i love books. i have a lot of books that sit on my shelf unread. i like getting books because they have all these new things that i have yet to learn about! and today i added some more books to that collection from collignon's generous offer to allow students to browse his library in wurster.
i used to read all the time. my parents would tell me to go asleep but i'd hide under my covers with a flashlight, holding up the boxcar children or nancy drew or harry potter.
but now all i do with my time is spend it in studio, sleep, or idle on facebook.
i've been starting to get back into reading... slowly chipping away at this new knowledge. ha.
here are some thoughts from andy crouch's "culture making: recovering our creative calling," which i got from chapter camp a year ago. it's alot but it's meaty!
"Culture has quite literally reshaped the world. In the nineteenth century, if you had asked well-traveled Americans to sketch a map of their country, including its most significant features, they would almost certainly have drawn you a continent full of rivers. The Mississippi, of course, but also the Connecticut, the Ohio, the Missouri, the St. Lawrence and a dozen more. Rivers -- part of the created, "uncultured" world -- were a crucial part of the world that early Americans had to make something of. And make something of them they did indeed -- the rivers, in their dual role as transportation routes for cargo and people on the one hand, and barriers to travel on the other, prompted myriad cultural innovations."
"The transition from river to highway is a transition from one world to another. We can argue about whether interstate highways make the world better or worse, but we cannot deny that they make a new kind of world. They do so partly by reshaping the physical world itself, blasting through hills and bridging rivers so smoothly that we don't even know the names of the rivers we cross. And they do so more profoundly by shaping our imagination, our mental picture of what is in the world and what matters in it."
"Yet no one -- not even those who read books with titles like Culture Making -- makes Culture. Rather, Culture, in the abstract, always and only comes from particular human acts of cultivation and creativity. We don't make Culture, we make omelets. We tell stories. We build hospitals. We pass laws. These specific products of cultivating and creating -- borrowing a word from archaeology and anthropology, we call them 'artifacts, ' or borrowing from philosophy, we call them 'goods' -- are what eventually, over time, become part of the framework of the world for future generations."
