Nate Barksdale Writing + Design.

This year I’ve joined a reading group at my church; last Sunday the book was an old collection of Wendell Berry’s influential agrarian essays. My eleven-year-old nephew sat in on our discussion (he’d read a couple of the essays in preparation), and asked a question that gets to the well-worn stumbling block when it comes to Berry’s bracing jeremiads: “But what if I want to be a computer programmer and not a farmer?” There are ways of answering that within the text, but not always satisfyingly. For me, the passage I loved most from the book was this one, the grace-note ending to Berry’s essay on wilderness.

Looking at the monocultures of industrial civilization, we yearn with a kind of homesickness for the humanness and the naturalness of a highly diversified, multipurpose landscape, democratically divided, with many margins. The margins are of the utmost importance. They are the divisions between holdings, as well as between kinds of work and kinds of land. These margins—lanes, streamsides, wooded fencerows, and the like—are always freeholds of wildness, where limits are set on human intention. Such places are hospitable to the wild lives of plants and animals and the wild play of human children. They enact, within the bounds of human domesticity itself, a human courtesy towards the world that is one of the best safeguards of designated tracts of true wilderness.

Originally published at culture-making.com.

Here’s something pleasing from a young Brooklyn artist: “Book # 001 of a series of books which contain 100% printed reproductions of everything in our world.” With a big nod in the direction of Jorge Luis Borges, who imagined an ancient empire where the craft of cartography had become so exact that the entire realm was mapped on a 1:1 scale, which of course covered the entire realm. “In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.” Tiangco’s first 1:1 reproduction is of an anthropology bookshelf; the whole thing is printed single-sided and perforated, so you can cut up the book and make a giant, bookshelf-sized poster out of it. Hey, it’s probably cheaper than Books by the Foot.

Originally published at culture-making.com.

A lovely string-soaked version of the Magnetic Fields song, to be included on Peter Gabriel’s forthcoming covers album, Scratch My Back. The lyrics are pitch-perfect lovely and (maybe unintentionally, though I wouldn’t put it past the songwriter) capture how I often feel when reading the Old Testament. Scratch My Back will also include Gabriel’s version of my favorite pop song of all time, Paul Simon’s The Boy in the Bubble. Simon and Gabriel are close enough in the pantheon that I can’t tell whether the new version will be transcendent or redundant, but I can’t wait to hear it.

Originally published at culture-making.com.

Here are some intersting thoughts on the ethics of book-buying from an old friend and colleague of mine. Owing to our own Christy Tennant’s year-end recommendation, I’ve got a copy of The Gift sitting ready on my nightstand—the only thing that stands between me and it are 900 pages of the Spanish edition of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Both copies are from the library, which means I am probably a horrible person.

There are ways around this: we can, for example, see it as a moral duty to buy books by authors who are still alive and who deserve money new, rather than used. We could buy books directly from authors whenever possible so that they’re getting a more just cut. We need to re-conceptualize how we think about exchange and consumption. Lewis Hyde’s The Gift presents one such way forward: thinking about artistic creation as something outside the economic. But that requires us to think different both as producers and consumers: maybe that’s what the Internet is trying to tell us.

Originally published at culture-making.com.

I’m currently reading Rebecca Solnit’s thoughtful and astonishing book about the human aftermath of disasters. She argues forcefully against the Hobbesian notion that disaster rips back the veneer of society to expose animal panic and animal selfishness, recounting story after story of post-disaster culture-making of the best kind: selfless, creative, effective, and even joyful. Disaster is horrible, and in its aftermath not everyone behaves nobly, but it also breaks through what Walker Percy called the “everydayness” of life, making it possible to see things and people anew.

When I ask people about the disasters they have lived through, I find on many faces that retrospective basking as they recount tales of Canadian ice storms, midwestern snow days, New York City blackouts, oppressive heat in southern India, fire in New Mexico, the great earthquake in Mexico City, earlier hurricanes in Louisiana, the economic collapse in Argentina, earthquakes in California and Mexico, and a strange pleasure overall. It was the joy on their faces that surprised me. And with those whom I read rather than spoke to, it was the joy in their words that surprised me. It should not be so, is not so, in the familiar version of what disaster brings, and yet it is there, arising from rubble, from ice, from fire, from storms and floods. The joy matters as a measure of otherwise neglected desires, desires for public life and civil society, for inclusion, purpose, and power.

