The Nature Reader

Well, it's an expanded, printed version of Ghosts of the Great North Wood.

More details once we hammer them out.

I'm swinging back and forth between wild excitement, mild disbelief and total "OMG who decided I could do a book? ~Ha!~" impostor syndrome and wondering when they will find me out.

hot damn, that's great! well done indeed :)

Nice one.

(Don't forget us on the Nature Reader thread when you're hangin' out on the Nature Writer one).

I heard some very funny gossip about a nature writer oft discussed on this thread, but obviously, I cannot share it. ;-)

Well, it's an expanded, printed version of Ghosts of the Great North Wood.

More details once we hammer them out.

I'm swinging back and forth between wild excitement, mild disbelief and total "OMG who decided I could do a book? ~Ha!~" impostor syndrome and wondering when they will find me out.

― Shugazi (Branwell with an N), Thursday, 18 September 2014 09:59 (3 days ago) Bookmark

Delighted to hear this - it will be a book *worth having*.

Go on, tell us your R-Mac story ...

It is not my story to tell.

Oh well.

Any books to recommend?

Currently reading George Ewart Evans' The Pattern Under The Plough. I've run out of steam with it a bit but notice that Richard Skelton lists it in his top ten favourite books (for those also reading The "classical" music you buy from Boomkat (2010): a thread to discuss Sylvain Chauveau, Johann Johannsson, Peter Broderick, Olafur Arnalds and others).

I'm not reading a nature book right now, but I am reading Noise by David Hendy, which is turning out to be a lot more interesting than anticipated. A social history of sound and human attitudes towards it. (All kinds of sound, music, natural sounds, speech, annoyances, mechanisation, shamanism, medicine, technology.) It goes a bit too fast, and covers so much ground so quickly I do sometimes wish he'd expand each individual subsection into a longer chapter, but I suppose it'd be 700 pages long then.

Probably outside the remit of this thread, though.

Currently undecided about whether to re-read "The Journal of A Disappointed Man" (for lifestyle tips) or to start Rackham's "The Ash Tree" ...

Simon Prosser on reading Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks

Hamish Hamilton Publishing Director Simon Prosser describes his experience reading Landmarks, the forthcoming title from bestselling travel writer and author of The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane.

“When I finished reading the first draft of Robert Macfarlane’s new book on landscape and language, I found that my vocabulary had notably and delightfully expanded:

I now knew ‘rionnach maoim’ (a Hebridean Gaelic term for ‘the shadows cast by cumulus clouds on moorland on a sunny, windy day’); ‘smeuse’ (Sussex dialect for ‘the hole in the base of a hedgerow made by the repeated passage of a small animal’); ‘af’rug’ (a Shetland word for ‘the reflex of a wave after it has struck the shore’); and ‘wind-fucker’ (the perfect East Anglian dialect nickname for a kestrel), along with ‘blonking’ (snowing), ‘babbing’ (fishing for eels) and ‘jirglin’ (playing about with water).”

All of these words, and thousands more, collected over a decade by Rob from the Shetlands to Cornwall, from Pembrokeshire to Suffolk, and from old Norse to Romani, appear in Landmarks, in the nine glossaries which interleave the ten chapters of the book. (Landmarks also describes Rob’s journeys into the mines of Cumbria, the moors of the Hebrides and the corries of the Cairngorms, as well as his meetings with glossarians, poets and word-collectors up and down the country.)

Landmarks is a book about the power of language – ‘strong style, single words’ in Rob’s phrase – to shape our sense of place. It is both a field-guide to the literature he loves (Nan Shepherd, Barry Lopez and Roger Deakin and more) and also a ‘Word-Hoard’, to borrow the title of the opening chapter. Over the course of the book we can chart a kind of love-affair between writer and language. The authors Rob is most drawn to tend to write with an exact and committed intensity about their chosen landscapes, in styles strong enough to revise our imaginary relations with places. They aim, in the words from Emerson which Rob quotes in the book, to ‘pierce…rotten diction and fasten words to visible things’, They are celebrants of the specific – and so too is Rob.

Over the book’s course, via its chapters and its glossaries , we come to realise that words and language, well-used, are not just a means to describe landscape, but also a way to know it, and ultimately to love it. If we lose the rich vernacular, regional, demotic lexis of these islands, developed over centuries, then we also risk losing our relationship to nature and the land. What we cannot name, we cannot in some sense see.

