Dancing in the Streets
"Cultural historian Ehrenreich explores a human impulse that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. She uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although 16th-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks to medieval Christianity. Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired uprisings and revolutions from France to the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports.--From publisher description."--From source other than the Library of Congress
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What Hacker News says
- Couple of books on this theme:
1. Putnam's Bowling Alone cites sociological sources
2. Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets cited historical sources
3. Liming's Hanging Out cites autobiographical and literary sources.
- If you liked Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed,"[0] you might like a few of her unrelated books as well. I highly recommend her "Dancing in the Streets,"[1] a 5,000 year history of the deadening of European culture (at Europeans' own hands, no less) that pairs nicely with Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000"[2], a book of similar pacing, as well as a much shorter book on the gendered professionalization/demolition of the medical practice in the medieval era titled "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses" or "W.M.N."[3]
Her "Bait and Switch,"[4] however, about the white-collar unemployment industry I found dull and unenlightening.
0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1869.Nickel_and_Dimed
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24452.Dancing_in_the_Str...
2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt
3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24453.Witches_Midwives_a...
4. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24450.Bait_and_Switch
- I will not pretend that reading is easy. I cannot appreciate your difficulty. I am eager to read. I read voraciously. What number you've read in your life, I consume in a year. I should, perhaps, regard you as a marathon runner would regard a couch potato looking to get into the sport of running.
I have this to say: I will _never_ reach the bottom of books' wellspring of value. I have not, yet reached diminishing marginal returns. Every book I read makes the next one more valuable.
You don't, however, have to read as much as I do to gain the benefit. My whole life, every year has brought me a handful of life-altering, mind-blowing new books.
That being said, I have put down many bad ones. Do not be afraid to quit a boring book. There are too many to read. There are so many more out there. Skip to the next one.
> I assume that the best part of the best books will surface in daily conversations.
I don't.
> I even find myself reading the comments and not reading the article most of the time.
Me, too. Books are way different, however. Articles too often, in my experience, couch the _news_ in many paragraphs of exposition, and background context. I skim them looking for the _novel_ information. Not so, with books, which I read in order to _augment_ my contextual, background understanding.
Time spent absorbed in a book allows for deeper re-wiring of one's basic precepts. An article may help you navigate your current mental models with agility, but only a book offers us the substantial choice of retaining or replacing them.
> Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books. -- bell hooks
Novels, likewise, afford a world-altering subsumption of reality. Our imaginations are massively powerful--or else, to put it another way, our connection to material reality is tenuous, and can be all-too-easily shifted to project ourselves into fantasies. A visit to alternate realms--even as mundane as contemporary fiction set in a different town--grants us opportunities that short forms don't. I have only rarely been swept away by a reddit comment, and felt myself to have visited another place. (One example might be the roadside in "Today You, Tomorrow me.")
I think you're reading in the wrong genre. There are dozens, and truly their boundaries are fluid, but self-help is perhaps the most vapid.
You are missing out.
I would recommend Bujold's "The Curse of Chalion" as a fantastic, mature novel with fantasy elements, or Stephenson's "Snowcrash" for a colorful adventure not without gravitas. If you're trying to gain non-fiction information, I would recommend Galeano's "Open Veins of Latin America," CrimethInc's "No Wall They Can Build," or Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets."
In the realm of pure intellectual pursuit, Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" will not disappoint.
- ...are stupid even to contemplate while we're still increasing carbon emissions. If you actually cared about the impact — and weren't just cynically cashing in on environmentalism's recapitulated caché — you'd be shorting big markets. The biggest threat to the world is unbridled capitalism, which VC's like you are incapable of abandoning. May as well ask a fish to bicycle.
This post is a pitiable joke, whose highest purpose is to stand in a museum, one day, as a testament to how blindly we charged into the apocalypse. I only hope that museum's curated by our children, and not whatever species finds our remains.
For a good, hard look at why I believe this, read Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything," and Peter Frase's "Four Futures."
If you're daring enough, you can follow those with Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash," and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets" and "Witches, Midwives, & Nurses" for a deep look at how and how long we've been going wrong.
If that all doesn't make you straight up suicidal (let alone quit maintaining your startup pyramid scheme), I have more reading suggestions for how to turn this ship around.
- Binging on Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickeled and Dimed, Dancing in the Streets, Natural Causes
