SMP,
> This concept of third places has been on my plate for a long time. It 
> first came up when I published a weekly newspaper in a remote place 
> and I was trying to figure out stories deep underneath the stories and 
> what glued the people and place together- how that worked and what it 
> yielded. Years later, for my graduate project in community and 
> regional planning, I took it up again. The short version of my topic 
> was how tourism ruins local economies because economic developers do 
> not look at local knowledge and etc. There are parallels in the Haiti 
> situation only the pillaging has been more blatant. I can report there 
> is not a lot of support for scholarship that goes gadfly. My topic was 
> not well-received. Bowling Alone and Putnam's work is on topic but, in 
> my opinion, a bit fluffy. That's where my dept. was stuck then.
please give us the unfluffy

mostly what you have here is a naive instinct to hold together and a 
whole lot of folks w/ solidness

we rarely wait to be received, we look to build that world we dare to 
imagine, unhooked, unhinged

> Some towns simply don't have true third places. I live in one that has 
> anemic versions only. That's one reason I like BP.
I just finished reading John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War, hits on 
some of this sense of power, community and 3rd places, the version I 
read he adds an afterword in which he writes how much he hates the 
book... but my reason for reading it at all is that he used to spend his 
summers at the William Floyd Estate (obscure signer Declaration of 
Independence) down the street from us (the families were Floyd-Nichols) 
and one of the locals, who happened to be the NPS guy in charge of the 
site --- we were working on a gutter there -- and brother of Leona's 
husband (Leona that worked w/ us on IPTW 2000), on knowing that I am a 
writer, and my somehow blabbing that Rudy and Laura on a PTN adventure 
had met JN in a whole foods market in Colorado, asked if I could track 
JN down to tell him to get ahold of the way-back farm family here as his 
childhood friend, who had never got right after Vietnam, needed some 
help, the way-back farm family whose vegetable stand I frequent and that 
I buy my stove wood from -- so it is this digging into our local 
communities to find no 3rd places that we seem to reach out to make 
virtual 3rd places... then Lisa points us at the slaughter of hogs in 
Haiti and I pick up a book JN says he would prefer the world read, 
American Blood, and read this incredibly grizzly scene in which a young 
boy is gut shot by an American grunt and a wild pig comes along and 
begins to eat the child alive from the intestines to the heart... if I 
don't get nightmares I will be lucky... and I hear about some guy that 
recently washed up on Plum Island, where I want to go work on the 
lighthouse, if we want to talk about deadly viral diseases, and his 
liver being tossed around on a plate... stay tuned

][<

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