Since we have considered our anti-whetstones, let’s discuss what our whetstones are. Jonathan Mayhew says:
Spain is my whetstone. Maybe one of my whetstones, because the blog is too; other conferences I might go to. My Thursday tertulia can act like that as well, though the conversation tends to be more social than intellectual there. Without this one has “one thought less, each year,” so to speak.
A whetstone is an activity, an experience, or a person that makes your mind sharper, gives you a heightened consciousness of the life of intellect, and helps you generate new ideas. My major whetstones are:
1. Spending time with my sister. She has a very intense professional and intellectual life and being around her makes me think faster, move faster, and want to achieve as much as she does.
2. Airports. The crowds of people, the constant movement, the sense of new arrivals and departures, seeing all of those people on the go, moving with a sense of purpose really inspires me and makes me think more clearly and with a better sense of direction. Also, the airplanes soaring into the skies make me want to soar intellectually, so to speak.
3. Malls or big department stores. I’m fairly starved of sensory impressions in the small town where I live. There are too few people, too few changes, everything is always the same, repetitive, routinish. At least, at a mall there are crowds of different people, objects with different textures that I can touch, various new smells I can inhale.
4. Big cities but not the ones like St. Louis that are empty and dead. Only the cities where there are crowds of people outside day and night.
5. Conferences sometimes. But not nearly often enough. One conference that really charged me up was the one where a very interesting performance artist from Latin America gave a talk and showed her art.
So ideally, I would take an airplane to meet my sister somewhere in Berlin or Barcelona to go to a department store together and then visit an exhibition of modern art. That would totally result in a whole new book project or at least a few articles.
What are your whetstones?
Clarissa's Blog 
Big cities with lots of people around. And going to conferences.
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I tend to pick up on other people’s….. vibes (for lack of a better word) so being in big agitated or aimless crowds tends to fog up my mind (though being around an excited crowd gives me a contact buzz).
Airports are okay if they’re not too crowded (as John Waters said, if you’re in an airport that means something is going on in your life). Shopping malls not so much (I tend to be a dash in and out buyer not a browser).
I don’t mind active cities (Budapest and Bucharest are favorites) but again there’s that suddenly too many people out of nowhere feeling that slows me down and makes me feel like I’m swimming in mud.
Puzzles help me, especially word kinds of puzzles and a few online games (like the submachine series). Cleaning also helps – I tend to prefer to let some mess form and then clean it up rather than keep things spic and span, but putting things in order is nice thought provoking work.
Long walks by myself (at least an hour) are wonderful for me to organize thoughts and work on problems, intellectual and otherwise.
Also new cultural phenomena, not necessarily high art but discovering new stuff from other cultures (esp ones I don’t know much about) is a wonderful feeling. Lately I’m into a kind of popular folk-based popular music from Albania which is much more accessible and interesting to me than similar kinds of music from Romania or Bulgaria.
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Topology conferences, Pagan religious events, and science fiction conventions qualify as my whetstones. They can also, although rarely, be “anti-whetstones”.
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Taking a university class in anything I am unfamiliar with. Getting (and learning) a protocol with some new science. Most recently, it was a Human Factors study to learn how people use a medical device new to them; fascinating. Painting and writing.
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I should also mention that in general living in central/eastern Europe has had a wonderful whetstone affect on me in general. I often say that living in Poland (or some neighboring country) is wonderful assertiveness training for wimpy Americans and has in general sharpened a lot of my senses.
There’s a lot to love about the US and I’m glad I was born and raise there but as an adult I really probably shouldn’t actually live there…..
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Talking about wimpy Americans, armed adults in cars who get deathly terrified of unarmed teenagers are one good example.
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See? If he’d gone to Poland (or somewhere close by) we wouldn’t have this whole mess! It just goes to show I’m right… again! (okay I’ll tone it down now)
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“See? If he’d gone to Poland (or somewhere close by) we wouldn’t have this whole mess! It just goes to show I’m right… again! (okay I’ll tone it down now)”
– Right you are, we wouldn’t. I can just about imagine the derision a Russian police officer would encounter if he complained that he was scared to death by unarmed teenage pedestrians. A prison sentence would be a sweet release for such a fellow.
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By my age you don’t need those sorts of things as you basically have your own rhythms. Or not.
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Thank you so much for following my blog. I really enjoyed your sharing of your whetstones, and I can relate to some of them. My talks with my sister, like yours, are whetstones for me. Also my book club meetings, some of the blogs I read, many of the books I read. I would add road trips by myself. . . stopping and absorbing without distractions. Thank you for posing this question. It was a whetstone itself!
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My major whetstones are:
New words
Ammosexual: A person who has a fetish about guns. Lots of folks like this in the NRA.
New phrases
Henry Giroux’s polemics on Truthout.
Of course, the news.
Today the people of Catalonia are voting in a non-binding independence poll.
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I love “Ammosexuals” too. Not as people but as a word.
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