Land Of Empty Time
People often ask why Minnesota seems to be such a hotbed of blogging. In addition to the Northern Alliance of Bloggers, there a number of other high-quality blogs based in the North Star State. Various theories have been offered to explain the phenomena.
Our own Saint Paul believes that it's due in large part to the mediocre writing talent (with a few notable exceptions) and overt political biases of the local media, in particular the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Others have claimed that it's because of the less-than-stellar weather, a theory similar to one often used to explain the number of successful rock bands that emerged from the Pacific Northwest during the heyday of grunge. The reasoning was that it was too crappy to do anything outside, so people were driven indoors where they honed their musical acumen.
Now we have another possibility posited by Mark Oppenheimer in a piece at National Review called Typing Alone (well worth reading). Oppenheimer believes that today's college students are trying to do too much with their time and are covering too many fields, rather than allowing for the kind of in-depth exploration often necessary to inspire true genius:
I return to the example of Stephen Fry at his typewriter. I don't know where he went to school, but wherever it was, I imagine that he pulled decent grades and fulfilled all his obligations while still having time for his odd and rather masochistic project. His school must have been -- or at least I fantasize that it was -- a place with dead time. Perhaps there was an expectation that students fill that dead time with hobbies, or with conversation, or with deep reading. Perhaps, of course, there were no such expectations at all, and most students drank away the dead time at the pub -- Fry might have been one such student, a compulsive typist and committed dipso -- but still, empty time makes us think. Boredom is a great builder of persons. It took London to make Charles Dickens, but it only took Minnesota to make Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
UPDATE: More on Oppenheimer's piece from King at SCSUScholars.
No comments:
Post a Comment