Wendell Berry: Life and Work

Essayist, social critic, poet, “mad farmer,” novelist, teacher, and prophet: Wendell Berry has been called many things, but the broad sweep of his contemporary relevance and influence defies facile labels. With his unique perspective and far-reaching vision, Berry poses complex questions about humankind and our relationship to the land and offers simple but profound solutions. Berry’s essays, novels, and poems give voice to a provocative but consistent philosophy, one that extends far beyond its agrarian core to include elements of sociology, the natural sciences, politics, religion, philosophy, linguistics, agriculture, and other seemingly incompatible fields of study. Wendell Berry: Life and Work examines this wise and original thinker, appraising his written work and exploring his influence as an activist and artist. Jason Peters has assembled a broad variety of writers including Hayden Carruth, Sven Birkerts, Barbara Kingsolver, Stanley Hauerwas, Donald Hall, Ed McClanahan, Bill McKibben, Scott Russell Sanders, Norman Wirzba, Wes Jackson, and Eric T. Freyfogle. Each contributor examines an aspect of Berry’s varied yet cohesive body of work. Also included are highly personal glimpses of Wendell Berry: his career, academic influence, and unconventional lifestyle. These deft sketches of Berry show the purity of his agrarian lifestyle and demonstrate that there is nothing simple about the life to which he has devoted himself. He embraces a life that sustains him not by easy purchase and haste but by physical labor and patience, not by mindless acquiescence to a centralized economy but by careful attention to local ways and wisdom. Wendell Berry: Life and Work combines biographical sketches, personal accounts, literary criticism, and social commentary. Together, the contributors illuminate Berry as he is: a complex man of place and community with an astonishing depth of domestic, intellectual, filial, and fraternal attributes. The result is a rich portrait of one of America’s most profound and honest thinkers. Jason Peters is Dorothy J. Parkander Chair in Literature, Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. This is a superb collection. Berry is one of America\u27s greatest social critics, essayists, and poets, and the grand simplicity and unity of his life and thoughts emerges from the fascinating details of his personal history, captured beautifully in the words of his friends. --David Ehrenfeld, author of The Arrogance of Humanism and Swimming Lessons: Ke Though the \u27characters\u27 herein are real people, there is magic in this book that rivals the best of Wendell Berry\u27s writings. Over and over we see solitary readers grappling with Berry\u27s art and thought amid struggles and in places unknown to the author. The magic is that they receive direction and succor even so. The loving reciprocity of these \u27What I\u27ve Gained from Wendell\u27 tales is so natural yet powerful it brings to mind planting and harvesting. The integrity-filled life, poetic depth, devastating prophesies, and superlative prose of Mr. Berry long ago achieved a consistency that verges on the relentless. To see his good work gently rise from the page, years and miles later, to touch lives he has not imagined in ways he has not foreseen, converts this near relentlessness into simple grace. --David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K I can\u27t think of any subject matter more timely, and timeless, than the suite of ideas that Wendell Berry has championed over the years. While giving thoughtful attention to those ideas, this anthology also offers rare insight into the person behind the words. Like the unmistakable laugh of Mr. Berry himself, it is sure to leave readers both invigorated, and basking in the grace of this gentle, wise man. --Jennifer Sahn, editor of Orion magazine [A] stimulating collection. Berry has long deserved such a masterful collection as this. Peters’ volume does what the best of the collections always do: It drives us to pick up Berry’s writings and read them over and over again. --Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., Charlotte Observer The essays collected by Peters unearth a simplicity and unity beneath Berry’s complex surface, proffering a source of inspiration for those seeking to live life better and encouraging audiences to forsake worldly consumerism in favor of consumption of Berry’s words. --Kentucky Monthly If it is true that we live lives of noisy desperation, prone to the seductions of fashion and to the ‘thrall of our appetites,’ we could do worse than to hear a voice that offers an alternative. Wendell Berry: Life and Work is a rewarding way to begin listening to such a voice. --Paul Doerksen, Winnipeg Free Press The most comprehensive single source evaluating Berry and his impact. --Whitney Hale, UK News Pairing literary criticism with more personal work, Peters\u27 volume does a remarkable jobn connecting the dots between Berry\u27s physical labors and his intellectual ones. --The Post and Courier (online) This appreciation of Berry by friends and colleagues is a fitting tribute to a man whose writing truly has the power to change lives. --Carmichael\u27s Bookstore Catalog “Those who admire Berry’s work will want to pick up this book even if they may already own some of its contents, because there is no other single volume that paints so complete a portrait of this remarkable man.” --Scott P. Richert, The University Bookman “Anyone undertaking a serious study of Berry will want this book. Those familiar with only one of his genres will find it a helpful introduction to the full range of his writing and activism.” --Lisa Woolley, Bloomsburg Review “The wonderful thing about this collection of essays is that it demonstrates just how varied and far-reaching Berry’s influence has been and how meaningful his work is to his readers in so many different ways.” --Resurgence Taken in sum, these essays illuminate the life and work of one of America’s most provocative native thinkers in which the reader senses what the subject professes he lives. --Richard Taylor, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society Shuman and Owens . . . presents articles based on how the work of author Wendell Berry can be interpreted in the context of living a true Christian life. --Book News Inc. [The contributors] discuss [Berry’s] placing community and interaction for the common good over the centralization of the work and life of the world. --Mary Popham, Courier-Journal.com A broad collection of writers examines the famous Kentucky agrarian writer’s work through a series of essays. --Lexington Herald-Leader This collection is a must-read, must-own….It is filled with the richness of writings from the essayists who delineate not only Wendell Berry’s great works, but give us a glimpse of the man, one of Kentucky’s greatest wonders. --Mary Popham, Louisville Courier-Journal This is a remarkable collection for reference and reflection. --Mary Popham, The Courier Journal This collection of essays put together by editor Jason Petes are written by 27 scholars, activists, and fellow authors that \u27unite considreations on Berry\u27s thinking, friendships, and labor.\u27. . .[It] is perhaps as good a glance inside the soul of Wendell Berry as one could hope for. -- Modern Mountain Magazine “Not only reminds us why it is such a pleasure to read Wendell Berry’s work...but it further compels readers to take seriously the implications of his work for their own lives and in their own communities. In doing so, it serves to extend the already considerable reach of Berry’s legacy.”--Journal of Agriculture and Human Values In many ways, this collection reads like a tribute to Wendell Berry and through this tribute the authors lead the reader into Berry\u27s thoughts on community, responsibility, and fidelity and these qualities are the yardsticks of happiness. One of the points driven home by this collection is that one should not consider the writingsof Wendell Berry without also considering his life, and thus the title of this collection is appropriate. -- Jacob Jones, University of Florida -- Jacob Joneshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_environmental_sciences/1006/thumbnail.jp

