Wendell Berry’s Composting Privy

Posted on February 29, 2008 by cmf

Bookslut picked up on the indelible image of Wendell Berry mucking out his composting privvy by pointing out this really interesting interview over at Mother Earth News. Some of his points seem a teeny bit dated (Green Acres? Who has watched Green Acres in 25 years?) but as always, it’s the way Wendell Berry champions those old, unsexy values of work and fidelity and discipline and the hard work of learning a craft. Which sounds very grim, but like the monastic rules, it’s the idea that through discipline comes joy. For instance:

BERRY: It’s like having a milk cow. Having a milk cow is a very strict discipline and a very trying circumstance. It means you’ve got to be home twice a day to milk whether you want to or not, or else the cow will be ruined. Some days you’d rather do anything than go down to that barn and maybe some days you go and you’re kind of bored with it. But other days it’s a most rewarding thing and you realize that you get the reward and happiness of it because you stuck to it when it wasn’t rewarding. There’s some kind of wisdom in that fidelity, when you can say, “All right, every day ain’t going to be the best day of your life, don’t worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.”

Years ago when I was the graduate student indentured servant for the Art of the Wild writers conference at Squaw Valley, we had dinner one night by the lake and Gary Snyder told us about how Wendell Berry called him after his divorce from Masa. Now Berry has written extensively about marriage and fidelity and that he basically doesn’t believe in divorce. Wendell called him up, Gary told us, and said that he should know that if he and Carole came east, they were always welcome at his place. Gary said it really touched him, because he knew how Wendell felt about such things, and he would never have taken Carole there without that kind of an invitation. That it would have been rude. And so, that phone call meant a lot to him, he was really grateful to know that the friendship between the two of them could transcend even such a fundamental difference. (Although they’re really more alike than different — one’s Christian, one’s Buddhist, one’s long-married, one’s divorced, then widowed — but the bottom line is they are both country people, both poets of the country ethic.)

In a week in which my blog seems to have been obsessed with do-it-yourself, and basic skills, and those things that Gary Snyder called “the Real Work,” it seems fitting to end with Wendell Berry, someone with a deep and unsentimental love for the physical world, and for the work it takes to live in honest relationship with that world.

More on Reviving Lost Skills

Posted on February 27, 2008 by cmf

Funny the way synchronicity works — I’ve been thinking a lot about how skills like learning to knit, or sew, or garden, or cook — skills some of our mothers (or in my case, my grandmother) discounted as being the kinds of skills that keep a girl tied to a domestic existence that stifles other opportunity — are for me a fulfilling way of refusing to cede control of my basic lifeskills to the corporate behemoths that seem to have taken over our lives. If I can sew a skirt, I’m not entirely beholden to clothes made in factories. If I can knit a sweater, I am not entirely beholden to some corporate entity for personal warmth. If I can put up my own pickles, I’m not relying on Clausen any more … none of this negates my existence as a cyber-worker, as a person who bought a new car a couple of years ago, as a person who still shops in stores and is in no way living off the grid. I just like knowing that if I have to, I can take care of some of my basic needs myself.

So this morning I pull up the SF Chronicle (another wonder of technology — I can read five newspapers a day) and Georgeanne Brennan has a really fabulous piece about how traditional pig-butchering celebrations are becoming, if not common, at least less of an anomaly than they once were:

The “day of the pig” also has renewed meaning now, when many people are concerned with the source of their food and with humane treatment of animals. Yes, there would be a slaughter, but it would be done with respect for the animal and the food it provides. Using every part of the animal – or as much as possible – would also show our respect for the life given. We would try not to waste a thing.

There’s a real value to keeping all these older skills alive, and in the case of the DIY crafts movement, to re-inventing them and making them hip and alive again. Skills like these brign us into contact with one another — there’s a reason knitting shops have become centers of community for many women (and some men) around the country. Keeping a garden gives me something to discuss with the folks at the farmer’s market in the summer, and because I produce more than I can eat, sharing food brings me into my community in ways I might not experience if I was simply buying all my food at the supermarket. Industrialized food production has been so successful at divorcing most of us from the animal and vegetable nature of our food that it’s no surprise to me that in much the same manner as the absolute conquest of wild nature caused Americans to go back and re-evaluate their relationship to and how they valued wilderness, that the success of industrial agriculture has spurred many of us to go back and re-evaluate our relationship to our food sources.

