served as Minister for Education, Science and Culture in the Green Left
Government of 2009-13 and has taught at the University of Iceland where she is
a specialist in Scandi crime literature. She is also an enthusiastic Morrisian
and gave a lecture to the British chapter of the Society tour in 2013.
In the lecture, entitled Good Afternoon Mr Morris she demonstrated
an extraordinary knowledge both of Morris’s range of contributions to society,
culture and politics, but also to their continuing impacts in Iceland. She
structured her talk after the time travel of News from Nowhere, around the idea of Morris’s reappearance in
present day Iceland, ‘our demented age’, where he joins her and her two brothers
in a discussion over dinner.
The themes of their ‘discussion’ ranged
over what she considered to be likely to be Morris’s chief interests on his
return; the survival of the Icelandic way of life including the way Icelandic
embroidery has influenced modern Icelandic design; the preservation of historic
houses and the pressures of redevelopment;
Morris’s views on how to build new businesses based on beauty and
quality; the importance of the local as opposed to the mass-produced; the difficulties faced by socialism,
particularly ‘the fragmentation that seems to be a constant of the political
left wing, exactly as he experienced in the late nineteenth century’; democracy
and the role of the media including social media and the experience of direct
democracy in Iceland’s recent history; the chasm between the power of big
corporations and the working class; the integration in perspective between
‘domestic beautification’ and the class struggle and equality; sustainability
and the intrinsic value of wilderness, and finally his likely views on ‘Game of Thrones’.
A feminist, socialist, peace activist and
climate change campaigner, she leads a coalition of centre right parties who
mainly represent fishing and farming interests and are strongly Eurosceptic.
Martin Stott
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