Disasters are, most basically, terrible, tragic, grievous, and no matter what positive side effects and possibilities they produce, they are not to be desired. But by the same measure, those side effects should not be ignored because they arise amid devastation. The desires and possibilities awakened are so powerful they shine even from the wreckage, carnage, and ashes. What happens here is relevant elsewhere. And the point is not to welcome disasters. They do not create these gifts, but they are one avenue through which the gifts arrive. Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times and in other extraordinary times.

Originally published at culture-making.com.

This is the first of a series of posts from all three of this site’s current contributors, about our favorite books, music, and movies of 2009—not necessarily made in 2009, but consumed, pondered, enjoyed and treasured by each of us during the past year. Tomorrow we’ll hear from Christy Tennant, with Andy Crouch rounding out the series on Wednesday.

Movies (well, DVDs): Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven; Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven, Chang-dong Lee’s Oasis, and Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard. 3/4 of the top tier have heaven-ish titles; all are about refuge in one way or another.

Honorable mention to Bette Davis in The Letter, the beautiful Apollo mission footage of For All Mankind, the sublime Flamenco of Carlos Saura’s Bodas de Sangre, and the quasi-New England cookiness of The Devil and Daniel Webster. I’ve also been trying to increase my Bollywood literacy, enjoying some 70s classics like Deewaar as well as, most recently, the hyperactive neon camp of Kutch Kutch Hota Hai, which is a bit like watching a revival of Grease in a gumdrop factory.

In my reading, the stand-out was Dave Eggers’ autobiography of a Sudanese ‘lost boy’, What Is the What. I also dug Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger on the levels of both story and history, as well as Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and the first half of John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor.

Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854–1967 was sublime and led me along all sorts of 19th-century-American-literary trails. Ted Gioia’s history, Delta Blues, got me thinking about music and filling out my playlists with Charley Patton and Skip James.

For a long time I’d been meaning to read Mungo Park’s 18th century Travels in the Interior of Africa, and now I have, and it was good. Ditto, except for the being-good part, for Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. The hypothetical version I’d carried around in my head was so much better.

I could read nothing but Lawrence Weschler and be quite content. Somehow I didn’t get around to Vermeer in Bosnia till a few months ago. Well worth the wait, if that’s what it was.

Finally, a few of my favorite tracks that found their way into my music library in 2009. Coming up with the list, I was struck by how much more personal all the associations were for songs as compared to music or books that captured, in terms of focussed minutes, far less of my attention than most books or movies. The blessing and the curse of songs is that they’re generally what’s playing while other things and thoughts are happening. We invite them into our world; more often, books and movies invite us into theirs.

Originally published at culture-making.com.

This is from a short story taken from David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel in progress, The Pale King. The whole story, an exploration of childlike faith, is worth reading and rereading—indeed, the emotion I most strongly associate with reading David Foster Wallace’s work is a (generally somewhat frustrated) impulse to reread. But in this case the impulse comes gladly and with a touch of, and a feel for, grace.

At any rate, the best analogy for the experience of hearing these childhood “voices” of mine is that it was like going around with your own private masseur, who spent all his time giving you back—and shoulder—rubs (which my biological mother also used to do whenever I was sick in bed, using rubbing alcohol and baby powder and also changing the pillowcases, so that they were clean and cool; the experience of the voices was analogous to the feeling of turning a pillow over to the cool side). Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me—as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands—particularly in the late afternoons of spring and summer, when the sunlight on sunny days achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold and was itself (the light, as if it were taste) so delicious that it was almost too much to stand, and I would lie on the pile of large pillows in our living room and roll back and forth in an agony of delight and tell my mother, who always read on the couch, that I felt so good and full and ecstatic that I could hardly bear it, and I remember her pursing her lips, trying not to laugh, and saying in the driest possible voice that she found it hard to feel too much sympathy or concern for this problem and was confident that I could survive this level of ecstasy, and that I probably didn’t need to be rushed to the emergency room, and at such moments my love and affection for my mother’s dry humor and love became, stacked atop the original ecstasy, so intense that I almost had to stifle a scream of pleasure as I rolled ecstatically between the pillows and the books on the floor. I do not have any real idea what my mother—an exceptional, truly lovable woman—made of having a child who sometimes suffered actual fits of ecstasy; and I do not know whether she herself had them. Nevertheless, the experience of the real but unobservable and unexplainable “voices” and the ecstatic feelings they often aroused doubtless contributed to my reverence for magic and my faith that magic not only permeated the everyday world but did so in a way that was thoroughly benign and altruistic and wished me well. I was never the sort of child who believed in “monsters under the bed” or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father (who clearly “enjoyed” me and my eccentricities) once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called “antiparanoia,” in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.

Originally published at culture-making.com.