Reading the Hopeful, Part 2: Enough

A typical Boreen, or green lane, at Cleanderry, County Cork

One of the reasons that I haven't finished the re-write/re-edit of More News From Nowhere is that the utopian impulse seems to be a fairly common one. No sooner do I think I've read everything I need to read in order to wrap up the project, someone writes something so relevant and/or useful that I have to read that in order to continue. 

The most recent preoccupation comes from a review I read in The Idler back in late 2019, which was followed by my purchasing the book and getting about halfway through it before I underwent yet another cardiac surgery (this time a stent in one of my old bypasses) and, soon after that, the world closed down with Covid 19. I recently went back to the book, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, by Mark Boyle and found it well marked up with notes and comments and have been drinking it in ever since. Just the thing to help me answer the naysayers who have (and will in future, no doubt) insist that nobody could live like my utopians live in my book. [The link to Boyle himself goes to the Wikipedia article on him, which can give you a good idea of what he's about.]*

Boyle mostly does live without technology. He gained a bit of notoriety with his first account of un-modern life, The Moneyless Man: A year of freeconomic living (at the above link), but this one goes further and does a spiffing job of making readers question their dependence on mod-cons. His account of living on his little Irish freehold challenges the presuppositions of even old Luddites like me. I find much to admire in his steadfast carrying forth of his principles. Were I fifty years younger and not dependent on the latest medical technologies for my continued existence, I'd be more than willing to give it a try. 

What we can all learn from his account is that educating our own desires is foundational to saving the world. That education begins with wondering about how much of what we have or desire is actually necessary, and how much of it has been programmed into us by our having been brought up in a capitalist economy that sees money (and what it buys) as a measure not only of economic status, but also of moral worth.

Reno Gazette Journal, 4 December 1930
via Ancestry

Reading Boyle, I am constantly reminded that I am barely two generations away from my grandmother's early life near Nevada mining towns, in a hand-built cabin with no running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, or refrigeration. They farmed the desert, and my great grandfather carried mail and passengers from town to town in a stagecoach. The only reason they crossed the border into eastern California was because the children needed to be educated, and there were no local schools. So the family packed up and rode the Slim Princess, a narrow-gauge rail service, to the Owens Valley, where my father and his siblings (and, somewhat later, I) were born. Big Pine wasn't exactly a bustling burg in the 1920s, but it did have electricity, and, within a decade, automobiles. In 1930, my father's little sister Adele was killed by one of these soon-to-be ubiquitous machines on her way home from school, when she she was only seven.

When I was about five years old, my father was transferred to a US air base near Tokyo. Because of my mother's desire to get to know the Japanese people, we rented a tiny little three-room house in a tiny little town. It had a rudimentary kitchen with a hand pump, and an outdoor benjo (squat toilet; or, better translation:  shitter), and a Japanese dancing school next door. In exchange for English lessons from my mother, the instructor agreed to teach me a traditional form of dance (Fuji Musume), and that's where I acquired the "baby Japanese" language facility that was later to enable me to communicate with veterans of the Japanese occupation when we were stationed in Taiwan some years later. But the rusticity of our living conditions provided an early lesson in how to live with limited technology. Our cottage was heated with a pot-belly wood-burner in the living room (which was where my parents slept), and that may have been where we got our hot water for cooking as well. I don't remember, though, and everyone involved is now long gone, so that question will go unanswered. But I do recall going together as a family to the public baths every evening, except when the snow was so deep outside our front door that we couldn't get out. 

We had to leave for base housing a year later when I started school--and the parallel with my grandmother's experience does resonates here--but that brief experience imprinted itself on my child's brain as adventure rather than hardship. I thus have a much better idea of what living without modern comforts is like than most middle class children of my own generation. Even our time in Taiwan (1958-1962) found us living in old Japanese houses with, if we were lucky, ceiling fans to cool us through subtropical summers, and hibachi heaters in the winter. Oh, and no television! For five years at the beginning of TV's golden age!

So, for me, Boyle's book provides a thoughtful, generous, and compelling look at what rejecting the overwhelming effects of increasing technological "innovation" could look like. And when approached as a conscious choice, rather than a matter of privation and injustice, the beneficial effects of living on enough (rather than too little or way too much) can offer us alternatives to the economic excesses and environmental degradation modern human lifeways are inflicting upon the world.

The question that undergirds my writing life these days seems to be a popular one among sociologists, economists, and philosophers alike: Just how much is enough? What do we actually need in order to live a satisfying and fulfilling life? William Morris called answering these questions "the education of desire" and saw that education as instrumental to bringing about a just and fulfilling society.

