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.
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.
Simplify! As opposed to Liquify!
While the headline in the Christian Science Monitor is true to a large extent--
--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.
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:
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.
Ice Awareness
January 27, 1854(From This Date, From Henry Thoreau's Journal, an excellent Thoreau blog.)
Cut this afternoon a cake of ice out of Walden and brought it home in a pail, another from the river, and got a third, a piece of last year’s ice from Sam Barrett’s Pond, at Brown’s ice-house, and placed them side by side. These lumps are not large enough to show the color. Walden ice has a green tint close by, but is distinguished by its blueness at a distance. The river ice inclines to a more opaque white. Comparing the lumps, Walden ice was, you might say, more crystalline than the river, but both showed the effect of heat more than the Barrett ice of last year, the bubbles being very much elongated and advanced toward the honeycomb stage, while in the Barrett ice they were spherical and there were wide clear spaces. This looked as if it would keep best.
When Thoreau was in New York
A lot of people don't realize that H.D. Thoreau worked in New York for a while, as a semi-successful free-lance writer, and as a door to door salesman, selling subscriptions to a magazine. This was when he lived on Staten Island, in 1843. He also visited the city on numerous occasions, in his capacity as part-time C.E.O. and chief engineer (my titles but they are accurate) of the family pencil and later graphite business. While there, he hung out in various places around the city (Henry James' house, the Hudson River waterfront, the salt marshes where now the Fresh Kills landfill sits), including the City Hall area, where publishing was centered. While downtown, I have to believe he heard nicknames, such as these, presented by The Bowery Boys, the most excellent Victorian New York blog, as culled from Luc Sante's Low Life, and introduced like so: "Just in case you're sick of reading '25 Random Things' lists on Facebook, feel free to post this tally of 19th and early 20th century bar owners and criminals in retaliation."
1 Boiled Oysters Malloy (owner of the Ruins saloon)
2 Dan the Dude (owner Stag Cafe)
3 Will Fox (piano player at Gombossy's Crystal Palice, who played wearing boxing gloves)
4 Diamond Dan O'Rourke (owner of a self-named bar)
5 Silver Dollar Smith (self-named bar on Essex Street)
6 Mock Duck (Chinese gangster, circa 1900, wore chain mail, wielded hatchet)
7 Slippery Johnny Leipziger (random crook, fun name to say)
8 Blonde Madge Davenport (prostitute who killed herself at McGurk's Suicide Hall)
10 Big Mame (also tried to off herself at McGurk's, ended up only permanently scarring her face with carbolic acid)
11 Chick Tricker (owner of the saloon Chick Tricker's Flea Bag)
12 Scotchy Lavelle (pirate turned saloon owner)
13 Johnny Basketball (rough who attended a 1940s Bowery ball)
14 Bridgie Webber (owner of San Souci Music Hall)
15 Johnny Camphene (bar owner who served varnish solvent as a liqueur)
16 One-Armed Charley (bouncer at the Hole-In-The-Wall)
17 Sheeny Mike Kurtz (member of the Dutch Mob, front for a pickpocket gang)
18 Mallet Murphy (owner of self-titled bar, wielding a mallet on wily customers)
19 Humpty Jackson (hunchback gang leader, headquarterd at a now vanished Lower East Side graveyard)
20 Lobster Kid (one of Humpty's gang members)
21 Johnny Spanish (ruffian known for carrying a minimum of four revolvers at a time)
22 One Lung Curran (specialist in stealing the coats of police officers)
23 Happy Jack Mulraney (whose facial rictus kept a frozen smile on his face)
24 Paddy the Priest (murdered by Happy Jack for mocking him)
25 Ding Dong (leader of a phalanx of children crooks)
(Upper left, actual Bowery Boys, NY Public Library)
Thoreau in the News
Here is Thoreau in the news, in Maine, where Thoreau liked to go to be in the woods (at least, after he went there first to look for a job and had some awkward resume peddling experiences: “A sensitive person can hardly elbow his way boldly, laughing and talking, into a strange town, without experiencing some twinges of conscience, as when he has treated a stranger with too much familiarity..."). The kicker in this column by Gordon L. Weil of the Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel is this observation on what you might call human ecology--he suggests an alternative spending of the $18.4 billion dollars already spent in controversial corporate bonuses:
If you paid people $40,000 a year with full benefits including health care, that bonus money would have paid 306,667 people for a year.
