Listening to "Exploring Music" with Bill McGlaughlin, on WUOL. Bill is the heir of the Karl Haas "Adventures in Good Music" legacy, which ended when Karl died and classical music stations finally retired the reruns. McGlaughlin originates from the same station as Peter Van De Graaff in Chicago, whom I've mentioned earlier.
Rarely do I listen to non-commercial radio in lieu of watching TV and I am not proud to admit it. I have a friend who stated once that she did not watch TV and she and her husband, both Ph.D. faculty members at the University of Utah, did not own a TV. (That was before they had a son. I wonder if they gave in and let the boy watch Sesame Street, etc., who then "progressed" to TV Land and finally MTV.)
In any case, Frances and Joel had computers long before I did and used them as tools and, I bet, as toys. I know I certainly envied Frances because she had a word processor to write with while I still struggled with a typewriter. I am a wretched typist but a good proofreader, and upon becoming able to amend, cut, and paste text with ease because of technology, I thought I had (as Chance the bulldog pup did when he spied the chickens) "died and gone to Kentucky!"
Which brings us to Wendell Berry, the renowned poet-essayist-fiction writer who lives near me, who does not own a TV. Neither does he own a computer, and he wrote a manifesto declaring that he has no intention of ever owning a computer.
Now I would never have the character to forgo the modern "amenities." I proved that to be the case long ago when I was in the Peace Corps in Nigeria. I was an idealist who was very hard on himself because he did not live up to his ideals, and I rued that I did not live under true hardship as I imagined most PCVs did. I now wish I had sought an assignment in Lagos, then the capital of Nigeria, which was the closest facsimile there to a community in a developed nation, with a proper water and sewage system and heck, even things like movies, and unabashedly stated that I wanted the cushiest assignment I could land.
But that's the old man in me talking. At 23, I thought I should, as Jack Kennedy had said in his inaugural, "pay any price, bear any burden, oppose any foe..." So I didn't dare let anyone know I was a closet wuss who loved creature comforts. What does it say about me that one of the happiest recollections of my teens was visiting my sister in Indianapolis and Memphis during summers, where she and I would stay in the air-conditioning and lie on sofas, read books, drink cola, eat ice cream, smoke cigarettes, and talk about ideals and ha-ha funny things in politics and society? What the deuce was wrong with that? the old man in me asks.
But the idealist in me kept trying to emerge and in any case I was always a sucker for pretty sermons and vaunted ideals.
I decided in my twenties that I wanted to be a writer of some kind and started reading what writers wrote about their writing, as well as a good deal of their writing. Two people I became highly interested in were Kurt Vonnegut, a fellow Hoosier, and Wendell Berry, nearby in Kentucky.
Wendell is an ardent advocate of his causes, chief of which is saving the physical environment by preserving, actually returning to a way of life he finds superior, physically and spiritually, to the current one. Wendell sounds very much like a Luddite to me, one who opposes technological progress, favoring reversing it by destroying or otherwise doing away with the latest advances.
I first read the term in Vonnegut's 1952 novel, Player Piano, in which Luddites smash -- the author ruefully notes -- flush-toilets. Other than his concern for reasonable -- as in not stupidly self-defeating -- measures, Vonnegut's views are somewhat like Wendell's, as both are somewhat like the views of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and George Orwell in 1984. (For a liberal, I have read a slew of books denouncing "progress.")
The question might occur: "Mr. Berry, in your zeal to turn back the clock, would you be willing to do away with flush-toilets?" The answer to that is yep. Wendell has written -- nay, published -- that he has equipped his residence with a "compost-privy" -- not merely a ghost-of-the-past outdoor biffy but a repository the contents of which he periodically opens and mixes with straw and puts on the compost-heap for his organic farming. (He stated, in his description of that procedure, that it is not pleasant -- I'll take his word for that -- but that he does it for a higher cause.)
So this guy -- perhaps I should not say, "puts his money where his mouth is," especially in this case -- but this chap practices what he preaches; he takes heroic measures to prove, among other things, that he is not a hypocrite. (I have wondered what Wendell's family have thought of that sanitary arrangement, but he would be angry with me if I wondered it aloud to him, I'm pretty sure.)
