We have a couple of Seymour’s later reprints on country and homesteading skills, which are valuable resources. I think this was just an early version of those. And I was hoping for more stories because, having read Fat of the Land, I know the man can really tell a story.

I got tickled reading this book, having read so much of Logsdon’s writing. This book can be quite the inspiration, particularly for those on limited amounts of land. As always, Gene’s got great information and told in an entertaining, funny way.

But, this is perhaps the most uneven Logsdon book I’ve yet read. It is EARLY Logsdon. In particular, the transitions within chapters are . . . stark, sudden. It is also interesting that the copyright is to the Farm Journal or whichever big ag mag he was employed at at that time. And knowing his later writings, I know he’s more organic now than then, but still with the healthy skepticism of the official version of how to do it.

I know people are supposed to find Kunstler to be a kick in the groin, but I find much of his writing strangely hopeful—probably because I’m living a life that is not dependent on oil.

Kunstler is, in general, a bigot against Southerner’s, so it is a grin to me that the real hero of his book, the person who causes all good things to happen, is the brash and pushy Southern religious kook. He cleans the pre-story story with a couple of big bombs and a couple of big epidemics to rather neatly cut the population. But his story neatly incorporates many different perspectives on the new world without machines, and how those different perspectives deal with it. Surprisingly to most people, most of them do figure out how to deal with it.

It also becomes clear what all we’ve lost to industrialization. And I think how we don’t just know instinctively how to get that back. But how humans do drift back to it.

I think people better start imagining what a world without machines might look like for them. And how they’d feed themselves in such a world.

I don’t like feminism generally. I’m a goddess after all and I don’t find it useful to exacerbate the sexual dichotomy in that way. If patriarchy is bad, so is matriarchy. Period.

And I’m a goddess, not a Christian. I tried, and frankly, I found the Christian religion to have used a spiritual teacher to shore up the positions of people in power. I’ve got no problem with Jesus, just with Christianity (and most other religions).

But I like narratives, and I liked this book. At least the first part of it. In the end, when she is trying (and, I think, failing) to square some weird version of Christianity with feminism she demonstrates her continued fear of being outside the mainstream. But when she is telling her story instead of trying to justify her religion, it is tremendously interesting.

I don’t entirely buy the “feminine wound” bit, but I was totally taken with her insistence that we (as females) have to be accountable for having bought into the patriarchal bull ourselves. It isn’t all someone else’s fault, in other words. I don’t think you can square “God the Mother” with Christianity (or Judaism), but I entirely get that if we don’t have Goddess as divine then women are seen as less, and that less is invisible—it becomes just the way it is.

I’d love to follow where else her pagan (‘cause face it, that’s what it was/is) has taken her in the years since she wrote this book. Because one of the reasons I read it to begin with, perhaps THE reason, was that when I was trying to be a good Christian, I read her stuff in Guideposts all the time. So it intrigued me to find out what journey she’d been on.

But here is the truth. The earth, our gardens, my horse—they do not care if we are male or female. They care if we tend them. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, and we happen to be having female or male experiences, but our souls are neither.

Really poorly written. We can do without regional writing like this, thank you.

Good story. Terrific descriptions of the lowlands that made me want to go smell them. And eat seafood. And good characters (although they could be better developed—I didn’t feel like I really knew who they were, ever). Mostly it made some good points about we women “of a certain age” and some of the self-discovery, or rediscovery, or something, that we have to go through.

Delivers what it promises—an outsider’s view but an intimate portrait nonetheless. Too bad the author is so abysmally stupid about some things that aren’t “Amish”—like he doesn’t know you can use corn cobs for kindlin’. So sometimes he’s in awe of things that are just common country stuff and not “Amish” at all. But he has a very balanced and I think realistic view of both the advantages and disadvantages of very “Amish” things like community: Sure, if you are Amish you have a strong community that will help you if you need something, but on the other side of that, you have a community that keeps an eye on you and judges you and tells you what to do (and may well do things that we English would consider horrible, like keep women in abusive relationships and very circumscribed circumstances).

