Posts tagged horizons of the possible

Woolf argues that a good reader needs to approach a text as a co-creator rather than a simple consumer or even a critic (though keep reading her essay ... eventually the time arrives to mount the judge's bench).

critique, cultivation and creation, england, horizons of the possible, literature, reading, writing

Nate

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Reading is a very complex art - the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it.

One should begin by sitting in the dock with the criminal, not by mounting the bench to sit among the Judges. One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something. And our first duty as readers is to try and understand what the writer is making from the first word with which he builds his first sentence to the last with which he ends his book. We must not impose our design upon him; we must not try to make him conform his will to ours. We must allow Defoe to be Defoe and Jane Austen to be Jane Austen as freely as we allow the tiger to have his fur and the tortoise to have his shell. And this is very difficult. For it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings Heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.

It's interesting to stop and ponder (as I'm able to do in my quiet, private workspace) the possibilities opened up, and closed off, by an age in which, for many of us, both solitude and non-solitude are often just a matter of closing a door or flipping a switch.

communication, horizons of the possible, noise, solitude

Nate

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It’s vital to understand that solitude, like silence, have rarely been available to human beings. Try reading Bruce Smith’s extraordinary (though too jargony) account of The Acoustic World of Early Modern England if you’re prone to think of the pre-industrial Western world as a silent one. Especially in cities, the noise — often literally deafening, in areas where blacksmiths and other craftsmen lived — went on twenty-four hours a day; though of course things were quieter in the countryside.

But not more solitary. In country and city alike, whole families slept in single rooms, often sharing those rooms with animals. Only the enormously wealthy could spread out into multiple rooms. (It’s worth remembering that throughout human history the vast majority of couples have had to have sex in the same room, and often in the same bed, with other people.) And all of these noisy and crowded conditions that we see in our studies of the European past are, of course, present-day realities for many people today; perhaps most humans on the planet.

As Diana Webb has recently shown in her new book Privacy and Solitude: The Medieval Discovery of Personal Space — reviewed here — medieval Europeans in general simply accepted their lack of “personal space,” but others valued it and desired it sufficiently to retreat from the world, as hermits and anchorites, in order to get it. But these were necessarily special cases. Until the nineteenth century in Europe and other economically developed parts of the world, very few people have been able to find either solitude or silence.

Librarything's Unsuggester tells us, based on millions of user-datapoints, that readers of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity are very unlikely to have read Christine Feehan's vampire novels, and that readers of just about any work of contemporary literary fiction (my latest try was A.S. Byatt's Possession) have not, apparently, been plumbing the breadths of recent Christian devotional writing. (For some reason I can't get it to return any unsuggestions for Culture Making. Could it be that that book's readers really will read anything? Let's hope.)

aesthetics, books, happiness, horizons of the possible, reading, serindipity, technology and change

Nate

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On sites such as Amazon and iTunes, homophily is a selling point: it’s the basis for “collaborative filtering”, whereby you’re recommended books and music on the basis of what others who made the same purchase - people like you - also enjoyed.

The unspoken assumption here is that you know what you like - that satisfying your existing preferences, and maybe expanding them a little around the edges, is the path to fulfillment. But if happiness research has taught us anything, it’s that we’re terrible at predicting what will bring us pleasure. Might we end up happier by exposing ourselves more often to serendipity, or even, specifically, to the people and things we don’t think we’d like?

You don’t need technology to do that, but then again, technology needn’t be the enemy: Facebook could easily offer a list of the People You’re Least Likely To Know; imagine what that could do for cross-cultural understanding. And I love the Unsuggester, a feature of the books site LibraryThing.com: enter a book you’ve recently read, and it’ll provide a list of titles least likely to appear alongside it on other people’s bookshelves. Tell it you’re a fan of Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason, and it’ll suggest you read Confessions Of A Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. And maybe you should.

A fascinating example of the power of a very simple cultural artifact to move the horizons of the possible. (Though it seems clear that the debates about exactly how checklists work, and how well, will go on for quite some time.)

horizons of the possible, medicine, safety

Andy

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Sticks and stones may break your bones — but if you need surgery, the right words used in the operating room can be more powerful than many drugs. New research published today in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when surgical teams heeded a simple checklist — as pilots do before takeoff — patient-mortality rates were cut nearly in half and complications fell by more than a third. . . .

