Category: books
ten more i like…
social-ism
I’ve been off facebook now for about a week and I feel great. In, fact, I’m more social than ever. I actually call people on the phone and pick up when it rings. I take my kids on all kinds of fun adventures and buy them ice cream before dinner. I take other friends’ kids to summer camp. I don’t spend endless hours writing and reading people’s posts, or waiting for someone to comment on mine. In short, now I’m actually living. Whenever I find myself in interesting situations, I still think of a witty one-liners that I could have posted on facebook that would describe my predicament, but then I realize that I’m not on facebook anymore and the urge passes. I also realize I don’t have a forum anymore to promote my blog, but I’ve never had more than a few readers a day anyway, so that’s OK. I remember that it was too easy to be snarky on facebook. Snarky at a safe virtual distance. I still worry, though, that most of my 95 facebook friends, except for my wife and immediate family, don’t know I left and might be thinking that I defriended them. I have to admit that I don’t know the proper etiquette for leaving facebook. I tried to send a message to all my friends at once but facebook wouldn’t let me . There’s a website called seppukoo.com which boasts that they assist you in your virtual identity suicide. There, you can commit virtual self-disemboweling a la Yukio Mishima. Maybe I should have done it that way? But that would have freaked out my mom. So in the end I updated my status to say that I was leaving, provided my email and blog addresses, left it up for 24 hours and the shut ‘er down. Now I’m thinking…Why did I use to facebook someone when they lived right across the street from me and I saw their car in the driveway as I sat at my computer? I could have just walked across the street and talked to them. I mean, there they were, mowing their lawn. We seem to live in a culture now where we are in a constant struggle between living life and recording life. If you record most of your actions via facebook, Twitter, blogs, digital photos and videos, when are you really living? It’s as if we are all on screen all the time. When you take a walk in the woods or swim in a creek, do you tweet about it afterward? There was an interesting article in the NY Times about virtual memories and how now everything can be recorded and stored on the web forever, rendering that oh-so-human quality known as forgetting all but obsolete. In the not-so-recent past, we used to slowly forget some things over time and remember others. But now, we can remember everything all the time and for all time. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for mistakes or youthful indiscretions. Or bad puns or compromising photos. Used to be, we’d just remember the important stuff. Now it’s all right there. Without the self-imposed pressure to record myself, I feel like I can be myself again. And pretty soon I might just do something really crazy like write a letter.
defriended
Maybe it’s a bad sign that the day I deactivated my facebook account, I started listening to Pet Sounds nonstop. Was Mark Zuckerberg sending me a telepathic message to grow a beard, wear a bathrobe all day, and spend a few years in bed like Brian Wilson, excommunicated from the human race for giving the ‘book the finger? Not sure. I do know that I was spending way too much time on the thing, compulsively checking to see if anyone had commented on my witty posts or requests for flash mobs and such, and taking their silence as a personal affront. This was silly, very silly. Jean Renoir famously said that “the real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons. ” Now everyone is just too busy. So facebook was supposed to give us an easy way to “keep in touch” in the midst of our complicated, overscheduled modern lives. But where exactly was the majority of my life being lived? It felt like more and more it was spent staring at a screen, something I don’t think human beings evolved to do. (Check out Chris Van Allsberg’s book The Wretched Stone for more on this.) Now it’s summertime in Maine, and I can’t say that in the depths of the dark frozen January that is sure to come I won’t swallow my electronic pride and re-up, but right now I’m going for a walk or a swim, or maybe I’ll make some art, or read to my kids, or go on a date with my wife, finish Grapes of Wrath or do some yoga. At least right now, I can’t live online and off at the same time. Me and Brian will see you in the woods.
