(Video and music above made from a Donna Tartt interview with Charlie Rose by Matt Pope. )
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“Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening.”-Pauline Oliveros
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Two people sitting, talking at a table. Telling stories. Listening to each other. It seems so common, but also uncommon. When was the last time you went over to an aunt’s house, or an older sister, and let her tell you something from the deep wells of her mind and heart? When was the last time you listened to the village wise woman tell you a tale around the fire?

To really listen to a tales such as these, a person needs to be silent, and when silent, listen. To be silent we need to slow down. What else is as cheap and free as entering into silence so we can listen?

Silence has a way of clearing the head. How can we hear our own inner voice, the voices of our sisters and brothers, the voices of the animals and trees, the voices of the rivers, the voices that come in on a warm and gentle wind, if we don’t stop the frenetic pace of production long enough to hear what they have to say?
Slowing down gives us the pause that revives.

Talking is only one side of the equation in speaking truth to power. To hear the power of truth, we need to first shut our mouths and open our ears. To cut through life’s noise we have to turn off the volume of the worlds chatter and mental chatter and go into deep listening. From that silence the voice of our own intuition might just be one of the things we hear awaken.

Lucky for us the composer Pauline Oliveros left a roadmap for re-tuning our ears to inner and outer voices. We can use it to slow down and enter those silences that are pregnant with sound.

FROM THE DEPTHS OF SILENCE, INTUITION

The title for this chapter comes from experimental sound artist, composer and ritualist Pauline Oliveros. A Tejana native of Houston, Texas, born in 1932, she was already playing music in kindergarten, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with sound and listening. She listened to everything, all the time. When she was nine, she started to play the accordion which was to be her lifelong instrument of choice though she became an accomplished multi-instrumentalist. She also became a maverick explorer of tape music, electronic sounds, and the creator of her own specialized delay systems.

Pauline was the definition of a deep listener. To her, the entire world of sound was rich with latent musicality. Reflecting on listening as a kid she said, “I used to enjoy my grandfather tuning his crystal radio. I liked the sounds of tuning the radio much more than the program. My father had a shortwave radio, which also I enjoyed the sounds of the shortwave tuning as well. Those were sounds that I liked.”

As she continued to excel at music in school, and with the encouragement of her pianist mother, she added violin, piano, tuba and French horn to the list of things she could play. At age sixteen, feeling the call of her vocation, she resolved to become a composer, and in time went to college in California. There she supported herself in part by giving accordion lessons. It was at San Francisco State College where she met the poet and composer Ramon Sender, the burgeoning minimalist master magician Terry Riley, and the devotee to avantgarde musical expression, Loren Rush.

With Riley and Rush she formed the very first free improvisation group outside of jazz music in the modern west. Riley had been commissioned to make a piece of music for a film score, but he hadn’t written anything, so he recruited Rush and Oliveros and took them over to the studios at KPFA to use their trusty Ampex tape recorder. They sat down with their instruments and no score. They improvised and caught the results on tape. Riley was on piano, Oliveros on French horn, and Rush on koto and percussion. They improvised several five-minute takes, and in the process realized how much fun they had playing unscored music together. When they listened to the playback together, they all realized they wanted to continue playing improvised music together. It’s an experience many kids who formed bands in the decades afterwards replicated: playing crazy ad hoc music, recording it to tape, and listening back with astonishment to the results. There is an entire world of seldom heard basement tapes containing such untold treasures.

Oliveros spent the remaining years of the 1950s steeped in Beat era circles of strangeness, making friends with a variety of iconoclastic composers, artists, and poets. Sender became one of her improvising partners, and the practice of improvisation became a key to the development of her work. For her twenty-first birthday, her mom had gifted her with a tape recorder, an expensive gift in 1953. The medium of tape created another avenue for creative composition and was another part of her greater destiny.

The legendary electronic synthesist Morton Subotnick was one of the strange ones who was called to the cultural scene in SF and he started swimming in the same circles as Oliveros. Soon he struck up friendship with Oliveros and Sender. They were all interested in electronics and what could be done with tape. With a hefty helping of the DIY spirit and some elbow grease, they cobbled together the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962 that functioned as a non-profit recording studio and performance space for experimental arts. (The full story of the SFTMC and how it evolved into the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College is a fascinating story in itself, and is something I’ve covered in a series of articles you can find in my archives.)

