This term—from blogging’s heyday—popped into my head this morning. Anyone else remember this?
Went to my favorite junk store and spent a total of $11 for a Winchester and a Blue Grass brace bit plus a Klein folding ruler. I’ve been picking up any Blue Grass tools I can find, mostly because they were based in Louisville (less than two hours from here).
We sent Darcy off to Europe for 12 days this morning. (Spain then south of France then Italy.) That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Darcy was having second thoughts but we talked her through it. Once we parted, Rachel and I sat on a bench and cried for a good while.
Charles Brooks takes photographs of the interior of various instruments and the results are amazing. (via Mortise and Tenon Magazine)
A more elegant way of saying what I was trying to say yesterday. Robin Wall Kimmerer:
When Nanabozho, the Anishinaabe Original Man, our teacher, part man, part manido, walked through the world, he took note of who was flourishing and who was not, of who was mindful of the Original Instructions and who was not. He was dismayed when he came upon villages where the gardens were not being tended, where the fishnets were not repaired and the children were not being taught the way to live. Instead of seeing piles of firewood and caches of corn, he found the people lying beneath maple trees with their mouths wide open, catching the thick, sweet syrup of the generous trees. They had become lazy and took for granted the gifts of the Creator. They did not do their ceremonies or care for one another. He knew his responsibility, so he went to the river and dipped up many buckets of water. He poured the water straight into the maple trees to dilute the syrup. Today, maple sap flows like a stream of water with only a trace of sweetness to remind the people both of possibility and of responsibility. And so it is that it takes forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.
… When my daughters remember our sugaring adventure now, they roll their eyes and groan, “That was so much work.” They remember hauling branches to feed the fire and slopping sap on their jackets as they carried heavy buckets. They tease me about being a wretched mother who wove their connection to the land through forced labor. They were awfully little to be doing the work of a sugaring crew. But they also remember the wonder of drinking sap straight from the tree. Sap, but not syrup. Nanabozho made certain that the work would never be too easy. His teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness.
Simply put, the way we were taught the market for consumer goods is supposed to work does not seem to hold anymore. The market was supposed to incentivize businesses to offer attractive products, at competitive prices, in a convenient format, and then customers were supposed to respond to those positive signals by rewarding them with their business. Now businesses increasingly take actively customer-hostile actions — locking up products, replacing paper menus with cumbersome QR codes, and of course chronically understaffing everything, which is the root of all of these issues — and insulate themselves from any feedback.
Communist Manifesto:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
As many, many others have noted, one of the chief aims of liquid modernity is to remove all friction from the experience of life. Driverless cars. AI. Augmented reality. You know all the examples.
Do you know how many times I’ve had to work on my mom’s touch faucet? They’re a solution to a problem no one had. I finally just took off the electronic components and told her the touch feature was permanently broken.
One of the themes of Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive and (to my recollection) Shop Class as Soulcraft is the docility being trained into humans with our ever-higher tech. He contrasts this docile type with “spirited” people—an apt word that has stayed with me recently.
It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff—he tends to act as though any material things he uses are in some sense properly his, while he is using them—and when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him. Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the face, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle? Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers. [Shop Class]
We need spiritedness. We need people who engage with the stubborn resistance of reality—not with arrogant willfulness but with curiosity and artistry cognizant of limits.
The world is too beautiful for a harsh asceticism. At the same time, the promise of a frictionless life is a lie—or, at least, it’s not a life. Beauty comes with burnishing.
Everybody makes fun of “prepper Jeremy” until the water main breaks. Now I’m sitting here having my coffee while others are rushing to Walmart. 😄
This 1975 documentary about a Kentuckian chairmaker is worth watching.
How about some garden pictures?
Kitchen garden (other vegetables and herbs are spread throughout our backyard):
Mountain mint about to bloom:
Concord grapes:
Broccoli:
Sunflower:
