The Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto: Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything made. Be afraid to know you neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in [...]
Tag Archives: Wendell Berry
Some Wendell Berry.
23-Sep-12Sales Resistance and Killing Chipmunks.
27-Oct-11Wendell Berry says that in the preface to his very interesting book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community that his book about “sales resistance,” a term which I think he never uses again (I do intend to look at the book again and review it). I presume he means by this term a life less economically [...]
Garden and Gun.
15-Sep-11Amazingly, there is actually a magazine called “Garden and Gun: The Soul of the New South.” And more amazingly, it’s not that bad. There’s an article this month about Wendell Berry, along with an article on “the new generation of women who are redefining the Southern Belle.”
Understanding and Virtue.
15-Sep-11“I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here…. It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness. The wild creatures belong to the place by [...]
Michael Pollan Meets Tea Party.
03-Feb-11A nice task for the Republican Congress looking to cut waste. Mark Bittman says overhaul our agricultural subsidy system: End government subsidies to processed food. We grow more corn for livestock and cars than for humans, and it’s subsidized by more than $3 billion annually; most of it is processed beyond recognition. The story is [...]
“Alien Brains For Dinner.”
26-Oct-10I was at a party on an organic farm last Friday, where the guest of honor was this gargantuan mushroom, found by the side of the road. And we had roasted chestnuts too, a first for me. My awe at drawing close to the processes of food growing and gathering only increases. Everything I do, [...]
For the Feast of John the Baptist: this extremely good essay by Wendell Berry; highly recommended. Proof – as if it were needed – that the Magisterium of the Church resides not in the priesthood – which is almost always wrong – but in the Prophets. As it was, is now, and ever shall be. [...]
Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry.
03-Mar-10Several years ago, when I took it in mind to write a book, I reasoned with myself thus: “Young writers go astray by trying to write ‘the Great American Novel.’ Don’t try. Write the best book you can about the county where you live.” That county happened to be Richmond County, or Staten Island, and [...]
Jayber Crow in the flesh.
03-Mar-10Took me by surprise. In the neighboring hamlet of Grahamsville, New York: Proof, I suppose, that Wendell Berry writes plausibly of rural America. And this, of course, is a thousand miles away from Jayber Crow‘s home of “Port William.”
Wendell Berry on why I live the way I do.
28-Oct-11“However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world [...]