Summer has been busy with grant-writing and new data collection, but Sunday I treated myself to a browse at the wonderful Bookmark independent bookstore in Halifax. This is what I bought:
New books for my office library
Tag: What I’m reading (Page 1 of 3)
My softcover edition of Sightlines (2012) looks like this.
While my first Kathleen Jamie experience, Findings (2005), came serendipitously while browsing the Halifax Central Library, my second was bought for me for Christmas by someone who knows me well. Dedicated “for the Island-goers” this spoke directly to me, fresh from the Falklands. Jamie is also a poet, and it is with such carefully chosen yet spare and modest language that she tackles these essays that work the vein between human and nature. Several concern remote islands and outcrops like St. Kilda and Rona, with historic human occupation that speaks of human ingenuity and fortitude, and where novel landscapes persist as a result. A favourite one conveys the zen experience of the Hvalsalen, the ‘whale hall’ in the Bergen Museum, its history and its renovation, which is recalled later in a meditation on the use of whalebone as memorial and in craft. One called ‘pathologies’ explores the human body as a habitat, for bacteria among other challenging organisms, inspired by our tendency to be selective about what we consider nature worth saving, or worthy of our awe. Yet another talks about Jamie’s experiences as a young archaeologist, excavating to ‘save’ history from development while erasing it. These are some of my favourites essays in this collection, which also have others focusing on natural phenomena like orca, aurora and seabirds. My preferences are not surprising given my interest in things social: after all, when presented with colonies of rockhopper penguins and black-browed albatrosses on West Falkland, I asked, “Can we go back and watch the shearing?”. Jamie needs to go next to the Falklands, given her fascination for remote islands, wind, and the history of human industry including whaling and agriculture. I think I’ll write and tell her.
A black-browed albatross patrols the rockhopper penguins, who are guarding their eggs, on a cliff at Dunbar, West Falkland.
My softcover edition of Alexandra Harris’ Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies
Becalmed in Heathrow after a cancelled flight returning from Portugal this fall, I picked up Alexandra Harris’ Weatherland (2015) to ease the wait. Last night I finished it. Why so long? Well, it was a busy time, and I dipped in and out between work travel and renovations. Frankly, at times like that, nothing other than fiction gets more than a page read at bedtime before oblivion. But I also savoured it. This is not a book to be rushed. It’s a beautifully written liberal arts education in paperback.
Harris goes back centuries to track the influence of weather and seasonal cycles on art and literature, and in doing so, tracks changes in awareness as well as public preferences fads in scenery. For instance she records Robert Burton’s observation in the early 1600s, in Anatomy of Melancholy, how “thick, cloudy, misty, foggy air or such as comes from fens, moorish grounds, lakes and muckhills” (p. 120) uniformly lower spirits. (Rod Giblett would say not much has changed in public perceptions of wetlands.)
Later, in the 1700s, the English idealize the Italian landscape, and painters like Richard Wilson tried to capture those moments when the English light matched that of the Mediterranean, like the paintings of Claude Lorrain from the previous century. I loved Harris’ description of the ‘Claude glass’ which was a small mirror carried to help late 18th century tourists get the painterly effect on a dreary day. Comically, users turned their back on the landscape and viewed it in reflection, the light changing toward the sublime thanks to the mirror backing. We cannot look back in anything like superiority given the popularity of the selfie stick.
Fast-forward a hundred years to the Victorian tourist for whom the fad was not light but shade, and public ferneries and the miniature, dappled, dripping landscapes they foster. I can relate. This attention to small scale makes me think of Macfarlane’s revelation in The Wild Places, as well one of my favourite quotes about Sable Island, in the Introduction of McLaren’s 1981 Birds of Sable Island:
A much travelled colleague has remarked that he has been in places more beautiful than Sable Island, but has seen more beauty there than anywhere else. The expansive seascapes and dunescapes, magnificent yet ‘dreary’ to some 19th century writers, soon force one’s attention to the smaller scale.
Harris moves forward to the poetry of Ted Hughes in the 20th century, for a distinct lack of the romantic in weather. Rather, life and death, as well as livelihood: of mending a tractor in the cold: “Hands are wounds already / Inside armour gloves” and “Between the weather and the rock / Farmers make a little heat”. She finishes in this century, as was inevitable, on climate change and how we should respond. There is little art and literature yet to draw upon here, but again scale is evoked (p. 386): “small alterations in familiar places can disturb us more than dystopian visions”. She invites us to savour and record now for remembering later: “certain plants in certain places, the light in the street after rain”, what she calls ‘intimate elegies’, reminding us that “in the sadness there is room for celebration.”
A particularly beautiful dust jacket eased my hesitation at buying hardcover.
