Have you seen those
Walking beside you?
They too
Have their way.

Professor Snell Putney wrote “The Normal Neurotic” which is one of the best Sociology books ever and it was required reading for his class: Social Disorganization. He was in the process of writing another book which turned out to have a long academic title. Yet in that class he predicted so much of the disorganization that we are seeing today in America and the world.

Social Disorganization was such a great name for a Sociology course. I’m sure there was a short course description for this class. I needed a certain number of units for a minor in Soc and it probably fit into my tight academic schedule. However, this class is the one that continues to help me make sense of the crazy, insane times we live in. I’ve never googled Professor Putney’s name before — but for some reason I wanted to find out what his follow-up book was to “Normal Neurotics” (or the long academic title: Adjusted American: Normal Neurosis in the Individual and Society) .

It turns out that the overly long title of his book would instantly discourage anyone from curling up on a long winter’s night to read: The conquest of society;: Sociological observations for the autonomous revolt against the autosystems which turn humanity into servo-men” It was probably sold as “The Conquest of Society” — which still doesn’t give potential readers a clue to the precognition that Snell Putney had of what was to come of the events and forces put in motion way back in the early 1970s.

Thanks to the vast Internet and people who hoard books I have located a used copy of “The Conquest of Society”. Somewhere in my library I still have the notes from Snell Putney’s “Social Disorganization” Class and I still have my original copy of “Normal Neurotic” on my book shelf.

My question is why have I been remembering this one class so vividly right now, and the insights I learned  from that class:  that there is so sort of order in the chaos of the world. Then when I decide to Google Snell Putney’s name — I learn that he has just died.

Below is Snell Putney’s Obit from his home town newspaper in the Florida Keys. I would rank him up there with the best and brightest of the non-Ivy league schools has produced. And frankly I can’t think of any so called Ivy league schools who have produce anyone in Snell Putney’s league.

SNELL ‘MICK’ PUTNEY

Gifted scholar, poet and environmentalist Snell “Mick” Putney of No Name Key died unexpectedly at the tender age of 80 on Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009, from a rare fungal infection, blastomycosis.

Born in Lincoln, Neb., to Williams W. and Hazel Snell Putney on Feb. 27, 1929, Mick earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Nebraska, before receiving his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Oregon. A professor for most of his adult life, he taught at Drake University, Florida State University, San Jose State University and Union Institute in the course of his long career.

Mick and his wife, Alicia, first visited the Keys by sailboat in 1978, before buying a house in Key Largo in 1983. In 1990, the couple built their beautiful solar home on No Name Key, which has been the site of many lectures and tours educating people on the possibilities of a sun-powered residence. What many people who toured the home don’t realize is that Mick built most of the house himself, as he did a 40-foot sailboat, and always had a workshop wherever he went. As his wife likes to put it, “Mick could fix everything … except a computer.” Mick was trailblazing, boating, building and fixing things up until the last month of his life.

Most people knew Mick from his tireless work to protect the environment, particularly that of the Florida Keys. He served as president of the Key Deer Protection Alliance for almost a decade, only ending his tenure in early November 2009. He also served on the board of directors for Last Stand for many years. Mick did everything a man could do to minimize his footprint on his beloved green earth. For those of us who will miss him so, and will celebrate his work, we can attest that his impact on all of us was enormous and profound, and will long be remembered.

Mick is survived by his wife of 35 years, Alicia Putney; his sister, Patricia Watson of Portland, Ore.; his son, Gregory Putney of Selma, Ore.; his daughter, Cynde Mitchell and her two children, Daniel and Amelia, of Peaks Island, Maine; and his beloved cat, Tee Cee.

Mick requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to one of his favorite charities: the Key Deer Protection Alliance, Last Stand, Witness for Peace – Southeast Regional Office (919-856-9468), the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (716-636-1425).

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 5, 2009, at the National Key Deer Refuge, at the head of the Manillo trail, where Mick donated more than 2,000 hours of his volunteer service.

http://keysnews.com/recent_obituaries

In bearing yourself to the world
Keep your pants on.
Not everyone will appreciate
What you have to show.