Temporal Cliques Admit Sparse Spanners

Let G=(V,E) be an undirected graph on n vertices and lambda:E -> 2^{N} a mapping that assigns to every edge a non-empty set of positive integer labels. These labels can be seen as discrete times when the edge is present. Such a labeled graph {G}=(G,lambda) is said to be temporally connected if a path exists with non-decreasing times from every vertex to every other vertex. In a seminal paper, Kempe, Kleinberg, and Kumar (STOC 2000) asked whether, given such a temporal graph, a sparse subset of edges can always be found whose labels suffice to preserve temporal connectivity - a temporal spanner. Axiotis and Fotakis (ICALP 2016) answered negatively by exhibiting a family of Theta(n^2)-dense temporal graphs which admit no temporal spanner of density o(n^2). The natural question is then whether sparse temporal spanners always exist in some classes of dense graphs. In this paper, we answer this question affirmatively, by showing that if the underlying graph G is a complete graph, then one can always find temporal spanners of density O(n log n). The best known result for complete graphs so far was that spanners of density binom{n}{2}- floor[n/4] = O(n^2) always exist. Our result is the first positive answer as to the existence of o(n^2) sparse spanners in adversarial instances of temporal graphs since the original question by Kempe et al., focusing here on complete graphs. The proofs are constructive and directly adaptable as an algorithm

Writing in the Disciplines Workshop

A workshop for Xavier faculty to learn about best practices for teaching discipline-specific writing. Participants explored the diversity of writing tasks expected of students in different disciplines and began to develop a writing assignment

The relationship between anxiety, personality characteristics, and working memory performance

