Culture

Wendell Berry, who died Monday aged 92, was a man who loved the soil and the soul. Writing from Kentucky, where his family has lived and farmed for generations, Berry built up, over more than sixty years, a corpus of fiction, non-fiction and poetry – all genres in which he distinguished himself – which, when taken as whole, reveals a profound and coherent philosophy of the earth and how it relates to human community.  Unfortunately, the average person probably doesn’t know who Berry is. Even those who have heard of him might only know his incendiary 1987 Harper’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” or his watershed 1977 takedown of maximalist agricultural practices, The Unsettling of America.

It averaged a brutal 91 degrees this week in Cameron County, the southernmost tip of Texas, and a group dressed as the cast of O Brother, Where Art Thou have been there sweating away at something big. A colossal limbless torso is parked on the dunes and a head, suspended from a crane, is swaying very gently in an ocean breeze. There is the smell of metal and hot dust.  Pending some finishing touches and last-minute dabs of glue, this Atelier Missor’s Prometheus, soon to be unveiled at SpaceX’s Starbase launch site – standing contrapposto, torch aloft, bidding the rockets a comradely “Adieu!

“Do Tim Curry proud,” my friend Simon said to me when he heard I was writing about him. Simon is, admittedly, a Tim Curry fan extraordinaire whose go-to karaoke song is "I’m Going Home" from the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, which Curry himself sang with mournful gravitas both on stage and in the 1975 film. Yet it also encapsulates the way in which the actor and singer, who has died aged 80, became an extraordinarily beloved part of the pop cultural landscape and remained that way for decades. Even a debilitating stroke in 2012, which forced him into a wheelchair and largely ended his on-screen career, could not damage the Englishman’s inimitable reputation as someone who made audiences laugh – a lot – and, when the occasion arose, tantalized or terrified them as well.

“And try to make the most of every moment / ’Cause if you never try, you never win.” There are few more appropriate lines with which to begin an obituary of Dolly Parton, although they do have the slight disadvantage of sounding like something that might be printed on an especially tawdry greetings card. Dolly – always Dolly, never ‘Ms Parton’ – was never particularly concerned about that sort of thing. She understood that sincerity was generally more effective than sophistication, and that if something was true there was little point in making it sound cleverer than it was. She was the greatest singer of her generation, the female Elvis if you will, and she was damned if anyone was ever going to persuade her otherwise.