The Nature Reader

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?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/22/nature-writing-literary-gold

“I have very mixed feelings about what is happening,” Mabey said. “I’m delighted that there is more writing about nature going on, but I’m increasingly confused by what this genre tag actually means. Nature writing ought to be writing about nature. I’m not sure books about pets ought to qualify, nor do I think books that are principally about the nature of the self ought to qualify.”

Is Mabey referring to H is for Hawk as a book about pets?

Humans aren't part of nature; I always forget that. Sounds like a grumpy dude that has his nose out of joint that another writer win a bunch of nice awards. Do not want.

It feels a bit odd in a ... one of my favourite writers disses my favourite recent book ... sort of way.

I was reading a book the other week (Ramble On by Sinclair MacKay) and while at the same time, I found it a good read, interesting and informative, I was also thinking "hmmm, this is, in structure, form and topic very, very 'Robert Macfarlane" and also suddenly very conscious that I was reading a work within a Genre. Each chapter had a thrilling walk, a specific Place, a bit of history and some biographical details about a figure associated with the rambling movement.

At the same time, I was thinking "ah, this is a Genre I like" but also "hmmm this is a bit derivative."

So I don't know if there is a point at which a literary genre codifies or calcifies into a Genre "The Robert Macfarlane Nature-Travel Book"; or just a point where one becomes AWARE of the genre's forms (and limitations). But I feel like one has a choice where one can say: hmmm, this book is not very good (granted, in this case, that the book is good) or just concede, "oh, this is a Genre now, not the special, exceptional case I thought the first one I read was."

Sorry, bus typing, not expressing myself very clearly.

Holloway film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hchlQmws93o

He's taking over the world. Macfarlane's sleeve notes for Grasscut:

http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/04/robert-macfarlane-landscape-grasscut/

& http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane

A good article, that. Covers lots of ground and a bit "listy", at points, maybe (and I came away with a list of names to explore) but I enjoyed his arguments pulling these disparate authors/artists etc together. Always feel I'm missing something with These New Puritans, mind (like them rather than love them).

I have to admit to having enjoyed Macfarlane's introduction to Shepherd's "The Living Mountain" more than the text itself.

Has anyone read Melissa Harrison's "At Hawthorn Time"? Or "Clay"?

Have mentioned on the dedicated Skelton thread (not sure how much crossover there is between threads) but his "Landings" has been reprinted: http://corbelstonepress.com/landings.htm

Not read but looks intriguing:

http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/04/little-toller-llewelyn-powys/

(Re-reading this thread, I can't diss anyone for being listy).

Started At Hawthorn Time but gave up after 50 pages - characterisation as trite as John Lanchester garlands with awfully pious, facile Fotherington-Thomas nature writing. Don't know she persuaded MacFarlane and Macdonald to blurb it.

^how she persuaded...

It's on my to-read list. But I have a kind of cautious approach because she's kind of in my social circle, and it's awkward if you read someone you're becoming friendly with's novel and don't get on with it, that kind of influences how you come to think of them as you're getting to know them. (It's different if you read the novel of someone you've known a long time; or if you read a novel first, then get to know someone much later.)

I dunno; I fully admit that I am probably tinged with more than a fair bit of envy. (We live very near one another, and it's annoying when she's all "Lookit this great new place I discovered!" when she's talking about a place I've been writing about and drawing for years, and it's like Streatham only has room for One Nature Writer, and her career is taking off and mine is totally stalled, so of course I'm going to feel a bit weird) but also she is Very Good At Social Media and I know really given all that I should beat down my complicated-German-word-for-feelings but I think sometimes the way to deal with feelings is just to acknowledge them. Any interactions I have with her or her work are tinged with envy. So it's hard to have any kind of objective sense of her work.

I will shut up now before I say something I regret.

I can see that completely.

Anyone read any Llewelyn Powys?

Just coming to the end of Conrad's "The Mirror of the Sea" in the Little Toller Nature Classics Series - have found it a bit of a slog.