Over the next decade Oliveros continued to compose, to write, to listen, to meditate and to collaborate. By 1971 she had performed and published her piece, Sonic Meditations. Oliveros was a lesbian and part of the feminist movement, and the piece came about from working intensely with a group of female-identified artistically focused spiritual explorers. From this sapphic locus of creative energy, the teachable practice of Deep Listening was born. Sonic Meditations was published in 1974, but the basic practices were further modified, tinkered with, adapted and extended over the next decades until her passing along with her growing body of work that included compositions, recordings and performances.

Oliveros explained Deep Listening as:

“a life long practice. The more I listen the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is…

The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening – listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time. Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception.

We open in order to listen to the world as a field of possibilities and we listen with narrowed attention for specific things of vital interest to us in the world. Through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to the sounds of our daily lives, the environment or music. Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.
Deep Listening is a birthright for all humans.”

One of the many close collaborators with Oliveros was her life partner Ione, herself an accomplished playwright, poet, writer and explorer of sound. They worked on the practice of Deep Listening by developing further sonic meditations, incorporating bodywork, and interactive performance. On a personal level the work included paying attention to “the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination, and dreams.” Ione brought dreamwork into practice as a core element. Our dreams are something are something to be heard and attended to. The effect of the work creates heightened aesthetic appreciation music and environmental sounds but doesn’t stop there. Deep Listening shoots its roots deep into the internal world of the imaginal realm. Through its deliberate cultivation it can help create a field of awareness where personal and community growth occur through “experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness.”

This practice opens a door to the growth of our intutive capacities. Such intuition is necessary not only for those who wish to improvise music in a group setting, but also to storytellers and writers looking to bridge scenes and sections of work, and for anyone who wants to lie there life as a creative work of art.

To get to that one of the first steps is slowing down, get comfortable with silence, as the master John Cage taught us. Cage also taught about response ability. In his essay “Experimental Music” he wrote that,

“Hearing sounds which are just sound immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing, and the emotions of human beings are continually aroused by encounters with nature. Does not a mountain unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder? otters along a stream a sense of mirth? night in the woods a sense of fear? Do not rain falling and mists rising up suggest the love binding heaven and earth? Is not decaying flesh loathsome? Does not the death of someone we love bring sorrow? And is there a greater hero than the least plant that grows? These responses to nature are mine and will not necessarily correspond with another’s. Emotion takes place in the person who has it. And sounds, when allowed to be themselves, do not require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is what is meant by response ability.”

The ability to listen deeply is also the ability to pay attention. In that attention we develop our response ability. Rather than react, having actually heard, a person can decide whether to remain in stillness or move into action.

Listening, then, is also tied to slowing down. To minding the gap between an impulse and whether or not it is worth following.

Listening becomes a creative act and a necessary rebellion in a time of deindustrialization. It creates a space for discernment amidst cognitive dissonance and conflicting narratives. Listening allows us to choose our own adventure within the available options, showing us new options as we grow the ability to pay attention for longer intervals of time, to hear what other people are really saying and doing, and await the response from our own inner voice. In difficult times listening will give us the ability to improvise with what life is calling to our attention.

Since Oliveros passed away in 2016, Deep Listening continues to be taught at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The work is also continued on another dream level and spiritual level by the Ministry of Maat, a group dedicated to “Spiritual, Educational and Holistic support for women and the full spectrum of cultural and gender identities” started by Ione.​

​SLOW AND LOW THAT IS THE TEMPO
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When I listen to music deeply, I slow down. I decelerate to the hiss of cassettes. I rewind the vinyl to hear it crackle and pop. I pop in a CD that might glitch and skip because of an imperfect surface scratch. When I slow down, I also think of how precious music used to be, before the era of recording. Then it can only be experienced live. Every performance was unique, never to be repeated. I thinking of the time and effort spent in learning an instrument, the time spent in composing a song or symphony. These heavy time investments continued with the dawn of recorded music. Artists and bands spend incredible amounts of time in the studio perfecting an album. Yet the glut of available recordings, especially when accelerated to streaming platforms, have made the experience more disposable. People don’t pour over the liner notes with the same obsession as music fans of previous generations did. On Spotify, there are no liner notes.

Art can help teach us how to be present with our attention. Present to looking at a painting for longer than five or ten minutes. Reading a book more than one time. Listening to an album multiple times, and then come back to again and again, with new experiences to hear what else is inside.

