A few years ago my friend Stephen and I were on a drive back from visiting the Kingston, Ontario hospice where his later mother had once spent time. 

Stephen pointed out a house with a blackboard out front: “they have a different Wendell Berry quote there every morning.”

Had I heard of Wendell Berry before? Surely I must have, what with my connection to The Old Farmer’s Almanac and the Whole Earth Catalog.

Yet Stephen’s mention was the first time I remember consciously thinking about him as anything other than “generic homespun American writer.”

Then this morning, from Nova Scotia printer Andrew Steeves:

I was heartbroken to learn of the death of the American writer and farmer Wendell Berry yesterday in Kentucky at age 92. I don’t think any living writer more shaped my own thinking, and life, than Wendell did. I feel very lucky to have known him a little, to have met and to have corresponded, and to have shared a little in each other’s lives. At the time of his death, a letter of mine posted some weeks ago surely sat on his desk — possibly unread, certainly unanswered, a last hello trailing off into silence.

And this afternoon, from Vermont writer, activist, environmentalist Bill McKibben:

Wendell Berry, who died yesterday at the age of 92, was such a great man that I hardly know where to start.

Continuing:

I was very lucky that my wife handed me a copy of his essay collection Home Economics about forty years ago, when we were still courting. If I hadn’t fallen under his spell I’m not sure I would have spent my life in rural America, red state and blue; I know that he taught me how to see my town and my county, and my country and my species, in new/old ways that have undergirded all my work. And I’m very glad that we became friends, visiting and writing back and forth. His droll good humor rarely faltered, in my experience. I did not agree with him at all times, nor he with me—though he had solar panels behind his house, for instance, he didn’t think they belonged on farmland, while I think they’re a boon to both farmer and planet. But we agreed on most things of real dimension, and I was always delighted to see in the mailbox a letter with the return address of Port Royal Kentucky. He was one of the last people with whom I had a true written, as opposed to electronic, correspondence. Sometimes he’d tap things out on a manual typewriter, but more often it would be in pencil, on lined yellow paper.

That I read two reminiscences today, from different reaches of my network, about a personal correspondence with Berry surely must mean something. 

Perhaps I will discover him in death as others did in life.

McKibben quotes a Berry poem, published in The New Yorker last November:

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

And here is Berry, from a review of the 1970 book Writers as Teachers: Teachers as Writers, as reviewed in The Whole Earth Catalog:

My aim as a teacher, as I have said, is to angle at large in the realm of the possible, to be always responsive to what might be. There is little chance of system in this, if by system you mean an ordered progression laid out in advance. If it goes as | think it should, there is no knowing what will happen next. It is when my students begin to go beyond what I expect, surprising and informing me, that I think the work is succeeding.

I base nearly everything I attempt on one assumption: that every person’s experience is in some way different from anybody else’s. Hence, everybody has something to tell me that i would be interested to know. The student’s task is to find out what it is and to write it well.

God bless Wendell Berry; you will be missed.

We took a quick, late walk through Victoria Park tonight for Art in the Open. The night was beautiful, and lit by the Moon over the harbour.

First spotted at The Rustico Cannery in North Rustico last week, I saw it again today at The Gallery in Charlottetown: kombucha from Farmacy + Fermentary in tiny, perfect stubby bottles.

I am using the typewriter that Catherine Hennessey gave me to type gallery labels for a show that Lisa and I are mounting on Monday. It’s a very satisfying machine to use, and I’m very happy with the results.

Come to The Gallery starting Tuesday to see the show, Layers of love, which will include new work from me, from Lisa, and from our collaboration.

From Palvelukeskus Helsinki:

Helsinki offers a free-of-charge hot lunch for children under the age of 16 at its playgrounds, which are open during the school summer holidays.

Here on PEI we have the Children’s Summer Food Program, which serves a similar role, the key distinction being that in Helsinki “all you will need to bring is a plate, a spoon and a mug for yourself,” whereas here on PEI you need to demonstrate financial need, and apply, including provincial health number and household income.

One is “let’s everyone eat together in community, while ensuring everyone gets fed,” the other is “let’s ensure everyone gets fed, but with a fence around it to ensure it’s only people who need it.”

I prefer the former.

(via Linda Liukas)

May I never be accused of wringing every last drop out of my tympan.

Two notable things happened this weekend:

1. I received beautiful an email from a reader of the blog telling me that they’d spent a week reading through the archives here, and providing a lovely summary of my zeitgest. It warmed my heart. Some basic research revealed that the email came from an AI bot.
2. Lisa noticed a photo with one of her prints in the background appearing in a promotion on Facebook. Zooming into the photo revealed that it was AI-generated: the credit on the piece was hallucinated and Lisa’s art piece itself altered.

Together these seem worth making note of as the first significant examples of AI intruding into our life in a malicious way.

Today was the last day for the Oh Hey coffee spot at Founders Hall, so I stopped down to have my friend Lori Joy make me a flat white. It was very good.

Oh Hey’s coffee will be missed downtown; you can still grab a coffee at their Brackley Beach location. And the Founders Hall retail location remains; there’s lots of Lori Joy’s art at both locations.

From Comparative Literature As Core Need In Desk Research and AI As Tool by Ton Zijlstra:

Put together it spells to me that when I am doing some deskresearch shining a better light on literary ‘dark matter’ becomes much more important. Are there any francophone resources, Nordic authors, Eastern European authors, hispanic movements around an issue I am exploring? Yes, the scientific world largely uses English as lingua franca, but language areas also have their own spheres outside of it.

Last night I volunteered at the ticket desk at City Cinema for a sold-out screening of the Malayalam-language Bethlehem Kudumba Unit.

Seventy people gathered a few blocks from my house to watch a film I’d never heard of, in a language I’d never heard of.

I’m left feeling insufficiently curious about my neighbours and their cultural universe. And I’m reminded that my mind spends most of its time wandering only in the English-language landscape. To my detriment.

Postscript: according to Statistics Canada, in 2021 Malayalam was the fourth most common “non-official language spoken in the home” of immigrants to Charlottetown, after Mandarin, Arabic, and Vietnamese. 

The Confederation Centre of the Arts is nearing the end of a dramatic renovation. As a neighbour, watching the Centre extend itself out and up over the last two years has been fascinating, and I’ve been endlessly curious about what the new parts will feel like.

Having a couple of curious friends in town for the month—one a retired architect, the other a former Charlottetown Festival milliner—seemed like sufficient conceit to ask for a tour of the renovations, and Steve Bellamy graciously agreed to provide one when I did so.

And so we gathered, Lisa, L., friends and I, on Friday afternoon for a deep dive into the belly of the out-and-up.

It’s an impressive expansion. Parts of it are breathtaking.

The use of mass timber throughout is a stark (and welcome) contrast to the sandstone of the original building: it’s simply beautiful, especially as exposed inside the new rehearsal hall that extends out from the old public library pavillion.

As a neighbour, the reorientation of the Centre, after more than 50 years, to finally have a proper “front door” (onto Victoria Row) will change the nature of the neighbourhood for the better. Here’s an architectural rendering of what it will look like (source):

Here are some photos I took during our tour; none really do justice to the scale of the new spaces, which need to be experienced first-hand to truly be appreciated.

For the curious, here’s the Centre’s page detailing the renovations, and here’s the project blog. For the deeply curious, here is the almost-500-page plan for the renovations.