Category: United States

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“Hermit of Lost Island,” Bahamas

Article in “Island Notes,” a feature column of Bahamaislandinfo, titled “Sadly Lost to the World: The Hermit of Lost Island,” about the American Trappist monk Gerald Groves.

Groves spent time at the Abbey of Gethsemani and knew Thomas Merton, then spent a little while in Martinique, followed by six years as a hermit in Bahamas beginning in 1960, a period described by the article. Groves lived in an abandoned and dilapidated Baptist Church built in 1902 until development drove him out, returning to the U.S. to study and teach. Groves died in 2003.

(Groves published an article about Merton in a 1979 issue of American Scholar.)

An updated URL (2014): http://www.thebahamasweekly.com/publish/author-historian/Sadly_lost_to_this_world_-_the_hermit_of_lost_beach33846.shtml

URL (no longer available): http://www.bahamaislandsinfo.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10087:island-notes-sadly-lost-to-this-world-the-hermit-of-lost-beach&catid=113:island-notes&Itemid=228

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NYT article on “shyness”

Susan Cain writes an article titled “Shyness: An Evolutionary Tactic” (or the more tentative version of the title “Is Shyness an Evolutionary Tactic?”) in a recent edition of the New York Times.

Shyness is here a synonym for introversion, which is examined as a means of observation and assessment by “sitters” versus the extrovert (“rovers”) curiosity and attraction to novelty that often ends in a rush into danger. Mentions introversion as a tool for creativity, contemplation, workplace stability, and psychological well-being. Important point, too, is the medical and pharmaceutical industry’s attempts to make introversion a disease in need of a drug.

The author has a blog titled “Quiet: The Power of Introverts” and a forthcoming book with the same title.

URLs: article – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26shyness.html
blog – http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com

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Alec Soth’s “Broken Manual”

Alec Soth is a Minneapolis photographer and publisher of Broken Manual, a collection of documentary photographs which, as its Vimeo preview puts it,

investigates the places in which people retreat to escape civilization. Soth photographs monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways, but this isn’t a conventional documentary book on life “off the grid.” Instead, working with the writer Lester B. Morrison, the authors have created an underground instruction manual for those looking to escape their lives.

The book is presently only available in a limited special edition.

URL:
website – http://alecsoth.com/photography/projects/broken-manual/
blog entry – http://littlebrownmushroom.wordpress.com/broken-manual/
Vimeo preview – http://vimeo.com/14759277

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Fate of CT “Leather Man”

An article titled “Let Private ‘Leather Man’ Rest in Peace, Teachers Says” in lohud.com, which provides local news for the lower Hudson Valley, New York and Connecticut, describes a controversy over the fate of the remains of the “Leather Man.”

As a team of scientists prepares to exhume the body of the famed “Leather Man,” a Connecticut resident is advocating to leave the mysterious 19th-century figure alone. In November, the Ossining Historical Society received approvals from the state Supreme Court to dig up the obscure leather-clad wanderer so forensic testing could be conducted on his remains. The society owns Sparta Cemetery, where the Leather Man was buried in 1889.

Donald Johnson, a Connecticut school teacher, opposes the exhumation. While the remains will be relocated to a safer site, the intent of the exhumation to extract DNA for research purposes, is wrong, argues Johnson, who launched a web site to express his opposition to the historical society’s plans.

URL: http://www.lohud.com/article/20110509/NEWS02/105090319/Let-private-Leather-Man-rest-peace-teacher-says?

This article is updated by a Huffington Post article.

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margie-goldsmith/exhuming-the-leather-man-_b_862032.html