Facebook is taking over our lives, have you heard? A case could be made that if I’m on there, it must have jumped the shark already. On the other hand, the population of Facebook is approaching the population of Brazil. Facebookers spend three hours a month on the site, which hugely exceeds the amount of time people spend, say, reading news online.
If three hours a month is typical, then in this one small area of life, at least, I’m an overachiever. The day I signed up, I set up my browser to load Facebook on startup. FB is the primary–and in some cases, only–way that I keep in contact with friends old and new. I hardly ever transition from one task to another without at least a glance at my news feed.
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Last night I went with some friends to hear the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. We don’t have season tickets, but our friends subscribe to the Masterworks Series, and we’ve gotten into the habit of tagging along. This time, as before, when I logged into Ticketmaster a few days before the concert, I worried that there wouldn’t be seats available, except perhaps for a nosebleed seat high in the balcony, with leg room comparable to the backseat of my first car. But apparently I needn’t ever worry. Last night the orchestra section was far from full. It was raining, with some pretty fierce storms blowing through and a tornado watch in effect.
But of course, the turnout wasn’t low because of the weather–not really. The economic downturn last year hit the orchestra hard, as it did many other arts organizations. As of last November single-ticket sales were down 32 percent. Subscriptions have been down as well. Last night, Ted Legasey, president of the symphony’s board of directors, announced that there will be a season next year (yay!), but it comes at a high price: pay cuts for staff and unpaid leave for the musicians (boo!).
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Stuff I like about living in the boonies:
- There’s room for the dogs to roam.
- Our house can’t be seen from the road.
- We have lots of peace and quiet (mostly); even when there’s a racket, it’s usually something kind of cool like the distant rumble of a tractor or the beat of horses’ hooves or the cheeping of frogs.
- There are ponds and wetlands all around us. The pond on one side reminds me of one of Monet’s Giverny paintings: water lilies and foliage dripping down over the water and even an arched bridge at the far end. The other pond is a magnet for waterfowl, including Canadian geese that lead their little flocks of fuzzy gosling around. I can see the wetlands from my office window. It’s filled with gnarled old water oaks that in summer fill my window with an almost electric green. (more…)
I’m calling this “Letters from the Country” in honor of Carol Bly, one of my favorite writers and a cherished mentor.
Back in the ’70s, Carol wrote a series of essays for Minnesota Monthly, and these were later collected in book form
. I first read Letters from the Country in the early ’90s, and it seemed awfully dated and generally outside my worldview. All that stuff about Nixon and the Mrs. Jaycees. Sheesh.
Carol died in December of 2007. As a way of honoring her and commemorating the role she played in shaping my own writing, I decided to read all of her writing. Since I intended to reread Letters anyway, I suggested it for a book group that I participate in, and I volunteered to lead the discussion. This time around, I found it to be considerably more topical. And ja, for sure, you betcha, it contains much of the great wit and moral fierceness that is characteristic of all of Carol Bly’s writing.
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