2022 in other media: movies

Posted on December 31, 2022 by smellincoffee

Favorites are in bold. Updated for the last time tonight…

Movies Watched in 2022 
1. Wild Target, 2010.  A dark comedy about a lonely assassin who is hired to kill an attractive fraudster and thief (Emily Blunt), but who instead develops feelings for her.  A fun movie all around with solid talent.  Ron Weasley is also lounging around for some reason. 

2.  No Time for Sergeants, 1958.  a comedy about an ambling country boy drafted into the US Air Force, and the inspiration for Gomer Pyle.  

3. The Quiet Man, 1952. A John Wayne / Maureen O’Hara movie in which Wayne plays an American boxer who retires from the sport and returns to the home in Ireland in which he was born. He promptly annoys the local big man (who wanted to buy the home and property to expand his own) and falls in love with the big man’s  sister, Mary Kate.  The result is a romantic drama with abounding comedy, featuring a lot of Irish stereotypes. 

4. Unstoppable, 2010.  Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson. Terrific retelling of a real-life runaway train incident  where a harrowing disaster is averted through the brave and creative efforts of a train crew. Working class heroes!  

5. The Many Saints of Newark.  2021. Sopranoes prequel focusing on the life of Dickie Moltisanti, Christuhphuh’s dad and Tony’s main role model and inspiration for joining la cosa nostra. Superb casting, but the story had a frustrating loose end.   

This trailer is misleading in that it focuses on young Tony, not Dickie, but it ends with the Sopranoes theme so it wins.

6. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,  1974.  Strange horror film about a group of teenagers who wander into a house and…er, get invited for dinner. Not something I’d watch again, but given its cult-classic status I’m glad I at least know what it’s about now. 

7. This is  the Last Dam Run of Likker I’ll Ever Make, 2002. Documentary celebrating the folk hero Popcorn Sutton, who brewed and sold moonshine for decades before the ATF began targeting him. He killed himself rather than submit to imprisonment at the hands of the goonie boys.  

8. A Knight’s Tale, 2001.   Heath Leadger stars as William Thatcher, a young knight’s apprentice who, when his lord dies unexpectedly before a joust, dons the man’s armor and  uses it to create a new life for himself as Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein. What follows is an unusual sports-comedy-romance  with a soundtrack by Queen and David Bowie.  Ludicrous but absolutely fun.  

9. Red Dawn, 1984.  Russia and Cuba launch a surprise attack on the United States, but a small group of teenagers creates their own resistance cell. Expected camp, got a surprisingly dark but very entertaining movie. 

10. 21, 2008.  Kevin Spacey is an MIT professor who recruits a team of math whizzes to earn money on weekends counting cards in Vegas.  Loosely based on a true story.  Very much a fun movie. I kept expecting Frank Underwood to erupt from Spacey’s genial professor and was not disappointed.  

11. Into the Woods, 2014.  A ‘medley’ of classic fairy tales spun into a musical about a childless couple, a young woman who desires to go to the prince’s festival, and a boy and his friend the cow. Absolutely brilliant music, but some of the characters were increasing unsympathetic as the story wore on, especially the Chris Pine-prince and the Baker’s wife.   Lots of talent here, but my favorites were Anna Kendrick (Cinderella) and Lilla Crawford as Little Red Riding Hood.  Little girl can sing!  

11. Shrek: The Musical. 2008.   It’s….Shrek. The musical.  Impressive singing all around. The Farquaad character was Springtime for Hitler-level campy, but   the actor carried the role well. Sutton Foster as Fiona and Brian d’Arcy James as Shrek were especially powerful vocalists, and I’m still wondering how they did her ogre makeup so quickly on stage.   If you’re ever in a gloomy mood and don’t have the time to read Wodehouse,  watch the first two minutes of Foster’s “Morning Person”.   Black moods = gone!  

12. Blade Runner 2049.  2017.  The sequel to the original Blade Runner,  featuring Ryan Gosling as a next-gen replicant who works as a bladerunner.   In the process of ‘retiring’  another replicant,  Gosling’s character makes an astonishing discovery that threatens to throw society into upheaval. The move is consistent with the world and aesthetics of the original, with now-defunct brands like Pan-Am still in existence.  Very good. 

13. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, 2013. Part two of Peter Jackson’s expansion of the Hobbit story into three movies.   Features some very improbable fighting along the river, but Smaug is a fun character.  

14. The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armie, 2014. The finale of the Hobbit expansion.  Nonstop fighting, so it grew bit tedious.  

15. Top Gun: Maverick.  2022.  The sequel to the eighties original, this follows Tom Cruise’s character Maverick as he trains a cadre of young hotshots for a brutal mission that resembles the attack run in Star Wars.  Adding to the drama is the fact that one of the hotshots is Cruise’s late wingman’s son.   Great action flick, with no politics or posturing: just cool Navy machines,  kickass pilots, and some thrilling heroics. There’s also a P-51 Mustang!  

16. Johnny English.  2003.  A Rowan Atkinson-starring James Bond parody. A bit like Get Smart or The Man Who Knew Too Little.  Hilarious all around.  

17.  The Terminal (rewatch). 2004.  A touching story about a man stranded in an airport after his country falls into civil war while he’s in the air.  

18. Guardians of the Galaxy. Action superhero-esque movie about a ragtag group of people who try to prevent a powerful artifact from falling into the hands of a major league baddie.  

19. Rise of the  Guardians. A kid’s movie about  heroic fantasy figures from childhood (Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, etc) being threatened by a villain. 

20. Willow. A light fantasy story about a Herod-like evil Queen who is prophesied to be felled by a baby girl.  The girl is sent down the river a la Moses, and rescued by a farming family (led by an aspiring magician) who then have to form a little fellowship of the baby and return her to a castle far away.  A young Val Kilmer appears as an action hero.  

21. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005).   Stars Martin Freeman, the fellow who was in The Hobbit and The Office.  

22. West Side Story, the original. A rewatch for movie. Never get tired of listening to that soundtrack or admiring Natalie Woods.

22. Top Gun. A 1986 action movie about jets, starring a young Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. I enjoyed the music, but the story was spoiled for me by having watched Maverick.  

23. Ghost Town. 2008. A film starring Ricky Gervais and Brian D’Arcy James, in which Gervais is a misanthropic dentist who  has a near-death experience while under anesthia and wakes to find that he can see and hear ghosts. New York has a multitude of them with unfinished business, and they’re desperate for Gervais’ help so that they can move on.   From this premise we get a rom-com, and my estimation of D’Arcy James’ acting chops continues to increase.  

24. Carrie, the 1976 original with Sissy Spacek and directed by Brian dePalma. An adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. Not quite as violent as the  novel, but well-acted, scored, and directed. 

25. The Blair Witch Project. 1999. An innovative art-horror film from 1999 about three teenagers who go missing in the woods while investing the legend of a ghost-witch.  

26. Slacker. 1989.  Not sure how to sum this one up, but imagine a film where the character changes every scene.  The setting is 1990 Austin, and the camera follows around a wide variety of characters and eavedrops on them and their stories before some other passerby enters the frame and we follow them, instead. 

27. Pink Flamingos. 1972. This was a joke played on me by a friend who refused to say anything about the film,  who insisted he wanted to see my honest, gut reaction. (It was mute horror.) Trash for trash’s sake. 

27. Goodbye, Lenin!  2003. A rewatch for me, introducing someone to the work of Daniel Brühl.  Goodbye  is the story of the fall of East Germany, as lived through a young dissident who, despite being arrested by the DDR’s authorities, was forced to keep it ‘alive’ for his medically frail mother, creating an elaborate charade complete with fictitious East German newscasts to prevent her from knowing the DDR and her world were gone.  A  thought-provoking film with comedic elements.    

28. The Miracle on 34th Street, 1947.   The gorgeous Alabama Theater does Christmas movie showings in December, and I re-watched this movie for the first time since  I was a kid.   I enjoyed it enormously,   from itty-bitty Natalie Wood’s already respectable acting abilities to the writing.  A lot of the film’s meaning and humor was lost on me as a kid.  