When we say the word ghetto, we generally think of rap, thugs, and crime.  What we usually think of  is a modern economic ghetto, a neighborhood where all the poorest people live  and can’t afford to leave.

I would be bold enough to suggest however, that true introverts live in a social ghetto.   We don’t fit in and are forced to live as misfits and outsiders on the margins.  Most extroverts barely even seem to realize that we exist.  We are pushed aside into a separate ‘neighborhood’ where we live out an isolated existence.  Our state of existence is one of social poverty.

Growing up and even into college, I had to fight off resentment whenever extroverts complained about relationships and other forms of social connection I hadn’t even the luxury of aspiring to.   I understood that these people lived in another universe and that there was no way I could hope to make them understand that I had truly lived most of my life at the bare subsistence level.  Even if I could explain my situation to the other person, the response might be bewildered pity or possibly even contempt, but never understanding.  Part of the torture is that I couldn’t even really talk to anyone about my situation.

Over years, a lot of my energy had been focused on merely surviving.  It makes long term planning very difficult for me to this day.  Not long ago, I was bewildered whenever someone asked me questions about marriage, or having children.  That was all so distant as to be completely off my map.  The asker, usually a girl, would see my deer in the headlights look and conclude I was weird or just stupid.  To me, stable social relationships and settling down was a thing that the Accepted liked to talk about.  It had no relevance at all to my life.

Every encounter I had with normal people became akin to a clash of understanding and values sooner or later.  Usually sooner.  Our expectations of life were on different planets.  They were counting on a comfortable life and a family.  I was hoping for survival.  I could very well be in the same economic bracket as the person to whom I was talking yet clearly I was in some way impoverished.  Truly I lived in another place altogether from these normal people, a social ghetto of sorts.

On the internet, I’ve been discovering more and more people who grew up in the same neighborhood that I did and I’m enjoying it very much.

As a final note:

The first ghetto, Il Ghetto, was not an economic ghetto.  It was a holding area in the city of Venice where all the Jews in town were forced to live.  These Jews were often quite economically wealthy, but their social unbelonging led them to experience another, equally oppressive form of poverty.

Lorenz in the New Yorker:

“Sure, we have common ground with Middle America — we’re all carbon-based life forms.”

(Cartoon of two businessmen talking over drinks, in a bar.)

This bitter funny text can be interpreted as outrageously insensitive and either cynical or sarcastic. But what if one, like me, is truly concerned with the unseen, and when it comes to the economy, unwilling to look the other way?

For I’m afraid companies with record earnings having had the perfect excuse, during the current crisis, of dumping up to 30% of their workforce and still function, are not about to re-hire anyone. So that a brand new underclass emerges, done in mainly by job-saving technology. A jobless recovery that will affect consumer spending, property values, schooling, healthcare, travel, and what have you, making a few richer and many, many poorer. With entire nations sliding down slopes of no return, success and power shifting to borderless and thus socially responsability-less multinationals and their officers and shareholders, who seem to have the future in a choke hold. Places where national yardsticks like GDP and the Dow Jones in social terms have become increasingly irrelevant. For what’s of utmost importance here not ‘growth’ and statistics but the internal distribution of all wealth. Only a State able to prevent future recessions given that 70% of most developed economies is consumer driven, and condemning this number of folks to the economic scrap heap, really not a good idea.

First of all, on the Finance front it should henceforth be institutionally forbidden to gamble, only real investment permitted, in palpable, visible products and services, not phantom transactions and self-serving speculation. Nature teaching us rampant life kills life, and rampant, senseless (paper) growth doing no better. So that happiness and fulfilment by percentage point, whipped up by numbers, remains merely ephemeral and most fleeting. Every act, every measure, every future indicator to be tangible and only directly reflecting such minor items as the status of food, shelter, health, education, emotive freedom and of course the environment.

