Fire and Knowledge

Back in the era of the body, when women and men were physically useful as well as physically attractive to one another, physical fitness was simply a condition. Little conscious attention was given to it; it was a by-product of useful work.

—Wendell Berry, “Men and Women in Search of Common Ground,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 141

Gladwell on SUVs. Worth reading.

The printed word cannot compete with the movies on their ground, and should not. You can describe beautiful faces, car chases, or valleys full of Indians on horseback until you run out of words, and you will not approach the movies’ spectacle. Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor. I cannot name what, in the text, alerts the reader to suspect the writer of mixed motives; I cannot specify which sentences, in several books, have caused me to read on with increasing dismay, and finally close the books because I smelled a rat. Such books seems uneasy being books; they seem eager to flight off their disguises and jump onto screens.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), pp. 18-19

Motivated no longer by practical needs, but by loneliness and fear, women began to identify themselves by what they bought rather than what they did. They bought labor-saving devices that worked, as most modern machines have tended to work, to devalue or replace the skills of those who used them. They bought manufactured foods, which did likewise. They bought any product that offered to lighten the burdens of housework, to be “kind to hands,” or to endear one to one’s husband. And they furnished their houses, as they made up their faces and selected their clothes, neither by custom nor invention, but by the suggestion of articles and advertisements in “women’s magazines.” Thus housewifery, once a complex discipline acknowledged to be one of the bases of culture and economy, was reduced to the exercise of purchasing power. The housewife’s only remaining productive capacity was that of reproduction. But even as a mother she remained a consumer, subjecting herself to an all-presuming doctor and again to written instructions calculated to results in the purchase of merchandise. Breast-feeding of babies became unfashionable, one suspects, because it was the last form of home production; no way could be found to persuade a woman to purchase her own milk. All these “improvements” involved a radical simplification of mind and was bound to have complicated, and ironic, results. As housekeeping became simpler and easier, it also became more boring. A woman’s work became less accomplished and less satisfying. It became easier for her to believe that what she did was not important. And this heightened her anxiety and made her even more avid and even less discriminating as a consumer. The cure not only preserved the diseases, it compounded it.

—Wendell Berry, “The Body and the Earth,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 110

Big Brother – pure McLuhan – Times Online

Famously – some would say notoriously – McLuhan defined television as a “cool” medium, that is one in which consumers felt they were participants, as opposed to a “hot” medium like radio where, he argued, they were more like passive recipients (few people talk back to a radio, many do to a television set). For the ITV1 and Channel 4 shows, the viewers were participants in the most direct way. They had to phone in, on costly special lines, to cast their decisive votes. Though such shows are called “reality TV”, they exactly match the concept of “hyper-reality” put forward by McLuhan’s direct heir, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. By this, Baudrillard means a media simulacrum which is taken for real life. In his best-known paradox, he argued that the Gulf War of 1990–91 “did not take place”, because, for most people worldwide, it was only a set of tightly controlled images on a television screen.

Neither I’m a Celebrity nor Big Brother represented any reality, of course, other than itself.

It takes years to write a book—between two and ten years…. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), pp. 13-14

FORTUNE: Trapped in cubicles

Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called “monolithic insanity.”

Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man’s pursuits are no worthier than the savage’s, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), p. 28