29. The Last Picture Show, 1971.   An interesting movie following several high school kids in their last days of school.   Think Dazed and Confused but set in 1950s Texas.  The cultural mores  are more in line with the seventies, though. 

30. Mr. Right, 2015.  Easily the sweetest little rom-com featuring frequent bouts of murder I’ve ever seen. Anna Kendricks, the reason I watched this movie,   encounters  an interesting chap in the grocery store and the two of them fall in love. Said chap is an ex-assassin who still assassins, only  now he targets those who try to kill others. He’s being actively huntted by both his former assassins, who see him as a rouge, and some criminals who view him as a threat. Hilarity, adorableness, and headshots ensue Anna Kendricks is absolutely adorable.

31. My Girl, 1991. A re-watch for me, for the first time since…well, since George H.W. Bush was president. It’s set during one summer in the 1970s, in which a young girl struggles with her widow-father’s falling in love with a new woman, and  another tragedy that ensues.    It’s interesting to have watched this as a kid the same age as Vada and Thomas J, and now as an adult.   

32. Beat the Devil, 1953. The first Bogart movie I saw and acutely disliked.  Bogart plays a reluctant associate of some criminal-esque entrepreneurs who want to buy some land with uranium deposits, then sell said uranium without the British government being none the wiser. This supposedly makes them the bad guys. Bogie has an affair with some rando’s wife, his wife has an affair with said rando, and then the police arrest everyone at the end a la Monty Python. Truman Capote supposedly contributed to this.

33. Wild at Heart, Nick Cage & Willem Defoe. Nick Cage and his girlfriend road-trip across the southern US despite Cage having a bounty on his head by his girlfriend’s mother-in-law, who thinks he witnessed the murder of said girlfriend’s father, who was associated with the criminal sort. Nice music. Nick Cage is pretending to do an Elvis voice the entire time and it’s hilarious after a while. He even sings “Love me Tender”.

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Turn off, tune out, and drop in

Posted on December 30, 2022 by smellincoffee

We can get rid of the television set. As soon as we see that the TV cord is a vacuum line, pumping life and meaning out of the household, we can unplug it. What a grand and neglected privilege it is to be shed of the glibness, the gleeful idiocy, the idiotic gravity, the unctuous or lubricious greed of those public faces and voices! And we can try to make our homes centers of attention and interest. Getting rid of the TV, we understand, is not just a practical act, but also a symbolical one: we thus turn our backs on the invitation to consume; we shut out the racket of consumption. The ensuing silence is an invitation to our homes, to our own places and lives, to come into being. And we begin to recognize a truth disguised or denied by TV and all that it speaks and stands for: no life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves. These possibilities exist everywhere, in the country or in the city, it makes no difference. All that is necessary is the time and the inner quietness to look for them, the sense to recognize them, and the grace to welcome them. They are now most often lived out in home gardens and kitchens, libraries, and workrooms. But they are beginning to be worked out, too, in little parks, in vacant lots, in neighborhood streets. Where we live is also a place where our interest and our effort can be. But they can’t be there by the means and modes of consumption. If we consume nothing but what we buy, we are living in ‘the economy,’ in ‘television land,’ not at home. It is productivity that rights the balance, and brings us home. Any way at all of joining and using the air and light and weather of your own place – even if it is only a window box, even if it is only an opened window – is a making and a having that you cannot get from TV or government or school.

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

Title taken from Scott Savage’s A Plain Life: Walking my Belief.

“If we had a motto, it might be the opposite of the one I heard in the 1960s telling us to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’. Our slogan could urge the world to turn off (virtual reality), tune out (advertising and materialism), and drop in (on your neighbors, to let them know it’s time to stop being lonely in America). Drop in – into something more real, more loving, than what you’re currently experiencing.”

