If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 9

Philip Petit won! Or the documentary that is about his tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, the now-gone Twin Towers. Tight rope walking, just after Thoreau died, at the turn of the century, was a national obsession, according to a book I read and enjoyed by Ginger Strand.

Strand goes from being dismissive of the stunts the falls inspire to being appreciative of their meaning. Blondin, né Jean-François Gravelet, the famous aerialist who high-wired back and forth to Canada in 1859 and 1860, becomes for Strand emblematic of the national balancing act for a nation that was on the verge of civil war — Niagara was a last stop on the Underground Railroad. Blondin tightroped in shackles, which confused Strand at first. “But imagine magician David Copperfield putting on a show somewhere in the desert along the Mexican border. Imagine he gets Regis and Kelly to come and tape segments of the show in which he builds a wall and makes someone disappear on one side of the wall and reappear on the other.” In 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary Talbert convened a group of African-American intellectuals on the American side of the falls and, after being denied a hotel room, crossed into Canada, where they began the Niagara Movement, which eventually became the N.A.A.C.P.

Once, Petit was quoted in Newsweek as saying: "I never fall," he says, "but, yes, I have landed on the earth many, many times." This is very Thoreau. Petit rules!
A live news report here.
(Photo above, of Petit's signature on Trade Tower, by Brian Rose.)

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 8

Thoreau is thought of primarily as a nature writer--the guy in the cabin in the woods. A lot of his writing, though, is about alternate histories. He looks thoroughly at the past. From The Thoreau You Don't Know:

If America was found and lost again once,” Thoreau wrote, “as most of us believe, then why not twice?” Walden calls us to jump out of the boat as we race over the falls of greater and greater materialism. Cape Cod is the book that looks back at the source of it all, that shows us we are not coming from where we thought we were coming from. Here Thoreau ends up looking less like a dead white male and more like the original alternative historian. Especially when it comes to Indians. A passage that stands out as forward- thinking, even by today’s standards, when it comes to Native American treaty rights, is this one, which is also funny, very Mark Twain (who was working as a printer when Thoreau wrote it):

When the committee from Plymouth had purchased the territory of Eastham of the Indians, “it was demanded, who laid claim to Billingsgate?” which was understood to be all that part of the Cape north of what they had purchased. “The answer was, there was not any who owned it. ‘Then,’ said the committee, ‘that land is ours.’ The Indians answered, that it was.” This was a remarkable assertion and admission. The Pilgrims appear to have regarded themselves as Not Any’s representatives. Perhaps this was the first instance of that quiet way of “speaking for” a place not yet occupied, or at least not improved as much as it may be, which their descendants have practicecd, and are still practicing so extensively. Not Any seems to have been the sole proprietor of all America before the Yankees. But history says, that when the Pilgrims had held the lands of Billingsgate many years, at length, “appeared an Indian, who styled himself Lieutenant Anthony,” who laid claim to them, and of him they bought them. Who knows but a Lieutenant Anthony may be knocking at the door of the White House some day? At any rate, I know that if you hold a thing unjustly, there will surely be the devil to pay at last.

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 7

The Letterman interview with Joaquin Phoenix was just spoofed, as Thoreau would have seen:

This reminds me of reading the New York Times today, and seeing an editorial call him a "prig." I think that when we call him a prig we run the risk of commenting less on the guy we are calling a prig and more on ourselves.

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 6

Say Thoreau were watching the Oscars tonight. He would be a little bored by now, and getting up to get another glass of something. The photo above (Library of Congress, by Russell Lee, and taken in 1939 or 40, of an orchestra during intermission at square dance in McIntosh County, Oklahoma

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars 5

Steve Martin just handed out an award. Best screenplay. Steve Martin plays the banjo—a clip:

A great banjo book that Thoreau would definitely have and would not doubt peruse were he watching the Oscars now would be Philip Gura's banjo book, America's Instrument. Gura, of course, won not an Oscar but a National Book Award last year for his book on the Trancendentalists--a book that put the transcendentalists back in a good place, as pre-1960s radicals, as opposed to the place that they have been in for a long while, which was a dusty place, a place where people thought they weren't doing anything. Speaking of banjos, of tunes still learned by ear, as they were in Thoreau's time, there is great banjo here.

