My first month at Catskill Native Nursery is done now. What wonderful work – yesterday I was planting dogwoods in Woodstock. The week before I was ripping up barberry in Eldred. These good deeds will not be unremembered in the economy of things.
Good for the Soul.
02-Jul-10The Beginning of the Garden.
02-Jul-10
Still quite the “work in progress.” One bed designed, three more to go.
In Bloom.
25-Jun-10
Rhododendron Maximum, in the Catskills.
One of the impressive things about modern ugliness and inefficiency is that it has always gotten the approval of committees specifically designed to preserve the aesthetics and functionality of neighborhoods. But since committee-humanity is unable to make a subjective judgement – saying, “This plan is ugly and it should not be built” seems insufficiently objective – committee-men rely on a suite of conditions which, if met, mean that the plan gets approved. One of them is sufficient parking. Frequently when a small site is redeveloped, providing parking means paving the whole property, except for maybe some gas-station islands of red mulch with Home Depot shrubs; you find this kind of development all around zoning-conscious fancy towns like Chapel Hill or Charlottesville or anyplace on Long Island. And for large developments, “minimum parking requirements” mean massive lots – so that if you park at the most distant point in the lot, that Best Buy is a distant line on the horizon. Both options are irremediably ugly, but come with approval of the zoning committee. You can fined for letting your grass follow its natural course by producing seed (providing bird food, animal habitat), because that’s ugly, but seas of black asphalt are fine, as long as the islands which bound the space are mulched or mowed.
A nice thread on this topic from Tom Salmon. He asks why these minimum parking requirements still exist, considering that they make developments which strive for urban density – which anyone who knows anything about zoning now thinks should be a goal of urban planning – almost impossible. I think it’s simply that all the Florida-culture people – the old folks whose constellation of values makes it plausible for them to drive an Oldsmobile or Cadillac – are willing to call their politicians every day to complain about lack of parking. My mother’s boyfriend – who, yes, has a house in Florida – complains about the parking in Queens every day. And he is, so to speak, old enough to vote (i.e. not just over 18 but over 70). “It’s ridiculous,” he says. “They gotta make more parking.” The original post on this thread by Tom Vanderbilt noted that this kind of thinking has created places like Hartford – a city which he claims is one-third parking spaces.
Again, what amazes me is that that kind of madness was created with a zoning committee in place. They didn’t start with the political principle, “Let’s zone Hartford 10% manufacturing, 10% government space, 25% residential, 22% commercial, and 33% parking.” They just came up with usage formulas and required new developments to provide parking for the numbers of people who would use the property. Because otherwise people would complain about there not being enough parking and would do the Yogi Berra thing – no one would go to Hartford because it’s too crowded.
I know that some people think that the only way we can arrive at this kind of Orwellian oxymoron – ugliness is beauty, density is emptiness, etc. – is through deliberate manipulation – i.e., a conspiracy. I don’t think these contradictions require a conspiracy. I think they’re the natural fruit of the universe. Work a compost pile and you’ll see – waste is fertility, death is life, etc. But there’s no need to get overly philosophical about this one. Just repeal these minimum parking requirement zoning laws.
Society Without the Father.
21-Jun-10An anecdote from Richard Rohr which caught my eye:
When I was giving priests’ retreats in Peru, a sister working in the main prison in Lima told me a story I have never forgotten. She said as Mother’s Day was approaching the prisoners kept asking for Mother’s Day cards. She brought card after card so they could write to Madre. As Father’s Day approached she decided to be better prepared. She bought an entire case of Father’s Day cards, so she could give them to the prisoners when they asked. She told me that case is still sitting in her office because no one asked for a Father’s Day card. She couldn’t give them away!
My friend looked at me with tears in her eyes because she understood the source of so much suffering. She realized so many of the men were in prison because they never had a good father or a father at all. Sometimes I think the “father wound” might be the most common wound on this earth.
I wonder if the jails and prisons of the world would not be much emptier if young boys had fathers to bless them, encourage them, and initiate them into manhood.
For the Feast of John the Baptist: this extremely good essay by Wendell Berry; highly recommended. Proof – as if it were needed – that the Magisterium of the Church resides not in the priesthood – which is almost always wrong – but in the Prophets. As it was, is now, and ever shall be.
But if we are to maintain any sense or coherence or meaning in our lives, we cannot tolerate the present utter disconnection between religion and economy. By “economy” I do not mean “economics,” which is the study of money-making, but rather the ways of human housekeeping, the ways by which the human household is situated and maintained within the household of Nature. To be uninterested in economy is to be uninterested in the practice of religion; it is to be uninterested in culture and in character. Probably the most urgent question now faced by people who would adhere to the Bible is this: What sort of economy would be responsible to the holiness of life? What, for Christians, would be the economy, the practices and the restraints, of “right livelihood”? I do not believe that organized Christianity now has any idea. I think its idea of a Christian economy is no more or less than the industrial economy–which is an economy firmly founded upon the seven deadly sins and the breaking of all ten of the Ten Commandments. Obviously, if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable iniquities, then Christians, regardless of their organizations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy–which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life.
For the Latinists.
18-Jun-10A Latin job for 2010-11 has opened at Regis in New York City – a program which should be (should not is) the best Latin program in any American high school. The school’s history has been shaped by the formative deed which started it – a large, anonymous gift which paid all the school’s expenses for 75 years, and remains at the back of the mind of all the sensitive students who pass through the building, as an ostensive definition of the proper use of wealth. Unfortunately, no one, Regian or otherwise, has ever replicated that gift – Regis remains the only free private high school in the country.
The school has a legitimate idealistic and religious component, and Latin does not feel out of place there, though it is a Jesuit school, and the Jesuits (like most of the rest of the Catholic Church) have been rending their own intellectual entrails for decades now. An interesting opportunity for someone who wants to make a splash with Latin.
Catskill Native Nursery.
16-Jun-10Yesterday was my first day of paid physical labor ever, I think. I took a job with Catskill Native Nursery. “Gardening For a Better Environment.” Landscape restoration, native plant propagation, gardening within nature’s parameters. And for me, using my body and working outdoors. A good beginning. Someone recently asked me if I’d ever work for a school again – there’s a Latin job at Regis that prompted a discussion of teaching – and my answer was, “If I could work as a landscaper.”
Edward Glaeser, via Andrew Sullivan:
Consider the purely hypothetical case of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The traditional libertarian would argue that regulation is unnecessary because the tort system will hold the driller liable for any damage. But what if the leak is so vast that the driller doesn’t have the resources to pay? The libertarian would respond that the driller should have been forced to post a bond or pay for sufficient insurance to cover any conceivable spill. Perhaps, but then the government needs to regulate the insurance contract and the resources of the insurer.
Libertarianism cannot handle the imbalance of modern life: that man’s powers of destruction now vastly outweigh his capacity to make restitution.
From Dostoevsky.
25-Jun-10The conclusions of one of the revolutionaries in Demons: