My second text study was an essay written by Wendell Berry in 1988 titled “The Work of Local Culture.” In it, he talks about really close communities of the sort that are very rare these days, because people don’t have the same roots to their place and knowledge of local culture, and as a result, young people move away from their hometowns and never go back.
The first thing that popped out at me was the high value Berry placed on good old-fashioned neighborliness. A good local community depends on people knowing and trusting one another, supporting and helping each other out, and is shaped from the inside, not by anything external. To illustrate the kind of close local community he was talking about, Berry told of a group of old neighborhood fogeys who would sit around in a field in Kentucky and just talk, and tell stories, even stories they’d all heard before. The kids would hear these stories, and in that way, local memory, and local culture, would live on. I think this is an important chunk of the passing down of knowledge thing I was talking about last week. These people didn’t have any money, but that didn’t matter to them. They had each other to support and help each other out, and they created their own entertainment. This reminds of Charles saying in my interview with him that real wealth has nothing to do with money, real wealth is having true friends.
Berry expresses his sadness and frustration that everybody is always moving away from their hometowns and families to big cities to get educated and be the biggest, most glorious and rich thing they can be. Everyone tries to move “up” as if it’s the only good direction to go, leaving big holes in the small but important spots. Those sort of insignificant things people do are often actually extremely significant in their obscurity, and a good local culture with people that are familiar with each other and the things they do, will appreciate those little things. While he was talking about education, he also showed a lot of disdain for “experts,” in this specific case, “educators.” He complains about how people are no longer educated to be effective members of their community, only to leave home and make tons of money. Before this was the prevalent attitude, education was centered more around the home as well, which the “experts” are now saying they’ve figured out that home is an important place to learn, and families should be involved in their children’s education. This is annoying because that’s the way it was done for years and years, before it was all ruined. They didn’t tell us anything new, they only hijacked old local culture and made it external, rather than the internally shaped thing it was before. I definitely feel the same annoyance for expertise as well. I’d rather look around me to the body of local knowledge that’s been cultivated forever by a community, than look up to some distant expert, who might not even be helpful. I think my favorite sentence from the whole thing is this: “the only true and effective ‘operator’s manual for spaceship earth’ is not a book any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.” Local culture is not only something I want for myself, but for the entire world, too. It breaks my heart when I hear about all those hundreds of thousands of old and diverse cultures disappearing as westernization and homogeneity creeps over them. I don’t even care if I never hear a thing about these cultures, I just want them to exist.
The hardest question the text raised for me was about Home. Home is something I’ve always known is important to me, but I’ve never teased out what it really means as far as my beliefs go. Having my own place to be comfortable and spend time in is really important to me, and having someplace you can always go back to. Berry talks about how sad it is that young people leave their hometowns and their parents and never return, and it made me think about whether I’m going to stick around Seattle forever. I definitely want to go places and travel, and I’ve dreamed of doing so for as long as I can remember, but I never could imagine living permanently in anyplace other than the Northwest. I’ve spent my entire life here, and most of my family is either in Seattle or Portland.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Interview 2: Charles Hadrann
Charles Hadrann is the very friendly, very talkative, and very opinionated owner of Wright Bros. Cycles works in Fremont, where I spent a lot of time over the summer. I wanted to interview Charles because his generosity and sense of humor, among other things, endear him to me, and also because he always seemed to me to be annoyed by crappy stuff, like I am (in the shop, he would sometimes call me over to a bike he’d be working on to make an example of it: “Look at this! It’s a piece of shit! A Sears bike! Factory made crap! It’s doesn’t deserve to be called a bike, it’s a bicycle shaped object!”). He also often said that patience was the most important tool in the shop, which always stuck with me.
I met Charles at 10:00 on a Friday morning at a coffee shop to do the interview. I started off by explaining what the whole interview thing was supposed to be about, and without my even asking a real question, he launched into his worldview and all I had to do was absorb what he said as he talked for a straight half hour. The very first thing he said was about keeping a positive outlook. What good will bitching and grumbling about something really do for you, anyway, he said. Having a problem solving approach to things instead is important to him, because bad things are going to happen no matter what, things that aren’t in your control, so what’s the use in griping? What can you do to make the situation better for yourself? How can you fix this thing that’s broken? Where’s the silver lining?
Something else Charles placed a lot of importance on is learning and knowledge. Particularly the passing on of it: connecting to people by teaching, mentoring, sharing skills, etc—he thinks that people shouldn’t keep it all to themselves, because then it’s as if it’s not even there at all. I can really jive on that, especially because those kinds of personal connections are important to me, and perhaps a bit because of the “passing down knowledge and skills” phrase. I don’t know what it is about it that draws me in so much, maybe it’s that it somehow implies tradition, which I find comforting. Doing things the same way they’ve been done forever, the way people have taught them to other people, provides roots to the past, which is important to me. I know that sounds tacky, but there ya go.
As much as I embrace learning and knowledge that way, it’s also something I struggle a little bit with. I firmly believe that people don’t need to know everything about everything, and am comfortable with common sense knowledge that people gain from experience of the world and people around them, and that isn’t necessarily always backed up by science. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake and progress for progress’s sake aren’t good things to go after all the time, because then it gets us too much power and we just start trying to fix what’s not broken, and do things just because we can. This really freaks me out, and might explain part of my resistance to fancy new science and technology.