I would just add that Thoreau was also thinking of the well-to-do as being desperate. A good example is the scene in Walden wherein the authorial "I" is planting his garden while a couple of people from Boston, riding in a fancy gig (what would be the Lexus sedan of 2009), look at him as they make their way to their country house as if he were a nut or, to use his joke, a kind of crazy vine. It's a portrait of disengagement, in the time when the idea of a country house, or retreat, was becoming a middle class necessity, along with servants, hourly wages, and coffee table books. Here is more of the Journal column:
Do you wince when you hear a Washington insider or a Wall Streeter refer to "ordinary people"? I do.
I guess those who call us ordinary people must be "special people." They have the power to reach into our pockets for taxes or fees or to control some of our conduct.
It seems that the folks in charge either ignore or take advantage of ordinary people.
Take health care. Members of Congress have a great government-funded program. Congress seems intent on debating endlessly whether health care should be privately or publicly insured, while about 40 million ordinary people go without.
Or taxes. Tom Daschle, nominated to be health policy chief, failed to pay some of his taxes. He used a company limousine for personal purposes, but did not consider it income, he said, because he had grown accustomed to such service when he was Senate majority leader. Daschle withdrew, partly because his tax problems looked so bad to ordinary people.
Or pay. President Obama says it is "shameful" that Wall Street execs were paid $18.4 billion in bonuses at the same time as hundreds of thousands of people were losing their jobs and Washington was pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into their financial institutions.
If you paid people $40,000 a year with full benefits including health care, that bonus money would have paid 306,667 people for a year.
Or bailout money. Most ordinary people run, or work in, small businesses and community banks or use them. They get no bailout or aid, because they never got into trouble.
Meanwhile the auto manufacturers, who stuck with gas guzzlers too long, and the financiers who conjured up housing schemes that collapsed, get help that will come largely from ordinary people.
Henry David Thoreau, as good a philosopher as America ever produced, once wrote: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." The mass of men and women are the ordinary people.
The special people may struggle to make things better for ordinary people, but their lives -- corporate jets, big bonuses, congressional perks -- are far from desperate. They seem to live in a cocoon of privilege and miss some simple things that could help.
Thoreau might argue that, in fact, the simple things are luxuries.
Life With Principle--or Cash
A performance that gets to the heart of what's happening in terms of dealing with "shameful" pay and stock markets crashing and Madoff and oil prices and reform and celebrity reform and cash, as well as Tuscany--by Beardo, yet another modern day Thoreau:
The market's gone all soft and the world has gone all hard.
Congressional Simplicity
The Opinionator shares this excellent video in today's post entitled The Early Word On Daschle's Exit:
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
Hedging Your Predictions
It is supposed to be a hedge hog? That's what the Oregonian says:
"Chriki", an African Pygmy Hedgehog faced the media and sunshine today at the Oregon Zoo. The little guy, whose name means "blessed" in Swahili, saw his shadow which in theory means that we have 6 more weeks of winter here in Portland. "Chriki" was held in the hands of David Bragdon, the Metro Council President, who explained that the old European tradition of weather prediction belonged to the hedgehog, but when early immigrants to the United States discovered there were no hedgehogs, they substituted the groundhog. Rob Finch/The Oregonian
Mass of Men
The New York Times crowded elevator story--Fairway supermarket on the Upper West Side has an elevator that is slow and crowded and the only way to get your cart or stroller up to the second floor--points out that the crowded elevator is the only way the organic foods section. The photo is of an organic shopper situation: the crowds are reported to be happy, in some sense, apparently even in their surliness. Men (as well as women) massed are less desperate, and certainly less quiet in lives momentarily underlined in the seconds spent between organic and non-organic, which is very organic, even using elevator power.
But if the store is a gladiatorial arena, the elevator is, surprisingly, “a haven — an oasis of civility,” said Bernice Price, a neighborhood resident and elevator veteran. “People make a quick assessment of the spatial restrictions, and they help each other. There is a lot of silent communication. People don’t seem to push.”
Of course, even if they do push, you might make the argument that they are happier pushing than sitting in an empty parking lot. Then again, you might not.
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