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 4

If Thoreau saw Penelope Cruz win the best supporting actress award, he might have thought about Woody Allen as an artist who has been called too parochial--writing about just one town, one set of people, which is not true, or no longer true, especially given that the movie that she just won for was set in Barcelona. Of course, that's what Thoreau did. There's a lot to that. Why do people have a problem with that? Says H.D.T.:

We are acquainted with the mere pellicle of the globe on which we live.

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 3

He just touched the hand of Kate Winslet, who is sitting next to Sam Mendes, who directed the play that Thoreau, if he were living in Brooklyn and had gone to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, would have seen: Mendes' version of "A Winter's Tale." Winter's Tale includes the following line:

Nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean; so over that art
Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
That nature makes;.....this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.
— Winter's Tale IV. 89

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 2

The red carpet has begun. Miley Cyrus said that Angelina "is my favorite person in all of history. Among the many people he seemed to think of as his "favorite person(s) of all history" was/is Chaucer, Sir Walter Raleigh, Emerson (for a while), and Whitman. But he also seemed to really like the old guys at the post office. People talking, people congregating, people socializing, in a way that people are less likely to socialize anymore. What if everyday were a red carpet day? What if we all processed? That would be a lot of work. Says H.D.T.:

I'm thankful that my life doth not deceive/ itself with a low loftiness...

(Photo by LIbrary of Congress: Orphans going to Coney Island in Autos, June 7, 1911.

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 1

If Thoreau live blogged the Oscars, he would just be turning it on, and you have to believe he would be watching via analogue, the clear choice for (A) simplicity and (B) cost saving in a down economy time. To wit:

The handoff of the White House seemed like a piece of cake next to America’s transition from analog to digital TV signal. With the White House, you switch residents but get a lot of the same stuff: podiums, helicopters, tour groups. With the switch that is officially taking place in television transmitters around the country starting this week, you could wind up with frame skipping, frozen screens, or, worse, nothing (as in snow). Bill Beam, the engineer in charge of the signal that WABC-TV sends off the Empire State Building, said recently, “We don’t know how it’s all going to wind up.” In the months leading up to the switchover, the city’s anxious cable- and dish-less citizens have been turning for answers to the Antenna King.

Sounds of the Subway

A subway sound that is reminiscent, or even more than reminiscent, of the song "Somewhere," from West Side Story--that's, in part, what Thoreau is talking about. The New York Times' Jim Dwyer notes:

To hear a love song from the undercarriage of a train, even fleetingly, qualifies as a found moment. But like Ms. McLaurin, not everyone is listening for it.

"It's hard to pick out a song in the midst of all the din down here," says Jim Dwyer. But it's like a breeze coming in here, these three notes. It's unmistakable. Once you've heard them once, you will hear them again and again. He says this in the audio portion of today's Times' column, About New York. For the record, research at the Thoreau You Don't Know indicated that the wind speed of a train entering the 4,5, and 6 strain station at Union Square is 7 m.p.h., thanks to the hand-held wind measuring device that can measure breezes coming into the station.

More from the column:

The playwright Tony Kushner told New York magazine last year that it was his favorite New York noise. Riders often ask transit officials about it, and readers still write to the City section of The Times to report their discovery. The filmmaker Julie Talen told me about it months before I finally caught it.

A little from Thoreau, from the journals, 1841:

Unpremeditated music is the true gage which measures the current of our thoughts - the very undertow of our life's stream.

Photos, New York Public Library, here & here.