six mile
No, it’s not the prequel to the Eminem movie. It’s time to simplify. I tried a vegan diet for one month, to mixed results. Despite the predictions I had read in various books and websites, I did not miraculously lose weight or start glowing by giving up all animal products. In fact, I got fatter. Maybe this was because I overcompensated for my non-violent piety by eating tons of dark chocolate (vegan) and drinking lots of beer and red wine (also vegan). I took Omega-3 pills and B-12 supplements, but I was still tired all the time. I also lost my motivation to exercise. Maybe I thought if I just gave up milk, meat, and cheese, I’d suddenly lose 20 pounds just by walking back and forth from my car to my front door each morning and evening. This is not to say that my little experiment didn’t have its benefits. I discovered sauteed collard greens, Earth Balance butter, and red beans and rice. I learned all about factory farms and how our food is made by reading books like Gristle, Ominvore’s Dilemma, The Jungle Effect, Food Rules, and watching films like Food Inc. and King Corn. My wife and I decided to buy a farm share again, and I found a local farm that sells fresh vegetables and makes its own Maine maple syrup just a few miles from my home. I learned that cows were never meant to eat corn, and that’s why there is so much e.coli in the world. That most of the antibiotics in this country are given to healthy farm animals on industrial feed lots to overcompensate for crowded, unsanitary conditions. My vegan month was an eye-opening experience, and it’s true that once you know something, you can’t unknow it. I’ll never eat at McDonald’s again unless I’m on the verge of starvation. I don’t miss meat, but I also know that I probably haven’t had my last cheeseburger. I certainly haven’t had my last Greek yogurt. But if I do have a cheeseburger again one day, I’ll try to make sure the beef was grass-fed and came from a small organic family farm. Do I feel like a failure? A little. But I can live with that. We are all evolving. We are hopefully becoming more moral, more just, more forgiving, more loving, more compassionate, more generous. So I bow down to the vegan gods, and Alicia Silverstone, for forgiveness. I’m not a Superhero yet. Maybe someday. For now, I need to simplify. The days are getting sunnier, longer, and warmer. Summer is close. I need to lose 20 pounds, and I am going to do that by walking six miles a day, swimming on my lunch break, doing the Hundred Push-Up challenge, and taking a day off once in awhile, maybe every Monday. Now I’m going to go get a slice of Buffalo chicken pizza….
ten i like
networks of affection
I wish I could write like Rebecca Solnit, but I can’t so I’m just going to quote a few lines from the opening pages of her new book, A Paradise Built in Hell. To me, this is what true citizenship is all about, not about shouting people down and threatening “we surround them.” Listen:
“When Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he is raising one of the perennial social questions: are we beholden to each other, must we take care of each other, or is it every man for himself?…Most traditional societies have deeply entrenched commitments and connections between individuals, families, and groups. The very concept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection, and the freestanding individual exists largely as an outcast or exile. Mobile and individualistic modern societies shed some of these old ties and vacillate about taking on others, especially those expressed through economic arrangements-including provisions for the aged and vulnerable, the mitigation of poverty and desperation-the keeping of one’s brothers and sisters. The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others…but if I am not my brother’s keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities.”
When I see what happened yesterday in Maine, when equality was defeated by bigotry and intolerance, and when I see the talking heads on cable TV shouting at us and one another, I wonder: Where are the networks of affection and affinity that are supposed to bind us as a society?
waiting for nothing
When I was at Syracuse University, I knew a budding writer named John. He let me borrow a book called Waiting For Nothing by Tom Kromer. Kromer wrote about the homeless during the Great Depression, desperate for food and shelter. I never gave the book back, and can’t seem to put my hands on it today, but the title alone is evocative of a mood these days. More recently in the New York Times, Tom Friedman wrote that if unemployed people are just sitting around waiting for work, waiting for the jobs to come back, they are essentially waiting for nothing. These days, you can’t just wait and hope that your luck will change. You have to create something new. The landscape has changed forever. But what if what you are creating means nothing to no one? What if the world seems like one giant echo chamber? The Genius Grant isn’t coming, the check’s not in the mail. You might be brilliant, but no one cares. Too many voices in the wilderness right now. Too many blogs. Too many opinions. Too many experts. People are too busy surviving. Sometimes it just might be better to drop out for a while.