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A year’s end…

Posted on December 28, 2022 by smellincoffee

Welcome to the liminal space between  the years, as we all recover from Christmas and brace ourselves for a weekend full of fireworks.  Reading activity is definitely ebbing down for me,  and has been for much of December — I’ve been slowly drifting through a Wendell Berry essay collection for three weeks now!      I anticipate finishing it within the next couple of days, and may add another to the stack from Christmas or my current Kindle Unlimited titles.   If my brain breaks out of siesta mode before the New Year starts, I’d like to post some reviews for books I’ve read this year but not done properly. There are several titles on my Top Ten Favorite Reads list that are in that state, so I need to remedy it. The top ten will be part of a series of year-in-review posts that will include the science survey, a general recap of the year, and a list of the movies I watched this past year.

And on that subject,  two books I’ve finished recently need reviewin’.  First up is Wendell Berry’s How it Went: Thirteen Stories of the Port William Membership.   This is Berry’s latest collection of Port William stories, centered around the character of Andy Catlett.  Andy is a prominent character in the Membership stories as a whole, having another book (Remembering)  devoted to his young life.   How it Went spans most of Catlett’s life, opening on the young Andy ringing the dinner bell in giddy solidarity with the bells of the town, announcing the end of World War 2.   This particular story throws a bucket of cold water on the reader, as Berry envisions that industrial machine that made victory possible will be  turned on  the American people – destroying them not in war, but in peace.  Berry uses the word ‘Membership’ for Port William very deliberately, and membership is a theme in this as in all of his novels;  Andy Catlett is directly dis-membered by the industrial machine when he loses his hand in one, and the people of Port William will be dis-membered as a contiguous society as  tractor and mechanized farming turn a mesh of interconnected, interdependent homesteads into just a few big mules,  keeping to themselves in their massive machines that insulate them from the land they’re working just as effectively as they destroy the user’s ties to his surrounding community.   If that all sounds a little glum, that is the story of Port William – but it’s not a sob story. Berry always works in beauty and sorrow together;  his novels leave readers sad for what was lost, but profoundly moved by what was and which might be restored, both by the subject and by his artful writing.  He is a superb storyteller, as not one of his works has ever failed to touch me – in the realness of his characters, and their flaws and strengths.  There’s a common theme in this of old men passing their knowledge to younger men, of  those young men’s shoulders growing with responsibility and their increasing awareness that the old men are gone, and that now they are the old men, with the duty to pass on the story of Port William, and the knowledge of how to husband the land well –  but reckoning, too, with the fact that there are far fewer people in the ‘new’ Port William, and that fewer still care about the place that was a membership, not merely a Census-Designated Area or the latest tract to be marked for subdivided development.

On a much different note, I also read Eight Days in the Woods: The Making of the Blair Witch Project.      I watched The Blair Witch Project for the first time this past Halloween,    having missed most of the media hub-bub back in the day with the exception of it inspiring a game panned by PC Gamer.     To the dismay of my cinephile friends, I enjoyed BWP enormously.  The sheer novelty of having the actors also be the videographers,  of immersing the viewer in a story that could be real because of that production approach  – the lack of ‘production’ –  struck me as very cool.    Imagine  footage not planned to the shot by producers, but created extemporaneously by character-actors as the characters would have experienced them!   BWP’s approach became ever more interesting as I began digging online for information about the film, and learned that the cast were exposed to enforced method acting:  they were experiencing much of what the characters did – the treks in the rain, the overnight camping harassed by strange sounds.  The line between Actor and Character was very blurry indeed.   Eight Days in the Woods is a history of how several film students met and hatched an idea for the movie,   one they wouldn’t begin to work on until a few years later.   We’re then taken through planning, production, and release, with the most interesting part being production.  The author-editor includes numerous photographs from the production period, and most interestingly the actor notes  –  those introducing them to their character’s basic backstory,  and giving them daily notes with an outline of where they’d need to be by days end.  This opens the production’s hood a little bit.   The filming was done in a fairly confined park, with the exception of the Griggs House two hours north of the park. One of the more interesting revelations of this book was that the producers’ plans were for a three-phase project, resulting a documentary movie inspired by the seventies series In Search Of….. (The original time setting was also be the seventies, but that proved impractically expensive for a few broke students!)    The on-the-ground footage that makes the movie now was only part of the originally planned film, which would have included interviews and analysis by researchers and experts.    Budget constraints limited how much “Phase 2” filming could be done, and inspired the idea of making a film that consisted only of the disappeared students’ found footage. If you like the movie, this is definitely of interest.

