Precipitate Picks: May 31-June 6th

This week’s staff recommendations discuss the social, the political, and the literary. Enjoy!

Daniel’s Pick:

Potato Hill Farm is a private farm in Augusta, Kentucky that serves as a day spa. For $80-$100 you can get a full body massage, foot reflexology, lunch, wellness coaching, a walk along the creek, and/or donkey therapy. My first instinct is to scoff at a place like this; paying for an afternoon on the farm seems one step up from visiting the Jamestown Settlement just to get away from it all. It’s also a farm, of course—nature domesticated—not a prehistoric rainforest untouched by humanity. Though, in an age in which America is becoming no longer a land of waving grain and western vistas but strip malls and big boxes, perhaps Potato Hill isn’t a terrible idea.

For any green space to endure against the scythe of economic growth, it seems crucial that it turns a buck, if not preserved by state or federal government. And, if direct contact with green spaces is necessary to maintain psychological health, as some researchers argue, maybe the commodification of green spaces into a good/service that we need to pencil-in and purchase isn’t too ridiculous in today’s world. Who knows? If the vacant, 12-acre lot of wildflowers beside my apartment complex gets developed by the end of the summer, I might be booking that donkey therapy sooner than I think.

Cameron’s Pick:

My new favorite dinosaur? Definitely the Brontësaurus, after reading Jane Eyre for the first time over the past week to kick off my summer vacation. By “reading,” I mean “eagerly pawing through its pages while eating bonbons in bed,” since the book’s heady mixture of Byronic woe, feminist social critique, religious meditation, and romance has only improved in its two hundred years of aging. Of interest to Precipitate readers, the book’s meticulously realized settings—especially the lonely mansion at Thornwood and the bucolic grange of the book’s latter half—mirror, dramatize, and occasionally confront its characters in classic Gothic fashion. Plus, there’s the recent film adaptation, if you’re too lazy or short on time to wade through five hundred pages of Victorian prose.

Josh’s Pick:

An examination of the virtually unregulated, multi-billion dollar business of bottled water, Stephanie Soechtig’s debut documentary, Tapped, shines a light on damning connections between the bottled water industry, oil refineries, cancer, birth defects, and the tremendous amounts of plastic waste soiling water habitats and stuffing landfills the world over. Rhetorically clear and visually arresting, the film lays out irrefutable evidence against bottled-beverage giants Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi, highlighting their shifty business practices and general disregard for public health. If you think access to clean drinking water is a basic human right, then check out this film.

Gwynne’s Pick:

If you’re a photography buff like me, you might be more familiar with James Agee’s 1930s project with documentary photographer, Walker Evans: Now Let Us Praise Famous Men. Agee and Evans travelled around rural Alabama to humanize (through arresting images and poetic reportage) the hardscrabble life of sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Agee follows a similar elegiac path in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family.

Set in early 20th century Knoxville, Tennessee, A Death in the Family chronicles the world-shifting moment of losing a husband and father unexpectedly. Based on Agee’s own father’s sudden death when the author was six years old, Agee invokes ecstatic Transcendental-esque prose to uncover the sacred within the profane, mediating the unimaginable loss of a loved one through the richly imagined material world. Truly inspired prose.

Caitlin’s Pick:

One of my favorite essays on writing is George Orwell’s “Why I Write.” If you’re not familiar with this essay, it was first published in 1946 by Gangrel, a short-lived literary journal in England. Orwell addresses his encounters with poetry at a young age, first with Blake’s “The Tyger” and later, with his attempts to write in the Georgian style; Orwell even tried his hand at a rhyming play, written at age fourteen, in imitation of Aristophanes. At age sixteen, Orwell recounts how he “suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, the sounds and associations of words—a moment all writers, I imagine, wish to come to so early on.

In “Why I Write,” Orwell explains how he has aimed to write more exactly and less picturesquely, a point that seems to go hand-in-hand with his discussion of the four motives for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. I’ve returned to “Why I Write” many times because of Orwell’s ability to pinpoint the shared experiences, struggles, and questions many writers face. Wherever you may find yourself in your writing life at the moment, consider taking a look at Orwell’s “Why I Write.”