Looks like it’s Sunday, and that means it’s time for another #Lifehouse thread. I’m intensely mindful that I’ve been talking about the book Quite A Lot lately, so I’m thinking of dialing back on the frequency of these posts a tad – you’ll let me know if that sounds right. But for today, let’s talk about one of my favorite aspects of the book, which is the chance it finally afforded me to affirm in my writing an intensely material, hands-on flavor of politics that descends from the DIY/DIT 1960s.
Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that I was kind of a fuckup at the age of 13, dealing with life issues that included not having a stable place to stay and also what I’d pretty clearly now characterize as ADHD. I was getting bullied in school – not awfully, but enough to make it an unpleasant place to be – and had started to cut classes. Up to then an ostensibly “gifted” student, I landed a failing report card in my first semester of eighth grade, and one day just refused to go back.
The school district insisted I see a psychiatrist, who wasn’t great, but to his credit told my parents, “You should trust him, he really isn’t going back there. You need to find an alternative.” Well, conventional private schools were out of the question. There were Friends schools around – two of them, excellent – but even putting expense aside I just bounced off their social universe. My parents were getting fairly desperate, when somehow they heard of a place that seemed to offer some hope.
It was a failing, hippie-era experiment in egalitarian education called the Miquon Upper School, which makes it sound a lot grander than it was. It was in a ramshackle house in Chestnut Hill, an hour away across town – I had to take two commuter trains to get there in the morning, and two to get back, which was its own kind of education. And it didn’t have grades in either sense, i.e. neither year-based distinctions of curriculum, or letter-based evaluations of performance. You called teachers
by their first name. You took whatever classes you felt ready for, with whoever else was there, from 12 to 18. There was lots of hands-on craft. It was the kind of place where students had a smoking room (!), and put on their own production of “Ubu Roi.” It literally saved my life.
There were many wonderful things about Miquon. I orbited a set of older students who seemed impossibly glamorous to me, who drove and smoked and made films and listened to the Specials and Black Flag and had sex (sometimes at school!). But the very best thing about Miquon for me was the library. It had been lovingly accumulated over two decades, and was filled to overflowing with the cultural and intellectual fruits of the American ‘60s and ‘70s.
This meant everything from James Baldwin and Tom Stoppard to “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and War Resisters’ League material on how to evade the draft. But it’s now clear to me that one thing I first found in the library there had more consequence for the rest of my life than anything else, and that was “The Whole Earth Catalog.” I’d just never seen anything remotely like it. It blew my mind.
There was a rich tranche of parallel texts in the library as well – unless I’m very badly mistaken, for example, it was the first time I saw Ken Isaacs’ brilliant “How Go Build Your Own Living Structures” (and the last time for many years, as well, until the internet returned it to me lifetimes later). There was, in short, access to a whole way of thinking about and intervening in the material world I’d barely been exposed to. http://letsremake.info/PDFs/k_isaacs.pdf
If I can summarize what I learned from that first scatty, ADHDish, mostly-looking-at-the-pictures encounter with this current of thought and praxis, it was that you didn’t have to accept the material world of tooling and shelter and vehicles as some eternal, received truth. People who felt left out of the mainstream deal could, with some effort, design themselves genuine alternatives. And these alternatives were generally what we’d now call lightweight, modular, extensible & user-configurable.
And what was very clear to me, and most exciting, was that people equipped with these alternative technics could step outside of the monstrous waste and inhumanity it was even then clear to me (at the age of 13, in 1981-82) was the purpose and motor of the mainstream economy. It would be years before I heard the expression #POSIWID, but I already understood the truth it encapsulated, and I wanted nothing to do with the purpose I saw unfolding in the world.
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