Thoreau to Ghandi to King

If you are in India, before March 14, be sure to stop in at the American Center on Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi, to see an exhibit featuring Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Thoreau. Returning to India to commemorate King's India pilgrimage will be former Senator Harris Wofford, who first visited India in 1935 as a young civil rights activist, as well as Representative John Lewis, who marched with King in 1965, in the march from Selma to Montgomery. (Gandhi, as previously noted in this space, was inspired by Thoreau, publishing Thoreau in his newspaper, Indian Opinion, and writing to his friends about how Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" had helped confirm for him the value of non-violent resistance--see here.)

King's march was was inspired by Gandhi’s Dandi March, when, March 12, 1930, Gandhi and 78 satyagrahis walked 240 miles to the coastal village of Dandi from their starting point in Sabarmati, to make salt, a commodity no Indians were prohibittted by the English from legally producing.

Secretary of State Clinton and Herbie Hancock send the American delegation off, with a nice closing quote (i.e., 17 or so minutes in!), first, about non violence and, second, about Jazz: "Jazz is not just about music. Jazz is a pretty good guide to most things in life, and I can tell you that as secretary of state I am improvising things every day":

Celebrating a Day

by Myrna gCopaleen, artist and photographer

Oprah vs. Thoreau

From Oprah.com:

A popular greeting card attributes this quote to Henry David Thoreau: "Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder."

With all due respect to the author of Walden, that just isn't so, according to a growing number of psychologists. You can choose to be happy, they say. You can chase down that elusive butterfly and get it to sit on your shoulder. How? In part, by simply making the effort to monitor the workings of your mind.

Research has shown that your talent for happiness is, to a large degree, determined by your genes. Psychology professor David T. Lykken, author of Happiness: Its Nature and Nurture, says that "trying to be happier is like trying to be taller." We each have a "happiness set point," he argues, and move away from it only slightly.

And yet, psychologists who study happiness—including Lykken—believe we can pursue happiness. We can do this by thwarting negative emotions such as pessimism, resentment and anger. And we can foster positive emotions, such as empathy, serenity, and especially gratitude.

But wait--with all due respect to the author of Oprah.com, isn't that what Thoreau is saying--the happiness should be in the pursuing (of happiness)? Isn't Walden a book about fostering all those things especially gratitude? Also, did the author of Walden say the thing about the butterfly? Or was it the author of The Scarlet Letter?
(Photo: Library of Congress here.)

LOCAL MAN!

You are not thinking big unless you are thinking local is something you can think when you are thinking about Thoreau. Imagine if a feature writer came upon Thoreau, as Thoreau ran around noting river heights, flower blooming times, the habits of farmers and immigrants. (Think Robert Frost as a village surveyor.) The headline?

LOCAL MAN NOTICES

Imagine if Thoreau had gotten around the country, as he began to want to, at the end of his life. Imagine if he had to answer questions about his writing, which he probably did at some point. Or in lieu of imagining those things, check out Dan Barry's answers to questions about his writing, which is noticing, of the finest kind, if you ask someone who has spent a little time watching Thoreau. (Barry, above, as photographed by Angel Franco, his partner in national noticing.) Also, did I mention that Thoreau, though he loved to rant about newspapers, also loved newspapers?

Aeolus Again

Yesterday, the wind was violent.

I found it all rather morose, though I think the wind was combining in my brain in a negative way with some bad things that were happening.

I can't wait for the spring winds.

Vice Versa

Via Professor Benjamin and http://youlookmarvelous.tumblr.com/...

Simplify! As opposed to Liquify!

While the headline in the Christian Science Monitor is true to a large extent--

LESS STUFF = MORE

--forced simplicity is a drag, no matter what anybody says. (In Thoreau's day, there was a professor at Harvard Divinity School who used to equate poverty with a special sauce or gravy, saying it enhanced the taste of finer things.) In this Monitor piece, the reporter talks about the guilt that drives people to give up stuff, for lack of a better word, so that other people can have their stuff.

