Fire and Knowledge

Prodigy on a mission to turn children into lovers of literature

Incredible. An excerpt:

Adora Svitak loves to read and write. Over the past 18 months she has had a 296-page book published and written 400 short stories and nearly 100 poems. Typing at 80 words a minute, she has produced 370,000 words while reading up to three books a day. The last novel she finished was Voltaire’s Candide. Not bad for an eight-year-old.

As if that wasn’t enough, the child prodigy has also made it her mission to persuade other youngsters to ditch their computer games and pick up a book or a pen.

I should not talk so much about myself if there was anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), p. 3

Michael & Jana Novak on Washington’s God on National Review Online

Interesting interview regarding Michael & Jana Novak’s soon-to-be released book, Washington’s God. Although, the freemason question made me a little suspicious. Of course freemasonry is not compatible with Christianity.

Corporate life is composed only of lower underlings and higher underlings. Bosses are everywhere, and all the bosses are underlings. This is invariably revealed when the time comes for accepting responsibility for something unpleasant[.]

—Wendell Berry, “Feminism, The Body, and the Machine” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 69

Wired News: Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone

Excerpt:

It doesn’t matter whether you’re reading your local rag, surfing the net or trying to make heads or tails of someone’s inane blog — the quality bar is set lower than ever, which is saying a lot considering it was never set very high to begin with.

But I’ll save the critical examination of my profession for another column. Today, I want to talk about one of the byproducts of all this mediocrity. Today I want to talk about the all-out assault on the English language and the role technology plays in that unprovoked and dastardly attack. I especially want to talk about the ways dumbing down the language is not only seen as acceptable, but is tacitly encouraged as the status quo.

Out of the retail rat race / Consumer group doesn’t buy notion that new is better

While many people will spend countless hours this year lining up at Wal-Mart and maxing out their credit cards at Nordstrom, a small Bay Area group has declared it will do just the opposite.

About 50 teachers, engineers, executives and other professionals in the Bay Area have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006 — except food, health and safety items and underwear.

This is a really great idea. It seems like a great way to check the consumer mentality that we all have these days. I know one of my goals for this year is to reduce the amount of garbage my wife and I buy and throw out. I started with switching to handkerchiefs, since I go through at least a box of disposable tissues a week (allergies). It was a little strange at first but now it seems normal. We have also been trying to use reusable containers instead of plastic wrap or aluminum foil. Now I am working on reducing the amount of packaging we buy—TV dinners and such are no more. Every little bit helps, plus it reduces how much we spend. Now if I can just train myself not to turn on the faucet full blast every time I turn one on…

(via Question Technology)

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.

—Wendell Berry, “Racism and the Economy” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 61

Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.

—Wendell Berry, “Racism and the Economy” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 59