Archives for the month of: March, 2011

Literacy: its own reward?

22 March 2011 //
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It’s easy to be cynical in these cynical times, surrounded, as we are, by various illiteracies:

  • Pop culture, with its contempt for age and authority
  • Commercial culture, with its money as the end-all-and-be-all
  • Hedonist-nihilist culture, with its lack of connection to anything larger than an orgasm

As someone trained in language and literature, I might be expected to have my nose down in a book. (Or up some other part.) Book! What’s that? Book! What’s that for?

literacy

Earnest, playful, dreaming, ideal, will kids grow up to read? Or will they be absorbed in mindless pleasures?

A retired friend who taught for a living reads voraciously. He reads novels, history, sociology, religion, science. He reads to get ahead, could be, which may be, deliberately, behind where the rest of us are going. Chris gives me a flying precis of the last half dozen books he’s read, then throws up his hands, and asks, “But, really, what use is reading?”

Doesn’t it improve the mind? I say.

Maybe it’s a process rather than product? I suggest. A process that generates a bit of light in this time of so much darkness? A bit of cool in this time of so much heat?

It’s not my intention here to talk about politics. (It only increases the temperature, quenches the light.) Or to mention religion, either. (Its effects are similar.)

I’d like, rather, just to pose a question. Does reading do anything? Does it have any uses? Or is it, well, just beautiful, fantastical, airy, impractical, platonic, archaic, feckless?

Do individuals need reading? Do businesses? And to what end? And to what purpose?

Are those of us who read, for duty and, yes, pleasure more than a little like the Libyan rebels, holding back the forces of brutality and darkness?

(As Hemingway said, in another connection, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”)

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Categories literacy

Think outside the box: really outside the box!

2 March 2011 //
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microshelter

Derek Diedreksen's Gypsy Junker invites you to think outside the box!

Well, we’re all so busy thinking outside the box these days — that’s the exhortation, isn’t it? — that we fail to see the box we’re trapped in. The box of cliches, jargon, obscure Latinisms, and boxed-in thinking in general.

Seems like a loony in Massachusetts has set about to right this problem — in a nouveau-Thoreauvian way.

In Walden, Thoreau opined that a man might live with dignity in a house the size of a railroad storage box, the kind he saw beside the tracks at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass, the kind that held RR supplies, I suppose. Thoreau was keeping his tongue in cheek, as usual. He was full of wit and banter about the follies of his fellow man, whose misfortune it was, he asserted, to be trundling down life’s road with his house and all his possessions on his back.

We don’t have to be a follower of Thoreau or know much about him to see that he makes some kind of paradoxical sense at least. (Do you think he’d have many followers on LinkedIn or friends on Facebook, now that it’s the popular thing to do, the boxy kind of thing we seem to seek?) We stress quantity so much, that is, that we forget about quality. Qualify of life, if you will. (Argh, I hate that phrase!) Or quality of time and space to inhabit and explore.

A recent New York Times article shows that Thoreau has a follower and friend in contemporary Stoughton, Massachusetts, a fellow named Derek Diedreksen who is into thinking outside the box. You see, he has been constructing in the back yard of his modest two-bedroom house a series of “micro-shelters” that he calls the Gypsy Junker, the Hickshaw, and the Boxy Lady. Like Thoreau with his cabin, Diedreksen has made his constructions out of materials he’s scavenged or bought on the cheap. Each has cost him less than $200. (In Walden’s first chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau lays out his expenses for boards, nails, mortar, etc. penny by penny.)

Of the Gypsy Junker, the largest of the three structures, Diedreksen says, “Originally, it was going to be a place to brainstorm for my book [about the micro-structures] and my designs. … There’s no better place than inside someplace that is unconventional and bizarre. It helps you think outside the box instead of sitting in some white-walled room.”

So there you have it. If you really want to think outside the box, get thee to a micro-structure if not a nunnery. All that breathing the shallow air of white-walled rooms will do you in. Guaranteed!

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Categories creativity, jargon, structure