Whether these changes can be sustained over time is another question. Gawande and his colleagues note in the study that a phenomenon called the “Hawthorne effect” may be largely responsible for the checklist’s success. The effect was named for a series of experiments designed to determine how to increase productivity at a factory in Chicago. All of the tactics implemented by the study leaders improved worker output during the experiments — but researchers realized that the effect they were really measuring was a boost in motivation among workers who knew others were watching.

“The checklist is kind of an effort to produce a consistent Hawthorne effect,” says Gawande. “It is intended to make people aware that other people expect these things to be done.”

This would be an interesting challenge: to locate a friend in a new-to-you American city using only conversations with people you meet—neither you or anyone of your informants would be allowed to consult the usual lists, maps, phone books, etc. I wonder if it'd be possible ...

africa, gardens and cities, ghana, horizons of the possible

Nate

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When I carried out fieldwork in Ghana during the 1960s, I was amazed by how migrants found their relatives, after traveling 500 miles to an unknown city of a million people. They had no addresses or phone numbers written down. When they arrived in the central lorry park, they would look for someone wearing Northern dress and ask him where they could find people like themselves. Directed to a particular district, they would seek out a leading figure in the ethnic community. They might then be directed to someone else from their home village. By all means, within an hour or two, they would be sitting with their relative. These African migrants knew that we live in small worlds connected by fewer links than most of us imagine. They used contingent human encounters and network hubs like local big men, not street maps. Their method was news to me then, but it shouldn’t be now.

I, too, am quite a fan of Whit Stillman's films (despite the fact that they somehow make me simultaneoulsy think, "Dude, I'm such a WASP," and "Dude, I'm so not a WASP"). To my mind the best of the trio is The Last Days of Disco, though who wouldn't also love a movie (Barcelona) whose IMDB reviews include one called—accurately, no less—"The Bible Dancer and the American Deer."

banter, film, horizons of the possible, humor, virtue, wit

Nate

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Because Stillman praises convention and doesn’t shun virtue, there are more options open to him.  It turns out looking at convention and virtue only through a perspective that disparages them can seriously limit your stock of references.  Stillman’s characters can move from examining Jane Austen or War and Peace to analyzing The Graduate from the perspective of the make-out king.  Stillman doesn’t feel the need for hip references; he simply explores his interests, and they are fascinating.

If praising virtue leads to creativity, this is good news for contemporary artists because it opens up more options for them.  Stillman is proof that virtue doesn’t have to lead to canned narratives.  Virtue in a world where it is largely misunderstood is fuel for drama, irony and a whole lot of cinematic fun.

Today, the nation’s rail network is just 94,942 miles, less than half of what it was in 1970. Pity that, as there are a lot of things trains did faster, cheaper, and more cleanly than the trucks that by and large replaced them.

horizons of the possible, railroads, transit

Nate

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In the first half of the last century,  railroads used these and other advantages of steel wheel technology to provide services we tend to think of as modern, or in some cases even futuristic. The Pacific Fruit Growers Express delivered fresh California fruits and vegetables to the East Coast using far less energy and labor than today’s truck fleets. The rhythmically named Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific (a.k.a. the Milwaukee Road) hauled hundred-car freight trains over the Cascade and Rocky Mountains using electric engines drawing on the region’s abundant hydropower. The Railway Express Agency, which attached special cars to passenger trains, provided Americans with a level of express freight service that cannot be had for any price today, offering door-to-door delivery of everything from canoes to bowls of tropical fish to, in at least one instance, a giraffe. Into the 1950s, it was not uncommon for a family to ship its refrigerator to and from a lakeside cabin for the summer via the REA; thanks to the physics of steel-on-steel conveyance, appliance-sized items could be moved for trivially larger amounts of   money than smaller goods (think about that the next time you shell out an extra $50 to check a suitcase of dirty clothes on a domestic flight).

