Al Zambone Explains Cattleblogging...

...and it has everything to do with place, farmers, rootedness, and the "rural Enlightenment."

Here is a taste of his "Manifesto on Cattleblogging":

This blog is a representation of some of my scholarly and intellectual interests.  Among these are what John Fea has cunningly termed the “Rural Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century.  I am, however, even more interested in a Rural Enlightenment–or Rural Renaissance, or Reformation, or Rebirth–of the 21st century.  This interest is deeply personal.  Noel Perrin entitled one of his books First Person Rural, and I think I can say the same of my own personal identity.  In some way I don’t fully understand myself, I in large part understand myself in relation to the rural landscape in which I grew up...

...Thus cattle are for me the symbol of rural life, and thus of symbol of place, of rootedness, of a pre-modern response (or post-modern rightly-understood response) to the anomie and rootlessness of modern life.  They are responsible for keeping us alive. And they cannot be photographed inside an apartment.