Patience in creativity is a factor here too. I was inspired to write about the slow and steady route of creation in part from reviewing the album Electric Voyeur by Big Blood. They spent ten years making that album. It would have felt dismissive to write a review of the album if I’d only listened to it once or twice. It was good to have some time with the album before I wrote my review, considering the time they invested into creating the masterpiece. On this album, they not only played all the music, they also built all the electronic instruments that were used to play the music. Hours and hours and hours, days, weeks, months, years were spent going between the soldering bench and the home studio. Yet the result can be listened to in under two hours. Artwork can be consumed with such brevity, but the time it takes to create art is long. The personal life experience required to make art is also something that cannot be rushed. No one gets to be an elder without the harsh personal experiences that have a weathered a person and given them the necessary gravitas to make lasting work. Such experiences run in parallel with time devoted to learning a craft.

Donna Tartt is a writer who listens deeply to herself and takes her time writing a book. Somewhere in an interview Tartt mentioned that it took her about ten years to write a book. Her breakthrough masterwork The Secret History came out in 1992. Her next novel, The Little Friend came out in 2002. Goldfinch was published in 2013. While I can admire the work ethic and prolific pens of people like Stephen King and other one-book-a-year writers, I cannot argue with the deep saturation and grain of language to be found in Donna Tartt’s novels. The prose is exquisite. True master craftsmanship. That takes time. I’d love to read another novel of hers. It has been over ten years since the Goldfinch came out. I hope she is still working, and if so, I imagine it will be worth the wait. The secret processes of the soul and creation cannot be rushed.
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The musician Matt Pope (Milhaus) made the amazing video and music here from an interview with Donna Tartt on the Charlie Rose show. It took a lot painstaking edits to make something like this. It took a lot of listening to her words, to her voice. It took a lot of time to make this beautiful video and music.

Creating a body of work as an artist takes an entire lifetime. If that body of work is to have grain, the same kind of gnarl and character as a tree, it is slow work. In the attention economy where everyone wants eyeballs on a finished piece, sloppy work and to AI slop is just one one result. With the financial economy in constant chaos and shambles, perhaps it is also time to opt out of the attention economy. Attention isn’t a bad thing. It is a good thing. Yet the more attention is craved, the more attention seems to go towards its own bankruptcy and deficit. When I give my attention to shallow clickbait, my attention accelerates into hyperactivity, my focus decreases and my efforts become scattered. I lose my ability to hold attention and concentrate on something for a longer period of time in the rush for immediate gratification. The ability to concentrate for longer periods of time necessary to do what Cal Newport calls “deep work” is eroded. Giving up becomes easy, staying with something, or with someone, over the long haul, is just another option instead of a lifelong commitment.

Slowing down to extend our attention gives grain to a work, it gives what the science fiction writer Rudy Rucker calls gnarl. It is something he seeks to put into his novels, which are my favorite of the cyberpunk writers. His works went beyond cyberpunk of course. As a mathematician, his books are of high philosophical concept, and the way he used stories from his life and transposed them into science fiction settings (a style he calls transrealism), make them so unique, there is nothing quite like them in the SF canon.

In one of his blog posts Rucker describes gnarl this way. “I use gnarl in an idiosyncratic and somewhat technical sense; I use it to mean a level of complexity that lies in the zone between predictability and randomness. The original meaning of ‘gnarl’ was simply ‘a knot in the wood of a tree.’ In California surfer slang, ‘gnarly’ came to describe complicated, rapidly changing surf conditions. And then, by extension, something gnarly came to be anything with surprisingly intricate detail. As a late-arriving and perhaps over-assimilated Californian, I get a kick out of the word.”

Rucker sought out the gnarlier end of literature for inspiration and sought to put the same high gnarl into his own writing. “If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone else’s dream. The gnarly zone lies at the interface between logic and fantasy.”

Gnarl cannot be easily automated, because part of what makes something gnarly is the grain of weathered experience, the slow growth of rings over the tangled knots of life.

