A Mere Muir?

The Thoreau You Don't Know staff was recently buttonholed at a party, and presented with the following statement: "I heard that Thoreau was never went out in the real wilderness, that he was no John Muir." There is a lot for the staff to say about this, including, bt not limited to the following: Thoreau was writing about a "partially cultivated wilderness" (i.e., his local farming, lumbering, village shop- and artisan-filled community); Thoreau hiked with friends; Thoreau did in fact do a little Muir-like time in Maine; Muir liked Thoreau, or his work, anyway. But what should also be pointed out was that Muir was no Muir, or at least not what we might call the Pure Nature Guy. What we mean is he dealt with the corporate interests in the world at the time, which were substantial, to create parks, the first National Parks, in essence. Here's this from an excellent piece, by Robert Pogue Harrison, on Muir in the March 12, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books, which seems to indicate that conservationists might work more closely with economic interests to fashion new kinds of 21st Century conservation:

Muir became a fixture of the steady tourist traffic to Yosemite in the early 1870s, an eccentric guide and congenial raconteur who impressed Emerson and P.T. Barnum, just as he would Theodore Roosevelt many years later. Part of the fascination of Worcester's account ["A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir," by Donald Worster, Oxford University Press] is to see how Muir's concerted conservation work emerged only in 1889 when he was already in his fifties, as part of the sudden wave of progressivism that swept America toward the end of the Gilded Age, and how this conservationism oddly sought corporate allies during its first flush of grassroots organization, accommodating itself to pragmatic, utilitarian, and commercial pressure, utilitarian, and commercial pressures of many kinds.

Muir's life and work is an example of how quickly things can change, how much affect a small group of passionate people can have on the government and society, how a good idea (national parks) has legs. Something Thoreau used to say, by the way, was, "[T]hank God they cannot cut down the clouds."

In Spite of Ourselves

This is it! Tonight's the night. This is what you've all been waiting for. Well, maybe not all of you have been waiting for it. OK, maybe some of you have been dreading it, but still, nonetheless it's here—the Brooklyn reading of the Thoreau You Don't Know, featuring the Washington Square Harp and Shamrock Orchestra. Why an orchestra, when talking about Thoreau? Because Thoreau is not a stick in the mud. He's really about joy, which, for him, is nicely epitomized in music, as some of these notes would indicate—he seems to be saying that we can be happy, in spite of ourselves, to kind of quote John Prine:

When I hear music I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest. (From his journal on January 13, 1857.)

A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree. This is no longer the dull earth on which I stood. (From his journal on on August 3, 1852.)

What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps? We are all ordinarily in a state of desperation; such is our life; ofttimes it drives us to suicide. To how many, perhaps to most, life is barely tolerable, and if it were not for the fear of death or of dying, what a multitude would immediately commit suicide! But let us hear a strain of music, we are at once advertised of a life which no man had told us of, which no preacher preaches. Suppose I try to describe faithfully the prospect which a strain of music exhibits to me. The field of my life becomes a boundless plain, glorious to tread, with no death nor disappointment at the end of it. All meanness and trivialness disappear. I become adequate to any deed. No particulars survive this expansion; persons do not survive it. In the light of this strain there is no thou nor I. We are actually lifted above ourselves. (From his journal on on January 15, 1857.)

Thoreau On Friendship

Here Thoreau is quoted on the influence of friends. The passage comes from his river book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers."

After years of vain familiarity, some distant gesture or unconscious behavior, which we remember, speaks to us with more emphasis than the wisest or kindest words. We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our Friends’ thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be.

Photo from Library of Congress, here.

A Break for Shakespeare

The markets are up, the markets are down! Here at the Thoreau You Don't Know headquarters, we're confused, as usual. Time for a break--this time for the Beatles, because the Beatles are in the air for at least two reasons: (1) people are complaining about the ticket prices to see Paul and Ringo perform together in NYC coming up some point soon; and (2) a Liverpool University announced that it will offer a Beatles degree or a degree in Beatles, or something like that. The important thing is that Thoreau dug Shakespeare, seen here:

This Just In

Whether it was inevitable or not seems like the inevitable question. See it for yourself here.

Talking Transportation With the Times

A member of the Thoreau You Don't Know team talks about shutting down the Times Square area to cars and, thus, opening it to people here.