In other words, don’t talk to us about the GDP and the Dowdy Jones but what’s your vision on never devaluing….the population. Because it’s not size, you fools, but beauty within!

I just discovered this delightfully-entertaining, half-hour episode comedy series about a diverse group of Muslims, set in a small Canadian town on on the prairie.  The 20-minute video above is the first episode.

The diverse group of Muslims in the town have the same disagreements among themselves that different groups of Muslims have in their own home countries, or even that different Muslim countries have with each other (between conservative and liberal views of Islam)–but all in an entertaining way.  Of course everyone in the town misunderstands things, in the same ways people misunderstand in real life.

Try this first video.  It’s a very cleverly done Canadian sitcom, filmed in Toronto, Ontario, and Indian Head, Saskatchewan.   The first episode (above) was filmed in Regina.  Little Mosque is the most popular sitcom in Canada and has been syndicated in France, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Finland, Turkey, Israel, the West Bank, and African countries.  It is light-hearted, and family-oriented.  Expats who have lived in Muslim countries will especially enjoy this humorous series!

Links to all Little Mosque on the Prairie episodes (Seasons 1 – 4) can be viewed HERE (scroll down the page).   The links are free.

I love this image. It’s by the San Francisco-based artist Mona Caron; see www.monacaron.com. I originally asked Mona’s permission to use it in an academic article, ‘Social movements and the bicycle’, which I’ve just now added to the ‘Pages’ section of this blog. To me, Mona’s picture beautifully exemplifies the different worlds of the car and the bicycle. It forms the cover of the book published to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of Critical Mass, Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration (edited by Chris Carlsson 2002, AK Press). (I’ll also put the short chapter which I contributed to that book up here, as well as some of my other writing, when I find more time.) Car culture results in the grey, grim, polluted urban present. The world of automobility is dark, oppressive, bad. In contrast, pedalling bicycles produces an ecological city, full of fresh air, trees and sunshine. The world of the bicycle is light, airy, good. The contrast is not of course merely between types of vehicle, but between the types of society which they tend to produce.

Anyway (the trouble with blogging is, once I get started, there’s always so much to say, and a need to limit myself … ), here’s the abstract for ‘Social movements and the bicycle’. If it captures your imagination and/or curiosity, please just click on to the full (10,000 word) article over in ‘Pages’:

This paper examines the bicycle’s role in the oppositional cultures of four British social movements; feminism and socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and anarchism and environmentalism from the 1960s until today. It argues that the bicycle powerfully enabled the expansion in the geographical, social and political horizons of both feminists and socialists at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast, within environmentalism and anarchism since the 1960s, the bicycle both symbolises and produces a desired compression of everyday life, fitting an expressive politics concerned with authenticity, community, and elevation of ‘the local’. The changing role of the bicycle in these movements points to the shifting landscape of political resistance, and to differences and continuities between so-called ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements. The case of the bicycle also demonstrates the importance of ‘ordinary’ materialities to the production and reproduction of cultural and political identities.

Temple University Press publicist Gary Kramer describes his experiences at a cumbia sonidero event he attended with Música Norteña author Cathy Ragland in Mexico City.

Last week I attended the Society for Ethnomusicology conference in Mexico City on behalf of Temple University Press. The conference exhibition helped Temple University Press promote the recent Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant (awarded to Indiana University Press and Kent State University Press as well) to develop and publish ethnomusicology multimedia.

There was considerable scholarly interest in our books and ethnomusicology multimedia at the conference. However, my ethnomusicological education came from an experience I shared with Temple University Press author Cathy Ragland (Música Norteña). Cathy invited me to a cumbia sonidero DJ event, held in a big warehouse-sized space in a neighborhood far from the conference hotel.

Even the cab ride to the site was exciting. A driver pulled up in an old, beat-up VW bug with the front passenger seat missing. We got in and Cathy tried to explain where we were going. I admired the Day of the Dead skeleton that hung from his windshield. (The skeleton “chattered” when the driver pulled its string, which he did for our amusement at every opportunity.) As we crawled through traffic, the cab driver would stop to spit or buy loose cigarettes from men in the street.