In my efforts to offer a plausible path to the good life in More News From Nowhere, I began to realize that what my utopians were really after was twofold: an escape from the economic and environmental crises facing twenty-first century humanity, and an alternative way to exist in a reimagined world where human goals were not defined in terms of wealth and power. And two recent books, with very similar titles, approach these questions from different but compatible viewpoints.

In 2022, Avram Alpert published The Good-Enough Life, a counterpoint to the prevalence of quests for greatness that have dominated human ambitions throughout history. Although most of us have been brought up to seek excellence and greatness, Alpert notes that striving for lofty goals develops hierarchies that inevitably lead to unceasing competition to be best at something. His reasons are complex and his evidence interdisciplinary, and he draws from both eastern and western philosophical and economic traditions. Fairness, equal opportunity, and the survival of the natural world are vital to enabling us all to flourish. Making America "great" again is hardly a worthy goal if it means that the planet and its denizens are the "losers" at the hands of the "winners." As I read this book, daily news broadcasts provided ample examples of the inevitable consequences of continually ignoring what is decent and fair and sufficient for everyone so that those with much more than they need can compete to build extravagant, wasteful, grandiose evidence of human wonderfulness. Especially since the artifacts these endeavors produce are only wonderful for a tiny fraction of humanity.

In 2024, Daniel Miller published The Good Enough Life, which combines political economy with an ethnographic study of the inhabitants of a small Irish town. This project provides a real-life grounding for the exploration of what economic sufficiency and "good enough" might mean in an everyday setting. Ethnographies often employ an almost narrative structure, and this one offers a cohesive framework for illustrating what "good enough life" means to those living it. This book is also carefully grounded in the philosophical notions of the good life that have developed since the Greeks. My favorite part of the book, however, is Miller's focus on geezers like me, living in an environment remarkably similar to that of my grandmother's life in my home town in California. Miller lived in "Cuan" (not its real name) for sixteen months, and interviewed 170 people to determine their views on life and technology and necessity in the modern world. 

My main reason for seeking out books like these was to be able to counter accusations about my naivety and what might seem simplistic solutions for complex problems. But criticism of a low-tech, philosophically informed way of living because it seems (to modern folk) impossible seems rather shallow from an historical perspective. My generation's very proximity to the much simpler lives of our grandparents and their parents, to people around the world who manage with many fewer modern conveniences, and to those who have no choice in any of this should make it fairly simple for us to at least imagine much less complicated and less technologically compromised ways to survive on this planet. Perhaps simply considering alternatives, and being able to better manage our choices might eventually lead to significant change.

William Morris ended News From Nowhere, having lived for only a short while in the world he had imagined, with this wish: " . . . if others can see it as I have seen it then it may be called a vision rather than a dream." Considering a good-enough life, rather than some gazillionaire's notion of worth and greatness, seems much more likely to produce ideas and models that could ameliorate the damage already done to this fragile planet and its inhabitants. 

I have one more post planned to conclude my offering of usable resources for changing minds (if not the world). Some quite hopeful and capable people have been writing and talking about how to heal the planet, and have come up with some actual strategies for accomplishing change. Life is getting in the way again around here, but I hope to be able to get it together within the next month or so.

Meanwhile, stay cool if you can, and do a rain dance or two if you think that might help.

Source and image notes

*I do not have a partnership agreement with my online shop of choice (Bookshop.org), but urge you to order from them if you don't shop on-ground. The "convenience" of Amazon costs more to my conscience than any benefits, and using Bookshop diverts a bit of my cash to an independent bookshop of my choice--and you can do the same if you're not currently all that fond of multi-billionaires. My links to books, however lead either to the original publisher, or to useful critical responses.

The brief note about my Aunt Adele's death came from Newspapers.com, bits of which I have access to through Ancestry.com.

While reading Mark Boyle, I learned a bit of Irish, thanks to his use of traditional words for some of the objects in his little community. One such term is boithrín pronounced (roughly) "bor-EEN." It describes a narrow path with grass growing in the middle, between wheel tracks--often from carts. Such routes were also common in both Taiwan and in the Owens Valley when I was growing up. The photo I've included, "Unpaved boreen on the Beara Peninsula, County Cork," is a good example. It was taken by Nigel Cox as part of the Geograph Project in Great Britain and Ireland, via Wikimedia Commons.

