Nate:
from "The Empire State Building," by Helen Keller, 13 January 1932 :: via Letters of Note

But what of the Empire Building? It was a thrilling experience to be whizzed in a "lift" a quarter of a mile heavenward, and to see New York spread out like a marvellous tapestry beneath us.

There was the Hudson – more like the flash of a sword-blade than a noble river. The little island of Manhattan, set like a jewel in its nest of rainbow waters, stared up into my face, and the solar system circled about my head! Why, I thought, the sun and the stars are suburbs of New York, and I never knew it! I had a sort of wild desire to invest in a bit of real estate on one of the planets. All sense of depression and hard times vanished, I felt like being frivolous with the stars.

Nate:
from "Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred," by Marilynne Robinson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 February 2012 :: via more than 95 theses

We live in a time when many religious people feel fiercely threatened by science. O ye of little faith. Let them subscribe to Scientific American for a year and then tell me if their sense of the grandeur of God is not greatly enlarged by what they have learned from it. Of course many of the articles reflect the assumption at the root of many problems, that an account, however tentative, of some structure of the cosmos or some transaction of the nervous system successfully claims that part of reality for secularism. Those who encourage a fear of science are actually saying the same thing. If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of modern life for which we should all be grateful.

photo
from "2009 Khanga Designs with Methali," found at Zanzibari Reunion :: via ALL MY EYES
Nate:
Nate:
from "A Conversation with David Foster Wallace," interview by Larry McCaffery, Dalkey Archive Press, 1991 :: via more than 95 theses

If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.

—Wislawa Szymborska (1923–2012), from "Under One Small Star"

image
"Winter Landscape," polychrome woodblock print by Keisai Eisen (1790–1848), from the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Nate:
Nate:

Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring…. So we don’t believe that life is beautiful because we don’t recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

Nate:
from "The trouble with bubbles," by Walter Murch and Lawrence Weschler, Los Angeles Times, 23 May 2010

What if, instead of that playful word bubble, we tried something a bit more accurately descriptive when growth at any cost became the goal. Say, "tumor": "the dot-com tumor," "the subprime tumor," "the derivatives tumor."

Would anyone seriously gainsay the highest possible vigilance over the proper functioning of their own body or doubt the need for strong regulation? Who, facing the prospect of a tumorous outbreak or living with a body demonstrably prone to such outbreaks, would entrust that body to a band of physicians blithely committed to laissez faire regarding these fatal bubbles of flesh?

Words matter. Metaphors frame thought. Pay them heed and tend them well.

image
from "Patent US690236 - COW-TAIL HOLDER," awarded to C. W. Colwell of Delhi, New York, United States Patent Office, 31 December 1901 :: via Tweets of Old
Nate:
Nate:
from "The Sound of Silence," by Virginia Morell, Conde Nast Traveler, January 2012 :: via The Browser

“Olympic National Park is the listener’s Yosemite,” Hempton said of his decision to locate his One Square Inch within the park’s forested realm. “In a single day, you can listen to an alpine environment, a wilderness beach, and a temperate rain forest. And it has the longest noise-free interval of any national park I’ve been to, and I’ve been to them all.”

Part of Olympic’s quiet stems from its location: It sits on a peninsula in a secluded corner of the country. The park is not crossed by highways, navigable rivers, or utility rights of way; and it lies west of the major cross-country plane routes. Only three commercial-airline paths encroach upon its borders. Alaska Airlines is the most active, flying overhead 37 times each day in summer, but it tries to avoid the park during routine maintenance and training flights—a concession the carrier made to Hempton after he wrote asking it to change its flight patterns.

photo
from "City Silhouettes," by Jasper James, 2010 :: via Feature Shoot and Petapixel
Nate:
Nate:
from "Alain de Botton: a life in writing," by Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 20 January 2012 :: via More than 95 Theses

Religions, he thinks, have the buttons and know how to use them. His book considers the Catholic mass, early Christianitiy's ritual of agape or love feasts, and Jewish Passover rituals to explore how religions encouraged us to overcome fear of strangers and create communities. He then tentatively imagines a so-called "agape restaurant" where, instead of dining with like-minded friends, you would be invited to eat with strangers. It would be the antithesis of Facebook.

excerpt Paving the home
Nate:
From "Paving Paradise", by Charles Kenny, Foreign Policy, Jan/Feb 2012 :: via Koranteng

