Conserving Consumption

In Shop Class as Soulcraft Matthew Crawford wrestles with our use and need for technology and machines.  It is obvious that technology has made some things easier and in many ways has made life better.  At the same time we must be willing to ask how machines and technology have done violence to autonomy and community.  Crawford acknowledges that a machine’s “readiness to serve our will is a good attribute,” but goes on to write, “But I also want to notice that there is a whole ideology of choice and freedom and autonomy, and if one pays due attention, these ideals start to seem less like a bubbling up of the unfettered Self and more like something that is urged upon us.  This becomes most clear in advertising, where Choice and Freedom and A World Without Limits and Possibilities and all the other heady existentialist slogans of the consumerist Self are invoked with such repetitive urgency that they come to resemble a disciplinary system.  Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.“

People are paid to deceive us into buying things we don’t need and they don’t care about.  Yet we continue to buy and dispose and buy again while willingly ignorant of the loss of our ability to conserve.  What have we gained for our loss?

Moving Leaves

Autumn means leaves around the Ballenger homestead.  Lots and lots of leaves.  We have three large silver maples (two in the front and one in the back) that shed leaves for weekss.  This year the tree in the back dropped its leaves about two weeks later than the two in front.  This helped spread out the work.  We have been using a lawn sweeper, that attaches to the riding mower, and wheelbarrows to move the leaves to the garden.  Then on Sunday my neighbor mentioned how he rakes the leaves onto a tarp and then drags the tarp to his compost pile.  I tried it yesterday and it is a much easier and quicker method.

This is the tree in the backyard, minus its leaves.

Here are the leaves on the tarp.

Pulling the leaves and my boss.

Finally, here is the garden in July…

…and here it is in November, covered with leaves and ready for another winter.

Working to Live

I decided to go ahead and start posting some quotes from Shop Class as Soulcraft instead of waiting until I am finished reading it.  The ideas within this book are ones that I have been struggling with for the past couple of years.  I dropped out of the workforce to take care of our daughter and because I realized I needed to form new understanding of work.  Even before picking it up I was certain that Crawford’s book would articulate some of the ideas in a way that I have yet to do as well as bring up some new ones.

I can’t remember a time when I liked to do manual labor.  I am a clock watcher.  I can’t wait to leave work.  Since I left my job at the bicycle shop I made a significant realization…I don’t like working for people, more specifically I don’t like bosses.  I like manual labor.  I lose myself in a job and find great satisfaction in growing and building things but if someone told me to do it it would become a life-sucking chore.  Much of that stems from trying to fit myself into jobs that were horribly suited for me.  My first job out of college?  Christian High School Principal/Teacher/Guidance Counselor/Athletic Director.  Soul crushing, blood pressure raising, desk job agony for two years.  That led to Starbucks and then to another desk job as a child care director and finally to the bike shop.  There were some other little jobs peppered in there but I mentioned the highlights of the journey to Newark and stay-at-home dad status.  In the introduction to Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford writes, “We worry that we are becoming stupider, and begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense.”    A perfect summation of my journey through the first decade of my life as a worker.

Now, when my fingers push through the dirt in the garden and when I cut a piece of lumber for something I’m building and when I give Emma a bath and when I make a meal for my family, I feel more alive than ever.

The Skull Mantra

This was the book I had planned to read after finishing Herzog.  I heard Nancy Pearl recommend The Skull Mantra in a recent edition of NPR’s books podcast.  I’ve been interested finding some good mystery novels to add to my reading list so Eliot Pattison’s first novel became my first foray into the mystery genre.  Obviously, I can’t compare The Skull Mantra to anything else in its genre but I have found it to be an enjoyable story.  Much like my experience with cinematic mysteries, I have found myself slightly overwhelmed with keeping track of all the important names, places and events.  The second half of the book moves at a much faster pace and seemed more focused, or maybe I became more focused.

The real beauty of the book is its description of the people and landscapes of Tibet.  Pattison describes a people that find their full identity in a place.  Despite the repressive Chinese occupiers, the Tibetan people find ways to protect and pass on their culture.  It is difficult to find any parallels in America when the only common culture is pop-culture.  An American in the book says, “Life is wasted back there.  There, they just live on the world.  The Buddhists, they have eight hot and cold hells.  But there’s a whole new level in America.  The worst one.  The one where everyone’s tricked into ignoring their souls by being told they’re already in heaven.”

The Shining

After reading Herzog I decided to read something light.  I’ve been wanting to read a novel by Stephen King and it was Halloween weekend so I decided The Shining would be perfect.  It’s been a few years since I saw Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the book but, as you know if you’ve seen it, the images were still very clear in my mind.  I expected that the movie had followed the book closely but I was mistaken.  The two stories are similar but distinctly different.  I was a little surprised a the amount of unnecessary and pervasive vulgarity used by King.  It is reminiscent of watching an action or comedy from the eighties where curse words are used just because they could.

