{"id":8759,"date":"2009-06-04T22:00:34","date_gmt":"2009-06-05T05:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/?p=8759"},"modified":"2010-06-26T10:26:54","modified_gmt":"2010-06-26T17:26:54","slug":"why-i-read-ibsen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/8759\/why-i-read-ibsen\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I read Ibsen"},"content":{"rendered":"

[I grew up in a grimy little industrial town called Danville, Illinois. It wasn’t until I was four years old that I stumbled onto an atlas and discovered why I had felt so much out of place from the day of my birth. I graduated from Danville High School two years early — and left town the very next morning. My sister was in that same graduating class, but she has never felt herself to be anything but comfortably at home. She got as far away as the University of Illinois in Urbana, forty miles west, then came back to teach Shakespeare to the college-bound minority of Danville High School. She throws in one Ibsen play a year, and I wrote this essay as a hand-out for her classes. This is madly off-topic, of course, but it’s in keeping with what’s wrong with American education. Plus which, it’s been a while since we’ve had some refinements around this joint, and I’m hearing from clients that they like the deeper-reading bits. So: For the wandering professor, Don Reedy, and for my homebody sister, let’s go for a dip in the fjords. –GSS]<\/em><\/p>\n

 
The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of amazing progress for the West. Average life-expectancy doubled. Infant mortality was halved. The fruits of science and industry were spreading to even the poorest of the poor — hygiene, sanitation, bountiful harvests, rail and sea travel, the telegraph and the telephone, abundant cheap fabrics from the much-maligned mills of England and America. The simple innovation of gaslight, precursor to Edison’s bulb, effectively extended human life by half. The year of 1848 was the year of triumph for the Enlightenment, and monarchies fell all across Europe. The ideals of Voltaire and Jefferson were everywhere ascendant and humanity emerged, dazed and wan, from the prison of tyranny, seeming to dance in the clean, sweet air of liberty.<\/p>\n

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of joy and beauty and purpose in life and in art, and this is one of the best kept secrets in the history of the West. Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[I grew up in a grimy little industrial town called Danville, Illinois. It wasn’t until I was four years old that I stumbled onto an atlas and discovered why I had felt so much out of place from the day of my birth. I graduated from Danville High School two years early — and left […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,24,212],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-casual-friday","7":"category-egoism-in-action","8":"category-flourishing","10":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":845,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/845\/the-frumpiest-little-dump-in-the-midwest-makes-news-again\/","url_meta":{"origin":8759,"position":0},"title":"The frumpiest little dump in the Midwest makes news again . . .","author":"Greg Swann","date":"January 3, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"O, the ignominy! Danville, IL is in the news again... This time, my frowsy little fly-blown hometown amends its past notoriety as the cheapest-of-the-cheap housing markets by refusing to release its abysmal sales data at all:[T]he Danville Board of Realtors in Illinois has decided to withhold sales data from the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Investment"","block_context":{"text":"Investment","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/investment\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/13\/in-my-little-town\/","url_meta":{"origin":8759,"position":1},"title":"In my little town…","author":"Odysseus","date":"November 19, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Business Week, asking where are the affordable homes?:The cheapest metro area in the Realtors' report was Danville, Ill., where the median price in the third quarter was $72,800 -- a level that's scarcely imaginable to people house-hunting in, say, San Diego, Miami, or Boston.I grew up in Danville, IL. It's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":674,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/674\/thanksgiving-brutality-eric-bogosians-talk-radio\/","url_meta":{"origin":8759,"position":2},"title":"Thanksgiving Brutality: Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio . . .","author":"Greg Swann","date":"November 22, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"I like brutal art -- no mercy, no quarter. I like any sort of brutality on the part of the artist, by which I mean the refusal to temporize or euphemize or in any other way permit the audience to gloss over or ignore reality. Understand, I don't seek a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Casual Friday"","block_context":{"text":"Casual Friday","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/casual-friday\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=gregswann-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B00004X13U","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1402,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1402\/a-cry-from-the-heart-for-every-chip-on-its-shoulder-burg-in-america-stage-true-drama-in-the-theatre-darling\/","url_meta":{"origin":8759,"position":3},"title":"A cry from the heart for every chip-on-its-shoulder burg in America: Stage true drama in the theatre, darling","author":"Greg Swann","date":"May 10, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"We saw a performance piece called \"Love, Janis\" last week. It wouldn't do to call it a play. It was more of a fictionalized chronicle of Pearl cavorting with her inner child while blasting through her greatest hits at top volume. The music was beyond excellent, and the interstitial crap\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Casual Friday"","block_context":{"text":"Casual Friday","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/casual-friday\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10744,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/10744\/unchained-melodies-a-sublime-mash-up-of-william-shatners-common-people\/","url_meta":{"origin":8759,"position":4},"title":"Unchained Melodies: A sublime mash-up of William Shatner’s cover version of Common People","author":"Greg Swann","date":"December 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I have time to write software today for the first time in a while -- which is well because we need it. While I was working, Radio Paradise (commercial-free semi-hip music for middle-aged white people) played William Shatner's cover of Pulp's Common People, and it made me so nuts I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Dirty Laundry"","block_context":{"text":"Dirty Laundry","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/dirty-laundry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6336,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/6336\/a-trolley-comes-to-phoenix-tendency-in-reporting-and-why-it-matters\/","url_meta":{"origin":8759,"position":5},"title":"A trolley comes to Phoenix: Tendency in reporting and why it matters","author":"Greg Swann","date":"December 29, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"So it's almost five days since I dropped the dime on the bribe gifts being thrust upon the contributors to AG. Has anyone publicly renounced them so far? We got to see Jay Thompson issue some tepid caveats about the gift products -- from our pages, not AG's. And we\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/blogging\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8759"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12447,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8759\/revisions\/12447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}