In an old post “My Blog, My Outboard Brain”, Cory Doctorow makes a point that rings very true to me: blogging is a way to systematize information flows, and reflect on what you consume (for lack of better word).
“Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward.”
“Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.”
Having shielded myself with a quote from 19 years ago, I feel no remorse about writing yet another post on my current read, Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language.” (A 44-year old book, by the way).
(On that Cory Doctorow blog post, by the way — Matt Webb in his Interconnected writes about Apple’s photo scanning and our paranoia, also quoting that same post, and making a different, and a much more important point than I am. I’m no comparison to Webb’s brilliance. Just read it, it’s great.)
There was one thought in particular that was invading my brain in the past couple of days: I miss music festivals and concerts, big and small. I miss them as an outlet to my energy, to let myself go. And that’s when I got to pattern #58: Carnival.
“Just as an individual person dreams fantastic happenings to release the inner forces which cannot be encompassed by ordinary events, so too a city needs its dreams.
Under normal circumstances, in today’s world the entertainments which are available are either healthy and harmless—going to the movies, watching TV, cycling, playing tennis, taking helicopter rides, going for walks, watching football—or downright sick and socially destructive—shooting heroin, driving recklessly, group violence.
But man has a great need for mad, subconscious processes to come into play, without unleashing them to such an extent that they become socially destructive. There is, in short, a need for socially sanctioned activities which are the social, outward equivalents of dreaming.
In primitive societies this kind of process was provided by the rites, witch doctors, shamans. In Western civilization during the last three or four hundred years, the closest available source of this outward acknowledgment of underground life has been the circus, fairs, and carnivals. In the middle ages, the market place itself had a good deal of this kind of atmosphere. Today, on the whole, this kind of experience is gone.”
Excerpt from
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
Right now, without big celebrations, festivals, music gatherings — there is very little opportunity to cut loose. I’m all too civil all the time. I think this makes me more irritable, more like a tight spiral that is waiting for an impulse from outside to spring. Various sports activities are fun, but they are not the same as dancing wildly and mindlessly to some of your favorite music, being a part of this big moving organism of the crowd. I miss this kind of rites, of shamanism. To unleash my energy out in a positive key. Cities need carnivals!