There's Beauty in the Bellow

We watched the BBC's Tudor Monastery Farm with the unstoppable Ruth Goodman several months ago. We've watched the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube but something about Tudor Monastery Farm -- maybe because of William T. Cavanaugh's lectures -- has stuck. Maybe because Ruth, Peter, and Tom explain the techniques of our forebears in more detail than the gentleman on Primitive Technology. Tudor Monastery Farm (such a mouthful!) challenges what we mean by Primitive. "Primitive" encompasses a vast range for us on this side of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Cave men living in caves to Roman aqueducts and Gothic Cathedrals. If you mean simple tools, well maybe yes, all those things are primitive. If you mean ignorant, most certainly not. The Medievals may not have understood the human body as seen under a microscope. But they most certainly knew what boiling water, salt, and sunlight could do. They wasted nothing. If their tools were simple, the...

In a rather odd episode of Falling Down the Rabbit Hole, I discovered this quote of quote quoted by Rod Dreher : In a recent piece for  n+1 , the feminist and trans theorist Andrea Long Chu argued that the trans experience, contrary to how we have become accustomed to think of it, ‘expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire’. Being trans, she says, is ‘a matter not of who one  is , but of what one  wants ’. She goes on: I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my make-up in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, an...

First off, I liked The Riot & The Dance, a nature documentary. It had a sense of humor, which most documentaries don't. I don't mean that you don't find humor in the films themselves, else why would we see so many shots of baby animals? They're funny, that's why. But usually the creators themselves don't have much humor about them. Reverence, yes. Awe, yes. Beauty, yes. An urgent message, yes. Sometimes Sir Richard Attenborough starts to sound tired telling the same story again and again, with different factoids, dragged down with the weight of saving the universe in its entirety. Dr. Gordon Wilson is quite taking with his gentle humor and enthusiasm for some of the more homely and despised members of the animal kingdom. I took his biology course plus some electives in college and all the things I liked best about him are present in the film. He's persistent, patient, careful of speech, and slyly provocative. I don't know where Dr. Wilson's w...

In Princess Mononoke, we see humans and gods at war. The forests and rivers and mountains are the domain of the gods and when humans farm or build factories, they cannot help but trespass upon sacred ground. How can war be anything but inevitable? Lady Iboshi employs prostitutes and lepers turning them into skilled laborers and giving them stable room and board. She defends them and cares for them and they give her unshakeable loyalty. But this utopia depends on the iron ore found under the mountain inhabited by gods and Lady Iboshi is willing to wage that costly war. We see not only men and gods in conflict but war between one human tribe and another. While Iron Town functions for the good of its people just as the gods seek the good of the trees and rivers, human greed willingly destroys both for short-sighted achievement. Prince Ashitaka comes from a tribe that has apparently lived peacefully amongst nature but his tribe is dwindling. He suggests at the end that there is a bette...

I'm reading Richard B Sewall's biography of Emily Dickinson and I have particularly enjoyed the attention that he gives to her education. Dickinson may not have had a multitude surrounding her telling her that she could be anything she wanted but she was far better educated than most people today. Regardless of whether her father, Edward Dickinson (Sewell disputes this), cut a foreboding figure, he believed that his daughters ought to receive an education. He doesn't appear to be particularly unique in this matter. Emily attended Holyoke with her cousin. Sewall offers no hints that the young women at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke were a controversial presence. Emily had several textbooks written by women -- and not on embroidery either. On botany . Science . Emily and the headmistress of Holyoke College, Mary Lyon, probably received a more rigorous education in a shorter period of time than we, for all our 16+ years of schooling. When Mary Lyon died (only a few mo...

Our descent into moral incoherence is well documented and frequently mourned. But it's still astonishing. I was reading an article about extricating oneself from Amazon's clutches because I would prefer to give Mr. Bezos a little less money. The article in question did not suggest that maybe Mr. Bezos has his fingers in too many pies and ought to have his influence curtailed before he overestimated his importance. No, the article made shooting people and offering NRATV as morally equivalent. This bothers me. Guns are  dangerous. And there are people aplenty who are much too excited about owning them. Others who own them and don't give thought to whether they ought to own them. Or whether their firearms might be accessible to the irresponsible and malicious. If I remember correctly, the Colorado movie theater shooter took his grandma's firearm. My father jettisoned his firearms when my brother became a passionate adolescent with minimal self control. (And he kept all o...