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pursuit of perishable things | brooke bryan

• story

• 25.Feb
• On the stories April and Frank Wheeler told themselves

• In “Revolutionary Road,” April and Frank Wheeler are a young married couple driven by ideas. The ideas they hold are of essence and forms, conceptions of things and states and realities that—for them—hold truth, greatness, and validity inherently within them. This essentialist thinking permeates the entire novel, as the couple desperately tries to avoid the [...]

• 08.Jun
• digital storytelling-for-sale

• Being a bit of a techie and a humanist who has a thing for folklore and narrative in all its various guises, I am connected to a bunch of “digital storytelling” folks on Twitter. In fact, they started to find me just after the moment all the transcription services found me…
  Anyways, I have been pondering [...]

• things

• 25.Feb
• Our want of stuff is fundamental. But complicated.

• One could argue that things have been more important than people since very early in human history.
  Women have been traded like cattle, gifts and dowry have preceded humanistic concerns, and man has, despite what we would like to think of ourselves, a certain sort of innate brutality when it comes to our actions against [...]

• 02.Jul
• Wall-E, Pixar, and Hannah Arendt

• I saw Wall-E with my family of five on Saturday, opening day, and was somewhat taken aback. I actually found it only remotely enjoyable (in that escapist, pop-corn crunching kind of way) because of the gravity - and the overt nature - of the message. In fact, I had my forehead in my hands and [...]

• home

• 26.May
• Domesticity and Progress: The Vacuum Cleaner Theory and other Thoughts

• “More Work for Mother” by Ruth Schwartz Cowan is, essentially, a history of the technology of the home. The author’s hypothesis is that the home was only partially industrialized in the Twentieth Century, and that the failings of technology to truly revolutionize the home environment (or, more importantly, the work processes required to sustain it) [...]

• 05.May
• Domesticity and Home Part II

• McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge.” Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
  I was very excited and somewhat saddened to find this book. Excited, because it seems to be in the vein of thought that I am searching for; and saddened because, original contribution being a thing [...]

• work

• 24.Feb
• On capturing the full scope of an evanescent vapor. With an audio recorder.

• The other morning my daughter, who is nine (and is biologically and by choice a night owl) was having her typical trouble getting up and ready for school. She insisted on clinging to me in the name of being cold, to which I said — “Get up! Get dressed! Dressing is a warming!”
  She didn’t miss [...]

• 10.Jan
• A Poem for Pantagruel

• Institutions crumble
  under the big foot of man
  But when he sits; rests, too long
  he builds them tall by hand

• past

• 04.Feb
• An ancient bouquet

• The last workbook of Greek and Roman Culture asked us to write an essay on some of the most influential ideologies that we had encountered while journeying through ancient Greece and into the Roman Empire. We were asked to “pluck a bouquet” of insights that we found applicable today.
  I usually have a zero tolerance policy [...]

• 22.Jul
• An Ancient Bouquet

• The last workbook of Greek and Roman Culture asked us to write an essay on some of the most influential ideologies that we had encountered while journeying through ancient Greece and into the Roman Empire. We were asked to “pluck a bouquet” of insights that we found applicable today.
  I usually have a zero tolerance policy [...]

• place

• 24.Feb
• Place makes “a people”

• The introduction to the book “Community and the Politics of Place” begins with a discussion of the similarities and differences between the Montana constitution and the US Constitution. The author sets up the idea that place (that is, the rolling plains and majestic mountains mentioned in the document) had much to do with how and [...]

• 29.Oct
• Mountain Top Mining

• This video brings me so many mixed feelings: the quality of the narrative journalism is top notch, and this gets me engaged and interested in a… crafty-meta-how-does-this-tick kind of way. But then the reality of the message and the scale of the truth hit me, where it hurts. This is a must watch not only [...]

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