Not particularly enjoying Nan Shepherd's "The Living Mountain".

i could've sworn I'd posted something on Llewlyn Powys on this thread, but I haven't - mentioned him on one of the what are you reading threads here:

Llewelyn Powys - Earth Memories (essays on nature, his tuberculosis, and a superb essay on Pieter Breughel - 'There have appeared from time to time in all countries certain artists who have discounted that whole field of religious and metaphysical experience which to many sensitive natures would alone seem to render the rudeness of life tolerable')

I really like the Earth Essays in fact - lovely late summer evening reads. I liked his phrase, that i stumbled across elsewhere - 'to be out of the grave, the great exemption'. At that time it seemed like a pleasant corrective to a maundering nihilism, which I have a weakness for, hopefully more internal than expressed, but finding out since that he was tubercular and reading some of the essays, it has additional force.

haven't any time to post recently, but I read the rob macfarlane essay on the eerie in pastoral a few weeks ago. it was good to see so many things I like put in one place. i found myself quibbling with it a lot though. some of that was probably the quibbling where two people have opinions in an area they know well, hair splitting - the sort of thing you see in books pages, sympathetic in interests if not always in manner - but i keep feeling there was something a bit 'off' about it. made some notes as i went, but it was a while ago now and i was on a plane, but will try and reconstruct some of my responses here.

One of the descriptions of A View from a Hill is described as 'the pinnacle of pastoral,' which suggests pastoral is a single type of expression, but there have been too many different versions of pastoral for it to have a pinnacle I think. it stands alongside comedy, tragedy, satire, romance and latterly realism as a persistent form of expression in western art. what's important to distinguish are its variants, whether that's marvell or de la mare, ballard, betjeman or capability brown, æmilia lanyer or christina rosetti. i think more restricted genres only can have pinnacles of that sort - MR James would in fact be a pinnacle of ghost story writing for me. it may seem picky, but i think this 'singlenness' underpins RM's essay, and causes some missteps.

'Important to distinguish its variants' because pastoral is defined by both uchronia and utopia - we use it as an area of projection (past) and desire (future)- so it represents both passively and actively (in terms of our configuration of it - archtitecture, landscaping, national parks etc), hidden aspects of our psyche and society *at a given time*. It is particularly flavoured by national self-identity. Distinguishing the threads helps untangle some of what makes us who we are.

i have a gut aversion to psychogeography - which I rationalise (how successfully i'm not sure) as a feeling that it is something that is bad at continuous history, at linking its artefacts to the present. it flattens the world around us, it lacks perspective, it gothicises the now with its disjecta membra. i don't mind that as an æsthetic, i do mind it as a heuristic. it has the same singleness as 'pinnacle of pastoral'. I would be interested to tackle this a bit more with someone who is a fan, as I don't really want to chuck it out of court - there's a lot there that I feel I should like, just seems to me that it's been jumbled the wrong way.

I don't agree with his categories - 'eerie' is doing too much work to yoke MR James and pastoral, though I agree with his attempt to divide horror from it. My definitions would be something like horror - the evil is described and is visible, and ghost stories - a less tangible fear, the evil is hidden, only partially described, and in the dark. ‘Eerie’ suggests to me something unrealised but destablising, something that can prompt a psychological unravelling. MR James’s beings do generally make their way into the world, but not until after a series of frames or narrative seals have been removed. They come from within books or pictures, are disinterred, enlivened from cloth and wood at the touch or presence of evil or evil intent, unintentionally bidden into material being. Eerie is empty.

My prefered term would be 'malign' pastoral. There is something in the apparently edenic that wishes us harm and I *think*, though I'm not sure, that this is p much a continuation of portrayals of the marginalised and oppressed Celt, shorter and darker than the incoming Anglo-Saxons, or perhaps the earlier mysterious switch from prehistoric cthonic pastoral, to the sky and sun worshipping period. Puck, the Little Folk, fairies generally, Jack o' the Green, hobbits and hobgoblins too, lurk in uncertain cultural spaces between evil, mischief, merriment and disruption. This thing that wishes us harm is licentious and priapic, so particularly threatening to periods of constrained morality. so there's also an element of 'daphnis and chloe gone bad' or at least more sexualised than manners would previously allow in more coy depictions. Men are innocent and virginal, often seen as victims, woman are strongly desired and idealised, as well as being despised and reviled for being 'tempresses'. John Cowper Powys' Wolf Solent is a great portrait of this, but then of course so is The Wicker Man. (Penda's Fen remains the most remarkable analysis of post-war pastoral i know, where the innocence is that of a youth discovering his gay sexuality in a heavily manichean pastoral setting). (Just on that 'marginalised Celt' thing, I think one of the things that distinguishes US pastoral is that the marginalisation, partial destruction and displacement of its aboriginal natives is comparatively recent. It is a process that can testify against the present, and is available as an existing force rather than being purely symbolised by its remnants (folk or actual - eg stone circles).