Reading The Hopeful, Part 1: Reading The Dead

Topographic Map of Utopia Planitia on Mars

In case you needed any evidence that I've been ranting on similar topics pretty consistently since this blog came into being in 2007, I used my search function to look up mentions of "utopia." One post in particular struck a chord with recent navel gazing on my part: "Who Can Really Save The World?" from July 2, 2009.

As I look back over these last seventeen years, things seemed almost benign and innocent in those days. The post's focus was on the question of individual vs. collective action as a means to fix things. The consensus of the replies to my take was that we need both. We can't do it alone, but we can't just ignore the impact of individuals. Since then, I've been reading both fiction and non-fiction considerations of possible solutions. But in 2009, our country had elected a thoughtful constitutional scholar who was also Black. I'm pretty sure I was a good deal more optimistic in those days than I am now.

In the 1990s I had read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars), and spent a great deal of time reading Ursula K. Le Guin's newer, more political works (I'd been reading her since the 70s). A bit later I began to discover hard science-fiction writers like Stephen Baxter, Liu Cixin, and Andy Weir, as well as visiting and revisiting the classics that had nourished my interest in SF since I first discovered Heinlein and Asimov and Clark as a ten year-old.

Lately, though, I've been especially gratified by Robinson's more recent contributions to my quest for a tinge of optimism. A few nights ago I finished (for the third time) his rather astonishing look at possibility: The Ministry For The Future. The particularly striking element of this long, dense extrapolation of possibility into practicabilty (not sure that's a word, actually), is that since the first time I read it, many of the near-future events depicted reflect current concerns and solutions in process. Nothing's pat, certain, or simple. But the thread of hope is there, and some very interesting ideas are worked through. This is not in any sense a Morrisian utopia, because the revolution Morris envisioned could not have happened without completely destroying the world as he knew it. 

So: I thought it might be helpful to compile a list of works--fiction, non-fiction, political/philosophical, interdisciplinary--that I've been reading or intend to read while I try to  make myself not-crazy. I've decided to begin with what amount to two literary obituaries, because they're still top of mind. [Note: I'm not linking the books mentioned because I don't have any affiliate agreements with booksellers and figure that you know where you shop.]

Reading the Dead

I have an unfortunate ability to discover potentially really inspiring or intellectually challenging writers just before or not long after they die. The first such discovery was the desert writer Ellen Meloy, who wrote The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (Pantheon, 2002). A  blurb for Howard Berkes's interview with Meloy on NPR's "All Things Considered" describes it as "a look at how color and light inform human behavior and in particular, the color turquoise, which ties together cultures from the American Southwest to ancient Persia and Afghanistan." A brief glance through the table of contents and a chapter or two were enough for me to buy it on the spot, and to read it almost immediately. At the time, I was just settling into my career as a design-school educator, still working on my not-yet-abandoned dissertation, getting used to life as a bungalow-owner, and still enormously homesick for the desert southwest. I'd had bypass surgery in 1995 after a trip home to the Owens Valley, and by 2002 I had started working on More News From Nowhere. A couple of years later I picked up a copy of her last book, Eating Stone, and found out that she had died suddenly at 58 in 2004 of a heart ailment. She was only a year older than I was. Only four books. Not fair.

Tatiana Schlossberg published Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have in 2019. On December 8, 2025, she wrote an article for the New Yorker about her experience with a rare form of leukemia: "A Further Shore" (it appeared in the online edition of the magazine on November 22, 2025 as "A Battle With My Blood"). She died on December 30, 2025. Again, not fair. But you could read Inconspicuous Consumption, be somewhat heartened, and learn something useful. It's wise, witty, erudite, and should be read by everyone.

Of course, when you get to be as old as I am, and your research focuses on "dead white guys," or "the canon," you rely on solid journalism and criticism to discover younger, promising, multi-colored, -gendered, or ethnically diverse writers who appear in the pages of book reviews (in my case) in The New York Times or The Guardian or The New Yorker or The Idler or New Scientist. My tastes are eclectic and often whimsical. So my discoveries are often serendipitous and almost always surprise me. 

As I work on finishing More News From Nowhere, I'm going through several stacks of recent acquisitions with an eye toward annotating my sources, and in the next few posts I want to "out" some of the most thought-provoking works that have come to my attention recently.  I've divided my stacks into related volumes, and will offer them up in sequence to keep the posts short. 

