Letters to a Young Farmer

Via Michael Pollan on twitter, these interviews with some of the authors of an anthology called Letters to a Young Farmer.

One of the major themes in your letter is the idea of pursuing diversity and complex relationships. Why is that important?

One of the reasons farms have gone to mono-speciation and segmentation and segregation is forced simplicity. But as we know, ecology is not simplistic; it’s complex. You can either have simplicity and externalized cost, which are simple in the short term, or you can have complexity and not have externalized costs, which takes a long-term view.
I don’t want to make it sound like if you go to diversity, it’s going to be simpler or better, but in the holistic scheme of things, it is simpler and better. You don’t have to have a refrigerator full of pharmaceuticals; you don’t have to take the pesticide exam and be certified as chemical applicators; you don’t have to have a door on the farm with padlocks on it so nobody will get in there and eat something. When you embrace ecological and financial diversity on your farm, in my view, you’re embracing actually a simpler life than trying to fight against nature every day by being simplistic.

Joel Salatin, whose words quoted above, talks about instant gratification, and says, "You’ve got to give it a go for 10 years. And you can’t Google experience", which is true; but he seems to think only Millennials are susceptible to the lure of having everything at the touch of a button.

I don't know what everyone's beef with Millennials is. Do the rest of us not want things as soon as they appear? Do we not borrow against the future to pay for what's new now? And really, whose fault is this encouragement of instant gratification?

If anything, it's the Milennials who realise they've been bequeathed a world that's an utter disaster. They're perfectly aware that it's down to them to make all the sacrifices their parents and grandparents refused to. And they're the ones going to be left holding the toxic baby they've been handed. If they want an occasional bit of instant gratification so that they know what it used to feel like to have it available all the time, I don't blame them.

I mean, don't confuse millennials with hipsters, okay?

As another contributor, Nancy Vail says, "Embarking on the path of farming is an act of hope in a time when there’s so much that we could despair about". Such an un-hipster life-choice, no?

All that said, I like the idea of combining Rilke with Fukuoka, so I support the idea of this book. If only I could find someone to buy it for me. 

The Sideways Door: March Response Column

I won't say I was disappointed by this month's submissions, precisely. But you know that feeling when you've waited and waited for a letter and it arrives, but it isn't all you'd hoped it would be?

That.

Here's the column. I wanted a one word title but apparently that is not possible - or at least, not advisable. So it's a bunch of words containing the one word I wanted. Eh.

The Sideways Door: March Prompt Column

This month, with vacations a scarce month away, I am thinking of letters and so this month's prompt column calls for a letter poem.

It takes a line from one my most favourite poems, Primo Levi's ;To My Friends' and you can find it here: 'Stamped by everyone.'

As I was writing this column, I discovered that a poem I had chosen and was quoting in full, by a young girl, was in fact a response to a prompt and so took the entire first stanza from the original. But I was sent this poem without also being told this crucial piece of information. 

Naturally, while I've used that kind of teaching tool in class, I couldn't include a result in a column like this. I might still post that poem separately at some point because even with its similarities to the original, it was still quite good.

A letter to end the year

Not mine. Not even from someone I know.

Wait.

You know how there are books of famous speeches that kids used to be encouraged to mug up, for elocution competitions and such? I once thought (and said in some blogpost I can't find) that it would be a great idea to have an anthology of fictional speeches; that is, speeches characters make in books, but which are fantastic and stirring and all that. I was thinking, mainly, of Andre-Louis Moreau from Scaramouche, but that's just me. Cat said, with perfect truth, that any anthology of fictional speeches that left out Gussy Fink-Nottle's prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury, did not deserve to exist. How can anyone disagree with that?

Speeches are all very well. Anthologies even more well. (Weller. Something.)

I want to now propose, in the last few hours of this old year, that someone do an anthology of fictional letters. Letters written by characters that, if taken out of their context and placed in the world, would deserve to be in Volume 2 of Letters of Note.

This, naturally, disqualifies epistolary novels, because they're all letters and we're not doing volume two of My Dear Bapu.

But I want to nominate this letter below for that imaginary anthology: it's between Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, in Gaudy Night. Now Dorothy Sayers, like a couple of other writers, is on an emergency shelf of books that are comfort reading. I have recently re-read Have His Carcase, but the big gun, the cannon, is Gaudy Night and it's usually saved for emergencies.

But I found this letter here and as love letters go, it is delicate and gorgeous; as a way to end the year, it is perfect. Here it is in full:

Dear Harriet,

I send in my demand notes with the brutal regularity of the income-tax commissioners; and probably you say when you see the envelopes, ‘Oh, God! I know what this is.’ The only difference is that, some time or other, one has to take notice of the income tax.

Will you marry me?—It’s beginning to look like one of those lines in a farce—merely boring till it’s said often enough; and after that, you get a bigger laugh every time it comes.

I should like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they are written on—but words like that have a way of being not only unforgettable but unforgivable. You will burn the paper in any case; and I would rather there should be nothing in it that you cannot forget if you want to.
Well, that’s over. Don’t worry about it.

My nephew (whom you seem, by the way, to have stimulated to the most extraordinary diligence) is cheering my exile by dark hints that you are involved in some disagreeable and dangerous job of work at Oxford about which he is in honour-bound to say nothing. I hope he is mistaken. But I know that, if you have put anything in hand, disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should. Whatever it is, you have my best wishes for it.

I am not my own master at the moment, and do not know where I shall be sent next or when I shall be back—soon, I trust. In the meantime may I hope to hear from time to time that all is well with you?

Yours, more than my own,

Peter Wimsey

*Siiiiigh*

On that letter of note, dear ones, here's wishing you a very happy year ahead.