How do suburban landscapes affect the people who live there? What impressions do they leave on you on first encounter, or after long exposure?
The first literary references that come to my mind are not favorable ones. In A Wrinkle in Time, when Meg and Calvin make their first incursion into Camazotz, a planet that has completely succumbed to “evil”, they first encounter that evil in the form of a Monotonous Neighbourhood:
Below them the town was laid out in harsh angular patterns. The houses in the outskirts were all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray. Each had a small, rectangular plot of lawn in front, with a straight line of dull-looking flowers edging the path to the door. Meg had a feeling that if she could count the flowers there would be exactly the same number for each house.
C.S. Lewis did much the same thing in The Great Divorce. The idea of an endless grid of identical houses serves, for him, as a vision of hell itself:
Several hundred feet below us, already half hidden in the rain and mist, the wet roofs of the town appeared, spreading without a break as far as the eye could reach. …We were now so high that all below us had become featureless. But fields, rivers, or mountains I did not see, and I got the impression that the grey town still filled the whole field of vision.
He could almost be flying out of Boston or D.C. with that kind of description. Lewis describes an infernal social dynamic whose result strongly resembles urban sprawl.
Further notes to this post will focus on other “found impressions” of the suburbs by authors, artists, journalists, and architects.
We owe this project to an ill wind in June three years ago. When we were married, Jessica moved here from Ontario and brought nothing with her but the suitcases we took on the honeymoon; the rest of her chattels followed a month or so later. Her dad did us the kind favour of hauling them over the border, piled on a rickety little trailer.
Unfortunately, he hit a bad patch of weather on the way. The wind held up the corners of the trailer tarp and the rain let itself inside. Books and clothes survived undamaged in their bins, but the Ikea dresser came right apart at the seams. We had to junk the dresser frame, but the drawers were in good condition; and, being too poor to be minimalists, we kept the drawers in the garage for scraps.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later, when we read Gardening Anywhere by Alys Fowler, that we knew what to do with the old drawers. The book has a simple plan for a composting bin, and Fowler makes a point of advocating reused lumber for projects like this (she made hers from skirt boards pulled from a dumpster).
I screwed the blocks into the corners before removing the drawer fronts (which were made of flimsy chipboard) and replacing them with scrap 1×6.
The box is made in horizontal sections which are not fastened to each other. This is so that when you turn the compost pile, you can just pop the top sections off the stack and restack them in a new spot off to the side. You then scoop the compost heap into this new box, moving the sections over as you go, until what was the bottom section is now on the top. In this way you have completely turned the compost pile upside down with a minimum of mess and bother.
All the box needs now is a final bit of weatherproofing. I’ll be priming the whole thing inside and out, and then painting it with blackboard paint. Fowler’s book has lots of good advice for actually managing and using your compost, as well as being a great manual for growing things in general; you should find yourself a copy if you have any interest in getting into light, urban gardening.
The complete box, closed. Fowler recommends a 2″ gap in the roof to let a bit of rainwater in, and to allow hot air to vent out.
Note that both Freakonomics and Reader’s Digest have declined in the same way: by lapsing into a pattern of regurgitating things that have been public knowledge for a long time.
Further note: Businessweek’s news about Freakonomics is itself not new, just as the post above about Reader’s Digest is not new (and wasn’t even new when I first wrote it!).
Ergo, both the Businessweek article and this very post are examples of old news about old news.
Icelandic group Arstidir performing medieval Icelandic hymn Heyr himna smidur at a German train station.
It is our express wish that oceans of just such public, impromptu harmonies — of every provenance — sweep over commuters everywhere. In my ideal city society, this kind of singing would be commonplace. Seriously, I have often daydreamed about being present for exactly this kind of experience; sadly, choral singing requires practice, and though I have racked my brain for a way to make practicing music a popular American pastime, I’m coming up dry so far.
It is also interesting to consider (as Dreher clearly has) how non-fictional Tolkein’s notion of “elvish” language and culture really is. This mythology is really just a reconstruction of the historical birthright that the Christian and pagan civilizations of the West have actually handed down to us. No matter how I think of this, I can’t seem to cast it in a way that seems somehow non-wonderful.
After eleven years this article has, of course, succumbed to link rot. To fix it up by replacing the broken links with working ones would be to waste some well-aged, vintage irony; so I offer, instead, this errata.
The patronizing link to “some point of reference” originally brought you to Google Directory, a relic from a time when, in addition to Alta Vista, we often used hierarchical catalogs of links to find things. The Google Directory was quietly snuffed out in 2011, so of course that link now gives you its own 404 error. As of 2014 you can still use Yahoo’s directory, though; and thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can look at an old copy of the Google one. (hands off the glass, please).