Ergo, I wasn't surprised when Wendell wrote in literary magazines of his scorn for computers. He is a fine writer -- did I say that I revere him for his ability? -- and he has stated his case far better than I ever could, so I urge you to read him in his own words. If you do not agree wholeheartedly with him, you will have nonetheless read some exemplary writing.
He said that he writes with pencil (or pen) and paper, and his wife types his work on a 1956 typewriter, adding comments in the margins. There being no use of electric power because the two work in daylight, he does not patronize companies that depend on strip-mined coal to fuel them. He finds the companies, with their ad campaigns to get people to buy things they don't need and can't afford, to be odious. He wrote this in 1987, so I wonder what he would think of cell phones in the ears of odious SUV-drivers now.
He writes, "I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work." Well told!
Wendell's "standards for technological innovation" are admirable: a new tool that replaces an older one should be cheaper and smaller; it should do better work using less energy, preferably solar energy; it should be repairable by a person of normal intelligence, offered by a small store close to home, and "should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships."
Admirable.
But please go on to read the comments by people at the same link who do write with computers (and probably use modern plumbing too, dagnab it, not having the character -- or insane, dogged fanaticism! -- to employ a compost privy). Then read Wendell's last words to them. I was disappointed. I thought I detected a good-natured charity -- and not taking oneself too seriously -- in at least some of the remarks to him. Gibes. You know, raillery. But Wendell did not see them in that spirit. He was in high dudgeon. I thought he might actually be amused by some of the teasing about using his wife in lieu of a computer. But that was what he was the most offended about.
He was painstaking -- for he is painstaking about everything, it seems -- in rebutting every last one of the remarks. And Jee-zus! was he ever righteous. I've been wanting to say this for a long time, about him, whom I once idealized and with whom I am now disillusioned. His conceding not one iota of merit to any of his critics makes me now think of -- God help us! -- the commander guy, who to this day can find not one fault in himself.
My disenchantment began with my one encounter of Wendell, at a lecture he gave at Hanover College. A kid was trying to get a picture of him for the school's coverage of his visit. Wendell stopped talking and after a tense moment of silence, bawled the young man out. The young man, not being a dumb farm animal, and being red-faced in the center of the audience's attention, verbally defended himself as merely doing his assigned job. "Well, you're keeping me from doing my job. So have at it and get it over with," Wendell snapped. Then he went on with his lecture. Gracious and eloquent and good-humored, mind you. He said some very good things on behalf of the environment and good government and God and recited a poem about a man standing by an outdoor bonfire that was awesome.
But I did not forget how he treated the youngster.
Afterwards at a reception I was still carried by the momentum of my erstwhile starstruck attitude toward him and chatted with him. I wanted to talk with him about his writing and he steered away from that. He told me he taught writing at UK, and I was surprised at his saying it was not aimed at aspiring writers (His "Oh no" was an "Of course not") but instead a course in more or less remedial English for secretaries?
He still piques my interest and I admire him, in the same way I admire Frank Sinatra only for his surreal pipes and the Duke only for his enormous ouvre of harmless fluff consisting of oaters with Elmer Bernstein scores. I read or heard Wendell confess, in comparing himself to Ed McClanahan -- read Ed's killingly funny The Natural Man -- that he (Wendell) has no sense of humor. He's right. Prophets are not funny. The only laugh I can recall in all of Wendell's fiction is Burley Coulter's observation at a funeral that Big Ellis's wife, Annie May, has a "voice on her like a bitch hound." That was in about a thousand pages.
Just before my 4-way CABG, I was attending a creative writing course taught by Gary Devon, a published novelist, and when I mentioned Wendell Berry, Gary said that the guy must bear a burden, being known as such a saint in these parts.
OK. I got that off my chest. It was a digression of sorts but something I wanted very much to say: Wendell Berry, like other idols, has feet of clay.
Oh. What is a BOOF, you ask? (Rhymes with "oof!") Stands for Burned Out Old Fart.
Say Good Night, Dick.
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