The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan: June 2009

Speaking of Metaphors

Here's a very HDT review by Ginia Bellafante, TV critic extraordinaire, with a mention of the little know International Bureau of Metaphor, as well as a sci-fi situation related to this.

What Did You Do on the Solstice?

Here at TTYDK, we took in Scandinavian fiddling, and a maypole dance, down at Battery Park, where the view is very nineteenth century, if you forget about the stevedores. Below is a snippet of ASI Spelmanslag, the fiddling group of the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who flew in to play the so-called midsommar festival--waltzes, polskas, marches and schottisches. As noted fiddler recently told us, "Scandinavian fiddle music is one of the few fiddle musics where there more fiddles you have the better it sounds." This seems very true, and we wish it were a metaphor for more things, though not everything, of course.

Frank Sees

Here's this on the cross country explorations of Robert Frank from the excellent photo blog The Year in Pictures. We would say something about landscape and memory at this point but the photos are so wonderful that, for the moment, we can't remember where we are.

That's The Sound of the Soundwalks Ending

Did you hear that? A visual vestige (left) on The Rest is Noise.

Keeping Up With the (Homeless) Joneses

OK, now I have seen it all: people who have homes are upset that people without homes are allowed to live in the expensive homes that did not sell because they were too expensive. Follow that? Yes, the homeless have been allowed to live in condos and the neighbors aren't happy. The homeless don't deserve this, says a neighbor:

To walk over there and see that folks in a shelter are living better than we are, it's not fair.

It used to be that people were against shelters on their street because the shelters were unattractive, the homeless homeless. Now, the argument is that the shelter was snuck in. But the shelter is a luxury condo--was a luxury condo snuck in? Does this mean people will be more wary of luxury condos? Does this mean that people will hope non-luxury shelters will be sought out in gentrifying neighborhoods? It's complicated.

Can't we just be pleased that someone got some people who needed help a place to stay?

T-Town

Thoreau was big on the question that asks you to look at whether you are using technology or the technology is using you. Our car industry has long driven us in the wrong direction. We are now, whether we like it or not, at the wheel. Let's turn Detroit into a transportation capital, rather than a place that makes machines that pollute our air and our water as well as our downtown and our generally activity-less lives. Let's mobilize ourselves, a la the New Deal, perhaps (see photo), to turn Mo-town into T-town, which doesn't sound as cool but is. Imagine turning the interstate highways into interstate high speed busways, just for instance. Michael Moore is onto this, and here are a few points of his multi-pointed plan:

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
2. Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce - and most of those who have been laid off - employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.

3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years.
4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.
5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.

Available now from Robert Sullivan, the New York Times best selling author, and published by Harper. A description from the publisher:

What if Henry David Thoreau—America’s pioneering nature lover, the man who famously lived in a little house of his own construction—was actually pro-city rather than just a monkish introvert who wanted to be left alone in the woods? What if the man we think of as so serious and introspective was really a joker, a bit of clown, a kind of stand-up comic in his day? And what if the fact that he often went home to his family or into town for supper didn’t show him to be a cheater or a fraud as far as self-reliance goes? What if spending time with his friends and family—i.e., community—was his point all along?

Reasons that Thoreau is maybe more applicable to these troubling times than you may imagine

¶ He was living not in a peaceful time where he could just sit there and look at a pond but at a time of financial crisis, panics, even, when unemployment was first being recognized as a crisis, when people began to think that the economic system was broken—to wit, there were unemployed workers often living at Walden Pond.
¶ He was not just writing about butterflies (though he uses one to excellent, redemptive effect at Walden's end) but about how work was taking over our lives, how play was disappearing, how things like conversation were disappearing, along with sympathy, empathy and gratitude.
¶ He was very interested in gadgets, being an engineer himself--no technophobe--and living at a time of intense technological excitement.
¶ He was big on tunes, as in music, as in having a playlist, though in those days it was called a repertoire—he played a mean flute.

A Review

A mischievous reporter on the universe, Sullivan has found beauty in a notorious swamp in The Meadowlands (1998) and wisdom in an alley in Rats (2004). In his latest slyly philosophical inquiry, he endeavors to free Henry David Thoreau from his calcified reputation as a cantankerous hermit and nature worshipper. Sounding like your favorite teacher who manages to make history fun and relevant, Sullivan vibrantly portrays the sage of Walden as a geeky, curious, compassionate fellow of high intelligence and deep feelings who loved company, music, and long walks. An exceptional writer mad for puns, Thoreau
was also a bold social critic and—the crux of Sullivan’s stimulating argument—a brilliant, tongue-incheek
humorist. Sullivan, himself plenty saucy, also elucidates Thoreau’s radical focus on “man’s
interaction with nature.” In command of a great diversity of fascinating material, Sullivan succinctly illuminates the striking parallels between Thoreau’s time and ours—foreclosures, lost jobs, and rapid technological change. Thoreau remains vital and valuable because of his acute observations, wit, and lyricism and his recognition that the “force of life is everywhere,” a perception even more essential now that the consequences of the societal choices Thoreau prophetically critiqued have reached staggering proportions.--Donna Seaman, in Booklist

More from the publisher:
Henry David Thoreau is one of those authors that readers think you know, even if they don’t. He’s the solitary curmudgeon with the shack out in the woods, the mystic worshipping solemnly in the quiet church of nature. He’s our national Natural Man, the prophet of environmentalism. But here Robert Sullivan—who himself has been called an “urban Thoreau” (New York Times Book Review) presents the Thoreau you don’t know: the activist, the organizer, the gregarious adventurer, the guy who likes to go camping with friends (even if they sometimes accidentally burn the woods down). Sullivan argues that Walden was a book intended to revive America, a communal work forever pigeonholed as a reclusive one, and that this misreading is at the heart of our troubled relationship with the environment today. Sullivan shows us not a lonely eccentric but a man in his growing village, a man who danced and sang, who worked throughout his short life at the family pencil-making business, and moved into his parents’ house after leaving Walden Pond, but always paid his father rent. Passionate yet whimsical, The Thoreau You Don’t Know asks us to re-examine our everyday relationship with the natural world, and one another.