The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan: Commons

Showing posts with label Commons. Show all posts

In Common Parlance

According to the New York Times Book Review's blog, Paper Cuts, the discussion between Lawrence Lessig and the artist Shepard Fairey. (Jennifer Schuessler wrote the post, "Steal This Blog.") Here's the moderator's Twitter feed. All I want to say is they talked about the commons. Thoreau talked a lot about commons, pitching himself as what he called an extra vagrant, a phrase that, if you think about it, gets better and better. Here's this about the idea of commons:

The Night Poster Boy Spent in Jail

You only have to be a subway rider to know the work of Poster Boy, as show in this Flickr photo (above) by Poster Boy & Aakash Nihalani. Subway advertizements are cut up, pieces from one mixed into another, a nose from Angelina Jolie finds its way, for example, to something along the lines of a Viagra ad. Now this, from Gothamist:

Last night before a benefit he was scheduled to participate in at a loft in Soho, the street artist known as Poster Boy was arrested by an undercover cop. Poster Boy was listed on a flyer for the event, a festival put on for Friends We Love, a series of videos documenting the process of a dozen different artists, including Poster Boy, who talked with us just last week.

Photographer Jim Kiernan tipped us off to the arrest. He arrived at event at Broadway and Howard Street to meet up with Poster Boy around 7 p.m., but police had already arrived after spotting the Poster Boy's name on the flyer. Kiernan says, "There was an undercover cop on the block and they came and picked him up. As far as I know, he's still in Central Booking right now and waiting to get in front of a judge...It's the second time they've gotten him."

Reports indicate that the police believe they have found Poster Boy, but can there only be one Poster Boy making Poster Boy-esque vandalart?

He was reported by the Times to have been taken to Rikers Island. Word was that he was moving on to bigger things anyway:

Very 19th Century, Very HDT

The commons are back--in the woods, in the town square, in the community of ideas, which sounds too mystical but you get the point. If not, here's this:

Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons. He is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage and the CEO of Neoteny. He is on the board of Technorati and helps run Technorati Japan. He is a Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute at SFC in Japan

Commons

Speaking of Steven Colbert, who addressed the idea of the commons yesterday

,

as noted by the N.Y. Times' Opinionator, the commons is old: that we live in the commonwealth, sharing the general good, predates kings, of course. The idea seemed to have died in the U.S., as the country aged--some towns in New England still keep their center-of-town commons common--i.e., a park--but the commons are returning in a lot of differnt ways. As far as a common landscape goes, Thoreau was referencing the English when he referred to keeping lands and land forms in a kind of common bank, for the civic good. Here's this from The Thoreau You Don't Know:

Thoreau was not a conservationist, per se; the job title did
not yet exist. But he was on his way to becoming one. He
recognized that Concord needed land- management practices
similar to those followed in En gland. “Why not control
our own woods and destiny more?” he asked in 1860.
He wondered why people did not donate land to the town.
He saw that trees—as well as hills and ponds and natural
landmarks— were as much a part of the town as its homes
and statuary, and that the landscape had a civic value, a
value off the books. “What are the natural features which
make a township handsome?” he asked his journal the year
before he died. “A river, with its waterfalls and meadows, a
lake, a hill, a cliff , or individual rocks, a forest, and ancient
trees standing singly. Such things are beautiful; they have a
high use which dollars and cents never represent. If the inhabitants
of a town were wise, they would seek to preserve
these things, though at a considerable expense; for such
things educate far more than any hired teachers or preachers,
or any at present recognized system of school education.”

Corporations may not like the idea of the commons, but--whether we are talking about videos or blogs or songs or arts or crafts or books or patents--we have more in common in the common than is commonly recognized.

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.