Speaking of Unemployment

A lot of people think that Walden is a paean to nature. And it is pro-nature. On the other hand, it is an economic analysis--or an analysis of the culture that thinks only economically. The goal, of course, is to mend the rift between thinking economically and thinking nature--"healing the false binary" is a phrase the the staff at The Thoreau You Don't Know have seen in academic papers. It seems relevant to point out that times were not good when Thoreau was setting out as a writer, as this brief excerpt from The Thoreau You Don't Know indicates:

Violent class warfare was more of a possibility than the typically genteel study of the Transcendentalists’ time would indicate, or marketers who invoke Thoreau’s namenowadays might imagine. Union membership had taken hold on a mass scale—in 1834, New York City’s General Trades Union created a National Trades Union, and had a march a mile and a half long—but the layoff s zapped their power. In the winter of 1837, as theaters were deserted and markets empty, renters were planning a mass action in New York City; landlords collectively held back on their attempts to collect. For the first time in U.S. history a president, Andrew Jackson, used federal troops in a labor dispute—against the immigrant Irish workers on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal who had attacked scab workers. The Workingman’s Party was agitating in Boston, while women working in the mills in Lowell went on strike, what they then called a “turn out,” singing, “Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I/ Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?” Philip Hone, the former New York City mayor and diarist, wondered how a workingman fed his family, given that Hone’s upper- class friends were in dire straits. “What is to become of the working classes?” he wrote. That spring, Emerson wrote in his journal: “Cold April; hard times; men breaking who ought not to break; banks bullied into the bolstering of desperate speculators; all the newspapers a chorus of owls. . . . Loud cracks in the social edifice.—Sixty thousand laborers, say rumor, to be presently thrown out of work, and these make a formidable mob to break open banks and rob the rich and brave the domestic government.”

In other words, there was a great recession, a depression, in fact-—that's what Thoreau was thinking about. And it should also be noted that Thoreau survived. It was a lot of work, but he and his contemporaries figured out ways to get by.
(Library of Congress photo of Big Bill Heywood leading strikers in Lawrence, MA.)

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 14

From everyone on the Thoreau You Don't Know staff: Good night everybody!

(Illustration, NY Public Library Digital Archives, here.)

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 13

If Thoreau were live blogging the Oscars, he might take a moment to note that an (excellent) film about the first openly gay elected official in California winning the best actor award for Sean Penn reminds him (Thoreau) that people are often wondering whether or not he (Thoreau) was gay. Thoreau is the kind of guy who always turns a question around. For Thoreau, the question might not be, Am I (Thoreau) gay? The question might be, What's up with 21st Century America that they are so concerned with who is gay? With how close your relationships are with those of the same sex? In Thoreau's day, there were intense male to male relationships that would now be labeled gay and maybe were and maybe weren't gay, a kind of moot point, given that they were good relationships. I am reminded of the fact that Lincoln, as a young legislator, answered an add for a roommate and shared a bed with the guy in Springfield for a while, no big deal. I guess the question is, Gay, not gay? What do you care? The question really is, Are you relating?

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 12

I don't know what the Reader is about even; I have not seen it. The people I am watching the Oscars/Live blogging the Oscars pretending to be the Thoreau You Don't Know tell me it's about a woman and a boy and post-WWII Germany and him reading to her, or something along those lines. All I know is that Thoreau says this, in the opening section, entitled "Reading," in Walden:

WITH A LITTLE more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 11

If you are the Thoreau You Don't Know then you don't know if they will name Frost/Nixon for any awards this evening, but you feel compelled to mention, after seeing Paul Newman's picture in the pictures of actors who passed away this year, that Newman was on Nixon's enemies list. Newman was what Thoreau, in Civil Disobedience, described as a friction, that thing necessary for the proper functioning of a machine, in this case the machine of government. Just for fun, read to his name on this list, which can be found here and is below:

The original list of 20 names of White House "enemies" submitted with comments submitted with comments to Dean by the of office of Charles W. Colson.*

Boldface type indicates a correction in erroneous White House identification of its political enemies. Material in brackets is additional information supplied by the editor.

Having studied the attached material and evaluated the recommendations for the discussed action, I believe you will find my list worthwhile for status. It is in priority order.