THE SLOW GROWTH OF MEMORY
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Human memory is another thing that has atrophied under the influence of viral media that burns out after just a few infectious days. News cycles (or as I like to call them, noose cycles, because they cut off circulation to the head) are as disorienting as they are vapid. Memories should be generational, if not longer. Our phone enhanced collective dementia places some of our stories at risk of swirling down the collective psychic drain.
At the beginning of this essay I asked, “When was the last time you went over to an aunts house, or an older sister, and let her tell you something from the deep wells of her mind and heart? When was the last time you listened to the village wise woman tell you a tale around the fire? ” Hanging out with Pauline Oliveros, Ione, and her other collaborators feels like hanging out with some older wise aunties, even when I am only listening to their recordings or reading their words. Reading the words of Donna Tartt I feel like I am with a cool older sister. When I read the stories of Bette A. in her book Slow Stories, and listen to her words in the collaboration with Brian Eno that was made for the book, I feel like I have been invited over to a hearthfire for a cup of tea and to hear the wisdom of another time. It’s like I’ve gone to see this storyteller who has things inside of her she needs to share, and that I need to know. These stories seem to come straight from the dreamworld and carry me to a place beyond material reality.

​Listening to Bette A.’s voice and the soft ambience from Eno on the recording, I feel safe, in a cacoon. It is this primal feeling I get, of having a mother or an aunt or a sister read to me while in bed. It’s so primal. It’s so timeless, as we are taken into the world of story.

(As of now, there is only a vinyl version available of the recording. I got to listen to a promo as a music reviewer. It would be wonderful if they released an edition that made the recording affordable for everyday fans. That said, the entire art package does go to a charity, The Heroines! Movement, a global storytelling movement around women role models, co-founded by Bette A.)

The quality of Bette’s voice is such that it fills me with emotion. It is this feeling of being read to, slowly, softly. I realize I haven’t experienced this in so long, that I am overwhelmed with a grief I did not know I had, grief for something I did not know I was missing. I listen to audiobooks sometimes but those don’t really count. Podcasts can be even worse. Poetry readings are good, but there every poet wants to be heard. When was the last time someone told you a tale and you really slowed down enough to listen and take it, be absorbed into it, be absorbed by and saturated by the story?

The fact that they are slow makes them better. This isn’t an audiobook you are rushing to listen to because you need to fill up your information gathering quota. Information isn’t knowledge. These are stories and there is wisdom inside them. The information highway sped things up, this is an analog off ramp inviting us to slow down.

When they started to record the stories in this multimedia project, Brian’s only instruction to Bette was to read her tale “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow.”

It seems to me that “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow” should be a new Oblique Strategy.

Slow down, listen deep, and find the grains of wisdom spoken by the wise woman in your life.

A Cheap Thrills Vacation Primer for Beating the Heat

May Day marks the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. It’s also the time of year when people start really figuring out what they are going to be doing for their summer vacations if they are lucky enough to take one. While it may not yet be blazing hot, the humidity and higher temperatures are coming, at least on this side of the hemisphere. With that in mind I share this Cheap Thrills article on what beating the heat might look like in a world of accelerated climate weirding and lower resource base. Along the way we take a dips in the lake at a summer Chataqua, hang out with Thoreau at his cabin, visit a bungalow in the borscht belt, and stop off for some gelato before having a siesta in the height of Ferragosto.
This article was originally written for the summer 2025 issue of New Maps and was edited by Nathanael Bonnell. 

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.” – Sam Keen

​​Sometimes you just want to get away from it all. Hit the road. Get out of Dodge, go someplace else for a little while, and then come back. One word for it is vacation. People really started going on them when the railroad hit its stride. The car, bus and airplane expanded the options of where to go, and for a time, long distance travel was relatively affordable. It can now be expected to become quite expensive again in the years ahead, thanks to the downward-sloping curve of Hubbert’s peak. Feeling that pinch doesn’t mean folks aren’t going to want to hit the escape button, though, as vacations have become a habit for the world’s industrial denizens.
Vacationing is, for the most part, a product of our industrial culture. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century the word itself generally meant a time when teachers and students vacated the schoolhouse. The main reason for vacating the schoolhouse was to get busy with the other work that needed to be done in the prime of growing season. To actually take a break from work, people had to have a bit of money, making vacations and resting cures the domain of the wealthy. As the oil gush of prosperity drove everyone’s fortunes up, the middle and working class were able to start taking a break too. A bit of surplus meant that taking a week off for a bit of rest and relaxation didn’t have to drain the coffers to their dregs.

Nineteenth-century physicians started to advocate that such breaks were good for the nerves, while other advocates of leisure suggested that they could be used as a time of spiritual renewal. This was all in contrast to the way many Puritans and Calvinists preached the gospel of work from the pulpit, proclaiming that idleness created a playground for the Devil. As more liberal forms of Protestantism such as Unitarianism came to the fore, they pushed back on this work ethic, and contributed to the idea of the good that could be had by taking a break. The influence of the Transcendentalist movement, and their ideas of taking time for reflection and self-culture, played no small part in this change of attitude.

