This week I read James Agee and Walker Evans’s Cotton Tenants: Three Families, originally a report meant for Fortune Magazine. Killed by the magazine in the mid-1930s, the piece was first published in 2013 by Melville House. I read aloud this week to just about anyone who would listen, highlighting a particular passage in Agee’s writing about the food of the Alabama tenant farmers he met in the summer 1936. The spiders appear like a miracle, in what Adam Haslett, introducing the book, refers to as “an unapologetic attack on a hidebound class system, an attack firmly grounded in the lived particulars of those near the bottom of the order.” Here’s Agee:

And now finally realize, insofar as that is vicariously possible, that this steady brutal bastinado of the bowels and bellies and brain goes on every few hours three times a day (when there is food at all, that is) for exactly as long as life lasts. Consider seriously the favorableness of this food as a diet for an unborn and for a suckling infant; for a child; for an adolescent; for an adult: and consider seriously whether it is not remarkable to the point of nausea that a plant nurtured in such soil should manage to live not in any full health nor in any fulfillment of its form, but at all.

The human organism, however, is remarkably tenacious of life and miraculously adapted to it. In the course of adapting, it may be forced to sacrifice a few side-issues, such as the capability of thinking, of feeling emotion, or of discerning any possibilities of joy or goodness in living, but it lives.

Twenty-six thousand feet up the cols of Everest, a long way beyond the staying power of plants, pale spiders have been found, who subsist on nothing more discernible than air. Apparently they also reproduce their kind. What else they do with their time and, for that matter, why, no one had yet made out.

I’ve also read this week an interview with essayist Charles D’Ambrosio, conducted by the writer Leslie Jamison and published by Tin House; the essay contains a very useful bit of instruction about allowing each of our sentences to “seem equally destined, a legitimate thing in its own right, free from any narrative intention [we] might have.”

I’ve also returned to an essay by Gerda Saunders, “My Dementia,” published originally in The Georgia Review and then in Slate. Saunders, who is writing through her dementia, is also the subject of a video project, available here.

And finally, speaking of videos: The band Ok Go dazzles once again. (After dazzling with this.)

Photo: “General Store, Interior,” Walker Evans