personal niche vs common ground

i just read a chapter of a book by john mcphee, in which he talks about our ever-shrinking reservoir of common references. he discusses a writing class he conducted in a high school where his granddaughter was a student. there were nineteen students in the class, and he asked them to raise their hands if they knew, or had heard of, a list of names and cultural references. nineteen hands shot up at the mention of time magazine, muhammad ali, denver, mexico, hamlet, and winston churchill. only eighteen knew about sarah palin, omaha, barbra streisand, or rolls royce. and on down the list. fort knox: 15. elizabeth taylor: 11. cassius clay: 8. norman rockwell, truman capote, joan baez: 5. Laurence Olivier: 1. Calabria, Jackie Gleason, Jack Dempsey, George Plimpton, Samuel Johnson, Bob Woodward: 0. in the end he concludes that this shrinking pool of common references is happening, but that it has also always been happening, as the world has gotten more and more complicated, and we have been segregated further and further into our personal niches of likes, dislikes, and areas of knowledge. i don’t have a particular conclusion. on one hand we are losing a method of connecting to each other. on the other hand, there are more and more people able to bring us interesting news from their area of specialty. i think if we stay walled off, this is a bad thing, and if we remain curious and open, it isn’t the worst thing. does it matter how many of you know that these beach stones with holes in them are called hagstones? well, now you know. your turn: share something interesting from your world.

beach rocks with holes in them (aka hagstones)

go team

i don’t really watch sports, and i don’t really have a home team. i love my great lakes region and my country but don’t automatically assume it’s the best place on earth just because i was born there. i mostly want everyone to win. but through five trips to the languedoc, this occitan cross has increasingly grown on me. i don’t respond to knights and crusades and heraldry. i am not particularly religious. but everytime i see this cross now, the symbol of this humble and beautiful place, i think to myself. yes. go team.

occitan cross

scale

we’ve been spending a lot of time at the beach this trip, because we have a son who has discovered fishing, to his father’s delight. i spent our last “fishing” trip dodging waves near the end of their reach, walking slowly from rock deposit to rock deposit, scanning the ground just in front of my feet. i was looking for a collection just like this, with stripes, and curious formations, and holes. as i put the composition together, i realized that i had also unthinkingly picked only rocks within a small range of size. i wasn’t deliberately thinking about how the rocks would lay out later, but instinct must have guided me, because, it’s easy to see now, the whole thing falls apart if the elements of the arrangement are out of scale.

beach rocks from Sète

b side

yesterday i posted a symmetrical pattern of the backsides of telline clams. today i’m posting a random but not quite chaotic pattern of the insides of telline clams. walk any mediterranean beach, and the little glints of lavender you see are shards of these shells. they are beautiful inside and out.

tellines (clams)

aftermath

this is in some sense the aftermath of a meal. these shells are tellines, tiny clams from the mediterranean, which we ate for lunch on a sunny terrace in november, an experience that still feels surreal to a pair of minnesotans checking their wintry feeds from home. when lunch was over, we started arranging the little double wings into patterns on the table, and when it became clear that this was going somewhere, we rinsed them clean, and i brought out some of my white still blog paper, and let my very patient husband with slight ocd tendencies go to town.

tellines (clams)