There are several intentional communities right here in Davis. Had you stayed a bit longer during your recent visit, Stanley, you might have been ready for your friend's quiz. But as it is, you failed.
I wrote a paper about the Oneida Community in 10th grade. Sexxxy.
Let me guess, he's part of a commune that is attempting to simplify life by eschewing the use of articles.
3: I don't know what you're talking about, old bean.
No one respects intent when it belongs to some slightly-foxed novelist, but let a scruffy hippie bring it up and suddenly everyone wants to hear their kombucha stories and celebrate their victories over the local fire marshals.
Actually, VW can probably answer this, but why was so much going on in that part of NYS in the 19thC? Presumably this is well known, but not by me!
As long as your old school mates don't try you sell you term life insurance, I think you are ahead of the game.
That area of of New York, oudemia, was part of the so-called burned-over district. Which is to say, that's where Christ's fire burned brightest during the Second Great Awakening, the evangelical revivals that brought us all manner of reform movements, common schools, temperance, abolitionism, and, yes, utopian communities.
the , after movements sb a :
Also, for the Obies out there: the Second Great Awakening gave us Charles Finney.
9: Mormons are too healthy to cough, Flippanter. Learn a bit about religion before you comment, okay?
I promise not to comment any more -- history makes me chatty! -- but it occurs to me that Finney might have coined the phrase "burned-over district". My comments have an appealing narrative arc, I think. I like the cut of their jib.
11: I've driven on I-15 and am still coughing from the exhaust.
13: but then again, you're not a Mormon, are you? Try to keep up, lad.
They live in that miasma! That guy who owned the Jazz probably died of black lung. Don't hide the truth any more, VW. What do they have on you?
I was a history major there. Oh yeah, that got covered!
I had a Mormon friendquaintance in law school who, when I asked him about his spring break trip, described a tour of the Finger Lakes region, Niagra Falls and Western New York. I was all like " wow, I love that region too, great unusual choice for a relaxing vacation. . . oh, right."
I have copies of diaries from one of my ancestors during the Civil War. She went on a tour of upstate New York, Niagara Falls, and etc. and also expressed a great fondness for parlor occultism, whatever it was called. She seems to have handily evaded Mormonism, although a lot of my more recent antecedents have been/are the kind of wacky Quakers who live in communities that might well be described as Utopian were they not so frugal.
8/9: You forgot the feminists, assholes!!!1!!1!
celebrate their victories over the local fire marshals
What's the beef with fire marshals? The classmate I ran into was cheesed off about it being illegal to sell unpasteurized milk, and the FDA's regulation of their herbal business.
What's the beef with fire marshals?
They get all pissy when you built unlicensed additions/structures and do your own wiring.
the so-called burned-over district
For all these years, I'd assumed the term was more recent and had to do with the obvious decay, structure-wise.
They get all pissy when you built unlicensed additions/structures and do your own wiring thing, man.
5: suddenly everyone wants to hear their kombucha stories
Yogi Tea's Green Kombucha Tea is really so wonderful that one should seek it out. One does, in fact. Just saying.
I thought the deal with kombucha was that you started with tea and kombuchized it yourself. It's crafty!
Can one combine Sambuca and kombucha? Flaming tea sounds pretty rad.
Although it's anise, come to think of it.
27: So Wikipedia says, I see. All I know is that there's this, which I do truly find terrific in the mornings, to the extent that I'm bummed if I'm out of it for my morning cup. After 20 or 30 minutes sipping a cup of that while musing, I'm ready to do 15 minutes of stretching before leaving for work. It's really fragrant and delicious, at least to my palate.
I read 29 as "Licorice Mingus". And because unfogged has well and truly robbed me of my sense of wonder at the absurdity unfolding around me all the time, instead of thinking, "well, that's odd and wonderful," I thought, first, "that's not a bad band name," and then, almost immediately after that, "but there are already so many different flavors of Mingus that it's probably already been done to death."
32: Yogi Tea makes a ginger flavor that is pretty good. I mean, if you're not a big slab of macho like me and need to break your fast on something other than pig iron and bile.
8: Also the Fox Sisters, as mentioned by Sifu. I presume part of this is a result of the canals and the boom and eventual bust of the economy -- it was kind of a 19th century Las Vegas, complete with floating spectacle.
8: Right, but why there in particular? We demand answers!
34: Yogi Tea seems to be excellent in general. Ginger is a stimulant, isn't it? I'm not sure I need stimulants.
Also Hudson River Bracketed.