The relationship between anxiety and working memory capacity (WMC) andperformance is a widely researched topic in the field of psychology. Typically, anxiety has anegative effect on working memory performance (Coy, O’Brien, Tabaczynski, Northern, &Carels, 2011). However, the direction of the relationship between anxiety and working memoryis somewhat poorly understood. Test anxiety, a form of state anxiety, has also been shown tonegatively impact working memory performance. In addition, personality impacts all aspects ofhuman behavior. Therefore, it is realistic to expect personality to have an impact on anxiety. Infact, many studies have established an association between job characteristics and anxiety andpersonality characteristics such as neuroticism. The purpose of the present study was toinvestigate and examine the relationship between anxiety, personality, and working memoryperformance. There were 45 participants, all of whom were students at Western CarolinaUniversity. The Beck Anxiety Inventory – Trait Version and Reactions to Tests inventory wereboth used to gather information on the participants’ levels of anxiety. The M5-120, which isbased on the FFM of personality, was used to gather information on the participants’ personality.Automated Complex Span Tasks were used to gather information on that participants’ working memory performance. Findings revealed significant relationships between gender and workingmemory performance and RTT scores as well as between type of instructions and BAIT scores.Findings also revealed significant relationships between RTT scores and working memoryperformance, BAIT scores, and the Neuroticism domain. Furthermore, findings revealedsignificant relationships between the Neuroticism domain and BAIT scores, the Extraversiondomain, and the Agreeableness domain. A significant relationship was also revealed between theOpenness to Experience domain and BAIT scores. Lastly, two multiple regression models werestatistically significant in their ability to predict working memory performance using RTT scoresalone, and RTT scores and the Conscientiousness domain as predictors. This study suggests thatboth anxiety and personality play a role in working memory performance but additional researchis needed to further explore this relationship

An Investigation of Spin-Valves and Related Films by TEM

The work presented in this thesis is a study of the reversal mechanisms of the magnetic layers within spin-valve materials and related films. Spin-valves display the phenomenon of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) and are now being utilised as magnetoresistive read heads in commercial applications. A spin-valve typically consists of two ferromagnetic layers separated by a thin spacer layer (eg Cu in the range 2-10nm). One of the ferromagnetic layers is "pinned" or fixed in direction by exchange coupling to an antiferromagentic layer such as FeMn or IrMn. This shifts the hysteresis loop by a few hundred Oersted (Oe), and so only the other "free" ferromagnetic layer can reverse under the influence of the comparatively small magnetic field from a passing tape or disk. This reversal corresponds to a change between a parallel 'low' resistance state to an antiparallel 'high' resistance state under the application of a magnetic field of ≈10-150e. The reversal mechanisms that take place in the "free" and "pinned" magnetic layers in a range of spin-valve materials have been studied using Lorentz modes of transmission electron microscopy. These results form the bulk of this thesis. The effect of Molybdenum impurity on the magnetoresi stance of Ni80Fe20 is considered as a secondary topic, and only chapter 6 is given over to these results. The first chapter introduces the basic concepts of ferromagnetism, magnetoresistance, and its application in magnetic storage technology. Particular emphasis is given to the various energy contributions that are present in thin magnetic films. This leads to the concept of domains and domain walls. Anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) and giant magnetoresistance (GMR) are introduced. These phenomena have enabled the production of many thin film sensors for applications including magnetic storage technology. Spin-valves are then discussed, reference being given to their application as a sensor in magnetic read-head assemblies. The possible commercial benefits of using GMR based devices for magnetic storage applications are highlighted. Transmission electron microscopy was the primary tool used to investigate the materials discussed in this thesis. Thus chapter 2 is devoted to discussion of the instrumentation and techniques employed. An overview of the important parts of a TEM is introduced. including the electron gun and microscope column. The aberrations which limit the resolution of the microscope are mentioned before the techniques used to image structural properties are presented. Particular attention is then paid to the Fresnei, Foucault and Low angle diffraction (LAD) imaging modes of Lorentz electron microscopy which are used to investigate the magnetic structures in thin films. Finally, the methods used to apply magnetic fields in-situ are discussed. Chapter 3 begins with a review of spin-valves detailing parameters such as the magnetic layer configuration, anisotropy arrangement, free layer reversal and deposition technique used for the samples investigated in this thesis. Structural properties such as the average grain size of the spin-valves are investigated by bright and dark field imaging. Diffraction studies allow some compositional data and the level of texture to be evaluated. The main body of results in this chapter concentrates on the magnetisaton reversal mechanism of the free layer in a range of FeMn-biased spin-valves with parallel anisotropy. The thickness of the copper spacer layer (and hence the strength of the interlayer coupling strength), is varied in the range 2-10nm, as is the angle of applied field, 0, with respect to the biasing direction. Fresnel imaging and LAD studies reveal there to be 3 modes of reversal that are possible in the free layer depending on the interlayer coupling strength and field orientation. Two of the observed modes involve a combination of magnetisation rotation and domain assisted processes while the third involves coherent rotation of magnetisation alone. The boundary between the modes of reversal was shown to be indistinct, and involved a free layer reversal that proceeded by an increasing amount of magnetisation rotation as ? was decreased. This was accompanied by the formation of an increasing density of low angle, low mobility domain walls. The observed modes of reversal are presented on a phase diagram and shown to be in many ways consistent with a coherent rotation model by Labrune. The main discrepancy between the model and observed modes of reversal is that domains are forbidden in the model. The chapter concludes with a brief study of a spin valve in a crossed anisotropy arrangement. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)