hiatus
I had some minor surgery last Friday, so I took this past weekend to recuperate. While I was flat on my back, gazing out the window at the sun-dappled leaves and listening to the birds singing, I was able to start and finish five books. They are: The Happiest Man in the World by Alec Wilkinson, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Into the Wild by John Krakauer, Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. All highly recommended. I can’t wait to fully recover so that I can get back on my mountain bike and resume my search for the perfect swimming hole. I’ve lived in Bath now for almost ten years and I’m just now really starting to appreciate the diversity of the landscape. The Kennebec can look foul one day, and as beautiful as the Seine the next. I might take a hiatus from this blog for awhile, too. It’s too beautiful outside to spend time at a computer. I hope you all can find your own private Eden this summer, too. Cheers! – henry
creepy naked guy
I have been on a quest lately to find a swimming hole within biking distance of my house. Living in Maine, and with the multitudinous rivers, streams and ocean inlets in my general vicinity, this would seem to be an easy task. But not so. Of course there are various places to swim, but I’m looking for a place a little more secluded, if you know what I mean. Thoreau and Ben Franklin are on my side in this quest for a place where I can indulge in an “open-air bath.” But there’s always the chance that I might get caught and viewed as some kind of freak. I had an experience last summer where I drove out to a secluded pond near my home. I hiked about a mile into the woods, and jumped into the water. Not seeing anyone around, I took off my bathing suit and threw it onto the rocks onshore. It was dusk, and the chances of anyone happening along were slim. And yet, who should appear out of the woods but four women. I was floating about twenty yards offshore and they called out to me, asking if I would mind if they joined me. Of course I agreed. What else could I do? They didn’t notice my state of undress, and, clad in their various swim attire, they jumped in as well. So here we have a great moral dilemma. Does a man, floating naked in the middle of a pond, admit to his newly manifested female companions that he is in fact naked and that perhaps they would like to take their leisure elsewhere? Or does he pretend that everything’s fine, just fine, nothing to see here? Well, I opted for the latter choice. But when the sun started to go down and the water got chillier, I had to make a decision. I slowly paddled towards shore, and gingerly retrieved my suit from the rocks at the water’s edge. You probably don’t know how difficult it is to put on a swimsuit while you are trying to tread water, but let me tell you, it’s not easy. As I climbed out of the water, clothed, I heard giggles behind me. They knew what had happened. I distinctly heard one of them say, “That must have been a thrill for him.” As if I was some kind of pervert. As if it was my plan to go skinny-dipping in a remote pond and hope that some women came along. Please. And yet, they had come out of nowhere, intruded on my privacy, and here I was, feeling like the creep. I remember swearing to myself that I would never let this happen again. But here I am, one summer later, looking for some kind of swimming hole utopia. I’m a married father of two, not some weirdo hiding in the bushes. All I want is someplace where I can be alone and feel close to nature. People can legally go off into the woods, drink a few Buds, and fire shotguns at innocent animals, or tear across frozen lakes on loud, belching snowmobiles, or plow through the woods on ugly, dangerous ATV’s, and all this is legal. And yet I, with my low carbon footprint, am some kind of freak. A man who goes into the woods with a gun to kill animals is called a sportsman. But a man who goes into the woods to swim unencumbered in a secluded pond is just a creepy naked guy, apparently.
baking bread, naming trees
I baked two loaves of bread the other day. This might not seem like such a radical thing. People have been baking bread for centuries. I got the idea from the book I’ve been reading, The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson. In it, he says “if you can make bread, you can do anything. It’s amazing how much confidence baking bread gives you.” My family and I have been eating this bread, which is so much more substantial that supermarket bread, for three days now, enjoying it with our dinners or toasting it for breakfast. It’s a gratifying sight to see your three-year-old son eating the bread you baked. I’ve cooked many meals for my family but for some reason making bread has been the most fulfilling cooking I’ve ever done. And it’s thrifty. Another of Mr. Hodgkinson’s mantras is to “reject waste, embrace thrift.” He advises us to throw out the telly and stop buying magazines. These devices just entice us to buy things we don’t need. Ride a bicycle, the thriftiest invention ever! I just saw an ad on television for Lowe’s, a chain of home improvement stores. Spring is here, and so now we must start our “outdoor projects” Gene Hackman, their paid spokesperson tells us. We are forever working, even during our leisure time. “Let’s build something together” Mr. Hackman exhorts. More like “Spend a lot of money at Lowe’s, using your Lowe’s credit card, and then go home because now you’re on your own, friend.” Commercials never tells us that spring is here and now it’s time to lay in the grass, do nothing, and watch the clouds pass overhead. For the stores, there’s no money to be made in promoting idleness. But it feels so much better to be thrifty than to shop. Shopping will never gratify us. That’s why we keep doing it. If we were ever really gratified, we’d stop shopping tomorrow. But that’s not in the stores’ best interest. To always keep us wanting for more is their philosophy. But what a sweet victory thrift is over waste! For example, I found a free book in a donation bin a few days ago, a guide to identifying trees of North America. It’s one of these old fashioned Golden guides, with colorful drawings instead of photographs. I didn’t pay a cent for it, and yet my children and I have been enjoying looking at trees and trying to find them in the book so as to name them. We found out that the tree in our front yard is (probably) a Norway maple. We’ve lived in our house for almost ten years and never knew that. For the longest time the tree in our front yard was just named “tree.” But now it has a name. And just yesterday my son said that when he got out of preschool he wanted to “look for trees.” Now that’s much better than television.