I hope friends, followers, and accidental readers might find these helpful if you, like I, are finding the world as it is increasingly difficult to navigate. Good books with good ideas and helpful outlooks seem always to have a place in our lives, whether their writers are still with us or not. 

If you have suggestions to make in any of the categories I'll be including, please let me know--and offer your own observations about their worth. 

Topics to come: Enough, Analog, Slow, and various aspects of political economy and Tikkun Olam [link is to search results on The Farm]

Image notes: Whenever possible I like to exploit the good will of organizations I support, like Wikimedia Commons and the Public Domain Review, so while looking for depictions of "utopia" I was pretty sure that an image of this segment of Mars would show up. But the colors here were a real surprise, so I thought it might be interesting to see what the ESA came up with to describe the image: 

This colour-coded topographic image shows part of Utopia Planitia, a large basin on Mars. It was created from data collected by ESA’s Mars Express on 9 November 2024 (orbit 26327) and is based on a digital terrain model of the region. 

A wide, horizontal view of a planetary surface shown in cool turquoise and greenish-yellow tones. The terrain looks smooth in places and mottled in others, with faint circular shapes suggesting shallow craters. Subtle colour variations ripple across the surface, giving it a softly textured, almost painted appearance.  

When I was reading the Mars trilogy, I really wanted some good photos, and this would have been wonderful to use as a bookmark.

Coming to Terms With Technological Change

Olivetti Lettera 22

For over thirty years I've been wondering how to approach emerging questions introduced by innovations in information technology.  At first (in the '80s) I accepted new-fangled objects like computers and screens almost without question. And then I happily embraced e-mail, primarily because it enabled me to keep in more frequent touch with my father, who had been an eager early-adopter. During the last fifteen or so years of his life (he died at 83 in 2004) we enjoyed a lively correspondence that had been enhanced by the ability to exchange messages much more quickly than we could by post--although we continued using the older tech in order to include family members who hopped on the bandwagon more slowly. 

We were both less receptive toward portable telephones, although I reluctantly bought an early Nokia when my mother was ill and I was teaching, although land-line phones sufficed for everything but emergencies. But borrowing a friend's mobile phone in 1995 for a solo road trip to California (only weeks before I underwent bypass surgery) made portability's uses even clearer. It still took some active persuasion for me to buy my first iPhone, but one of my students convinced me of its efficiency, and I fell under Apple's spell.  I still have that old silverback, which had to be replaced within a year or so, but have reluctantly upgraded only when I had to. It's really too bad that Apple was, from the beginning, so committed to planned obsolescence that it would never develop anything that didn't need to be modified on a frequent schedule. Fast tech was born at the dawn of the era of fast food, fast fashion, and ever-increasing waste.

Oddly enough, my first gig at the Art Institute of Dallas was teaching "Computer Literacy" in 1989. I'm not sure why I was hired, except that I had been a TA at UTD in the computer science lab before a real teaching assistantship opened up. But by the time I became a full-time humanities instructor, I had realized that a course website would help me communicate better with my students and make it possible to provide resources for them that our high-tech multi-media focused college couldn't yet supply. 

So I bought a domain, started learning how to use Adobe PageMill, and created a site that became known as "Owldroppings" (don't ask). I switched over to Adobe Creative Suite when I got a free teaching copy, and that provided me with better tools for design and image manipulation. A couple of students hosted the site over the years, and I eventually learned enough about maintaining it to take over its management. Not long after that, a colleague convinced me that I really needed to start a blog. And so, nearly nineteen years ago, on June 22, 2007, I wrote this: 

I swore I would never do this. Who wants to read my stuff, anyway? But pressures mount in an academic/technical environment, and I was seduced by somebody else's blog.

I grew more enthusiastic about the enterprise as I got into it; then, of course, life got in the way and my output dwindled. But I have kept it up, if intermittently. The websites not so much.

My distaste for other social media, however, has remained steadfast in most ways. I've never had a Facebook or Twitter account, having been pretty ferocious in my opposition to what they and similar platforms were putting out from the day they were launched, despite the fact that my children and many other family members eagerly opened accounts on one or more of them. 

I actually had an Instagram account for a few years because I thought it might be good for putting pictures up on the blog, but only ever used it to follow a few bookstores--and recently got rid of it altogether. There is a Quora account (I joined in 2011 because Ursula K. Le Guin had one; but she left shortly after I arrived), on which I still hold forth very occasionally on topics about which I have some expertise. There's also a Pinterest account because it's still a good curatorial tool and substitutes for collections of magazine clippings--although mine has no social value to me or anyone else. My only regret about using it is that when it gets bought up by some greedy megacorp that decides I don't buy enough stuff from the advertisers, I'm outta there and so are all my beguiling boards and images. My feed is increasingly being populated by AI Slop, however, so perhaps it won't take an EMP to drive me away or obliterate my collections.