But the thing I was most curious about was what sorts of repercussions his “Samuel” and his family, who were who the book was really about—a book that the “community”, the “church”, would not approve or appreciate.

I read “Oral History” by Lee Smith ages ago and didn’t much like it and had never read this. Then a nearby county school system was asked to take this book out of their library, and the paperback version showed up in my library’s new books section, and I read it.

Wow. It is an absolutely fantastic book.

Ivy Rowe and I share a culture. She would be of my grandparents’ generation. While the circumstances of my life and of her life are very different, somehow I feel that in our souls we are the same.

If you want to find out about Southern Appalachian Culture, read this book, The Doll Maker by Arnow, and Night Comes to the Cumberland by Caudill. I should make an “I recommend” list.

Read this book.

this movie is simply one of the best I’ve ever seen. And then I question that conclusion. ??? Is it? I don’t know. But it captures a lot and says a lot in a way I understand and relate to. I saw it twice while we had it and I would own it and I want to repeatedly see and own very few films. It was made in 2004, starring Patrick Swayze and his real life wife (who also wrote and directed) Lisa Neimi and another man who must be friends with them (George de la Pena). Of course they are all real life dancers. I knew this about Patrick Swayze, and also that he’d had some knee injuries, etc. And so this movie sort of takes those things and of course some fictional things and makes them into the best doggone movie I’ve ever seen? It captures a lot anyway.

Called, One Last Dance.

See it. Really.

Now, in my privileged past, I did dance, seriously. But my experience of dance was not complicated by my having ever had any dreams about it. I was good enough at it, I had fun with it, I hated toe shoes and couldn’t tumble worth a hoot but by gawd I could perform, it was what it was, and when it was over it was done.

But their dancing in the film is, well, excellent, superb, everything. It is very classical with modern thrown in, rather Joffrey maybe? The film is rather like a musical where they start singing but you don’t really notice because you are into the story except they start dancing and it is part of the dialog but without words. Which is a play on words because the dance they are working on is called without words.

And the story just really touches me, especially now. About dreams, delayed and abandoned and haunting, and how they can sometimes be, well, not re-lived, but danced again, in their own way in their own time. I especially love the ending where they show it is so NOT about external validation but about the dance itself. I mean, I think that ending captures at least some of what I mean by a lot of the things I say about that.

And did I mention that Lisa is beautiful but not Hollywood? Wow, so refreshing, that. I love what real people really look like and I hate how Hollywood and ubiquitous braces and tooth veneers make everyone look exactly the same. Same teeth, same nose, same boobs or pecs. Boring. I have always liked people who look like they can do something. No, who look like they DO do something.

There is so much to love in the movie! There is this speech by the yoda-like elder dance master about not working so hard, about finding the heart and that until you do that you can do all the steps and still have nothing, about how you have to DANCE it so that the mirror disappears. There is this wonderful speech by Lisa/Chrissa about how she undertook this project to be like everyone else and she learned how to be but that the Max character had asked her to dance had helped her to remember the truth she knew at 14. That’s my single most favorite moment, the moment that speaks to me most clearly.

And then there is love. Capital LOVE. And even a nod to family actually being the single most important thing.

And you know what? I want no less. I mean, this movie sort of puts into film format, not exactly my desires or expectations but something like those, an openness to the magic that the universe might bring me despite how many times I mess up. An openness to be the real me, who I universally am, despite me getting in my way. Etc.

ok, there ya go.

And now there’s news of Patrick Swayze’s pancreatic cancer. Patrick, thank you for this film. And for the Pecos Bill in Tall Tales, another excellent film. Thank you thank you thank you.

must see. beautiful.

I am an Appalachian and yet when I see films dealing with the culture of India, I often feel explained in a way that I don’t get from, say, Deliverance or the oxycontin documentaries. Appalachia needs our own beautiful film maker and we haven’t found her yet.