The event was held in this huge space—a warehouse for cabs, I understand. When we arrived, the ticket takers patted us down twice(!)—for weapons, I suspect. They didn’t charge us—perhaps because we were two of the three gringos at the event. Cathy later explained that the organizer was told to keep an eye out for us.

The space had a row of bright rod-like lights against one wall that flashed while the first DJ spun the music—which featured conga (drums), keyboards, guitar, and other instruments. Another wall had a huge sign where many folks (including us) took photos. We heard four DJs spin during the two hours we were there, and peering into their CD racks, I spied everything from Mexican musicians to Depeche Mode.

Many of the attendees wrote dedications on sheets of paper that they hoped the DJs would read as the music played. The facial expressions of some of the guys trying to get their messages read showed how meaningful these events were to them. It was often quite difficult to hear the actual music over the constant announcements, and the volume was extremely loud. (Cathy regretted she’d not brought earplugs, as I did the next day, when the hearing in my left ear wasn’t so good.)

As we got our bearings amid the lights, the noise, and the smoke—cigarettes were plentiful, infusing the air and our clothes with a pungent odor—men and women started salsa dancing all around us. At times, many dancers were encircled by a modest crowd, and they were the best performers to watch; they moved gracefully and fluidly to the music—it was simply hypnotizing. I wanted to dance, and although Cathy egged me on to ask a peroxide blonde in skin-tight pants to salsa, she was a bit intimidating for a non-pro like me. I did eventually line dance with two guys because I felt I could actually follow the moves. (I didn’t do so well, but at least I can say I dance, or tried to salsa).

Part of the allure was seeing the people—a diverse mix of working-class Mexicans in all their fabulousness. Guys dressed to the nines in suits and sport jackets, or sported only T-shirts and ripped jeans. Some women were heavily made-up and bejeweled while others sported bad dye jobs, overly tight clothes, or “chic” body-hugging sweat suits. The coolness of these individuals, all of whom glistened with perspiration was palpable.

What I most admired from what I observed was how everyone got along and, like us, was there to have fun. Men danced with women and then switched partners; men danced with men and women with women. The attendees ranged from teenagers to middle aged couples. One older gentleman, who was quite drunk, asked Cathy and me what we thought of the event, and if it was like anything we’d ever attended before. It wasn’t, I replied. When he put his hand on my shoulder to talk, the pure heat from it burned under my shirt.

At one point, we went over to one of the refreshment stands to get a drink. I ordered a Coke, and the server wiped it down with a dirty rag that prompted me to pour the contents of the can into a huge paper cup. The power from all of the music/sound made my cup vibrate in my hand. My throat soon vibrated too. But I found this exciting. The sensation mirrored my excitement.

As the event continued, I wandered around and found some promotional materials—the publicist in me never rests. I took some promotional flyers and a huge colorful poster for the next event. The poster is now hanging in my office, a souvenir from a memorable, musical night in Mexico.

The Second Innocence is an experimental project drawing on nearly five years of thought and work.  

It draws on literature, philosophy, social research, educational theory, music, film and a massive amount of very self indulgent imaginings.   It is effectively, a book which will grow in readable chunks on this blog as long as anyone is interested to read it.  It aims to be a narrative, moving from fictional allegory to philosophical enquiry and back again; until a final point is reached and the entirety of the story becomes apparent, though along the way it will pick up on a lot of topics of interest and creative experiments.  It will be published in a fairly draft form however; and I would be fascinated and and greatly appreciative of any feedback, questions or additions; though I should probably warn the unwary – I will make no apologies for not making it too obvious, or keeping some of meanings hidden for a time.

This blog will tell a story of a trail of thinking around the subject of childhood innocence… and hopefully it will, if not prove interesting to you, then at least open your mind to a way of thinking that never seems to reveal its depths to me.

I sincerely hope you enjoy it.