I have cousins who spent some profitable summers dismantling Upper New York State mansions and hotels and resorts -- taking apart the tile and marble and light fixtures and even structural members so they could be resold. They each kept some good bits; Cousin Steve has a kitchen table that he knows both Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe sat on. (It was a swimming-pool edge at the time. There are pictures.)
The classmate I ran into was cheesed off about it being illegal to sell unpasteurized milk
Unusually subtle, Stanley. Good job.
The Wikipedia article on the Burned-over District does give credit to Finney for the term from his 1876 autobiography.
Did not make the connection at the time, but we once stayed in a B&B run by Seventh-Day Baptists in that part of New York (they founded Alfred University in 1836). The sect started much earlier in England but flowered in western New York during that time and were apparently a significant influence in Adventists adopting Seventh-day Sabbatarianism. They are a very small denomination today (the B&B owner had been a minister, but was now doing construction work in part due to not enough churches).
Do present-day intentional communities bear much resemblance to these?
27: The only real reason to do it that way is if you're cheap like me.
My kombucha seems to come out fine, but the "pancake" never seems to reproduce. Which is fine by me, since if the number of "pancakes" doubled each time, things would quickly get out of hand.
I had assumed that the Chautauqua movement was part of the Second Great Awakening in upstate New York, but it seems to be a few decades too late and the founders were not from the area.
Also things seem to last much longer than their alleged shelf life in my fridge (except for milk, which goes bad pretty much immediately). For example, I left a sourdough starter in there for like half a year before feeding it.
Sourdough starter is the best pet ever, unlike my stupid basil which dies within days of arriving. What do you mean I have to water it more than every other week?! :'(
One issue I hadn't thought about with small-scale farming is what to do with the two or three egg-laying chickens come winter. Apparently the choices are (a) heat their enclosure or (b) eat them.
And given the expense and hassle oF option A, apparently B is the winner quite frequently.
46: I know there's a pun in there somewhere (or at least I was convinced the first sentence was a setup when I read it).
Milk seems to spoil more quickly now than when I was a child (and, to be fair, paid little attention to the lifespan of milk, except when it soured). I blame the Georges Bush jazz music feminism the death of publishing society.
Silly Benquo. Organisms that rely on the whole photosynthesis thing do need sunlight and water. It's the way they are. The basil will reward you for realizing what it needs!
48: I blame my slowing reaction time.
"But I just put it in!"
"No, it's been three months."
49: I tried watering once, but that didn't work.
44 - Chautauqua is really a wonderful, if insanely old-fashioned and earnest institution. (Take a vacation to listen to lectures, many of them about religion! Plus, boating.). I had a chance to go with my parents last year but couldn't.
49: If only it would remind me. My friends who own cats don't have this problem.
53: Some good friends of ours went every year with their kids.
55: That's the perfect way to be sure your kids are interested in nothing but monster trucks or something.
Take a vacation to listen to lectures, many of them about religion! Plus, boating.
I miss New England a lot sometimes.
the Second Great Awakening gave us Charles Finney
HOW DARE YOU LEAVE OUT THE MIDDLE NAME
At the bookstore where I bought nothing last Sunday, there were multiple copies of Shopkeeper's Millenium on the 50¢ rack.
||
One of my friends recently started a tenure track job and bought a house, and it seems to have changed him. Now he refers to grad students as "youngsters," and generally acts like a grand old man. It's disconcerting.
|>
60: Come to his house with 20 friends, a keg, and 10 pizzas.
My aunt and uncle go to Chautauqua regularly.
John Roebling (Brooklyn Bridge) came over to the US with an interesting technological utopian, John Adolphus Etzler who attempted and failed to found intentional communities based on his ideas and inventions in the Midwest and Venezuela (he and Roebling split up when they got to the US).
Fellow-men! I promise to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor, and without pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, and in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish, without labor, in one year, more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years; may level mountains, sink valleys, create lakes, drain lakes and swamps, and intersect the land everywhere with beautiful canals, and roads for transporting heavy loads of many thousand tons, and for traveling one thousand miles in twenty-four hours; may cover the ocean with floating islands movable in any desired direction with immense power and celerity, in perfect security, and with all comforts and luxuries, bearing gardens and palaces, with thousands of families, and provided with rivulets of sweet water; may explore the interior of the globe, and travel from pole to pole in a fortnight; provide himself with means, unheard of yet, for increasing his knowledge of the world, and so his intelligence; lead a life of continual happiness, of enjoyments yet unknown; free himself from almost all the evils that afflict mankind, except death, and even put death far beyond the common period of human life, and finally render it less afflicting. Mankind may thus live in and enjoy a new world, far superior to the present, and raise themselves far higher in the scale of being.