Anyways, back to Charles. He talked about how looking at and taking things in baby steps is important. A big project, for example, should be broken down into lots of little projects, and that way it’s not so daunting. To illustrate this, he used a bunch of marble cubes as a metaphor. “Take a cube, and carve and wear it down until it’s a perfect sphere. Then throw it over your shoulder and move on to the next one.” Small habits also seem to be important to him. When he was talking about learning, he said he tries to make sure he learns one new thing a day. Reading something everyday, something he really wants to read, not like the newspaper or things like that, is also something he makes a habit of. I can connect this to my appreciation of simple pleasures. Every once and a while something of grand proportions is always good, but really, what makes me smile are the little things. A good cup of cocoa, the satisfaction of doing laundry, a nice pen, a really good song or piece of art…these kinds of small things provide sort of an underlying foundation of satisfaction and happiness that everything else rests on.
Two words that Charles came back to several times were patience and perseverance. When I asked him about his thoughts on quality, he looked at the question from the perspective of fixing something and doing a quality job. “Do a good job the first time,” he said, “or you’ll have to take more time to fix it the next time.” This often means taking time and having patience with it. And if you get frustrated with it, take a break, come back to it and keep trying. Patience is something that’s really important to me to have, and I like to think that I have it when it counts, even though I can be impulsive at times. Perseverance I’m not as sure about, I haven’t really thought about it much. If there’s something I want or a goal that I have, I think that I’m usually able to go for it and keep at it until I get what I want, but I also know about myself that I’ll give something up pretty fast, or just flat out refuse to do it, if I think I’m going to be bad at it. I like to be good at whatever I do, so if something doesn’t come naturally to me, I tend to be stubborn about not doing it for the sake of my large and fragile ego, even if I know it’ll be a rip-roarin’ good time.
Given how much I like and respect Charles, I took pretty much all of what he said during the interview to heart. He didn’t so much change my beliefs as much as reinforce them, but he definitely gave me a few new things to think about, most importantly perseverance, and caused me to mull over things that have been floating around my head for a while, like the knowledge and learning thing.
I met Charles at 10:00 on a Friday morning at a coffee shop to do the interview. I started off by explaining what the whole interview thing was supposed to be about, and without my even asking a real question, he launched into his worldview and all I had to do was absorb what he said as he talked for a straight half hour. The very first thing he said was about keeping a positive outlook. What good will bitching and grumbling about something really do for you, anyway, he said. Having a problem solving approach to things instead is important to him, because bad things are going to happen no matter what, things that aren’t in your control, so what’s the use in griping? What can you do to make the situation better for yourself? How can you fix this thing that’s broken? Where’s the silver lining?
Something else Charles placed a lot of importance on is learning and knowledge. Particularly the passing on of it: connecting to people by teaching, mentoring, sharing skills, etc—he thinks that people shouldn’t keep it all to themselves, because then it’s as if it’s not even there at all. I can really jive on that, especially because those kinds of personal connections are important to me, and perhaps a bit because of the “passing down knowledge and skills” phrase. I don’t know what it is about it that draws me in so much, maybe it’s that it somehow implies tradition, which I find comforting. Doing things the same way they’ve been done forever, the way people have taught them to other people, provides roots to the past, which is important to me. I know that sounds tacky, but there ya go.
As much as I embrace learning and knowledge that way, it’s also something I struggle a little bit with. I firmly believe that people don’t need to know everything about everything, and am comfortable with common sense knowledge that people gain from experience of the world and people around them, and that isn’t necessarily always backed up by science. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake and progress for progress’s sake aren’t good things to go after all the time, because then it gets us too much power and we just start trying to fix what’s not broken, and do things just because we can. This really freaks me out, and might explain part of my resistance to fancy new science and technology.
Anyways, back to Charles. He talked about how looking at and taking things in baby steps is important. A big project, for example, should be broken down into lots of little projects, and that way it’s not so daunting. To illustrate this, he used a bunch of marble cubes as a metaphor. “Take a cube, and carve and wear it down until it’s a perfect sphere. Then throw it over your shoulder and move on to the next one.” Small habits also seem to be important to him. When he was talking about learning, he said he tries to make sure he learns one new thing a day. Reading something everyday, something he really wants to read, not like the newspaper or things like that, is also something he makes a habit of. I can connect this to my appreciation of simple pleasures. Every once and a while something of grand proportions is always good, but really, what makes me smile are the little things. A good cup of cocoa, the satisfaction of doing laundry, a nice pen, a really good song or piece of art…these kinds of small things provide sort of an underlying foundation of satisfaction and happiness that everything else rests on.
Two words that Charles came back to several times were patience and perseverance. When I asked him about his thoughts on quality, he looked at the question from the perspective of fixing something and doing a quality job. “Do a good job the first time,” he said, “or you’ll have to take more time to fix it the next time.” This often means taking time and having patience with it. And if you get frustrated with it, take a break, come back to it and keep trying. Patience is something that’s really important to me to have, and I like to think that I have it when it counts, even though I can be impulsive at times. Perseverance I’m not as sure about, I haven’t really thought about it much. If there’s something I want or a goal that I have, I think that I’m usually able to go for it and keep at it until I get what I want, but I also know about myself that I’ll give something up pretty fast, or just flat out refuse to do it, if I think I’m going to be bad at it. I like to be good at whatever I do, so if something doesn’t come naturally to me, I tend to be stubborn about not doing it for the sake of my large and fragile ego, even if I know it’ll be a rip-roarin’ good time.
Given how much I like and respect Charles, I took pretty much all of what he said during the interview to heart. He didn’t so much change my beliefs as much as reinforce them, but he definitely gave me a few new things to think about, most importantly perseverance, and caused me to mull over things that have been floating around my head for a while, like the knowledge and learning thing.
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