Well, we are all localists here, watching our national economy stagger and moan. Is there any room for a conversation about local economies? What would a local economy mean?
One of the false notions Wendell Berry tries regularly to expose is…
March 2009
Alexandria, VA …A few nights ago in Washington D.C., Wendell Berry was among the speakers at what turned out to be a pep rally for opponents of global warming. They struck me as an assemblage of D.C. cosmopolites, well festooned
E.D. Kain identifies a paradox in modern American conservatism that will be familiar to students of George Grant. Forty years ago, Grant wrote this in his essay, “In Defence of North America”:
It may be inded that, like most of…
CLAREMONT, CA…. We have become homeowners.
This week, my husband and I are moving boxes from our latest rental into a house that we may finally call home.
It’s a big change, to live somewhere with a relative possibility
Rock Island, Illlinois.…
It’s a little-known fact that many of our finest writers owned time machines and paid frequent visits to the future. Furious John Ruskin (1819-1900), for example, that mad critic of industrialization, surely must have passed through the
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY. …It’s town meeting day in the once and future republic of Vermont. Herewith, from the American Conservative, my profile of Frank Bryan, the University of Vermont professor whose Real Democracy (2004) is the finest work ever written
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.…
Via Derbyshire, this Terry Teachout column makes an important observation that relates back to Derbyshire’s criticism of the influence of talk radio and my post on community:
The information age offers something for anybody: Survivor for simpletons, The Sopranos
PHOENIX, ARIZONA. I don’t think that many reviews have yet appeared, but John Lukacs has just published another memoir, titled Last Rites. Patrick Allitt has an appreciative, but not uncritical, review (subscribers only) in the latest American Conservative. He is right that this volume is not, for a variety of reasons, as “scintillating” as Lukacs’s Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990). But then, Confessions truly is scintillating. It’s one of the finest American memoirs of the twentieth century. What makes it so fine is that it is not simply American. It is also deeply Pennsylvanian. In a state blessed with many more great quarterbacks than great writers, the Hungarian-born, British-educated Lukacs can lay claim to have evoked the character of the southeastern corner of the state as well as anyone ever has. (In this respect, add to Lukacs’s Pennsylvania oeuvre his Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines and certain sections of A Thread of Years, one of the most memorable books I have ever read.)
DALLAS, TX. …I am bemused, appalled, and fascinated — more or less at the same time — by the foofarah over Rush Limbaugh’s CPAC speech. His version of conservatism is popular, of course, but is not recognizable as any kind
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.…
E.D. Kain had a fine quote from Wendell Berry that provides a good definition of community to start any discussion of place and limits:
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared,
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NEW YORK.… March came in like a frigid lamb, and even though the temperature never did climb out of the teens the snowless patch in our backyard was large enough for my daughter and I to play catch