1. Arnold M. Picker, United Artists Corp., N.Y. Top Muskie fund raiser. Success here could be both debilitating and very embarrassing to the Muskie machine. If effort looks promising, both Ruth and David Picker should be programmed and then a follow through with United Artists.

2. Alexander E. Barkan, national director of A F.L.-C.I.O.'s committee on Political Education, Washington D.C.: Without a doubt the most powerful political force programmed against us in 1968 ($10 million, 4.6 million votes, 115 million pamphlets, 176,000 workers--all programmed by Barkan's C.O.P.E.--so says Teddy White in "The Making of the President 1968"). We can expect the same effort this time. [See p. 468E3]

3. Ed Guthman, managing editor, Los Angeles Times [national editor]: Guthman, former Kennedy aide, was a highly sophisticated hatchetman against us in '68. It is obvious he is the prime mover behind the current Key Biscayne effort. It is time to give him the message.

4. Maxwell Dane, Doyle, Dane and Bernbach, N.Y.: The top Democratic advertising firm--they destroyed Goldwater in '64. They should be hit hard starting with Dane.

5. Charles Dyson, Dyson-Kissner Corp., N.Y.: Dyson and Larry O'Brien were close business associates after '68. Dyson has huge business holdings and is presently deeply involved in the Businessmen's Educational Fund which bankrolls a national radio network of five-minute programs--anti-Nixon in character.

6. Howard Stein, Dreyfus Corp., N.Y.: Heaviest contributor to McCarthy in '68. If McCarthy goes, will do the same in '72. If not, Lindsay or McGovern will receive the funds.

7. Allard Lowenstein, Long Island, N.Y.: Guiding force behind the 18-year-old "Dump Nixon" vote campaign.

8. Morton Halperin, leading executive at Common Cause: A scandal would be most helpful here. (A consultant for Common Cause in February-March 1971)[On staff of Brookings Institution]

9. Leonard Woodcock, UAW, Detroit, Mich.: No comments necessary.

10. S. Sterling Munro Jr., Sen. [Henry M.] Jackson's aide, Silver Spring, Md.: We should give him a try. Positive results would stick a pin in Jackson's white hat.

11. Bernard T. Feld, president, Council for a Livable World: Heavy far left funding. They will program an "all court press" against us in'72.

12. Sidney Davidoff, New York City, [New York City Mayor John V.] Lindsay's top personal aide: a first class S.O.B., wheeler-dealer and suspected bagman. Positive results would really shake the Lindsay camp and Lindsay's plans to capture youth vote. Davidoff in charge.

13. John Conyers, congressman, Detroit: Coming on fast. Emerging as a leading black anti-Nixon spokesman. Has known weakness for white females.

14. Samuel M. Lambert, president, National Education Association: Has taken us on vis-a-vis federal aid to parochial schools--a '72 issue.

15. Stewart Rawlings Mott, Mott Associates, N.Y.: Nothing but big money for radic-lib candidates.

16. Ronald Dellums, congressman, Calif.: Had extensive [Edward M. Kennedy] EMK-Tunney support in his election bid. Success might help in California next year.

17. Daniel Schorr, Columbia Broadcasting System, Washington: A real media enemy.

18. S. Harrison Dogole, Philadelphia, Pa.: President of Globe Security Systems--fourth largest private detective agency in U.S. Heavy Humphrey contributor. Could program his agency against us.

19. Paul Newman, Calif.: Radic-lib causes. Heavy McCarthy involvement '68. Used effectively in nation wide T.V. commercials.'72 involvement certain.

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 10

Speaking of scores... From the South Florida Classical Review:
For most of his lifetime, Charles Ives was regarded as something of a benighted crank.

The Danbury, Connecticut, native was successful in the insurance business, but little of his music was known or performed while he was alive. In the 1950s and, largely, after his death, Ives’ stupefying originality and the innovative, experimental nature of his music were finally recognized when he was championed by Leonard Bernstein and others.

And then this:

In addition to requiring a pianist who can handle the fusillade of notes, the sonata also calls for a flute in the concluding Thoreau movement, and, in some editions, a viola in Emerson, which Denk believes is a too-literal misinterpretation of Ives merely asking for a viola sound. “I don’t think even Ives was perverse enough to put a viola in a piano sonata.”

Here's some from Ives.

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, 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, 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, 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.

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?

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.

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.