The Shining was a fun read and perfect over the Halloween weekend.  I recommend The Shining if your looking for a quick, fun and creepy read.

Herzog

My interest in literary novels led me to the unavoidable confrontation with Saul Bellow.  Bellow is usually mentioned in the list of the last century’s great American writers.  I first heard of Bellow while I was reading Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Bound.  Naturally, or at least I would like to think, I connected Bellow and Roth and assumed a stylistic parallel.  Since I was impressed, but not fond, of Zuckerman I had put off reading Bellow.  Recently I heard Jeffrey Eugenides once again praising Bellow and specifically his novel Herzog.  I could wait no more.

Moses Herzog is a man on the brink of mental, physical and spiritual exhaustion due to a horrific divorce.  He writes letters to friends, foes, colleagues, the famous and the dead.  These letters are sometimes written on any scrap of paper handy and sometimes they are simply written in his mind.

Herzog has all of the urban neurosis and idleness I have  found particularly frustrating in most of the late literary novels I have read.  There is a deep devaluing of manual labor that is assumed and is an unnamed cause of much of the dysfunction in the lives of many characters.

Like Roth, Bellow is very aware of the sexual inclinations of men and does not ignore his character’s desire to be with women.  Unlike Roth, Bellow doesn’t make the pages of his book a vehicle for him to imagine women performing gymanastics on his penis.

Herzog is brilliantly written.  It is conscientious and philosophically challenging and at it’s heart is about a man who wants to love.

I highly recommend Herzog.

But I, with my memory- all the dead and the mad are in my custody, and I am the nemesis of the would-be forgotten.  I bind others to my feelings, and oppress them.

With one long breath caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don’t cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don’t poison everything.

We Can’t Have It Both Ways

The following quotes are from Jason Peters’ article Long Live the Luddites.

Plenty of technological gluttons regard themselves, and want to be regarded, as careful consumers of technology. They are nothing of the sort. They are large-mouth bass with treble hooks deep in their throats. The principal feature of our economic lives–that we use the world up when we make things and poison it when we throw them away–is no concern of theirs.

But there’s the rub. We’re not going to be able to operate for much longer by eating out and driving home to shit in our own nest. It astonishes me that the sophisticated non-Luddites don’t get this.

For if we want to preserve our communities and the land on which they depend, then we’re going to have to learn to refuse most of what’s for sale. We can’t have it both ways.

Build Soil

The following lines are from Robert Frost’s poem Build Soil.  Find Frost’s collected poems and read Build Soil in its entirety.

Let those who possess the land and only those,

Who love it with a love so strong and stupid

That they may be abused and taken advantage of

And made fun of by business, law and art;

They still hang on.  That so much of earth’s

Unoccupied need not make us uneasy.

Let none assume to till the land but farmers.

I only speak to you as one of them.

You shall go to your run-out mountain farm,

Poor cast-away of commerce, and so live

That none shall ever see you come to market—

Not for a long time.  Plant, breed, produce,

But what you raise or grow, why feed it out,

Eat it or plow it under where it stands

To build the soil.  For what is more accursed

Than an impoverished soil pale and metallic?

Build soil.  Turn the farm in upon itself

Until it can contain itself no more,

But sweating-full, drips wine and oil a little.

I will go to my run-out social mind

And be as unsocial with it as I can.

The thought I have, and my first impulse is

To take to market—I will turn it under.

The thought from that thought—I will turn it under.

And so on to the limit of my nature.

Don’t join too many gangs.  Join few if any.

Join the United States and join the family—

But not much in between unless a college.

Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are is one of the more enjoyable movie experiences I’ve had over the last few years.  I don’t know if I was in the right mood or if it is a good movie.  I will leave the final verdict to film critics and historians.

I do know that it perfectly captures the tension in the lives of children but I don’t think it is primarily a children’s movie.  Uncertainty is the implicit villain.  Uncertain circumstances and uncertain emotions simmer until they reach a boiling rage.  The unfortunate truth of the movie is that many children make that discovery for themselves.

 

Children wake up,
hold your mistake up,
before they turn the summer into dust.
If the children don’t grow up,
our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up.
We’re just a million little god’s causin rain storms turnin’ every good thing to rust.
I guess we’ll just have to adjust.

lyrics from Wake Up by Arcade Fire

The Crying of Lot 49 and Wendell Berry’s Questionnaire

The Crying of Lot 49 is the first book in some time that I wanted to quit reading after having already read a significant portion of the book.  Pynchon’s style is a significant departure anything I have recently read.  I believe the jarring stylistic difference, the meandering postmodern plot and a character named Mike Fallopian made me yearn for some time with Steinbeck or Berry.

The turning point was Oedipa’s journey through the city and further into uncovering the Tristero organization.  The underground organization is represented by a muted post horn symbol and in her quest, Oedipa finds this symbol throughout the city.  It is never clear if any of what she uncovers is real but like Oedipa it made me want to continue the journey.

Wendell Berry’s Questionnaire

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.