The link to the HTTP/1.1 spec bizarrely uses an FTP address that probably did not work for more than a month after the pixels had dried. This is so mind-gogglingly stupid that I cannot imagine why I did it. At any rate, if you do want to read about the technical details of the web’s transport protocol, you might try reading a copy transported over, you know, the web, or something.
When, I said, above, that “the idealist in me at age 20 wasn’t able to stomach twenty years of having creative solutions shot down by unaccountable, unfixable, and inscrutable technical problems,” this is exactly the kind of thing I feared:
Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There’s a team at a Google office that hasn’t slept in three days. Somewhere there’s a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she’s dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
Is not the real experience of each individual very limited? And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming an egotist? Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?
3-D printing may be the new future of low cost housing. An inventor in China has developed a massive 3-D printer which “The sprays emit a combination of cement and construction waste that is used to print building walls layer-by-layer.”
This additional article states “Each 650-square-foot home apparently cost under $5,000 to produce.”
For a visual demonstration of the process there is a Youtube video.
This a bit of a two-headed post. I’m talking about The Future of the Internet to anyone who might be interested in that. But I’m also talking about Distributism and using the internet as an illustration of distributist policy. I happen to be passionate about both things.
A core point about distributism is that it emphasizes the importance of property over enterprise. Instead of starting with the question How can we increase business growth, we prefer to start with the question How can we increase property ownership for the common person?
If long-term stability and independence are important, then it’s not enough to have access to services, income, or the data you create, because access can be taken away or exploited. It’s much more important — again, for the sake of personal stability and freedom — for people to have ownership of these things. And it’s not enough for personal ownership to be merely “technically possible” — it should be widespread and actively encouraged.
We’re seeing this exact sentiment in the growing “Indie Web” movement, which is a distributist movement without knowing it. They’ve realized the downsides of prioritizing access over ownership on the Internet — the danger of relying on big businesses like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook provides access to social networks and a publishing platform, but not ownership. What happens when they make it hard or impossible to search your past photos, links and statuses? What happens when they change their privacy rules? What happens when they eventually shut down? Answer: you live with whatever decisions they make, with no recourse.
[W]hen we use centralized services like social media sites, however helpful and convenient they may be, we are handing over ultimate control to third parties that profit from our work, material that exists on their sites only as long as they allow.
…Amber Case, one of the Indie Web creators, was drawn to it because the Web had become “a claustrophobic space where all I could do was consume, with barriers to building and owning.” She saw a new generation of Internet users who’d never registered a domain name, and weren’t even aware of what was possible.
The Indie Web movement aims to make it easy for people to set up their own domain names and servers, and to use them to interact and publish in the same ways we do on Facebook and Twitter — without ceding ownership of their data. This way, your data is completely under your control, and you have the ability to publish things that will never be taken offline until you decide to take them offline. No one is selling it to advertisers, no third party is making decisions about how it looks or what people see. And you now have the ability to back up your data, so it won’t be lost when a company shuts down their service.
Looking through the lens of property rights, and fostering a culture that values property, has two additional benefits. First, it solves the problem of privacy on the web. “Privacy policies” have never and will never be a solution to securing online privacy. Fundamentally, the whole idea of a “privacy policy” is predicated on the user ceding ownership of their data, and their ultimate purpose is to protect service providers from liability for doing whatever the heck they want with that data. They’re also unenforceable, and can be changed at will. But when you own your data and the tools that make use of it, the “privacy policy” is whatever you say it is, full stop.
Finally, small properties tend be humanized and beautiful spaces, and web properties are no exception. Frank Chimero illustrates this beautifully:
Have you ever visited an architect’s house, one they designed themselves? It’s fun to walk through it with them. They have so many things, arranged so thoughtfully, and share the space with such pride because of the personal reflection the house required to design (not to mention the effort it took to build). It’s really quite special. I think there’s a pleasure to having everything under one roof. You feel together, all of you at once. In a way, building your own house is the ultimate project for a creative person: you’re making a home for what you think is important, done in the way you think is best.
But the web right now is a house divided: a silo for each little thing that you make. As I look back at how I’ve used the internet this year, I’ve come to realize it’s not sustainable for me to continue this way. Hosting my things all over the place is fatiguing, never mind attempting to keep track of everyone in multiple places.
We owe this project to an ill wind in June three years ago. When we were married, Jessica moved here from Ontario and brought nothing with her but the suitcases we took on the honeymoon; the rest of her chattels followed a month or so later. Her dad did us the kind favour of hauling them over the border, piled on a rickety little trailer.