A Saturday Globe review for Miller’s Valley caught my eye, and when I discovered I was 46th in line to borrow the book at the Central Library, I headed to the marvellous independent bookstore Westminster Books during a weekend trip to Fredericton to buy my own copy. The book tracks the coming of age of a girl in Pennsylvania as she watches government pressure inexorably lead to the inundation of her family’s farm for the ‘public good’. The flooding plays the same role in this book as in many others I’ve discussed here and in recent papers – shorthand for obliteration, loss, injustice, and forgetting – but what distinguishes it is in demonstrating the capacity to adapt over time, nonetheless. A few excerpts from the last page resonate particularly:
I don’t really miss the Miller’s Valley I used to know, the one in which I grew up, my very own drowned town. It’s been gone a long time now… They’re talking about having a big celebration for the fiftieth anniversary… and that’ll clinch it. If something’s been around fifty years, it’s been around forever. Most people think it’s always been there. They run fishing boats and go ice skating and sit in folding chairs and look out over the place where we all lived and it’s just water to them, as far as the eye can see. I guess it’s just water to me, too. … When I talked to Cissy about Andover, when I was a kid, I thought her life, her past, her childhood, all of it was buried down there under the water. I didn’t understand that it was above the surface, in her, the way mine is in me. … Lots of people leave here, that’s for sure, but people stay, too. And some are like me. They circle back. (p. 256-7)
Hand-drawn map by Joe George of a transect from the Woolastook campground in NB over old homesteads flooded by the Mactaquac Dam.
In this same weekend I visited Joe George at COJO Exploration, who had spent the day scuba diving in his quest for the old townsite of Kingsclear, now under the Mactaquac headpond. His hand-drawn map from the dive shows the foundations, wells and other infrastructure he swam over, trying to avoid stirring up sediment in the low-visibility (2 ft) conditions. Looking at old maps, he reckons the well (“still water in it!”, he joked) belonged to the Long family. Joe is hoping to set up a recreational scuba track – as he showed me, basically a high-viz yellow cable – to allow visitors to explore the drowned town. He also hopes, however, to find some relics of life there, to share with either prior residents or local museums.
Dams are in the news, either in terms of removal (see a discussion here about opening the gates of the Glen Canyon Dam), or protests about construction. For instance, a public letter signed by Canadian scholars protests about Site C’s approval as a violation of process and treaty rights. An early-stage proposal for a dam on the Eldred River near Powell River BC is being protested by rock climbers (on the basis of a long-standing base camp) and foresters (the transmission infrastructure associated with independent power installations affects forestry and thus jobs), possibly the first time that those two bodies were on the same side of any issue.
Serendipity is a frequent companion when I browse in bookstores and libraries. Two of my favourite books of this year were found that way. Unlike my two favourite books of last year, by Monbiot and MacFarlane, which were gifted and recommended, respectively, these were completely accidental discoveries. They are in a similar vein of natural history, both books slim but speaking volumes, penned by women whose names should be as common as those listed above.
Kathleen Jamie, Findings (2005)
The first was Kathleen Jamie‘s 2005 book Findings, encountered when seeking Annie Dillard in the Halifax Central Library. This book is subtitled Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World, which is – as they say – right up my alley. She writes gentle observations from a domestic place that are anything but mundane. While she may be doing it in stolen moments between dropping off and picking up kids, or on weekends carved out of the usual routine, her anchoring in these familiar places makes her discoveries all the more poignant: a nesting peregrine, coastal flotsam and jetsam, archaeological evidence of our long thriving. Unlike most books, where I have started to turn down pages to mark good quotables, Jamie’s text was too rich to choose. One blurb on the back, I cannot remember whose, wrote of her gift for “finding without taking”, and I can’t think of any better way to put her magic.
Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss (2003)
The second book was Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2003 Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, handed to me as a random pick from a Chapters shelf by someone who knows me well. I’ve always loved mosses. I was aghast to find a big bag of moss killer in the house we bought when we came to Halifax. But I liked them in that head-height kind of way, where the colours and textures mix into a sort of landscape fabric. Kimmerer made me lie down, and showed me how much I had been missing. This is where Macfarlane himself ended up in his otherwise macho quest, The Wild Places, when he finally recognized that wildness is a matter of scale. This book was a revelation. Her writing is so lucid, full of scientific detail without the obfuscation, and grounded in strong narrative. I felt tuned into a new dimension, though I also appreciated her observations on larger landscape pattern. She memorably describes the loss of old growth forest in the Willamette Valley of Oregon’s Coast Range:
The landscape spread out before me looks more like ragged scraps than a patterned quilt. It looks like indecision as to what we want our forests to be. (p. 141)
This is exactly what I thought when I spent some time looking at Canadian forests on Google’s new Timelapse tool.
Postscript: My attempt at a trifecta failed. Annie Proulx’s, Bird Cloud (2011; misleadingly subtitled, A Memoir of Place) is a flawed undertaking, smacking of contractual obligation as she tries to marry well-told stories of her family history and Wyoming landscapes with a whiny tale of high-end home construction in an impractical yet beautiful setting that should probably have just been left alone.
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