Which brings me to my current conundrum, confession, and concession. (Don't smirk; I worked hard on that.) 

Remember that course website ("Owldroppings"), the construction of which convinced me that not all modern technology was a waste of time and effort?  It hung around the interwebs for several years, even after I retired, and a couple of my former students decided it was worth preserving. So they deposited bits of it onto The Internet Archive's wonderful, magical Wayback Machine. In the meantime I had redesigned the home page and renamed it "Owl's Farm (The Website)," considered some ideas about what could happen to it, and then let it sit.

I had also constructed a site for what I had once thought might be my final attempt at a doctoral dissertation: a riff on William Morris's utopian novel, News From Nowhere, complete with resources and other materials related to what I called More News From Nowhere. And because I was teaching both Morris's book and mine in a course called "Technology and Utopia" at AiDallas, I published the first draft online. And there it sat. Until last week.

Since early this year I've been trying to reclaim both sites and bring them back to life. But I kept having technical problems with my software (a pre-cloud version of Dreamweaver), my computers (two old Macs running old operating systems), my understanding of how FTP works, and my host (Go Daddy) with whom I've been doing business for twenty years. I got frustrated a couple of times, and backed off when I couldn't understand what I was doing. This lasted for about six months, but last week I decided to try again and was introduced to a new platform that I automatically said NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO to. But the particular salesman I talked to (they call them "Guides") engaged me in conversation long enough for him to get on the Wayback Machine, scrape my material off, slap it into the Ai program, and produce pages that weren't awfully different from what I would have done.

In essence, the program did--in about a half an hour total--everything I had been trying to do since I retired. I feel a bit like Sibling Dex meeting the robot Mosscap for the first time in A Psalm for the Wild Built (thank you, Becky Chambers)!  "Cheese" (my guide; not his real name, but close) managed to convince me, not by using ad-speak or some tech-salesperson language with which I am inadequately familiar, but by showing me. And it's not AI Slop, either. It's my sensibilities tidied up a bit and translated into a newer, cleaner version of what I had constructed all those many years ago. I can edit everything (even code, although it's not code-based), add my own graphics and images, and pretty it up if I want to. I've since been working on both sites as I think about what I want to happen with them, making changes, publishing them, and getting on with my life.

I still have major problems with the current artificial intelligence obsession. I'll go into those in some depth later. I'll also feature a discussion of some of it in the novel. But for now I'm back to writing and editing, and have built (along with my robot, who's very affable and polite, and probably needs a name) workable update of the originals. If you're curious about the earlier material, you can always visit the Wayback Machine, although accessing More News From Nowhere can be confusing, the text has changed significantly, and will not be uploaded until I'm ready for feedback. I also haven't tried looking at older versions of owlfarmer.com. 

Once again, however, the right person has talked me back from absolutism and stridency to a position of reasonableness. I still deplore the latest trends in visual manipulation, although perhaps charts might be a good outlet for "designers" who simply want to type in a few parameters and push a button. But for those of us who learned from scratch how to design and edit code and were pretty successful at it, and who are now older than dirt and not all that good at it any more, this alternative may provide a path forward.

More News From Nowhere* and "Owl's Farm: The Website" are now linked at the top of this blog. "Owl's Farm (The Blog)" and "Owl's Cabinet of Wonders" will stay on Blogger and undergo only a few modifications and updates.

I hope you folks who are still here will stay with me.  

*Note: I am well aware of Nick Cage's song of the same name; the two works share a source of inspiration (Morris's book) and possible thematic elements (according to the Wikipedia account), but I've never heard the song itself. I began working on the material that led to my story in 1992 when I started conducting research on Morris and his critique of modern technology, so I was way ahead of Cage with that title.

Image credit: My first text-producing machine ever was an Olivetti Lettera 22. The photo is from Wikipedia's page, because the one I still own is a rusty, scruffy mess.  My mother had a friend who was an Olivetti salesman in Taiwan, and he gave her the 1961 script version. She gave it to me, and I typed papers on it in college. One professor wrote on the cover of what was otherwise an excellent paper on John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B, "This typewriter could drive a man to drink." Here's what it looked like:

I think there's a technological message in here. Somewhere.