Mary Harrington:

Most secular modern and post-modern creatives intuit that the age of naturalism is long since over. But this discovery confronts us with the enormous, gaping hole that yawns, where we’d expect to find a metaphysical framework able to give coherence and moral order to non-naturalistic artworks…. I submit that this is the real sickness in contemporary culture: not the abandonment of naturalism as such, but the widespread (and highly politicised) refusal to allow the reality of any metaphysical substrate able to sustain the artistic depiction of forms, and ends.

In other words: Why are you making what you’re making? Truth has many layers; you don’t have to depict the obvious one. But I will submit that if you don’t begin by studying the obvious one, you will never be able to see what lies behind it. You may have your ideas of it, but you won’t be able to see it.

This week’s work

Recently I heard someone say that such-and-such a farm had “buffalo and other iconic animals.” What other animals are iconic? What animals are not iconic? Is there a chart somewhere I can reference? Are the non-iconic animals insulted?

Made oatmeal-potato datschkuche for breakfast and it is the best thing I’ve ever eaten this week. You can have the recipe receipt if you can read my handwriting. See William Woys Weaver’s Dutch Treats for the original.

I am continually experimenting with my garden space, but here is one thing that works year after year: I run jute twine through steel fenceposts for a crude trellis, tie up and spread out the plants with the same twine, and in fall compost the whole mess, leaving the posts for next year.

“Coffee in a can” must be one of the saddest phrases in the English language.

Two observations today. (1) Thank God for human beings willing to help other human beings solve problems in ways not entirely condoned by bureaucracy; and (2) those designing to replace such human beings with AI should be thrown in an ICE prison, given a phone, and put on hold until they starve.

Just ran across an article that I thought might be interesting but quickly learned that the New Scythians were not in fact proponents of appropriate technology in agriculture. Alas

Two things you might see more of in Raleigh if people didn’t tend their lawns so carefully: a great crested flycatcher (which nests in natural holes in trees) and a crazy array of grasses going to seed. But you can see the carving (and me) downtown at Artsplosure Saturday and Sunday.

Thought I would try carving some text again: the first lines of Goethe’s “Mailied” (May Song), loosely translated, with the first bars of Fannie Mendelssohn Hensel’s setting of the text. I had a terrible time carving it, and only realized the problem was not me or the knife but the wood after I’d done too much work to want to start over. The chatoyancy, that shimmer at the bottom, is a clue… far too late.