In fact MR James is not even particularly pastoral. His method is usually retribution deliberately placed or designed into human artefacts - curtains, mazes, books, choir stalls, mezzotints etc - and little of his writing evokes pastoral elements (not even the bit Macfarlane quotes as the pinnacle of pastoral - it's more a sort of picture postcard pastoral (which, yes, *is* a form!). This is the form of category error that i think psychogeography makes, and RM makes in the essay - too much is indiscriminately aggregated into one place, linking by piling in a congeries of stuff ('eerie') in this case. Arthur Machen is a much better bet for his argument, tho slightly less canonical.

Some more fragmented thoughts in my notes:

I think this may be my problem but things like 'James is one of only two writers who has caused me to wake myself with my own screaming' have me going 'oh come *on*'. Frankly I don't believe him, but as I say, I think maybe this is a failure of imagination on my part. I remember first reading The Rings of Saturn by Sebald, where he gets lost in a maze and makes it seem mortally inextricable, and then has a diagram of the maze on the next stage and scrawling ru fuckin srs in the margin.

-

RONG - Everyone knows Greenwich is the eeriest Cooper Dark is Rising text! Not the Dark is Rising itself. [and for several of the reasons already cited above - the way it violently wrenches the role of the woman in malign pastoral from male perspective into female, it's strong jack o'the green elements, and by far the strongest sense of unaligned primal force, rather than the moral good and bad.]

-

‘We are very far from nature writing’. This is true. Tho see Walter de la Mare (very strong on nature writing), Jocelyn Brooke’s seasonal writing and Denton Welch, all with links to the uncanny and malign pastoral.

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Why is the civil war so important? Again, lack of detail leads to rongness, saying it’s appealing because it was a ‘radicalised period’ as current writers etc wish ours to be ignores the: Puritanism, land in common, non conformism nexus. Also, the beings that shift over time as a consequence of religious/cultural changes – Dymchurch Flit.

-

His attempt to explain the appeal of 'military and security' (i'd add 'communication' to that) within all this is interesting. Though he got a wholehearted nod from me with 'The monumental era of 20th-century detection technology, when structures needed to be vast in order to see further, has proved especially attractive' I was less certain when he linked it with current fears about state surveillance. It's still something i'm struggling to get a sense of really, though there's no denying its force. My current theory would be something like 'fear of nuclear annihilation resulted in speculation about a society that would have to return to the very rudimentary possibly prehistoric pastoral. The structures that signified these powers (electrical, nuclear) in the landscape symbolised this fear or expectation. This has resulted in a specific 'science+pastoral' aesthetic':

Plutonium waste
Eking out in drowned steel rooms a half
Life of how many million years? Enough
To set the doomsday clock - its hands our own:
The same rose ruts, the red-as-thorn crosshatchings-
Minutes nearer midnight. On which stroke
Powers at the heart of the matter, powers
We shall have hacked through thorns to kiss awake,
Will open baleful, sweeping eyes, draw breath
And speak new formulae of megadeath.

Something of the Ozymandias about them maybe too, in this light. Something something space travel new pastoral old civilisations something. Anyway, interesting essay, always nice to see lots of good things mentioned in one place. Tho smdh Iain Sinclair.

I meant to respond to your post wisely, Fizzles.

I'm still *stuck* on Shepherd's "The Living Mountain". I'm determined to finish it but it feels like hard work, particularly as it is only 100 pages or so.

I bought Powys' "Earth Memories" and might appear on this thread to talk about it but judging from previous experience might just whinge about finding it a slog ..

I meant to respond to your post wisely, Fizzles.

i really do think in cases like this it's the thought that counts.

Anyone buying the Richard Skelton book?

What's been great this year?

Feel like I've given up on/put aside more books than usual this year.

Looking forward to Marcus Sedgwick's "Snow" and Cheryl Tipp's "Sea Sounds" monographs in 2016, though.

And Amy Liptrot's "The Outrun".

Oh ... from the Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/05/best-nature-books-2015?CMP=share_btn_tw

(Made me intrigued about "Fish Ladder" and "Inglorious").

"The Outrun" is very good. Beautifully observed. Loved the chapter about ambergris (a version of which appeared on Caught By The River).

Also, really enjoying Fred Kitchen's "Brother to the Ox". What I've read so far is pretty much "farming memoir" though I think that changes.

May be of interest: http://richardjefferiessociety.co.uk/