The practice of going on a vacation is something that can be saved as a habit of leisure even as the industrial economy continues to decline. Adjustments into how far and how often a person will travel will need to be made, especially by those belonging to the international jet set class. Even those of us who are used to more modest vacations will need to change our expectations. The days of hopscotching across the globe in planes are, in the long run, numbered. Most folks never could afford to go even to the other side of the country, much less another continent, anyway. Finding contentment in our home counties, states, and bioregions will be one of the waves future vacationers aim to catch. Meanwhile, those with an entrepreneurial spirit, and who live in the right kind of place, might even be able to cater to the wants and needs of future travelers as a secondary source of income in a time of decline.

The issue of climate change and seasonal work is not unconnected to vacation. Decline brings with it many difficulties, and one of them will be adjusting to harsh outdoor work as the limitations of air conditioning begin to assert themselves. Summer is the traditional time of a break from school in the United States. This was ostensibly tied to the needs of farmers. Extra hands were needed in the barns and fields during the long hot days. Yet hot days also make hard work more difficult. In places like Italy, where the summers can be as humid and scorching as here in Ohio, it has become tradition for most of the country to take off for at least the first two weeks of August. One way to cope with increased heat is to slow down and go for a swim.

The exact patterns around vacationing will be different in Illinois and Indiana compared to Texas or Maine. For one thing, many people in North America are landlocked, and it won’t be so easy for everyone to get to the ocean to escape the heat, though rivers and lakes are likely accessible, and even closer to home, so are swimming holes in creeks and ponds. If trains can be kept chugging for a longer time, and buses used in place of atomized cars, they may take some people away to a variety of shorelines. The trains were the first to take people to the oceans for getaways in the first place.
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To return to the Transcendentalists, it was in the nineteenth century that one man made a personal escape, and set a promising pattern for future vacationers in America. That person was Henry David Thoreau and the pattern he pioneered was established in this nation’s collective consciousness when he built a small and economical cabin for himself down by Walden Pond.

​For the American, getting away from it all seems to have started when Thoreau went to Walden to live his life in the woods. Walden wasn’t that far away from his original home in Concord, Massachusetts. He could easily walk back as needed, and he did so often to eat dinner with family or friends like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Being a prolific walker, heading into town was no problem for Thoreau. His isolation was, in this respect, mostly internal, as he also received visitors. But just being on the outskirts of town, it was enough for him to help his mind escape from the kind of thoughts people had in town, to really start thinking his own thoughts. He collected those thoughts in his book Walden and now they continue to echo down the years. I think they have led to the establishment of a permanent Walden in the American mind. He moved in to his cabin on the Fourth of July, after all.

It seems appropriate to start with Thoreau when talking about vacation, considering that in the last issue I wrote about the practice of naturalism. Of all the things Thoreau was, he liked to consider himself as foremost a naturalist. His imprint is all over the environmental movement. Yet the word vacation and the name Thoreau aren’t often thrown together, even while for many people a vacation is a way to get back to nature. At least for citified folk like myself, I often think of vacations as a journey to a place where I’m going to do some hiking, some swimming, some walking, some spending time outdoors. They’ve often included camping, and it’s always a bonus if I can get far enough away from the light pollution of the city to really be able to see the milk in the Milky Way.

​As Thoreau’s good friend Emerson wrote in his essay “Nature”:

​Restoration from real sorrows can come from being alone in the woods, in communion with the trees, bathing in the air of a forest, the light of the stars. A cabin is a place to, in Thoreau’s words, “Simplify, simplify, simplify. ” This is in contrast to the complexity of the contemporary vacation, whose planning, execution and cost often create as much stress as they are supposed to alleviate. It can be hard to simplify when our internal and external lives are a cluttered mess. Breaking from regular routines, forgetting about work, errands, and chores, and stopping long enough to allow what matters to us to register inside our minds can be considered a first step towards simplifying.

The urge to rusticate loomed large in our collective imagination even in 1845, when our population was smaller and our square concrete cities less sprawled. Despite the language Thoreau used to talk about Native Americans (“savages”), it is clear from his writing he truly admired their way of life and gives many passages of his prose to praising it. One way of looking at his experiment at Walden might be as a white man’s vision quest, a search for what a person could be in America. Thought of in this way, a vacation can be used to retreat from society at large, a tool to recalibrate ourselves to our own inner vision. A cabin retreat is a great place for such a quest.