In the first chapter of Landmarks Rob writes grippingly about the battle to prevent a farm of 234 wind turbines, each 140 metres high, being built on the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis. To some, like the writer Ian Jack, arguing in support of the planning application, Lewis was simply ‘a vast, dead place’; but to the majority of others concerned, it was a landscape full of life and particularity. How to express this? The answer lay in part in language, in the scores of ‘precognitions’ – statements of evidence – submitted by islanders, which included love-songs, poems, ballads and personal stories. As Finlay Macleod, a Hebridean friend of Rob’s active in the campaign concluded: ‘‘What is needed is a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’ – a lexicon to banish the vision of Lewis as a ‘vast, dead place’. Happily, incredibly, the campaigners eventually won their battle – a victory for both place and place-language which may of course be only temporary.”

In some sense, Landmarks is a step towards just such a phrasebook, rich in language which sings, touches and affects, ‘offering glimpses through other eyes, permitting imaginative contact with distant ways of being, and habits of perception that might be valuable to save and to share’.”

Landmarks will be published in March 2015 by Hamish Hamilton. Image credit, Stanley Donwood.

^ Makes me think of Richard Skelton's work, that.

Do you ever have the sense that you're being marketed to so strongly that you just want to cross your arms across your chest, narrow your chest, and say "hmmmmm"?

Like, Robert Macfarlane mixes nature writing, linguistics and obscure, legacy hyper-local languages?

I'm feeling v v marketed to right now.

I think you'll find we're "bang on trend".

Apparently, Skelton actually features in the book.

It's gone a bit quiet, here.

Good Robert MacFarlane fronted TV documentary on Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain on the BBC Iplayer just now. MacFarlane is an insightful reader of Shepherd and it's wonderful to see some of the places she wrote about.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-30277488

Finally read "H is for Hawk". I'd have preferred it if the hawk could have lived off Quorn pieces but it is stunning. Very good on grief/grieving.

^ Costa Book of the Year, apparently.

Chris Yates' Nightwalk is quietly charming.

8 months too late but...yyes - it is. I loved it. I am building up a collection of night themed books some of which overlap this thread and are well worth looking at. Latest is The Darkness is Light Enough, an out of print book about badger watching in the early 80S written by a woman (Chris Ferris, a pseudonym apparently) with a bad back who can't sleep and so wondrrs around the woods befriending badgers (I an NOT makinhg this up) and confronting those who eould fo damage to them. You can buy a copy (and her other books) v.cheaply in the normal places. Also worth getting (and not mentioned as yet?) is Patrick Barkham's Badgerlands which is where I heard about the aforementioned Ferris.

Crap...the typos in that last post are numerous. You'll get the gist though...

Love the description of The Darkness is Light Enough. Will hunt it down.

Strangely, bought Badgerlands last week.

Something about Badgerlands slightly irritated me but I can't put my finger on it. I think it's just a bit too balanced, reasonable? There's a lot of TB stuff in it - understandably - and not quite enough badger. I enjoyed it but I wasn't quite satisfied!

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/28/helen-macdonald-h-is-for-hawk-costa-prize-six-nature-books

Macfarlane's shoes, apparently:

http://greenshoesblog.tumblr.com/

^ I realise this was a step too far for my fandom.

Anyone excited about "Landmarks"?

http://www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Events/Detail.aspx?eventId=2466

I missed that Oliver Rackham, of Woodlands / The Ash Tree fame, died last week.

http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/8274

Had seen that. Have only read The Ash Tree, which I wasn't particularly fond of. Other recommendations?

Currently reading TH White's "The Goshawk". Obviously I have been inspired to do so by "H is for Hawk". Surprised the latter hasn't prompted more comment on this thread. It really is very good. Anyone read any of Macdonald's other books?

I think I'm about to go on a Sara Maitland binge, having read two of her books, both of which were exquisite. (except I think there are only 3 of them.)

the "nature" in this thread is Very British

My "nature" reading undeniably tends to be UK-based. I don't think its an unwelcoming thread, though, Benbbag.

Didn't say that. Just that what "nature" means to me is quite "different to" as you say what it means in a kingdom lacking a desert (or desert canyon), a whitewater (or even wild?) river, a glacier, contemporary volcanic activity, or a mountain peak more prominent than that of New Hampshire's Mount Washington, whose summit most people visit by car or cog railway. For better and worse to varying degrees, it seems a "mild" sort of nature just as I find what little I've experienced of the country (ok, London)'s weather, culture, and food.

