Like many other people, I suspect, I’ve experienced a bit of Kickstarter fatigue owing to the number of requests I receive every week to support one project or another. But Colin Marshall’s new project Notebook on Cities and Culture is definitely one worth our support. Colin’s public radio interview show The Marketplace of Ideas is one of the best podcast series I’ve encountered, and I was honored to be part of it. But never mind me: his interviews with Peter Toohey, Lee Rourke, Gabriel Josipovici, Sarah Bakewell, and Tom McCarthy — among many others — are the kind of smart conversations bound to give you ideas and inspiration. I’m sure the new series will be just as engaging, so I hope you’ll consider lending your support.
It is at lion rock that i catch my first glimpse of the southern coastline and get a taste of what it actually looks like. After all that park-like landscape, the rugged desolation really takes you aback. New Zealand was one big dramatic postcard, as though a top Italian designer had drawn the landscape on a computer using top-of-the-range software with the aesthetic-maximizer function cranked up. This is different: primitive and rough, so beautiful, in a way I’ve never seen anywhere else, that at first it’s hard to call it beauty at all. The southern coast of Tasmania is beautiful in the same way as the rocky fells of Lapland are beautiful. There’s nothing inviting about it, nothing alluring; it’s a landscape that is perfectly aware of its own qualities and doesn’t feel the need to try to please anyone. It can afford to be aloof.
~ Johanna Sinisalo, Birdbrain
~ Karen McRae, Winter Wrapped Trees (via Helen McClory)
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So I decided to look for some place to eat something — anything — and that wasn’t easy. To the north was Tiananmen Square, to the east was the Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall, and to the west was the Great Hall of the People, where the ceremony would be held. So my only choice was south. I went south. I passed several soldiers, with their eyes steadily fixed on the same spots just like some wax statues. Then I passed an old, high, western-style building, whose windows were broken, like a gothic haunted house. Then a beautiful public convenience, like a temple. Nothing to eat. I decided to go on. I crossed by the subway. In the subway I was quite taken aback by what I saw. Three monstrous beggars — maybe demented, maybe deformed, maybe just dirty, I couldn’t be sure — lying on the ground, covered with rubbishy quilts (obviously, they slept there in the night). I had no choice but to pass them, quickly, I must say. And at last, when I returned to the surface of the earth, I saw the KFC across the street. I had a great breakfast at KFC. These were just like a series of symbols, I told myself.
~ Kong Yalei @ Granta
If there is a problem with the novel, and I’m agreed with Shields that there is, it is not because it doesn’t participate in modern technology, can’t talk about it or isn’t involved with it; I can download in seconds on my Kindle a novel made up entirely of emails or text messages. Perhaps the problem is rather a slow weakening of our sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which we make our own urgent narrative contributions; this being replaced by the author who takes courses to learn how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in his own culture. That package may work for some, as I believe my student’s account of dramatic upheavals in the Mongol empire will work for many readers; it has its intellectual ideas and universal issues: but it doesn’t engage us deeply, as I believe my other student’s work might if only he could get it right. And this is not simply an issue of setting the book at home or abroad, but of having it spring from matters that genuinely concern the writer and the culture he’s working in.
~ Tim Parks @ NYRB
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And yet, and yet – so much of the ‘nature writing’ we see today still falls right into the same trap. We have seen it very clearly recently, in so many of the submissions we’ve received for our forthcoming ecopoetry anthology. Except that now, what is curious is that the poems which are focused on ‘poetic moments’ of admiring pretty daffodils are matched by poems that can only be described as self-flagellating guilt dumps. We aspire to an ecopoetry – to an ecoliterature – that moves beyond all of that. None of which is to say that guilt isn’t appropriate when we look at what we’ve inflicted on the planet – and none of which is to say that there isn’t still a need for very fine poems that celebrate the beauty and mysteries of the natural world too. But what we really long for is writing – whether poetry or prose – that connects the two conflicting responses to the natural world and then moves on. What we need from ‘nature writing’ is to replace it with genuine ecoliterature – literature that doesn’t just acknowledge, but that actively embraces all the contradictions and discomforts inherent in our relationship with the natural world – those contradictions which surface in all of our genuine attempts to reconnect.
@ Earthlines
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So I see the relationship of people to trees as a conversation that involves quiet, attention, listening. What people have always done with breath, with spirit, is make stories, and I have no reason to believe that trees don’t similarly shape their breathing. Trees listen, then they tell their side of the same survival narrative. We have this conversation continuously on the molecular level. When the trees speak they tell me of course of water (they even sometimes make the sound of it quite convincingly.) They also talk about light. When I breathe in deeply in a forest, a light brightens just behind my eyes as surely as I see a canoe when you say the word canoe or conjure my daughter when you speak her name. Trees tell me other things as well; they seem to know me. Sometimes they tell me things that I don’t know I’ve heard until a long time after. Our breathing, I imagine, tells the trees of joy and desire, anger and injury, and is often shaped into the long sighs of sorrow. We tell it all, in every chemical flavor, storytelling virtuosos who by now, after a couple of million years, know how by heart.