The Indian capital bans plastic bags—just like San Francisco, except the regulation seems to be a lot further-reaching (besides covering millions more residents). Evidently Rwanda, Bhutan, and Bangladesh already have similar laws.

environment, government, horizons of the possible, plastic, pollution, technology and change, transit

Nate

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Carry a plastic bag in Delhi and you could be imprisoned for five years. Officials in India’s capital have decided that the only way to stem the rising tide of poly­thene is to outlaw the plastic shopping bag.

According to the official note, the “use, storage and sale” of plastic bags of any kind or thickness will be banned. The new guideline means that customers, shopkeepers, hoteliers and hospital staff face a 100,000 rupee fine (£1,370) and a possible jail sentence for using non-biodegradable bags….

Civil servants said that punitive measures were needed after a law prohibiting all but the thinnest plastic bags – no thicker than 0.04mm – was ignored.

Although the government had originally concluded that plastic bags were too cheap and convenient to be disposed of, the authorities appear to have been swayed by environmentalists who pointed out that used bags were clogging drains and so providing breeding grounds for malaria and dengue fever. There is evidence that prohibition of plastic bags can work. Countries such as Rwanda, Bhutan and Bangladesh have all had bans enforced.

From my current morning reading, the 1987 Booker Prize novel.

horizons of the possible, language, naming, reading, speech, words

Nate

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Today language abandoned me. I could not find the word for a simple object—a commonplace familiar furnishing. For an instant, I stared into a void. Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. Later, I made an inventory of the room—a naming of parts: bed, chair, table, picture, vase, cupboard, window, curtain. Curtain. And I breathed again.

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes—our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorized Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.

Lifehacker is probably one of my most-read blogs that doesn't translate into many (or any, till now) posts on this site. There's definitely something seductive about wasting one's time reading other people's suggestions about how not to waste time. But now Lifehacker's founder and lead blogger is stepping down to get back to making stuff. Of course (I tell myself) finding and curating good stuff is its own form of culture making, but often it still can feel a level removed.

blogs, horizons of the possible, internet, time

Nate

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As the years passed, Lifehacker became my online alter ego, my professional identity, my work and my play. I happily gave up time I’d normally spend on creative side projects to the site, because it was my primary outlet for the two things I love most: software and writing. But as our staff and audience grew, the news chase intensified, and management duties piled up. I started writing and coding less and air traffic-controlling, copy-editing, budgeting, doing PR, and assigning stories to my writers more. While that all has been great experience I am lucky to have under my belt, it’s time for me to recalibrate how I’m spending my days. As someone put well, it’s time to mitigate the urgent to focus on the important.

The bottom line is this: for someone who loves making things on the web, spending 100% of the time blogging about what other people are making is simply untenable.

Inspired in part by reading Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, an artist has created a fruitful long-term creative partnership with the residents of an inner-city neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

art, gardens and cities, horizons of the possible, mosaic, pennsylvania, poverty, public space, sculpture

Nate

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Twenty years later, this area is still poor, with high unemployment but hope can be found at the Village of Arts and Humanities.  That’s what the small art park has grown into—a tangible symbol of renewal that covers more than 120 formerly abandoned lots with murals, sculpture gardens, mosaics, flowers, community gardens, playgrounds, performance spaces, basketball courts, art studios, even a tree farm. 

“The entire community seems to take part in the use of the spaces,” writes Kathleen McCarthy, who nominated the Village for Project for Public Space’s authoritative list of the world’s Great Public Spaces. “As we walked down the street, trying to find one of the parks, a man walking beside us directed us to the Park, and told us the history of it and the wonderful artist, Lily Yeh who started the park. He spoke with pride that this was a part of his community. We sat on the benches made of smashed tile and mirror, making wonderful curves and places to sit. Across from us, women sat and smiled, waved. Children ran over and asked us to hide them during a game of hide-and-seek…. I’ve never felt more welcomed in an unfamiliar place.”

When I first read the first paragraphs of this, I thought: hmm, this doesn't bode well for the urban, cosmopolitan New Jerusalem described in Revelation 22. But going further, I recalled: "On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." So that, research suggests, should help even things out.

cultural worlds, gardens and cities, horizons of the possible, revelation, trees

Nate

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And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it’s also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting—that’s why Picasso left Paris—this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

“The mind is a limited machine,“says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.”

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.