Dear Lord: please let me live long enough to see the last hippie die Shades of "Women's position in The Movement is prone."Wendell Berry's wife does his typing for him, cuz he's sooooo ascared of the big bad computer and is just another lefty male hypocrite. He doesn't even own a tv, and I'm supposed to take anything he says seriously?? What a soy-brained loser. I say we bury the corpses of his entire generation at Woodstock and slam dance on their graves.
The article she links is also amusing in it's way, if you're amused by that sort of thing - flatulent, self-absorbed, self-important. The bits I read, anyway. Couldn't take too much. Funnier still is that apparently the author has been dining out on this same droning point of luddism since at least some time in the 1980s, according to the memory of the spouse, who had wandered into my lair as I was chuckling over Shaidle's rant. I asked him if he recognized the target, whose name was only vaguely familiar to me. He furrowed his brow, then a light went on: "Oh, thaaat guy. Yeah! When I was in grad school I read an article of his that was such a piece of crap it made me indignantly cancel my subscription to Harper's. It's the same article he's talking about. That was in the '80s. Jesus, he's still picking that carcass?"
Recycling, darling, recycling.
(I'm not sure of the boundaries of Shaidle's "generation", above. As I am technically a boomer (b. 1958), I hope that she means to adhere to the spirit, not the letter, of the slam-dancing diktat.)
Oh god, I remember in that Contemporary Multicultural Humanities course I took a few semesters back we had to read a Berry essay. It was after Sept 11, I think. It was all about how we should all move back to tiny communities and farm by hand, or something like that -- kind of like the Shire, only not so high-tech.
Posted by: Andrea Harris on July 31, 2003
I hear you on the Wendell Berry luddhism. He may be a hippy but not a boomer. He was born in 1934. Here's some more via http://www.arh.eku.edu/Eng/SERVICES/KYLIT/BERRY.HTM
Oddly, he does not have a modern toilet; instead he has a clean white privy in the backyard. The wastes deposited there are made into compost. Tractors are not used to plow his fields, either. Berry uses a team of draft horses in replace of "Exhaust-stinking, engine-roaring, gasoline-guzzling tractors" (11). Berry feels he is doing his part by not harming the environment any further.
Another technology he does not convenience himself with is a computer, which Berry explains in his essay "Why I Am Not Going To Buy a Computer?" He writes his works and then his wife revises and types then on a manual typewriter. Berry gives three main reasons for not buying a computer: (1) He would hate to think that his work could not be done without a direct dependence on strip-mined coal. (2) He does not want to replace the close bond between him and his wife with an expensive unnecessary piece of equipment. (3) He does not want to "fool himself" by owning a computer, a tool that itself does not make his writing any better than the writing he does with a pencil. His first reason is in regard with his awareness of the land being striped to produce the electricity to run the computer. For the same reason, he writes in the daytime without electric lighting (179-171). By not participating in the "rape of nature," he shows his concern for the environment.
Posted by: Jill on August 04, 2003
He still uses chainsaws, though, 'cause they're so convenient. (But I guess he hates himself afterwards, so that's OK.)
He does not want to replace the close bond between him and his wife...
So when my spouse does menial chores for me that I'm too lazy to do for myself, it strengthens our marital bond. I like where he's going with this, but I'm not sure the spouse would buy into it...
Posted by: David Fleck on August 04, 2003
Hey, if you want to earn some extra scratch writing essays for Harper's on how I wash the dishes and iron the shirts, that's cool with me. However, if you start writing pompous-ass essays about the evils of using dishwashing machines and slick expensive Rowenta irons for doing chores that you yourself do not do....hmmm, chainsaws, eh?
Wait, I have a better idea. How 'bout I write a pompous-ass essay on how those unwanted back veggie gardens should be cleared and leveled with a teaspoon... After all, I'm not shoveling in the garden - I'm just gonna point you in the proper moral direction, ok, honey?
Posted by: Moira on August 04, 2003
There are a lot of things you can do that are natural, more in keeping with traditional human relationships with nature, and earthier: dying of typhoid fever, say, is one of them. My guess is that Barry may do without a tv set or computer, but he avails himself of modern medicine.
As to the aside about "the position of women in the movement is prone," I think that came from Stokely Carmichael. Tom Wolfe responded by wondering if Carmichael didn't know the difference between prone and supine, or was just expressing a preference.
Posted by: Alex Bensky on August 05, 2003
"He would hate to think that his work could not be done without a direct dependence on strip-mined coal."
I assume his typewriter is woven out of hemp? Otherwise I am afraid he is just as dependent on "strip-mined" ores -- such as the iron ore that went into the steel that his typewriter keys are made out of.
Posted by: Andrea Harris on August 08, 2003