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A Christmas Tease

Posted on December 27, 2022 by smellincoffee

It is Tuesday, isn’t it? Christmas and the holidays have me in a temporal mist. Teasing from Wendell Berry’s The World Ending Fire again, because I haven’t been reading anything else. (Definitely in siesta mode!)

As a people, we have lost sight of the profound communion – even the union – of the inner with the outer life. Confucius said: ‘If a man have not order within him / He can not spread order about him …’ Surrounded as we are by evidence of the disorders of our souls and our world, we feel the strong truth in those words as well as the possibility of healing that is in them. We see the likelihood that our surroundings, from our clothes to our countryside, are the products of our inward life – our spirit, our vision – as much as they are products of nature and work. If this is true, then we cannot live as we do and be as we would like to be. There is nothing more absurd, to give an example that is only apparently trivial, than the millions who wish to live in luxury and idleness and yet be slender and good-looking. We have millions, too, whose livelihoods, amusements, and comforts are all destructive, who nevertheless wish to live in a healthy environment; they want to run their recreational engines in clean, fresh air.

Industrialists are always ready to ignore, sell, or destroy the past in order to gain the entirely unprecedented wealth, comfort, and happiness supposedly to be found in the future. Agrarian farmers know that their very identity depends on their willingness to receive gratefully, use responsibly, and hand down intact an inheritance, both natural and cultural, from the past. Agrarians understand themselves as the users and caretakers of some things they did not make, and of some things that they cannot make.

Agrarian farmers see, accept, and live within their limits. They understand and agree to the proposition that there is ‘this much and no more.’ Everything that happens on an agrarian farm is determined or conditioned by the understanding that there is only so much land, so much water in the cistern, so much hay in the barn, so much corn in the crib, so much firewood in the shed, so much food in the cellar or freezer, so much strength in the back and arms – and no more. This is the understanding that induces thrift, family coherence, neighborliness, local economies. Within accepted limits, these virtues become necessities. The agrarian sense of abundance comes from the experienced possibility of frugality and renewal within limits. This is exactly opposite to the industrial idea that abundance comes from the violation of limits by personal mobility, extractive machinery, long-distance transport, and scientific or technological breakthroughs. If we use up the good possibilities in this place, we will import goods from some other place, or we will go to some other place. If nature releases her wealth too slowly, we will take it by force. If we make the world too toxic for honeybees, some compound brain, Monsanto perhaps, will invent tiny robots that will fly about, pollinating flowers and making honey.

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Joyeux Noel

Posted on December 25, 2022 by smellincoffee

A favorite scene from a favorite movie, in which humanity and the prince of Peace overcame the State — at least for a night. The scene where the German singer grabs a Christmas tree and advances into no-man’s land singing will never fail to enrapture me. Merry Christmas! May one day men cease worshiping the State and alles Menschen werden Brüder. Scoot forward to the five minute mark or so if you’re not one for preludes…

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Teasin’ with W.B. again

Posted on December 20, 2022 by smellincoffee

The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it. [ ….]

However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories, too, as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community, too, must collect leaves and stories, and turn them to account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself – in lore and story and song – that will be its culture. These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, ed. Paul Kingsnorth
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Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell

Posted on December 19, 2022 by smellincoffee

Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley
© Peter Kreeft 1982
182 pages