The cabin in the woods takes on another resonance today as a possible place to “bug out” when the shale hits the fan. A person would flee to such a bug-out location if their main domicile was struck by a disaster of some kind, whether natural or man-made. Stocked up and equipped with the tools of survival, these kinds of shelters are for more than just getting back to the basics: they’re places to hunker down for shorter or extended durations. Consider working on them as a kind of vacation a prepper might have now, before taking a permanent vacation later.

Thoreau’s cabin escape was, for the most part, a solitary venture. Not all vacationers have the luxury of that kind of alone time, nor the funds for a plot of land and the permits required to build if a person wanted to keep it legal. A secondhand camper or a repurposed van is more affordable for people, as evidenced by the many modern-day nomads living in them. There are lots of people already living in campers and vans stationary as well. As the cost oil continues to go up, living in these kinds of vehicles, parked in the yard of a family member, a vacant lot, or hidden away elsewhere, will continue to be a downwardly mobile home option.
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Sometimes being alone isn’t really what a person wants anyway. Sometimes they want to get away with a spouse, family and friends. This brings us to a slight detour at summer school, or summer camp anyway, and that convivial movement of gathering together for self-improvement known as the Chautauqua.

he Transcendentalist movement helped to get a number of ideas and practices around education into circulation. The majority of Transcendentalist movers and shakers had worked as teachers to one degree or another. This includes Emerson and Thoreau, but also Amos Bronson Alcott, whose ideas were a forerunner to much that is taken for granted in education today, such as his taking kids on field trips to learn through experience. Field trips were a radical idea in the 1800s. Now they are standard educational practice. Thinkers like Elizabeth Peabody promoted a view of education emphasizing the innate knowledge within a person, and teaching as a way to help facilitate a flowering of what might as well be called intuition. Getting an education, then, became a mode of self-culture and spiritual refinement. As such, it was considered to be a lifelong endeavor.

In time, people would even take vacations from work to attend lectures in the summer as part of the Chautauqua movement, which had a precursor in the Lyceum movement.

The Lyceums were kickstarted in Massachusetts by Josiah Holbrook in 1826. He was another believer in the notion of self-improvement by learning across the span of an entire life, and his efforts promoted the transmission of “useful knowledge” through public lectures. After he created the National American Lyceum to teach his method of teaching, other Lyceums grew up all around the country as if a colony of fruitful mushroom spores had just erupted from the soil. By the mid-1830s there were 3,000 Lyceums catering to the public’s inclination to learn, and to be entertained while learning.

A number of the New England Transcendentalists got involved, using the Lyceum as a way to transmit their philosophy to the wider country on the speaking circuits that developed with their growth. Emerson and Thoreau were both avid Lyceum lecturers, and many of their talks were later polished up into poetic prose for publication.

Following the chaos of the Civil War the Lyceum waned as a cultural touchstone, but in 1874 the Chautauqua waxed in its place as something of a successor. The Chautauqua started off in western New York near a lake of the same name, as a summer training program for Sunday school teachers and other churchy types. The Methodist ministers John H. Vincent and Lewis Miller were the two people behind it, and like other summer traditions, it was first organized as a camp, this one geared towards religious instruction. As interest and enthusiasm for this camp of learning grew, they loosened things up a bit to include talks on general topics, music, and recreation. The success of the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly was such that the format was copied and other Chautauquas sprouted around the country. Later in 1904 the enterprising Keith Vawter and Roy Ellison took the show on the road and presented the Chautauqua in tents as they traveled from town to town, city to city, giving people the chance to pay a modest fee to attend.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering its religious origins, that mixed in with the whole Chautauqua shebang was the idea that society could be improved through teaching citizens to be morally upstanding. As such it was in direct competition with other circuits of the time that had more in common with the circus. In other words, vaudeville. Whereas racy vaudeville offered humorous and libidinous ways to take the mind off of everyday stress, the Chautauqua billed itself as being able to improve the mind and character. As such it aimed to appeal to self-styled upper-crust highbrows, and keep out those deemed rancorous, lowbrow, and lower-class. Failing that, it would build them up into something better.

