David Walbert: Unhewn Stones

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:51:58 -0400

At Roy Underhill’s window-making class, 2022… At the end of the first day he went around the room sweeping the entire class’s shavings to each bench and took these faked photos.

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:00:00 -0400

Facing the usual early-July glut of cherry tomatoes I made confit: basil leaves in a baking dish, a layer of whole cherry tomatoes, a few crushed cloves of garlic, a liberal sprinkle of salt and enough olive oil to come about halfway up the tomatoes. Roast at 325F for maybe an hour until slightly brown on top and wrinkled.

I was afraid I was wasting two pints of tomatoes but honestly the result is one of the best things I have ever eaten. (Though I do say that about once a month.) The confit went into a couple of half-pint containers in the freezer, whence I’ll have pasta sauce in a couple of months when the season is over.

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:43:17 -0400

“It is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.” —Hawthorne

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:17:39 -0400

New woodworking website is live.

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 08:31:37 -0400

When I finished Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers last month I wanted to post something here more than the “finished reading” flag that feels like awarding myself a medal; but I didn’t get around to it. Read Morten Høi Jensen’s review instead, and then do read the book:

For the most part, they are characters we only ever know socially, as it were, either in dialogue or by their consumption of goods. Yet by fixing the narrative in their various households and domestic concerns, Tergit’s novel rebels against the remorseless one-way traffic of history. Here, banal instances of private life jostle against political turning points. Tergit’s novel rescues those moments that history would not only fail to record but would obliterate the memory of….

Naturally, it is difficult to read Effingers without also reading the Holocaust back into its pages, yet the novel frustrates this response by the sheer abundance of life it evokes. Tergit, writing to a publisher in 1949, was adamant that what she had written was “not the novel of Jewish fate.” If that’s all it was, it might be of only historical interest, yet who among its twenty-first century readers could fail to find its account of a liberal, cosmopolitan culture’s downfall distressingly resonant?

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:12:23 -0400

Ran across this fascinating toy that lets you see the night sky from any point on earth at any time in history.

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:23:55 -0400

Hey folks, I need to ask a favor if anyone has a few minutes. I am replacing my SquareSpace woodworking website with a new, hand-built one and would like a few people to test it out for me: look around, see if you run into any problems, and reply here or send me a message through the contact form.

There is no online store as such, only an email-request form. So you might even choose a carving, click “request purchase” and try out that functionality, with a note saying you don’t actually want it and are just testing. I’ll make the same offer here I’m planning to put out on my email list: if you do that, and there’s ever anything you actually do want, I’ll give you a 10% discount (max $20).

Here’s the link to the beta version.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 19:39:01 -0400

Proposition: Video replay should be used, if it is used at all, only to correct on-field, real-time calls that may by objective standards have been incorrect: was the ball fair or foul, was the runner safe or out, was the receiver’s foot in or out of bounds, did the puck cross the line. Video replay should never be used to make or alter subjective judgments. Given enough time and analysis I can prove virtually anything you like, and so can a referee with multiple camera angles and slow-motion.

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:03:37 -0400

Stories of European tourists being pleasantly surprised that we’re not all ogres over here have me thinking of Frances Trollope and remembering that I should be glad Americans don’t spit as much as we used to.

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 22:17:50 -0400

Granted I chose my angles carefully, but the native perennials have managed this well so far without any city water, only what’s fallen from the sky.

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:22:41 -0400

“May Song II.” Four panels in a reclaimed window, 20×25 inches. The text is my somewhat free translation of a portion of Goethe’s poem “Mailied,” and all but one of the flowers depicted are drawn from photos of my front-yard flower meadow (in past years, when it rained).

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:16:22 -0400

Rain barrel installed, after two additional (unforeseen but unsurprising) trips to Lowe’s. Now I expect either the eastern piedmont will turn into a temperate rain forest, or it will never rain again and we’ll all wind up as extras in a film version of Ezekiel 37.

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:08:31 -0400

Two inches of rain in the past week has Crabtree Creek rushing by at a normal height, but the wetland area by Raleigh Road tells the full story. The stumps in the first photo and the cracked earth in the last should be well under water. We have a long way to go before we’re out of this drought.

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:54:06 -0400

The empty coffee cup sits on the park bench. It has had a busy morning, filled with ambition, and now it has found its peace.

City Zen

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:25:42 -0400

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.

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:13:36 -0400

This week’s work

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:14:13 -0400

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?

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:56:31 -0400

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.

Sun, 31 May 2026 12:01:42 -0400

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.

Sat, 30 May 2026 07:25:30 -0400

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

Fri, 29 May 2026 12:31:03 -0400

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.

Fri, 15 May 2026 11:22:02 -0400

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

Thu, 14 May 2026 09:46:16 -0400

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.

Wed, 13 May 2026 16:46:52 -0400

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.

Wed, 13 May 2026 16:34:35 -0400

Follow-up on the Second Luddites Congress: The August 1996 issue of the Friends Journal includes an article about the meeting (pp. 16–18) which includes a “summary statement” that may be the same as the “statement of means” referenced here and elsewhere, but I don’t know for sure. (Otherwise, I am fairly convinced that the document is not online, which I suppose means that the Congress was not entirely unsuccessful.)

I can’t say why I’m suddenly so keen to read up on this, except that it feels like a loose thread of old research.