And that difference seems very much expressed in the literature vs. American nature writing by people like, to choose a somewhat extreme example, Edward Abbey.

Ah, I'd read your post as having a go.

"I don't think its an unwelcoming thread, though" < By which I meant ... aside from me mentioning Mabey and Deakin in the opening post, there's not been any attempt to set parameters for "nature writing" and there has been nothing at all to stop anyone posting about any not Very British writing.

What Maitland do you recommend, Branwell? Only really seen "Gossip from the Forest" and didn't fancy that.

Why didn't you like Gossip From The Forest? because if you don't like that, you're not going to like Maitland.

(Obv I thought it was great, but the combination of nature writing and folk tale study was totally up my alley. I liked the structure of the book, too, the way it was divided up into 12 woods she visited during 12 different months, with an appropriate folk tale between each chapter to break it up.)

It's something I particularly like about this thread, and the current thread of Nature Writing discussed within it, is the idea that Nature is, actually, everywhere. There's this kind of thrusting, macho Nature Writing which is all about Glaciers and Mile-High Mountains and Great Barrier Reefs, and it seems to promote this idea that capital-N Nature is something you have to go, well... *elsewhere* to experience.

I like this (perhaps very English) idea that Nature is, in point of fact, everywhere you look. It's in hedgerows and the overgrown bits of railway lines. You can find it on bombsites and vacant lots in London. You can find it in cracks in the pavement as well as in deserts and ice fields and lava flows.

The progression of Robert MacFarlane really shows the movement from one style of nature writing to the other - that his first book was a history of Mountain Climbing, and of course that was all macho travel and crampons and Grand Scenery Nature Writing. And then halfway through The Wild Places, he seems to experience this very definite and important shift - that he went looking for Nature - for The Wild. And he spent a night on top of a glacier on a mountain, and actually found it a horrible experience, totally remote - not wild, just alien. Contrasting that with the Burren, which is a more small-scale, not-remote, almost domestic kind of place - there he found Nature and The Wild in all its lush profusion. And the more he shifts from these Awesome Feats of Sublimity to these small, more personal, more familiar, more pastoral impressions of nature, the better his writing gets. Or at least, the more I like it. (True, he has the gift of writing to make strolling a Holloway seem as thrilling an experience as a corrie on the Isle of Skye somewhere.)

I didn't get beyond the mention of "fairy tales" in the title, so didn't give it a proper look ... and nothing has pointed me back in its direction until your post.

I love "The Unofficial Countryside" but hated "Edgelands" - for the most part, I just prefer Mabey's writing but I did feel that the authors of the latter were somehow trying too hard and were somehow unconvincing.

I could be confusing authors but isn't there a point in one of Macfarlane's books where he acknowledges walking around a mountain as being as valid as walking to the summit.

(Sorry, that's bullet point-y and half-formed).

Macfarlane on The Living Mountain *now* on BBC4.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04tqk1n/secret-knowledge-12-the-living-mountain-a-cairngorms-journey

Best email of the day: "Landmarks" has been dispatched.

Going to wait and savour it but for those that don't want to:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape?CMP=share_btn_tw

Melissa Harrison on Landmarks, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/56015218-bc3c-11e4-a6d7-00144feab7de.html#axzz3T26srVjF

http://www.campdengallery.co.uk/catalogues/kjackson3.pdf

Ouch > http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/14/boundless-tracing-land-and-dream-in-a-new-northwest-passage-kathleen-winter-review

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/15/landmarks-robert-macfarlane-digested-read

I recently read a description of "H is for Hawk" that appeared to suggest that it would prompt lots more Nature Writing but I do have a sense of feeling like I now don't want to read another book that is partial personal autobiography, partial biography (of a historical Nature Writer) and partial "journey". This isn't a criticism of "H", which I adored, but more a vague feeling that it was good enough to feel like a "full stop" on this kind of writing. I'm not at all surprised to read a review like that of the Kathleen Winter book. Disclaimer: Obviously I will appear on this thread in a few months time having been enraptured by a book that is all these things.

The Macfarlane book is one of three books I've got on the go at the moment. I'm skipping the glossaries as I was becoming overwhelmed by them (I'll enjoy them more reading them in short bursts). It's a good book but it does feel slightly like the literary equivalent of a b-sides collection, with lots of previously "released" work albeit re-written (or "re-recorded", if persisting with the analogy).

Apparently there's an "exclusive extra chapter" in the Waterstones paperback edition of "H is for Hawk". Is it socially acceptable just to read in-store?