As the role of education continues to be questioned in America and change with time, the possibility of developing a new kind of summer school for “useful knowledge” might be a potential model for vacationers who want to improve their life of mind and have uplifting entertainment. As with any organic social movement, it is the people in the movement who get to decide what it is about. If I had my druthers future family summer camps would be devoted to the Humanities, Ecology, and Memory, or what I call HEM (in contrast to STEM). The inclusion of some bawdy songs and ample time dipping in a lake might be enough to keep it free from moral grandstanding and appeal to a variety of peoples. For that matter, there might as well be multiple types of summer camps catering to the needs of a diverse array of communities. After all, WASPs bent on social reformation aren’t the only ones looking for a distraction in the dog days of summer heat.

For the greater part of fifty years smack dab in the middle of the twentieth century Jewish vacationers from New York City regularly headed to the Catskill Mountains to what was called the Borscht Belt, also known as the Yiddish Alps. In a large part, it was driven by the need to get out of the hot multistory apartment buildings of the sweltering metropolis. The mothers and grandmothers would get a place at one of the five hundred resorts that catered to people at various income levels and head up with the kids as soon as they were out of school. This vacation land was in its prime between the 1920s and 1960s. Excluded elsewhere, especially during the 1930s, the Jews found an oasis in the Catskills. In the seventies, the rise of affordable AC, cheaper air travel, and the decline of rail service to mountains all contributed to their downturn and, in many cases, eventual abandonment.

There were fancy hotels for the wealthy, but for those of lesser means, bungalow colonies and kuchaleyns. The bungalows were little cottages all grouped together. Usually just a bedroom or two, kitchenette and screened porch to play cards in when it rained or get away from the mosquitoes. The same families rented the same bungalow year after year so when the kids went up with the women for the summer, they got to meet up with their summer friends, different from the city friends they had the rest of the year. There is something about being with certain group of people for a specific set amount of time during our adolescent years that lends itself to creating a sense of enchantment.

These bungalows had communal centers where people gambled in little homespun casinos, comedians told jokes, and movies were screened in the evenings. Sometimes a musician would pop in. All of these and more were standard fare at the hotels as well. Meanwhile, the kuchaleyns were even a bit more down-at-heel than the bungalows. This Yiddish word means “cook it yourself” and was used to denote boarding houses where people could stay but no meals were provided. People went to them anyway and managed to have a good time.

Modern stand-up comedy in its present form owes quite a bit to the entertainment circuit of the Borscht Belt. Just as the Transcendentalists polished their material through Lyceum lectures, Jewish comedians crafted their art of talking into what we now know as stand-up comedy on the circuit. Comedians such as the late Joan Rivers cut their teeth catering to the roughly half-a-million people who went up to the Borscht Belt each summer, giving them plenty of experience for their further efforts in showbiz. Others such as Sid Caesar and Jerry Seinfeld were influenced by that particular style of humor. All of this has left an indelible mark on American culture. It makes me wonder how future patterns of summer leisure, and the entertainments provided for them, will in turn influence the larger cultures in which they are nested.
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During these summers it was standard for the men to stay in the city to put in their work hours for the week. By the time Friday afternoon rolled around they were eager to get in on the comedy, the card games, and time with their families. They got into their cars and headed up to the bungalows as fast as they could. This particular behavior is less likely to be emulated in a time of increased fuel shortages, but the other pattern, where children and their caregivers (of whatever gender) go to a kind of retreat for a part of the summer, just might. Another possibility for getting away with the whole family is to just shut everything down for a few weeks in the summer, like they do in Italy.

​If summer has a last stand, it’s in August. The promise of a summer and its freedoms are in full bloom on Memorial Day. As Labor Day draws near those promises start to wilt. I can still relate to punk rocker Henry Rollins when he wrote, “August used to be a sad month for me. As the days went on, the thought of school starting weighed heavily upon my young frame.” I remember wanting to pack in as much time with friends as I could before the school bell rang again. August is a time when everyone might as well have one last hurrah for the summer before getting back to the grindstone, and the Italians have good enough sense to just close it all down for half of the month.