~ Richard Hoffman
~ Paula Swisher (via)
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The Oven Bird by Robert Frost
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
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It wasn’t easy to live in the woods, especially when we wanted the light on our heads. If only to know shoal and wave and dune. Maybe The Mountain thought so. Or maybe not. Maybe The Mountain was too busy pointing his chair in the direction of the house he’d lost to think any of us deserved such things.
So we did what we could to convince The Mountain. We fed his hummingbird with a dropper. We built an enclosure for his baby deer. We bandaged The Mountain’s wounds after he fell asleep one night, but when he caught us tending to him, he brushed us away. When we walked him through the hospital we’d built for the animals, he said, you’re cold and ruthless. His tone couldn’t have been further from fury which made it that much harder to take. And when we tried to lift our heads to meet his eyes, we couldn’t see past his disappointment, big enough now to blot out the country we’d built in his name.
~ Paul Lisicky @ Tin House
Julia Leigh’s The Hunter is one of my favorite novels; I’ve read it multiple times, have assigned it to my students, and even wrote an essay about it of the academic sort that’s probably not much to read. So I’m cautiously curious about this film adaptation of the novel coming this spring (though the involvement of noted outdoorsman Willem Dafoe gives me hope).
Part of what makes the novel so powerful is the protagonist’s anonymity: he’s embodied in his actions, but never given a clear identity, which might be hard to maintain on screen. But The Hunter is also one of the (very) few novels I’ve read in which the familiar clash of “man v. nature” is complicated by cultural, historical, and technological alienation in ways we more often see in urban rather than wilderness or rural fiction. Those elements could really work in a film. So I’ll most likely see this when it’s released (unlike the recent Tintin, a childhood favorite I’m terrified to see the film of).
Your books often deal with loneliness. Do you think that most people feel alone in the world?
We are locked up in our own minds, although we instinctively reach out to each other for compassion, solidarity, understanding, and we often succeed, it should not be forgotten. But we cannot know each other. You could call that loneliness, or you could call it character; making us who we are, being different from one another, which is a good thing. The unending conversation with ourselves, we all have, but it ought not to be the only conversation. How can we know ourselves, when there is no one to compare us with? We define each other, to a large extent, and that is also as it should be. But we don’t want to be alone, I am sure.
~ Per Petterson
“The ocean is home to fish, whales, sharks, and lots of other creatures, including those strange jellyfish that look like underwater kites. There’s room for all kinds. But there’s no room for bears, especially polar bears. When will they learn not to stick their noses where they’re not wanted? We’re tired of teaching them the same lesson over and over again.”
Paid for by an orca
~ Ben Greenman, When Animals Run Attack Ads
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7. Deer
I never saw the deer. It was one side of a fence and I was the other. It made a weird, primeval grunt. The noise connected with some primitive part of my brain and suddenly there were two voices in my head; the thought process that I think of as ‘me’ and an older, much older, fearful thing that was thinking backawaynowbackawayowbackawaynow. Despite knowing that I didn’t really need to move, I started to back away.
Fear 9/10. Shame 1/10. Discomfort 2/10. Total 12/30
~ Benjamin Judge, Top Ten Animals that have caused me to Experience Fear, Shame and/or Discomfort
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Times were, Americans knew how do deal with four-footed threats. Roughly 100 years ago, Recreation magazine solicited readers’ input on the “wolf question.’’ The many responses can be boiled down to two essentials: Poison ’em or shoot ’em. “The coyote, like the poor, is always around us,’’ reader Vic Smith wrote. In 1897, when Montana was offering a $3 bounty for every pelt, “I shot 37 coyotes in one week,’’ Smith reported. If the state raised the bounty to $10, Smith opined, it would “practically exterminate these animals in less than two years.’’
~ Alex Beam, Boston Globe
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Cats aren’t the only animals that are mentally stimulated by flashing and dancing lights, though. As it turns out, researchers at Wageningen University, in the course of their research on ethical livestock farming, noticed that pigs like to play with dancing lights as well. European regulations currently require that pig farmers provide mentally-stimulating activity for their pigs in order to reduce boredom, which leads to aggression and biting, and researchers at Wageningen University, in collaboration with the Utrecht School of the Arts, are currently developing a video game called “Pig Chase” for livestock pigs that is not unlike my cat’s iPad app.
@ Scientific American
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In what has been deemed “the worst case of badger baiting seen” by the investigating RSPCA officer, district judge Kristina Harrison heard how the defendants used a Bedlington Terrier with a tracking collar to locate the badgers in their underground sett.
~ Faces of the badger baiters
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Utah forbids hunting at night, but some people can’t resist. So the state uses a trap to lure violators. The Division of Wildlife Resources has five robotic deer. They’re placed near highways at night. They mimic deer movements. But like the monster in a Halloween nightmare, the deer don’t drop when shot. Instead, an officer emerges to seize your gun. A similar decoy in Georgia had to be replaced after being shot more than 1,000 times.
@ NPR (via)
~ Jeremy Mayer, Typewriter deer