In One No, Many Yeses, journalist and green activist Paul Kingsnorth detailed his journeys across the world, spending time with people who were actively resisting globalization — or rather, the disruptions that globalization caused in their local communities. Real England: Battle against the Bland does something similar, but much closer to home for Kingsnorth. So much closer to home that he visits the community his ancestors came from, Kingsnorth. The deep local connections people had to their places and how richly their place-cultures enveloped these peoples’ lives, enraptured Kingsnorth, and he explores that aspect here. Kingsnorth travels around England visiting people who are fighting government bureaucracy for the control of their canals, trad pub owners who are being displaced by pub corporations, and farmers who are being displaced by the English version of agribiz. The result is something like Berry’s Unsettling of America, or The Small Mart Revolution — a celebration of common folk finding ways to resist the corporate colonization of their villages and the homogeneous cookie-cooker offerings it makes predominant. Jim Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere also strongly applies, Reading this book as an American means sailing into territory that is both familiar and alien: while I have firm notions of pub culture in England, for instance, they’re almost wholly informed by CS Lewis and the Inklings — and the culture of canalways was wholly unfamiliar.

Relatedly, sort of, I stumbled upon Joan Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook while prepping for a Teaser Tuesday. The book is based on her observations traveling through several Gulf states in 1970, though the narrative often breaks for scattered observations without comment. The locations chosen strike me as very haphazard: she begins in New Orleans, strikes out for Biloxi but wind up on Meridian instead, then wanders over to Tuscaloosa and Birmingham before returning back to Mississippi. There is no program or agenda at work, only her desire to experience the south and get an idea for what was on people’s minds in 1970. This is an interesting period to experience the South, only five years after the high watermark of the Civil Rights movement — and I was amused to see that Didion was touring the Gulf South during the worst part of the year for tourism — late summer, when the sunny south is at its hottest and stickiest. It’s a time of the year that explains some of the culture of the South — the way older homes were constructed, for instance, with high ceilings and dogtrot planning, and some would argue it’s why we’re so violent. (Jim Webb would argue that Scots-Irish blood and culture had more to do with that.) Not surprisingly, Didion finds a bit of summer lethargy — people sitting on porches, rocking and waiting for the long day to close and the night to bring some relief from the heat, and Sunday lunches that seem to fill the entire span between morning church and evening service. I’ve never read Didion before, but she has a wonderful talent for description that drew me in. There was surprisingly little about race relations in this, aside from her conversation with a municipal booster who said that people were starting to make peace with one another after the activists and reactionaries had gone away. The biggest remaining issue was forced bussing and integration. Didion also remarks on a strong sense of ambiguity about indutrialism and progress: people wanted growth, but were wary about the character of their places being lost. (I can sympathize: I remain grateful that Atlanta, not Birmingham, netted an international airport because the resulting sprawl would have overwhelmed the bucolic university town I’ve spent some of my happiest years in!) I’ll have to look into Didion’s works to try more of her writing style.