Bonnie Russell, a legal publicist in Del Mar, Calif., shares that attitude. “I feel a great relief at cleaning out my closet to donate to the less fortunate and not replacing things,” she says. Part of Ms. Russell’s decision to pare down and share with others had its roots in what she calls “good, old-fashioned guilt.” As she read news stories about people having less, “I realized I’m sitting around plenty of unnecessary things,” she says. “One day I looked around and realized I didn’t want to have a life of stuff. I wanted to have a life of experiences.” One recipient of Russell’s generosity stands on a street corner near her home to look for work. “He’s there at 7 a.m., six days a week, and has helped with handyman chores for years. I give clothes and other things to him directly because I know they’re more apt to find a thankful or needed home.”

While it is better that they are driven to help other people through guilt than through no way at all, it seems as if there is also some joy in choosing something that is less and already more, because, as HTD said, Surely joy is the condition of life, these houses being a case in point:


In other words, less does not seem like less, and having more doesn't make you feel guilty. Here are some young people who helped in this project, a $20,000 house--8th graders from Denver.

The program is called the 20K house program, and it happens in rural Alabama. The history:

Initiated by Sambo Mockbee, the mission of the Rural Studio is to enable each participating student to cross the threshold of misconceived opinions to create/design/build and to allow students to put their educational values to work as citizens of a community. The Rural Studio seeks solutions to the needs of the community within the community’s own context, not from outside it. Abstract ideas based upon knowledge and study are transformed into workable solutions forged by real human contact, personal realization, and a gained appreciation for the culture.

A Life Without Principle

There almost went the economic man, maybe. (Via Andrew Sullivan (no relation) at the Daily Dish.) When Thoreau went to live in his little house on Walden Pond, another writer was writing a book in the Adirondacks, and noticing that businessmen who had fled an earlier financial panic where living in the woods too.

Marchas por la Paz

Thoreau was a practical philosopher, a practical activist. When he wrote about his stay in jail he talked about not paying a tax not because he rejected the government but because he wanted the government to work better—he made himself a friction, a principle that Thoreau the mechanical engineer knew as necessary for a machine to work. (Yes, folks, Thoreau enjoyed technology as much as the next guy.) A book that describes the simultaneous practical simplicity and radicalness of what “Civil Disobedience” is talking about is Breach of Peace, by Eric Etheridge, which contains portraits of the Freedom Riders today, accompanied by mug shots of them when they were jailed for riding a bus in Mississippi at the beginning of the civil rights movement, a collection of practical philosophers: “I can’t speak for nobody else,” one Freedom Rider recalls. Etheridge is currently on tour in Mexico, where the war that Thoreau protested was waged illegally by the U.S. After Thoreau wrote "Civil Disobedience," he was read (and reprinted, in a fair use kind of way) by Ghandi, whose practices were in turn taken up in part by the Freedom Riders. Full circle.



Etheridge tours Ohio and Michigan this week:

Cleveland Public Library
Sunday, Feb. 22
2PM
325 Superior Ave. N.E.
Cleveland, OH 44114

Flint Public Library
Monday, Feb. 23
7PM
1026 E. Kearsley St.
Flint, MI 48502

Kalamazoo Public Library
Tuesday, Feb. 24
6:30PM
315 S. Rose St.
Kalamazoo, MI 49007

More info here.

Free and Public

Up in the woods, looking at forests, I ran into the public library in Cummington, Massachusetts, birthplace of William Cullen Bryant, the poet and one-time editor of the New York Post, the paper which, today, has on it's front page the following headline concerning Alexander Rodriguez, the Yankee who most recently admitted taking steroids: "A-Hole!" He is famously featured in Asher Durand's painting, Kindred Spirits, which used to be in the New York Public Library but now is in the Wal-Mart Museum in Arkansas. The area featured in the painting was visited by Thoreau. You would never know it from Durand's painting, but the area was, at the time of the painting, heavily logged. On a trip there, Thoreau got to know the logger, and liked his rustic living accommodations.