They call this time of year Ferragosto and it goes all the way back to Emperor Augustus in 18 BC. He gave the first day of August off to farmers following the rigors of the summer growing season. When the Catholic Church gained ascendancy, the holiday needed some religious mojo and got moved to August 15 to celebrate the Assumption of Mary into heaven. During the Fascist years when Benito Mussolini was in control, he threw the lower classes a bone and gave them three days off from August 14th to 16th and made tickets on the trains cheaper so they could go to museums in the cities and to their beloved beaches. People would pack up lunch supplies and head out for fun. As the twentieth century wore on, many workers got in the habit of taking a week or two off in August. Since this made it difficult for anyone else to get anything done with so many other people just taking it easy, the culture as a whole followed suit. These days Italian businesses by law give four weeks off a year, and most companies generally just close down for Ferragosto, and that word is now associated with this collective pause. Travel agents advise against going to Italy in August because many of the shopkeepers and the like are on holiday, the big cities are deserted, and everyone has gone to the beach.

Part of my interest in Ferragosto came from when I was reading about the “Lazarus Lizards” or common European wall lizard (Podarcis muralis), that was introduced to Cincinnati around 1950 by the son of the owner of the Lazarus Department store. This so-called “invasive” species is now prolific. Someone else told me how the climate here is similar to Italy (hot and humid in the summer). One branch of my family is Italian (from the town of Ripafratta, outside Pisa) and I had been reading about the kitchen gardens of Italian immigrants in the United States. Thinking of the climate being similar, I started to wonder what else I could learn from these ancestors, such as how they coped with the heat.
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Soon my mind turned to gelato and how a summer vacation isn’t really a summer vacation without at least one stop at an ice cream stand. One of the most beloved of my Italian ancestors was a guy named Ice Cream Johnny. He lived from 1851 to 1943 and made his life in the hills of Kentucky outside of Frankfort. While so many of our other relatives are forgotten, we are still talking about him. That’s what being an ice cream maker will do for you. Give you immortality, or at least your name a longer memory.

Hand-cranked ice cream freezers were invented in 1846 by Nancy Johnson in New Jersey. Before that time, ice cream was an occasional luxury of the rich. After that, with new ways for transporting and keeping ice frozen, ice cream became something even poor little whippersnappers could get as a summer treat. Ice Cream Johnny had his own dairy cows to make his own ice cream with, before taking it into town on a horse-drawn wagon to sell to his fellow Kentuckians.
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Hand-cranked ice cream is a low-tech process, so the possibility of ice cream can remain in our hot futures as long as ice itself can be kept and the special metal-lined bucket and canister used to make it can be crafted. For that matter, shutting everything down for a two-week holiday requires zero technology. What it does require is a willingness to slow down and set aside production to practice il dolce far niente, or the sweet art of doing nothing. In a world of strict energy limits, periods of time where no work gets done can be great for everyone.

RE/SOURCES:

​Aron, Cindy Sondik. Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. New York, NY.: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Carter, Jamie Betesh. “Back to the Borscht Belt.” <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/back-to-borscht-belt-jewish-catskills-revival>
Groubert, Mark & Hunley, Eric. “Levine’s Bungalow Colonies.”

​I first heard about the bungalow colonies on this episode of America’s Untold Stories. Mark Groubert is a great story teller and he tells about his time as a kid growing up and spending summers in one of the bungalow colonies. He even snuck off to visit a music festival known as Woodstock. I don’t endorse Groubert or Hunley’s political views, but for history and JFK assassination lore, the earlier episodes of their program are worth digging through.

Hayes, Brittany. “The Fourth American Institution.” <https://ushistoryscene.com/article/chautauqua/>
Joelle, Memoree. “Comedy in the Catskills: Remembering the Borscht Belt” < https://newyorkmakers.com/blogs/magazine/comedy-in-the-catskills-remembering-the-borscht-belt>

Minchilli, Sophie. The Sweetness of Doing Nothing: Living Life the Italian Way with Dolce Far Niente. London, UK.: Thorsons, 2020. This little guide to slowing down in the manner of the Italians is the perfect thing to read in a hammock.

Nichols, Ashton. Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement. Chantilly, VA.: The Teaching Company, 2006. This course of 24 lectures on DVD with accompanying guidebook was a great source of pleasure to listen to this past winter. There is no need to watch the lectures as it is just Professor Nichols talking with occasional slides. I listened to them on my headphones while working, playing the DVD in a computer. Courses from the Teaching Company are the kind of thing you might be able to find at your local library!

Provenzo Jr., E Eugene F. & Provenzo, Asterie Baker, ed. “Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education.” <http://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/foundations/chpt/lyceum-movement>
Visit Italy “15th of August: origins and facts about the Italian Tradition of the ‘Ferragosto’” <https://www.visititaly.eu/history-and-traditions/ferragosto-origins-and-facts-about-the-italian-tradition-of-august-15th>

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