My First Sweater

Posted on February 26, 2008 by cmf

Here it is — my first sweater. It only took me four years — well, it really only took about a month of actual knitting — I started it a couple of times and had to pull it out a couple of times but finally, it’s done. I’m wearing it now. It’s cozy and heavy and although the sleeves are a little long, it actually fits and the proportions are right –

I’m going to do another one in this same pattern but using Becky Weed’s gorgeous wool she mills over at 13 Mile Ranch. This will be my locavore sweater — the wool was grown and processed just over north of Bozeman — I’ve written before about buying Becky’s lamb and I’ve been wanting to knit something from her yarn for a while now (but I told myself I had to finish the sweater I’d started first). I love that she converted an old barn on her place to a mill, and that she’s working so hard to develop multiple revenue streams for local sheep ranchers. Plus, the wool is gorgeous …

I think I’m going to do this one in a different stitch — seed stitch maybe? With a dark mohair trim and wooden buttons? This is one of those things like learning to sew a skirt, or make jam and pickles, that makes me feel good. I like being able to make something myself, something that doesn’t look like what everyone else is wearing, and that I can tweak so it’s exactly the way I want it. I also take great comfort in not being entirely reliant on the consumerist corporate world for basic things like feeding and clothing myself — there’s some real bottom-line security in knowing that I can take care of my basic needs, that I haven’t entirely lost those skills.

Eclipse in a Small Town

Posted on February 21, 2008 by cmf

I could see the early parts of the eclipse from my living room window, and so I watched it for a while while I sewed my sweater together (not a Franken-sweater although somehow the two front panels of the cardigan are about an inch longer than the back panel. Luckily, this one calls for a decorative crocheted edge which I’m relying on to hide such things). When it was nearly at full eclipse, I stepped outside to watch.

All up and down my street there were people standing in their yards watching the eclipse. A couple of high school kids came out of a house across the street and went to get in their car, “hey! look at that!” one of them said. “Yeah, it’s an eclipse,” I heard my neighbor Mike, two doors up the street, tell them. “Cool.” We all hung out in our yards, watching the eclipse.

Its why I wanted to move to a small town. I love that we all kind of know one another. We get on one another’s nerves sometimes — I had the fence guy here yesterday because it’s become clear that my next door neighbor and I both need a little more privacy in order to get along. So come spring, Mike will return and build me a privacy fence to match the one on the other side of my lot. Good fences, as they say, make good neighbors (and I’m already dreaming of what I can plant along that sunny fenceline).

There’s a Very Old Man whose house we pass every morning on the way to the dog park. His Sweet Brown Dog always comes to the fence for a little love and so we stop, and pet the dog, and wave at the old man in his living room window. Just after Christmas, the Very Old Man disapeared, and I feared he’d died. One Sunday, walking the dog, I ran into his nice old-hippie next door neighbor who told me that no, he’d had a heart attack, but he was okay and they thought he’d be home in a couple of weeks. The neighbor told me she’d met the sister of the Very Old Man at the nursing home where he was recovering. Our grumpy old man had been raised in a tiny cabin in Mill Creek, in a family of ten kids. His parents died when he was only 16, and he’d stayed in that cabin and raised all those siblings. “I know he wanted to get married and have kids of his own,” the sister said. “But he stayed and raised all of us, so that never happened.” Last week, walking to the park I ran into the neighbor as she was carrying a plate of spaghetti and meatballs next door to the Very Old Man for his lunch and it was clear that she’s taking him a plate for lunch and for dinner every day because he’s very old and someone needs to make sure he eats. She didn’t make any kind of big deal of it, I only figured it out because she said Brown Dog is glad to see her twice a day because she knows she’ll get leftovers.

And that’s why I love living in a small town. Because we all watch the eclipse together. Because everyone watches out for the Very Old People on their blocks. Because the default position is that we’re all in this together, not locked away behind our three car garages in neighborhoods where no one walks, or talks to one another. We walk. We say hello. We pet the dog and wave to the old person in the window and ask the neighbor what happened. We learn one another’s stories.

My New Tool

Posted on February 19, 2008 by cmf

Look at my new pruning saw — isn’t it beautiful? The most beautiful thing about this pruning saw is how well it works. I’d been using a hacksaw, which was really arduous, but this baby, with it’s many sharp teeth made short work of the overgrown golden plum tree, the overgrown local plum tree, and the last of the two weedy ash trees that were taking over my garage.

See what I did with my new saw? It was a very productive weekend. Now let’s just hope for one of those springs we sometimes get where the weather sets up perfectly for fruit trees – it’s always dicey since late-spring frosts are not uneard of around here.

