Personal: July 2008 Archive Page

Steampunk is one of my guilty pleasures... I think of it more of an asthetic than a literary movement, and I own neither a pair of aviator goggles nor a wind-up pocketwatch. Nevertheless, it happens that at this moment in another window I'm rendering a 3D view of an brass-and-glass spaceship ethership that features in the steampunk bedtime stories I've been telling my kids ever since I saw the last name "Gearhart" in a student roster.  Randy Nakamura sounds a little mystified by the popularity of the steampunk style, though he does a fair job exposing its sillier excesses.

[A]s Peter Berbergal of the Boston Globe notes, "In all of the new Steampunk design there is a strong nostalgia for a time when technology was mysterious and yet had a real mark of the craftsperson burnished into it." Never mind the fact that the Victorian era was a time of demystification: Darwin's theory of natural selection upset centuries of received religious knowledge about human origins, and the mechanization of virtually everything meant you could produce objects, designs and books ten or twenty times faster and distribute them to the very ends of the earth. As Philip Meggs, commenting on the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, has succinctly put it: "Handicraft almost completely vanished. The unity of design and production ended." The world had suddenly become smaller. If Steampunkers are looking to the past for some sort of inspired return to a prior era, then they are running in slack parallel with their ancestors. The Victorians were cultural raiders without peer. Rococo, Tudor, Gothic Revival and the umpteenth generation of Neo-Neo-Classicism were not enough. They went abroad to bring back the ill-gotten gains of their imperial aesthetic loot. Moorish ornaments, Ukiyo-e, Chinese porcelain, hieroglyphics all found their way into Victorian eclecticism. Form before concept.

The Boston Globe:

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries -- one not available to creatures that spend all their time pursuing mere survival. To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one. It is in these times of reflection that people often discover something new, whether it is an epiphany about a relationship or a new theory about the way the universe works. Granted, many people emerge from boredom feeling that they have accomplished nothing. But is accomplishment really the point of life? There is a strong argument that boredom -- so often parodied as a glassy-eyed drooling state of nothingness -- is an essential human emotion that underlies art, literature, philosophy, science, and even love. --Carolyn Y. Johnson

If one defines boredom "feeling depressed and anxious because one has nothing interesting or worthwhile to do," then I've proably been bored for about 5 hours since I've been married. While I don't mow my lawn as often as most of my neighbors, I do find myself refreshed by the hour or so during which I can't really do anything mentally other than let my thoughts wander. I generally think about my father, who spent a lot of time keeping up the lawn (and the rest of the house), and how as teenager I found where he kept his "to do" list, and I would try to spend about 45 minutes a week doing something on that list. (It would generally put him in a great mood to find that I had done something on that list, so he'd sort of celebrate by taking me out to lunch while out on an errand... so doing that little job was a way to score some quality time with Dad.)

It still seems strange that I have household responsibilities now, and every moment I spend with my kids is a potential memory that they'll keep returning to for the rest of their lives.