I just joined the public beta of the Ello, which seems to be a wannabe hipster alternative to Facebook. Seeing as I never got Facebook, and despite my utter lack of hipster-tude (now and forever, amen), I thought I’d see if it made any sense to me.
It doesn’t, at least not yet, but I thought I’d try it out as a kind of public commonplace book. And then I thought that, given that I’m going to be spending the next couple of years in the bunker trying to get a couple of large projects actually done (finally getting going on a long promised book, for one), this seemed like a way to keep a conversation going here, which I hope you won’t mind too much.*
So here goes: the first of what might be just one — or who knows how many — brief notes on things that I encounter on my way to doing (or avoiding) the work I ought to be accomplishing.
Giving that a try (again, and let me hammer this point, with no promises of consistency) here’s something. I’ve just started in on a book that’s been on the periphery of my “hot could you not have read this” list for a long time, Leo Marx’s classic, The Machine in the Garden. (Oxford University Press, 1964, 2000)
Very early — first half dozen of pages or so in, he starts to draw the distinction between the mass-culture version of the pastoral ideal and the one expressed in foundational works of American literature.
Marx was writing (as he notes in an afterward) out of an biography that included a Harvard education in the last class to graduate before the US entry into World War II, and service in the US Navy that ended a few months after the bombs landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Marx’s trajectory from ’37-’45 exactly matches that of my father, by the way; Marx and dad were friends, which is an odd the-world-is-much-smaller-than-it-appears grace note to all this. There’s a story there, or actually more than one, that Marx told me the one time we’ve met. Perhaps for another post..)
Ideas about the tricky relationship between the facts of the unbelievably rapid technological transformation of American life from independence, and the dream (fantasy?) or vision of life within unspoiled nature take on particular force in the wake of the bomb and the lived memory of industrialized war. It’s no wonder, it seems to me, that Marx as a literary and cultural scholar would wish to “describe and evaluate the uses of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of American experience.”
What did stop me in my tracks, though, as I read my way through his first chapter — “Sleepy Hollow, 1844” — is the degree that his account of the cynical, for-popular-consumption use of the pastoral ideal maps directly onto our political landscape, right here and now, more than half a century after Marx published the book. Just check out this passage:
“The first, or sentimental kind [of pastoralism] is difficult to define or even locate because it is an expression less of thought than of feeling. It is widely diffused n our culture, insinuating itself into many kinds of behavior…An inchoate longing for a more “natural” environment enters into the contemptuous attitude that many Americans adopt toward urban life (with the result that we neglect our cities and desert them for the suburbs). Wherever people turn away from the hard social and technological realities this obscure sentiment is likely to be at work. We see it in our politics, in the “localism” invoked to oppose an adequate national system of education, in the power of the farm bloc in Congress, in the special economic favor shown to “farming” through government subsidies, and in the state electoral systems that allow the rural population to retain a share of political power grossly out of proportion to its size….” (p. 5)
There’s a hint of datedness to that passage. But if Marx’s concern about the ’50s growth of the suburbs doesn’t quite track with the issues central to the urban-exurban divide today, still, look at how well he captures the basic shape of American politics today. We’re five weeks out from an election in a country that in many ways is utterly transformed since he wrote that passage. But in just as many ways, we’re still stuck in the same damn cycle of stupid. The point being, of course, that old power, like an old habit, hangs on with the grim urgency of a nicotine jones. Which, in our current predicament, is depressing as hell.
*And if this does bug you, I’ll be happy to refund every cent you spent on this stuff…
Image: J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken, 1839.
Tommy
Facebook sucks. Look if anybody IMHO could get rid of the stuff I dislike about Facebook, billions to be made. I don’t want to join you for a game. Yeah that dude you tell me I might know bulled me 20 years ago in high school, don’t want to be his “friend.” I just want a method to comment with my friends and family.
I’ve been meaning to sign-up for a Ello account. But signed up for so many that went nowhere!
BGinCHI
A work that plows similar conceptual ground but in terms of English early modern (and late medieval) is Harry Berger Jr.’s great book Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making.
The works he covers are not just textual but visual as well. Right up your alley, Tom. Berger is the most perceptive close reader of his generation, imho.
JPL
Catclub mentioned below that early voting has been blocked in Ohio. It could effect Sunday voting also. As we know hourly workers don’t need to have the polls open longer. Corporations rule. Maybe someday
the middle class in America will understand what fascism is all about.
I should add the shrinking middle class
jl
I think that wrapped up in the pastoral and independent farmer, rural crafts-person ideal lie some very precious and rare things that are hard to come by in urban life, at least in the United States today, and were hard to come by anywhere in the world, during our early history: autonomy, from autonomy a sense of self-respect and independence, and the ability to achieve mastery at a worthwhile endeavor consistent with self-respect.
