by their first name. You took whatever classes you felt ready for, with whoever else was there, from 12 to 18. There was lots of hands-on craft. It was the kind of place where students had a smoking room (!), and put on their own production of “Ubu Roi.” It literally saved my life.
Looks like it’s Sunday, and that means it’s time for another #Lifehouse thread. I’m super-mindful that I’ve been talking about the book Quite A Lot lately, so I’m thinking of dialing back on the frequency of these posts a tad – you’ll let me know if that sounds right. But for today, let’s talk about one of my favorite aspects of the book, which is the chance it finally afforded me to affirm in my writing an intensely material, hands-on flavor of politics that descends from the DIY/DIT 1960s.
Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that I was kind of a fuckup at the age of 13, dealing with life issues that included not having a stable place to stay and also what I’d pretty clearly now characterize as ADHD. I was getting bullied in school – not awfully, but enough to make it an unpleasant place to be – and had started to cut classes. Up to then an ostensibly “gifted” student, I landed a failing report card in my first semester of eighth grade, and one day just refused to go back.
The school district insisted I see a psychiatrist, who wasn’t great, but to his credit told my parents, “You should trust him, he really isn’t going back there. You need to find an alternative.” Well, conventional private schools were out of the question. There were Friends schools around – two of them, excellent – but even putting expense aside I just bounced off their social universe. My parents were getting fairly desperate, when somehow they heard of a place that seemed to offer some hope.
It was a failing, hippie-era experiment in egalitarian education called the Miquon Upper School, which makes it sound a lot grander than it was. It was in a ramshackle house in Chestnut Hill, an hour away across town – I had to take two commuter trains to get there in the morning, and two to get back, which was its own kind of education. And it didn’t have grades in either sense, i.e. neither year-based distinctions of curriculum, or letter-based evaluations of performance. You called teachers
I had never heard of the Noahopinion blog until a friend sent me a link to it the other day, specifically to a post about this book, “Emergent Tokyo.” Noahpinion characterized it, glowingly, as an empirical defense of market YIMBYism, and it very nearly put me off ordering the book despite its being highly relevant to my interests. That guy’s dumber than a bag of rocks! This book is nothing of the sort! It’s wonderful!
@tokyo_0 Funny you should mention TT. I chose not to cover the movement, out of concern for its politics and demographics primarily, but also because I couldn’t really turn up much in the way of concrete, practical, real-world results I could point people at.
I kinda buried the lede yesterday: my next book “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World On Fire” is finally available for pre-order from Verso! It’s about how we organize ourselves as communities to survive the climate-systems collapse unfolding all around us, drawing on lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, Occupy Sandy and the Crisis-era Greek solidarity clinics straight through to municipalism in Spain and democratic confederalism in Rojava! https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse
So let’s talk about prosopagnosia, or “faceblindness.” I have it! What this means is that I could well have known you for twenty years, but if I see you outside of the context in which I usually encounter you, or even if you change your hairstyle (!), I may simply not recognize you the next time we cross paths. It’s mortifying! I have literally introduced myself to people I’ve worked alongside for years – who are, entirely understandably, generally fairly miffed that I’ve treated them so poorly.
This has real social consequences, as I’m sure you can imagine. People who literally feel unseen are unlikely to feel super-warmly about someone so seemingly self-involved as to forget the people they meet. So *finally*, after decades of suffering through this, I’ve figured out a modest workaround, and I really recommend doing something like this if you, too, suffer from any degree of faceblindness. It’s a little embarrassing, but it seems to circumvent that larger, later mortification:
Whenever I meet someone new that I like – which is, y’know, often, because y’all can be some charming motherfuckers – I confess my faceblindness immediately and up front. I say something like, “Hey, if I run into you on the bus or around the neighborhood, and I seem to be giving you the cut direct, I swear I’m not! Please forgive me, and, if you will, indulge me by reminding me of your name and where we met.” I cannot tell you how much grief this has prevented. https://uncommon-courtesy.com/2014/10/01/the-cut-direct-the-fiercest-etiquette-punishment/
It really is that simple. I get that doing this little song-and-dance at the very beginning of a friendship may seem a little extra, a little performative even, but I think it’s worth it if it prevents me from hurting someone’s feelings for no better reason than a few glitchy connections in my fusiform gyrus. I wish I had started doing this *years* ago, but if you’re in the same boat, hopefully you can benefit from my experience before suffering with things for much longer? 👊
And finally, on reflection, I think my faceblindness is so distressing to me precisely because courtesy, decency, politeness and the respect bound up in what we mean when we say we “see” people are so important to me. They’re some of the few things standing between us and the abyss, fr fr, they’re hanging by a thread, and ideally I want to be enacting them in all my interactions with everyone who isn’t a complete shitbird.
In this regard, something clicked for me when, of all things, I first heard Hannibal Lecter describe Clarice Starling as “courteous and receptive to courtesy.” Lecter’s own elaborate courtesy did not, of course, interfere with him being a monster of the bloodiest sort, and that’s a principle we can attend to more generally and with great profit. But the idea that the awful grief so many of us carry all the time might be buffered, even a little, by something that amounts to a theater of kindness?
@cfiesler@edsu@ldodds@luis_in_brief See, I don’t understand what that means. And I’m someone who tried to contribute locational information for 12,000 Chicago bus stops to the project, unsuccessfully.
@edsu@luis_in_brief@cfiesler Yes, I want to be clear that @ldodds was clearly responding in optimism and good faith! The fact that I don’t, personally, think OSM is the greatest model only speaks to the very great difficulty technical initiatives face in being anything like invitational as I’ve tried to define it here.
Endurance athlete, heavy-music fan, compulsive greeter of cats. My next book is “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World on Fire,” coming from Verso mid-'24. #syndicateofinitiative