A New Project

Two of my bookshelves

First off, what an amazing and humbling thing to have such a great (okay, sometimes great and sometimes inflammatory to the point of seeming allergic) response to my essay in Full Stop. Reading the comments, both on the Full Stop website and on the Lost Art Press blog was by turns cheering, frustrating, and confounding. I won’t bother arguing point by point with various commenters, but I will say that I am encouraged by how much diversity of opinion exists among those who identify as woodworkers (esp. handtool woodworkers). One key thing I learned is that mentioning the name of Karl Marx (briefly in a several thousand word essay) is still enough to derail the whole argument for some. There’s a valuable lesson there–some ideas might suffer from attribution. But really, go read some Marx. As one commentor pointed out, attributing Communism and the acts of Lenin and Stalin to Marx is like attributing the Inquisition to Jesus. Marx was a deeply ethical, careful thinker.

But, back to my new project. The response to my essay, along with Nancy Hiller and Megan Fitzpatrick’s Instagram posts about their bookshelves and several wonderful emails, has gotten me thinking about my books. Admittedly, it wasn’t hard to get me thinking about my books, since I’ve devoted my life to being a scholar of literature (a.k.a. “overeducated buffoon” to one axe-grinding commentor). I chose to go to grad school not because I thought it would be a plum way to get a living–in fact it means seven years of no savings, sub 20k salary, and constant stress. And chances are I won’t ever land a faculty job; less than half of literature Ph.D.s do (though it’s good work if you can get it). Instead, I decided to get a Ph.D. because I have a deep belief that our lives are driven by the stories that surround us. And I wanted–needed–to understand those stories, especially the ones from what still seems to be the pivotal moment in American history and identity: the mid 19th century.

At root, this goal of understanding stories stems from the premise that stories are fundamental. We want certain things because we have stories about them. We do what we do because of stories. That’s why we make things from wood. Because we have a story (or many stories) about what it means to make things from wood. That’s why we want to take vacations to Hawai’i. We tell ourselves that it’s pleasant there (and it is!). But we also know that going to Hawai’i has some social value–we have a story about “making it” that includes beach vacations, Mai Tais, and tan lines. We know the value, to ourselves and others, of having those personal and shared stories of joy and pleasure (after all, memories are just stories we tell ourselves, and psychological experiments has shown its not very hard to make memories of things that never occurred). So we have all these stories, most of which are given to us and all of which share a certain architecture, and then we tweak them and live them and try to realize them.

So my new blog project, for the next several weeks (while I’m not home with access to my little workshop) is going to be book reviews. I want to write a bit about the stories that my books have told me about what good work is. That might mean work with wood. It might be more abstract and philophical takes on work. You’ll get my little reviews of Jim Tolpin and Hannah Arendt, Henry David Thoreau and Christopher Schwarz. I don’t know where it will lead, but I hope you’ll check back.

Tomorrow: thoughts on Jim Toplin’s The New Traditional Woodworker.