Minor Literature

This is a little bit in response to those feacebook lists about what books you like.  I like facebook and all, i really truly do (not just saying that to keep the stazi from coming to get me), but there are only so many times i want to broadcast in hope of likes even from my friends, - anywho

I was looking for the old solid red cover of this book, for an image of it, but none are preserved.  The good news for all of you is that you can just get a pdf of this whole book apparently online, so that's sweet.  I mean for FREE.

But what was I going to say about it.  It really came to mind cause I was thinking of the various kinds of writing that Rachel teaches, comp for beginners, poetry, and then I have a few other friends teaching various college classes which require your standard essay and what-not, beside which we are all writing for our blogs our facebooks and ourselves.  One thing all of the more academic settings seem to stress is to know your audience, i guess now that i think about it, its funny that those settings seem to cause a certain ammount of amnesia in which grammar lessons might seem like a scapel to simply remove more memory/knowledge.

but i was talking about the book toward a minor literature which makes my top ten list of books that even tho i don't remember much of continues to influence me cause for one it is a way of grounding where you are writing from in a very specific writing way, which is good if writing is what you are doing.  from there i do think it cross applies.  minor literatures in rock and roll are numerous.  I guess now is a good as time as any to clarify what I mean.  or what i think deleuze meanth, which is, you have your major literature, which you read as the canon, and the which you read as phrase might too be important, even shakespeare might be read as a minor lit.

i'm beginning to get the sense i'm in over my head and either need to reread the book or have one of my more up on it friends step in.

but until i do let me finish the point with aspiring poetry and comp writers. i think it makes it clearer.  what makes so much of that work so painful is it is trying to be written as major lit, and its not that they will work themselves up to the major leagues tho that may be possible too, it's just that where they, maybe most of us, are positioned is not as part of the major cultrue, but part of the minor, or even sub-culture (again, someone, explain the dif to me).  people are trying to write their movie reviews as movie reviewers and they lose any particularity in their language.

i'll stop for now until i figure out what im talking about but book, youre still on my top ten.

This is starting to be the season when people are going to check old links and search for names and come looking right here for a CSA, which we won't be running this year.  That, plus the fact that some time has passed, seemed to make it the appropriate moment to reflect (for me at least) on the decision to not have Open Heart Farm this year.

I've got mixed emotions about it:

1) (and it's number one for a reason) The land I was on in the Intervale was marginal, and the option to move the whole thing to truly unmarginal land wasn't really there.  A few Side points here: the soil quality down there is excellent. b) as little as five to six hundred yards away as the crow flies are farms that have significantly different circumstances.  I can understand why they would stay.  Maybe they only lost 25% or less during the actual flooding of what was there at that time.  you replant as quick as you can, bet on a long fall and you maybe have done just fine.  Besides which people on bad soil probably lost 25% of their stuff just to rot in that clay soil, whereas had we dodged the flood we would have been slow, but lost nothing.

brings us to

2) I didn't want to move to a space where I would be choosing seeds (today probably had I been doing it) and I could have no excitement, just worry.  I know there is always chances and always weather, but being so close to that river's edge is avoidable, everyone else who is staying in the intervale is further.  All they really need is 4 inches less rain in May and then again in June and they are probably golden.  Even if that happens my fields still would have had loss and thats the difference.

3) so that's where i am now on that. working at a job i still don't think it's too wise to name online cause there must be things ive signed that said i won't, kinda looking for land where one and two don't have to occupy as much space in my brain as the joy of farming would normally.

now that I do have that job for which i am actually quite grateful i don't have quite the time to ruminate via typing on pet sounds box set that i want but we can always say maybe that is for the best . . .