Before infomercials, I suppose he needed something like that to pay the bills.
Depressing how much of that is true & we're still not always happy.
Other wierd: why do US utopias turn into kitchen brands? Amana, Oneida, sort of Shaker.
why do US utopias turn into kitchen brands?
A surprising number of them seem to have focused their communal labor on making furniture.
63: without labor
That's silly.
Look, modern-day intentional communities are under no illusion that there will be no labor involved. Good grief.
65.1: Emerson took note of Etzler and worried a rather legitimate worry* (Thoreau also wrote a lengthy critical essay ("Paradise (to be) Regained" reviewing Etzler's book).
Mr. Etzler's inventions, as described in the Phalanx, promise to cultivate twenty thousand acres with the aid of four men only and cheap machinery. Thus the laborers are threatened with starvation if they do not organize themselves into corporations, so that machinery may labor for instead of working against them.
why do US utopias turn into kitchen brands?
Germany must get its kitchen brands from people who slept with or made guns for Nazis. Kind of makes me wonder if Le Creuset isn't some French cult.
67.2: Good grief.
So you are saying this dude's utopian vision does not accurately reflect the viewpoint of members of intentional communities a century and a half later?
Thanks for clearing that up.
I'm interested in Stanley's friend's intentional community, is what I'm saying.
And one last intentional community. Fourierism finds a utopian socialist home (briefly) in Texas. Dallas to be precise. Bob's a hundred and fifty years too late.
Yeah, it didn't last long at all. Fourierism transformed fast.
I can do, in a year, without gaining a callus, more than my grcat-great-great-greats could do in thousands. Dynamite, backhoes, some scary xenobiotics.
What's the frequency, Joseph?
Careful! He's a Fourierist!
So: is it just me? or did NY state used to be (what with the tent revivals and the utopian communes and such) just a whole lot more interesting than it is today?
I guess you could argue that Joyce Carol Oates is continuing a tradition of quirky-to-borderline-crazy (almost Gothic, and almost as nutty as those crazy southerners) NY in her numerous novels set in central and upstate New York? Except that (or perhaps I should say because), I dunno, and maybe it's just me, I find her work a bit ... off-putting? creepy? unsavory? That widow's memoir she published a while ago was truly weird in its neglect of the, one might have thought somewhat salient, detail of her remarriage (while she was mourning, and while she was writing her account of that mourning, that is). Yes, I judge, so that you won't have to...
I can do, in a year, without gaining a callus, more than my grcat-great-great-greats could do in thousands.
Maybe so, but can you live for thousands of years?
Fucking kombucha, have people lost their minds? Come on, just look at that thing.
80: It's a welcome break from yogurt, and slightly less socially unacceptable than drinking raw vinegar.
Also a nice complex beverage to offer non-alcoholic friends.
79: With modern cloning technology he can live for thousands simultaneously.
||
Holy shit, aftershock. That was eerie. I'm now not glad I missed the one yesterday by driving (apparently, right through the epicenter, of all places).
|>
Wait, does that mean I should have noticed something just now?
85: It was a long, slow rumble. Sounded like a train, which I realized was impossible in my current location. And the cats freaked.
86: They do feel like trains, don't they? (At least, the ones I've been through!) Stay safe, Stanley! Listen to Thundersnow about what to do!
Huh. I heard something exactly like that as I went up the stairs from the basement about when you posted your comment. That must have been it.
The stairs here are noisy, and the neighborhood is quiet - a truck could have made that sound (possible where I am).
Yeah, the sound bothered me more than the shaking.
I should go to bed.
80: It's a welcome break from yogurt, and slightly less socially unacceptable than drinking raw vinegar.
Dilute pineapple vinegar is really refreshing.
How diluted?
You know, diluted enough.
92: When I was drinking raw cider vinegar, it was about a tablespoon per 8 ounce cup of water.
I don't know how strong pineapple vinegar usually is.
The only reason I stopped was that my bottle ran out and I forgot to buy a new one.
98:
1) Because it is tasty and refreshing.
2) In the hopes that it would have a slight probiotic effect or other vague unspecified health benefits, since decent yogurt is pricey and I also got tired of eating it every day anyway.
3) Because I am kind of nuts.
(4) Because you don't understand how aftershave works?
100: Hmm, that would explain the stomach problems when I switched to a commercial brand...
Vinegar is completely dead, I think. 1 and 3 are perfectly good reasons, though.
102: Even raw (unpasteurized)? That's mildly surprising; I thought the bacteria were still alive...
And more generally, you were right.
Vinegar mother should be alive- for thousands of years...
Pineapple vinegar is also super easy to make.