More Movies …

Posted on February 17, 2008 by cmf

My movie marathon continues, and the sweater I began in 2005 is nearly complete — to be fair, I’ve put it down for months at a time, and then pulled out whole sections, but it’s the first one I’ve ever knit. Of course, the proof will be when I put all the pieces together — will it be worth wearing or will it be a Frankenstein’s monster of a sweater? We’ll know soon …

So, as the award season bears down upon us, here’s a roundup of what I’ve been watching this week:

The Lives of Others: Like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, this is one of those movies that I thought I wouldn’t like. In fact, I’ve sent it back to Netflix 3 times after having not been able to get past the opening interrogation scene. I can’t do movies about totalitarianism — they give me nightmares. But I kept reading such terrific things about this movie that finally, this weekend, I stuck it out — It’s marvelous. All the accolades are completely justified — the performances are wonderful and I truly didn’t see where the plot was going. I may very well watch it again tonight now that I know what’s going to happen so I can see how it unfolds. The surprise is that the movie turns out to be about goodness — about the cost of doing the right thing, the cost of trying as hard as one can in impossible circumstances to do the right thing. That the characters are attempting this while buried up to their necks in an evil that they don’t realize is nearly obsolete is all the more heartbreaking.

Margot at the Wedding: Another one I might not have watched had I not had a screener sitting here — Noah Brumbach’s world of lost children and their lost parents in the 70′s always hits a little too close to home for me — but that’s part of the appeal as well. That nearly-forgotten world of self-actualization and bad hair. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black are wonderful as the odd couple with the most genuine connection in the whole movie — another suprise, a movie I liked much more than I thought I would.

Into the Wild: Unwatchable. I got about an hour into this 2.5 hour movie and was so bored I turned it off. If I had to see that character blather on about “the wild” one more time with blissy romantic stars in his eyes I was going to throw up (and this is from a person who fought for the academic legitimacy of wildness and nature during all 5 years of my Phd work). This is the worst sort of Romanticism — it has none of the astringent inquisitiveness that made Krakauer’s book so interesting. Krakauer is someone who has real wilderness skills, and a has been a part of the climbing/outdoors community long enough to see how many starry-eyed untrained goofballs like McCandless are pulled out of rivers and peeled off cliff faces every year because they mistook romantic enthusiasm for skill and preparation. But Sean Penn seems to have cast all that by the wayside in this film.(And the paddling scene really pissed me off — that the PR people are claiming that Emile Hirsh paddled those rapids himself, with no training is absurd — anyone who knows the least bit about whitewater boating can see that a) an untrained boater would have eaten it at the first wave and b) the person in that boat has real skills and knows what he’s doing. I can see a long summer ahead for my search and rescue friends.) At any rate, while I liked the ancillary performances — Catherine Keener is terrific, as is Vince Vaughn as the combine operator (he should play more working guys — he’s got the physique and he’s really good in that milieu). At any rate, I was curious about his one because the book was a sort of seminal text in my academic work and one I would have loved to have taught (the book is much better on how McCandless was influenced/seduced by a particular strain of American literature, with a lot of Tolstoy thrown in for good measure). But I found the movie unwatchable.

Gone Baby Gone: Another terrific surprise — Ben Affleck directs and absolutely nails that strange Boston underbelly. Casey Affleck, who was the bright spot in Jesse James runs away with this movie — he plays that rarity in American popular culture these days, a man. He’s boyish in appearance, but this movie is, like The Lives of Others, deeply concerned with morality — what is right? what is the greater good? how does one live as a good man in a corrupt and evil world? Amy Ryan is also really great as the drug-addict mother of the missing child — it’s a performance in which she never panders to the audience, never tries to redeem her character. Another surprise of a movie —

There’s this week’s movie roundup — there might be nothing on TV thanks to the writers strike, but it’s a really strong year for movies …

Valentine Pig

Posted on February 14, 2008 by cmf

Look at Valentine the pig — it’s not photoshopped, there was this story in the Daily Mail earlier in the week about this adorable Glouchestershire Old Spot pig who came out covered in hearts.

The farmer who bred here has been breeding Old Spots for 25 years, and is pleased to see that the breed’s come back from near-extinction.

My own pig project is on hold for the moment. All my partners in pig raising/curing are tied up with other projects, as am I, and so for now I’ll just have to settle for whatever non-CAFO pork I can manage to find.

So Happy Valentines Day from Valentine the pig …

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Monthly Archives: February 2008