Tag Archives: Kunstler

In Praise of Printed Journals, Newsletters, and Ephemera

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The first tomato (Cherokee Purple) of the year.

Change happens, with or without our participation, in the cultural blink of an eye. Consider that it has only been 12 years since I stopped wearing a jacket to Friday night dinner at Hunter’s Cafe in Sweetwater. It’s something I recalled when a recent farm volunteer expressed her discomfort with wearing anything but sweatpants and T-shirt to college classes: “It would make me feel too uncomfortable to ‘dress’ up.”

No turning back, I guess. Even more Quixotic would be to arrest the digital flood of information that too often buries good writing. Although ‘flood’ may not be the best description; a flood leaves damage and evidence of its passing. The digital word, this most ephemeral of ephemera, this nontangible, unable to hold content for longer than the next click, diffusing into the ether with a fading screen, is my chief concern.

Newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, journals, quarterlies, newsletters, letters, ephemera of all sorts, have almost entirely disappeared from our lives, leaving behind only the debris of seldom-read mass-produced circulars to be dumped into the nearest landfill. The digital world has completely replaced the regular timetable of the printed with an endless flood of content, curated or not, in an inbox that vanishes from the mind, even if read, before the next click of Refresh.

The humble church bulletin (or any newsletter from a community group) is now replaced by a Facebook page, or a QR code. The nature of that particular ephemera was that it lingered in your life, the bulletin floating around on your car seat or countertop, a visual reminder that someone was sick, dead, or getting married.

Or ponder the endless stream of well-curated writing on the online platform Substack. It’s a venue where smart and intellectually curious people craft some of the best essays to be found, but the pieces are written for the digital world, amid the tsunami of information and amusement. They have no permanence. They flood in and wash out into nothing, given life only briefly by our distracted eyes, the authors already busy creating new “content” before the last article has disappeared under the sedimented layers of bytes.

Here on the farm, we still subscribe to several print journals and receive newsletters from those dwindling number of organizations that bother with paper. It may seem too obvious to say, but the thing about receiving a copy of Local Culture (Front Porch Republic) or the wonderful Farming Magazine (Kline family) in the mailbox is that those publications linger in our lives. I may sit down and read it cover to cover and toss it aside or stack it by my reading chair. A month later Cindy may pick it up and read an article or essay. “Did you read the piece by Kunstler?” she asks.

“Hmm, remind me,” I’ll say. She does and I realize I need to reread it. Or I pick up the year-old copy of Farming Magazine in the bathroom and read the series on growing potatoes, again. Having printed matter at hand encourages conversations, fosters relationships that endure far longer than those engendered by the sharing of a link by email. Print is, literally, durable. The online world promotes a restless consumption, whose writings are instantly out of date. We don’t go back to the inbox, because it is already jammed anew. What is read is then gone — out of sight and out of mind — with the blink of a screen.

You won’t discover a scrapbook of digital links put together in an old trunk by your grandmother, a QR code for the funeral service bulletin for your grandfather in a file or a book. You won’t go into the bathroom and find a collection of essays in cloud storage nestled on top of the toilet. This world is ephemeral; ephemera belonged to another age.

We no longer exist in a continuum where time and custom are married. Today’s culture is all too immediate and of no lasting duration. Our contactless future is now. So, shuffle over here in your bunny slippers and hit Delete, then Refresh. A world of fresh distraction awaits.

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Reading this weekend: The Epistles of Horace (translated by David Ferry)

Highway 36 (revisited)

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Has anything changed? One might wonder if a trip down highway 36 this spring, in the midst of a pandemic, would yield a garden or two? Inquiring minds…. This piece was written in May of 2014.

storms building in the north

I spent a couple of days in the heartland this week. I flew into the Indianapolis airport and took the two lane highway 36, from Indiana into the heart of Illinois. A drive, straight as an arrow, that takes you though some of the richest agricultural land in this country. Small towns were planted every five to ten miles, even an oddly placed suburb in what seemed the middle of nowhere, and vast oceans of farmland.

Having nothing better to do with my time, I counted vegetable gardens. I counted as I drove through towns on the highway. I counted as I passed subdivisions. I counted as I passed farms by the dozens. Finishing the trip two and half hours later with a grand total of zero vegetable plots spotted. My recent digs at neighbors for not planting gardens now seem misplaced, because well over half of the homes in our valley have some sort of vegetable garden. But zero? 

Now we can assume I missed plenty. But I was diligent in looking and even a casual survey should have turned up the odd patch of tilled ground behind a house or two. But I also didn’t see any small orchards or vines. Most homes in our valley sport at least a pear tree or two in the front yard. 

What could account for a food desert in this landscape? Was this the curse of rich land and commodity prices? Or was it that I was simply looking at 200 miles of an industrial park disguised as an agrarian landscape. A bit like those fake Hollywood towns of yore, looks the look at first glance but nothing supporting it. 

It was odd to see old farmhouses with the corn and soybeans tilled and planted up to the driveways. The houses bobbing on the landscape like lost boats at sea. Gone were the outbuildings and barns of the past, now replaced with corrugated buildings housing supplies and gargantuan equipment. No room in this landscape for the personal or something as humble as a vegetable patch or fruit tree. No need for the homestead pig or grapevine, the message is clear, this is valuable land. 

Yet what explained the absence in towns of vegetable gardens? As is my wont, I’m no doubt guilty of reading too much into this simple lack of observable gardens. But vegetable gardens, a few chickens and a fruit tree or two make a statement. And their absence in our rich heartland is a statement, something darker, a yielding of ones will or culture. 

Perhaps it is better to farm or garden on land that requires a bit more struggle?

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Reading this weekend: Living in the Long Emergency (Kunstler). The just published update to his 2005 bestseller. A concise overview of “where we are”. Although, since the work was written just before the pandemic, one imagines the author wishes to have been able to add an addendum.