Those are not stupid things. However, there may be a lot of stupid in how people think those things can be achieved. But then there is a lot of stupid in how people think love and relationships can be achieved too, and those are also worthwhile ends. It is the human condition.
It is true that people can be very easily manipulated and exploited through their deep-rooted needs
Omnes Omnibus
test
jl
@Omnes Omnibus: We are going to be tested on this post? What? I want a review session.
Omnes Omnibus
@jl: My comments were disappearing into the ether, so I switched back to the short form of my ‘nym to see if it worked and it does. Mysterious and capricious are the ways of FYWP.
JPL
@JPL: I should have mentioned blocked by the Supreme Ct in a 5-4 decision along the usual line.
http://www.scotusblog.com/
aimai
@BGinCHI: This sounds great, Bgin Chi. I need to put both these books on my reading list.
BGinCHI
@aimai: If you are keen on the subject, check out Berger’s recent work on Dutch painting. Really amazing stuff.
Here:
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=316
And here:
http://fordhampress.com/index.php/manhood-marriage-and-mischief-cloth.html
And here:
http://fordhampress.com/index.php/subjects/renaissance-studies/caterpiage-cloth.html
StringOnAStick
@Tommy: I agree with you on Facebook; I hate the damned thing. We only signed up because we have some friends in Canada that we only get to see in person once a year, but it was a way to keep up on what fun times each couple was having. That worked for awhile, but now the circle has expanded to more than I want it to, and my husband’s boss sent him a friend request; exactly how can you say “no” to that? You can’t, so now he has to be super careful about whatever he posts or likes on FB. The fact that FB makes that weasel Zuckerburg one of the richest guys in the US is just salt in the wound.
If Elio becomes a reasonable alternative then I am all over it, if only to take business away from Zuckerberg’s empire.
sharl
A few recent early analyses on Ello:
Quinn Norton’s long read, What Does Ethical Social Networking Software Look Like;
Scott Rosenberg’s skeptical Remove Blindfold Before Embarking for Utopia (subtitle: “Why do we keep rushing to embrace Facebook alternatives that haven’t earned our trust?”) – also a long read; and
Andy Baio’s (aka waxpancake) also skeptical but somewhat more hopeful short post actually on Ello.
FWIW, Sam Biddle at Valleywag relayed an e-mail from a new Ello user who signed up under the user name “Clickhole”, and was rather promptly informed that he would have to change his user name pronto, or it would be deleted. So freedom from hassle by The Corporate Man will not be found at Ello, at least where trademark issues can be invoked.
Looks like a social media baby in the cradle; we shall see if/how it develops…
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: I see that you are no longer the first of your kind.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: I am no longer announcing it. And technically I wasn’t really the first of my name. It was first used in 1789 (that I know of) by an person sent from Rennes to Nantes to speak to the local version of the Estates General in favor of the rights of the people. Rafael Sabatini grabbed the incident and the use of the pseudonym for the novel Scaramouche. So, like Gale Sayers, I am third.
canuckistani
I spent days getting linked up with all my friends on Orkut, and it ended up just laying there unused. I spent days getting linked up with all my friends on LinkedIn, and it lays there unused. I spent days getting linked up with all my friends on Google+, and it just lays there unused.
Wake me up when something has enough momentum to get all my friends and relatives to drop Facebook and I’ll do something
newnumbertwo
I have a couple friends that are intimately involved with creating Ello, and when they say that they are trying to create a social networking site that doesn’t view the user as a commodity, I believe them. I think they’re trying to do good here, and given the rate at which my friends appear to be signing up, my decision to leave Facebook 2 months ago seems like not a terrible idea.
I wish there was an API and that one had the same level of granularity in terms of blocking other users as in Facebook, but I’ll cut em some slack for now.
ellennellee
sure appreciate the art selection. btw, did you catch the turner exhibit at the peabody-essex museum? stunning.
Cervantes
Great book, Tom, if I do say so. You’ll enjoy it.
It was once, decades ago, assigned as summer reading for an incoming freshman class at MIT. Discussion with the kids was just wonderful — even if not all of them had actually read it.
James E Powell
If you are interested, this is Leo Marx giving a pretty good lecture about Jay Gatsby & the Mythology of American Origins
pkdz
I live in Madison, Wisconsin, where the nearby corn fields are being replaced with McMansions. It triggers my pain body to see the both the loss of the farm land and also think about the white flight.
KS in MA
@Omnes Omnibus:
Those are neat historical notes. I’m guessing the phrase (not as a name) probably goes back to one of Paul’s epistles, no?
ellennellee
YAY! more turner!!
thx.