Starting in 2000, a program in Mexico’s Coahuila state called “Piso Firme” (Firm Floor) offered up to $150 per home in mixed concrete, delivered directly to families who used it to cover their dirt floors. Scholar Paul Gertler evaluated the impact: Kids in houses that moved from all-dirt to all-concrete floors saw parasitic infestation rates drop 78 percent; the number of children who had diarrhea in any given month dropped by half; anemia fell more than four-fifths; and scores on cognitive tests went up by more than a third. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, mothers in newly cemented houses reported less depression and greater life satisfaction.) By 2005, Piso Firme had spread to other states, and 300,000 households—about 10 percent of dirt-floor houses in Mexico—had taken part in the program.

It helps if the street outside the house gets paved, too—not so much for health reasons as for economic ones. Economists Marco Gonzalez-Navarro and Climent Quintana-Domeque found in a 2010 study that paving the street in the town of Acayucan, Mexico, added more than 50 percent to land values and caused a 31 percent rise in rental values. It also considerably increased households’ access to credit. As a result, households on paved streets were 40 percent more likely to have cars.

 

photo
from "Forever Bicycles," by Ai Weiwei, Taipei Art Museum, 2011 :: via Co.Design
Nate:

Book Travel News
Travel & speaking

Fuller Theological Seminary
22 May 2012
Pasadena, California

First Baptist Church
10 June 2012
San Antonio, Texas

Samford University
2 August 2012
Birmingham, Alabama

Dallas Theological Seminary
17 September 2012
Dallas, Texas

Western Seminary
8–11 October 2012
Portland, Oregon

The quotations, images, and embedded media in this blog are the work of the credited authors, artists, and publications, and are employed in the spirit of fair use, commentary, and criticism. We always link to the original source of material we cite. If you think we’ve missed something, let us know. The inclusion of media on this site should not imply its owners’ endorsement (or for that matter awareness) of this book, blog, or the blog’s curators and commentators. Though we hope they’d like us.

[Culture Making] was smart, challenging, and most of all very humane. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and talking about it long after I finished reading.
—Tara, educator living
in Cambridge, Mass.
horizons of the possible  cultural worlds  music  photography  art  technology and change  food and drink  europe  community  gardens and cities  cultivation and creation  asia  books  africa  language  children  literature  writing  painting  movies  video  cities  family  changing the world  power  gestures and postures  internet  business  medicine  grace  technology  government  consumption  poverty  education  color  reading  animals  architecture  india  poetry  maps  money  visual arts  trends  performing arts  3 12 120  agriculture  disciplines  transport  design  south america  war  travel  communication  economics  sculpture  transit  film  tv  science  advertising  work  psychology  churches  revelation  infrastructure  france  sport  clothing  england  fashion  politics  unintended consequences  home  bible  copying  street view  failure  generations  women  creativity  story  christmas  history  craft  humor  china  landscape  time  development  pop culture  water  nature  california  museums  dance  computers  play  discipline  suburbs  creation  new york  remixes  kevin kelly  furniture  primordial stories  charity  least of nations  japan  naming  parents  middle east  stewardship  germany  stories  neighborhoods  journalism  religion  light  russia  church  traces of god  love  australia  islam  media  law  names  mission  italy  words  mexico  games  cell phones  drawing  new jerusalem  pentecost and beyond  translation  typography  graffiti  shopping  entertainment  statistics  david taylor  philanthropy  heroes  change the world  twitter  libraries  creation and cultivation  space  redemption  buildings  military  sound  wilderness  death  marriage  risk  finance  cultivation  tradition  rob walker  beauty  lists  alphabets  data  visual art  race  engineering  safety  signs  cars  migration  modernity  christianity  taste  happiness  natural sciences  memes  innovation  philosophy  prison  service  environmentalism  collage  crime  condemnation  television  reconciliation  critique  19th century  ideas  environment  noise  illustration  south africa  lamin sanneh  google  stone  convergence  nigeria  recreation  oceana  turkey  friendship  voice  wonder  animation  babel  canada  pets  nostalgia  latin america  news  wealth  paper  kenya  heaven  monasticism  leisure  genesis  public space  afghanistan  john stackhouse  future  memory  multiculturalism  irony  vision  prayer  tools  metaphor  hip-hop  vocation  biology  colonialism  fiction  gold  food  scripture  scale  invention  health  makoto fujimura  consumerism  mentoring  bodies  gospel