Odds and Ends, Vol. 13

I seem to have amassed another selection of great links, so here goes!

James Alexander Cameron is writing a dissertation on English churches, and his observations about medieval architecture mistakes are hilarious.  I ended up subscribing to his blog on the basis of this article, but am enjoying his writing.  I find his secular detachment from the sacred subject he is studying to be an interesting study in contrasts, as well as valuable commentary from the other side.

Related: this image haunts me.

One of the original crunchy cons, Joel Salatin takes down Amanda Marcotte's whiny Slate piece about home cooked dinner.  I agree with Marcotte that there are many obstacles to getting a good dinner on the table, but many of the objections she cites seem to me to fall under the category of #firstworldproblems.  As usual, Salatin provides a farmer's perspective on these things: 

"With slow cookers, indoor plumbing, timed-bake and refrigerators, today's techno-enabled kitchens allow busy people to cook from scratch and eat with integrity far easier than during Great Grandma's time. She had to fetch water from the spring, split stove wood, start a fire and churn the butter and she still managed to feed a large family very well. If our generation can't do at least as well with our 40-hour work week and kitchen tech, then we deserve to eat adulterated pseudo food that sends us to an early grave. I don't know that anyone's children deserve this, however."

Read the whole thing.

Amazing paper cut illustrations.

Tolkien and goodness.  I was reminded of a quote from Graham Greene's Bendrix in The End of the Affair: "happiness is even harder to write than goodness."  From the article: "One of the reasons that Tolkien’s stories continue to inspire us is that he does something few authors are able to do: he makes goodness compelling and desirable."

This is real faith.  Read the embedded link as well.  Both are a powerful story of one man's unshakable faith in the midst of a terrible storm.  God gives us much grace in the moment.

I read Wendy Shalit's book A Return to Modesty about nine years ago, and it had a pretty big influence on me.  I've always been a fairly modest person, but her book helped me to feel good about it.  She recently wrote an article about the troubling trend of nude selfies (so called s*xting), especially amongst teenagers, and why modesty remains important.  Far from an antiquated notion, modesty is about protecting the private self.  In our increasingly public age, maintaining and protecting this space is so important, and we have to teach ourselves and our children how to resist the allure of living everything out loud.

Yale has digitized a mass of photographs from 1938-1945, organized by county, and the database is fascinating!  Click the county on an interactive map, and it takes you to all the photos stored for that county in the time period.  

Amazon customer support gets creative with a disgruntled customer.  I'm ambivalent about amazon these days, after the whole Hachette debaucle, but I will say about this particular exchange, well done!

Black and white photos of 1950s/1960s Hong Kong.

Since finishing Cheap and reading Peter King's book, I've been thinking hard about what it means to my modus operandi, and while I don't yet have a global approach to the issues raised in both books, I have been thinking more about my shopping habits, my basic consumerist mindset, and how to change that to something pre-modern.  I don't have any coherent answers yet, but I found Sarai's article on having restraint with fabric shopping helpful.

And in a related article: Design Sponge talks about cultivating craftsmanship and making mindful purchases.  This is basically what Cheap is getting at, in the end, but it is hard to do on a large scale, given how the global economy works and the relative price of wages to quality goods.

Shana of The Mom Edit (formerly Ain't No Mom Jeans) shares a reader letter that is wonderful.  The letter is about how sartorial sense is shaped by where you come from, and why it's hard to leave who you are behind.

Rod Dreher continues his discussion of the Benedict Option, and what it is (and isn't).

I read a lot of germ theory history during graduate school, and I remain fascinated by medical history in general.  A new study turns the current thinking about the progression of disease in the New World on its ear.

The problem of pain.

World War I in color.

Evidence continues to pile in that people read differently on e-readers.  I got a Kindle for Christmas last year, after much debate, and actually, I don't really like reading on it that much.  I still prefer a physical book, and the highlights from other readers in the Kindle versions *really* annoy me.  I did read some light things on the Kindle, and that was the primary purpose of it for me, but I can't do serious reading on it, and I dislike it for fiction reading that I want to attend closely to.

I don't even know how to caption this one, but these photos are fascinating.

I've noticed in the last few years that American culture lately puts a lot of value on artists, entertainers, creative types, etc., and I've wondered about whether this value was misplaced.  It certainly puts a lot of pressure on non-creative people to be so.  I consider myself a fairly creative person, at least in the sense that I like to make things, but I find the way that creativity is currently valued very frustrating.  When every second show on television is a campy reality show, and all the world is a Facebook stage or a Pinterest pin, it is hard to find private space, to create for the sake of it, to enjoy natural beauty.  I find that Pinterest really exacerbates this for me, which is why I rarely go on the site.  It just makes me unhappy. As it happens, modern notions of creativity as a force to be unleashed within the self are very recent, and not only was creativity not valued in earlier times, it was not even understood to come from within.  Joshua Rothman explains.  From the article:

“Every culture elects some central virtues, and creativity is one of ours. In fact, right now, we’re living through a creativity boom. Few qualities are more sought after, few skills more envied. Everyone wants to be more creative—how else, we think, can we become fully realized people?...This watchful, inner kind of creativity is not about making things but about experiencing life in a creative way; it’s a way of asserting your own presence amidst the much larger world of nature, and of finding significance in that wider world. By contrast, our current sense of creativity is almost entirely bound up with the making of stuff. If you have a creative imagination but don’t make anything, we regard that as a problem—we say that you’re "blocked.""

and more:

CREDIT

"It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age. We live in a consumer society premised on the idea of self-expression through novelty. We believe that we can find ourselves through the acquisition of new things. Perhaps inevitably, we have reconceived creativity as a kind of meta-consumption: a method of working your way toward the other side of the consumer-producer equation, of swimming, salmon-like, back to the origin of the workflow."

Read the rest.



Amazing night photography.



And more (different photographer and technique)

Long time readers of the blog will know that I lived in Russia for a time about 12 years ago (in addition to a student semester there in college), and that experience was quite formative for me.  I still miss living in Russia, and the arrival of fall always makes me miss it more for some reason.  I keep up with Russian news and to a lesser extent, Russian politics.  I want to revisit my Russian language learning at some point.  So it goes without saying that this article about the rising mortality rates in Russia since 1992 piqued my interest.  It turns out that the larger picture is one deeply rooted in the history of the Soviet Union, one that as a Soviet historian, I find very interesting.

Check out Paul Roden and Valerie Lueth's amazing woodcut.