The scene: ….well, we’re not sure. Somewhere out in the ether. The players: C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and JF-Serial-Adulterer-Kennedy. Open on all three personalities standing, confused. They’re dead, having all shuffled off or having been shoved off the ol’ mortal coil on November 22, 1963. They have found neither eternal bliss nor everlasting torment, however. They have found…an argument, and for all three this is a welcome diversion while they ponder their fate. A discussion of ‘where the hell are we?’ quickly turns into a theological debate between Lewis, representing traditional Christianity; Kennedy, representing liberal humanistic Christianity (or secularism); and Aldous Huxley, representing pantheism. It’s a two-stage debate, with Lewis first squaring off with Kennedy on the necessity for believing in core Christian doctrines versus modern hedging, and then Lewis debating Huxley on Christianity’s distinction and fundamental incompatibility with other religions. The first is essentially an expansion of Lewis’ “Lord, Lunatic, or Liar” argument from Mere Christianity, and the latter was a thought-provoking argument for why Judaism and Christianity are so markedly different from all other religions, save those that borrowed from them — Islam being viewed as an imitator or a Christian heresy. As you might imagine from a Catholic author, Lewis presents the strongest case — though Kreeft does not permit himself to write Kennedy and Huxley as converts; they’re somewhere in the “I get the argument but I still can’t believe it” neck of the woods. I was hoping Kreeft would get more into the weeds of Lewis pointing out the implications of the men’s worldviews, as he looked to the logical extension of relativism in The Abolition of Man, but Kreeft keeps things confined to the two major debates. I haven’t read enough of Kennedy or Huxley to know if he captured their voices, but Lewis was fairly recognizable — though it helped that Kreeft often had Lewis quoting himself, either consciously or unconsciously. I do love the premise of the book, though, and it appears Kreeft has another with Socrates arguing with modern philosophers.

Next up: Wendell Berry’s How it Went and The World Ending Fire. Stories and essays…

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Postcards from Ed

Posted on December 18, 2022 by smellincoffee

Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
© 2007 ed. David Petersen
337 pages

“Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.”

Although I was first drawn to Ed Abbey by his nature writing,  over the years I’ve become more fascinated with Abbey as a person.   Books like Obey Little, Resist Much demonstrated how complex a man he was –  one impossible to pigeonhole,  accused of being a reactionary from some quarters and a tree hugger from others.    Postcards from Ed,  incorporating nearly four decades of his personal and public letters,   puts this genuine American character squarely center-stage,  where readers can grow to know him better.   It’s less of a book and more of a visit with a friend, seeing him through moods of bliss and melancholy, of  passionate work and even more impassioned philosophizing under the stars. 

When I first read Desert Solitaire, knowing nothing of Abbey beyond his name, I made the same mistake most who read a little bit of Abbey do:   I immediately sorted him into a convenient box,   that of the Environmentalist. “Thoreau in the desert,”   I decided.  (That was a two-part mistake, for I later realized that Thoreau, too, was too unique a character for a slapdash label to stick to easily.)     The more I read of Abbey, the more varied I discovered his work was – and the more interesting. His central subject was not The Environment, or even the western wilderness that Abbey loved,  defended in words and action – but rather, the fate of man and nature in the hands of the techno-industrial machine. In this he’s more like Kaczynski than Thoreau,  though much more fun to be around, and much less dangerous to receive mail from. On that subject,  Postcards is a curated collection  of  letters and postcards,  sent from various spots in Arizona and Utah, and largely originating in the 1970s and 1980s.   They’re a good mix of personal letters, which themselves range from philosophical reflections to accounts of recent hikes in the wilderness, and more publicly-oriented missives,  in which Abbey writes presidents, governors, and letters to the editor.   A few from Abbey’s early years are included, but most from this period were lost to disaster.   That’s a shame, since the late teens and early twenties are a transformative time, especially for an active thinker like Abbey, who was an irritant to the alphabet goon squads from his early twenties onward.  (He began by publicly urging college men to mail their draft cards back to D.C. at a protest against both the war in Vietnam and the conscription being used to carry it out.) Good luck to the reader attempting to stick Abbey in a box; he was a man of great passion and sometimes divided opinions, calling himself an anarchist yet urging the government to do more to protect the west — cursing liberals and corporate tycoons in the same breath.

Postcards from Ed shows us the growth of a young man who journeyed West from ruined Appalachia, who arrived in time to see the canyonlands of southern Utah and its sister states come under the sights of industrial development – wherein the landscape was mined, logged, and dammed.    Abbey wrote about it publicly, in books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang; he worked with organizations like the Sierra Club and Earth First! to raise awareness and spark resistance, and if you believe his and his friends’ claims, he actively engaged in sabotage in his numerous wilderness wanderings.    To Abbey,  the diversion of public money for private gain (in the creation of infrastructure that only one company would use) was offensive enough that action was warranted, but  knowing that such infrastructure was enabling the plunder and ruin of a huge swath of the country  made him apoplectic.  Another key bugbear was the ranging of private cattle on public land, which he viewed not only as parasitical, but destructive to the west’s ecology:   cattle consumed food that should have been the province of mule deer and elk.  He argued this not because he was a hunter, but because he believed the creatures of the West had more a right to be there than sandal-wearing golfers who wanted a desert view from their Colorado-draining irrigated golf course. Although not a religious man, Abbey venerated the undespoiled wilderness  and defended it consistently for decade after decade.    Despite his melancholy over the future of that wilderness, , which  seemed destined to disappear under ore mines and ticky-tacky residential developments,   Abbey maintained that he was an optimist.    The unsustainable, by its nature, is doomed: sooner or sooner,  the growth-bubble that was industrialization civilization would pop and the likes of Tuscon and Phoenix would disappear like dust in the wind.   Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell, he maintained, and like a cancer   reckless overdevelopment would destroy the very civilization spurring it on.  He preferred that we avoid a catastrophic die-off by tapering our numbers down ,but viewed the ultimate triumph of reality  as inevitable. 

Postcards is a fascinating book, one that I was pained to be finished with – because we don’t just experience the  jeremiad-levying  Abbey, the wilderness wanderer Abbey. We find Abbey the friend, Abbey the literary critic, the doting but often firm father, the disappointed epistoler, the humorist, someone who wanted to write a novel in honor of the working men whose stock he came from.   I was delighted to find him exchanging letters with Wendell Berry (one wonders what Berry’s half that correspondence entails!)  and responding to articles from papers and magazines all over the country — always with a mix of temper, steely intelligent, and mocking humor. This book makes him more real — in his humor, his abrasiveness, his righteous anger, his deep wonder and profound appreciation for the wild that remained. I will count it as one of my very favorite reads from this year, and one alone in being one I had to start reading again the moment I finished it — just to spend more time with Ed. Why do such interesting men leave us soon and the bores and cads linger for decades?

Quotations to follow this week…

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Teasday Tuesing with W.B.

Posted on December 13, 2022 by smellincoffee

This morning’s tease comes from a Wendell Berry anthology, The World-Ending Fire.

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a ‘practical’ point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way. The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography.

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Lost on Purpose

Posted on December 12, 2022 by smellincoffee

Lost on Purpose: The Adventures of a 21st Century Mountain Man
© 2015 Patrick Taylor
187 pages

The real adventure for me was letting go of everything I had defined as important and conducting another experiment with my life.

Lost on Purpose is the account of one man, Patrick Taylor’s, attempt to follow the trail of Lewis and Clark over the Rockies. He chose to do this during the same season as the Corps of Discovery, despite knowing this meant he would be climbing as winter’s first snowstorms moved in. The scope of this ambition impressed, appalled, and bewildered the Idahoans Taylor met — though they were mostly impressed. The account is highly and constantly detailed, Taylor sharing with readers how he whittles little stacks to pen a fish in place so that he can grill it properly, or describing the various layers he was wearing. There are some readers who are drawn to that kind of detail, of course, but if you’re looking more for Ed-Abbey style descriptions of the landscape, be warned there’s more mention of not just the trees than the forest, but the pine needles and the bark. Taylor also incorporates excerpts from Lewis and Clark’s journals, which indicate that much of this unforgiving landscape is as it was two centuries ago. The sheer ambition of Taylor, makes the details slog worthwhile, as he describes making his way up the mountains, losing the trail as a blizzard moves in, and — undoubtedly the book’s highlight — relives with the reader his few days spent with a trapper, a kindred spirit who lived by himself most of the time and spent his nights skinning pine martens. After two months of wilderness trekking, Taylor uses his emergency comms to have himself picked up, but his feat suitably impressed a local enough that Taylor was hired on to take care of a remote property during the winter months. (One hopes it wasn’t The Overlook hotel.)

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