I’ve been on a farm-kick, reading rural voices, some Canadian, American, British, about sheep and goat and horses. In the end, because I read things in parallel, the themed stack drifted across lists.
132. The Yorkshire Shepherdess by Amanda Owen (Magna Large Print Books, 2014)
Found while browsing the library catalogue. Found out after that it has a tv series attached so we got to see the scenes physically as well. Some faces to put the pages.
A thoroughly enjoyable book of a good storyteller of a woman who has a sheep farm in Yorkshire, just a few miles as it happens from where we last stayed. An amazing landscape, and a picture of the dales near there and its bog hangs over my desk from when we stayed just a few miles from there before we knew it was there.
It’s a autobiography from childhood to farm life, from suburb girl to mother of 7 on 2000 acres.
She can paint the scenes of people and situations vividly, catching people’s reactions and words as, for example, in the story of getting her kids education. She tells the school that if her kid needs to go to a further school 2 hours each way, she’ll home school. The educational inspector comes out, and is left gasping at how remote the farm is.
Okay, she told that much better. But she reels out for pages, placing things in the right order. The technique that I was just saying I wished local histories used more rather than list punchlines and boy, oh boy, you would remember this word if you lived then and there. Poetry is the right word in the right order but order of reveal in storytelling, more so.
She has a good sense of timing. Many poets, myself included, could learn from storytellers that art.
We read the whole thing aloud to one another.
133. smithg by Max Middle (above/ground, 2005)
Found while sorting my chapbook drawers. (3 hulking drawers now). The problem with chapbooks is finding some system to make them retrievable. They are more physical than a particular wave in the ocean but it seems not. Once someone has a book with a spine, I file the chapbooks of that author with that but before, disorder.
The chapbook was enjoyable but I can’t summarize why or how. It’s a direct experience not as mediated by language and story. It’s something to the tongue, a tickle of the head. Hope Max puts out more poetry.
134. Meteor Showers: Gil McElroy issue (Stanzas, issue 31, 2002)
Got at a small press fair, I presume.
What an enjoyable read. I must have read it when I first got it but it lost nothing for repetition.
The poem of the nearly going off the road because of watching the sky stands the strongest in memory.
135. A Small Place by Jamica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988)
I can see how this book got on multiple recommended lists. It is a powerful look at Antigua, colonial powers and their legacy on the islands for the people who stay without the option to zip off to America on a green card visa for medical treatment. A critical look at the tourists who come to distract themselves by their humdrum by being in someone else’s humdrum. What is exotic and with-an-accent? An engaging read. Damning. Can First worlders go wandering as innocent individuals divested of their histories? Can one vacation blithely ever again?
Here are two bits:
136. Legends of the North Land by Martha Craig (1910)
Culturally interesting. The woman claimed to be the reincarnation of an Indian Canadian girl and performed Massey Hall and the like to audiences of thousands, much like Pauline Johnston and Grey Owl did. Populist verse of legend and nostalgia for what Lett called the extinct race. Found on online from microfiche. A sense of it here:
137. What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012)
Y’all should read this. Fascinating stuff.
What does a plant perceive? It can tell up from down, from particular cells which if cut off early enough prevents the message. If cut off later, the message was transmitted. They can distinguish red light from blue and grow differently. Plants know when they are touched, when they are shadow, know when a neighbouring tree is under attack by insects. A leaf being injured lets out a chemical that tells its own leaves, which pass the message and release insecticide to protect themselves. If you isolate the leaf in a plastic bag, other leaves don’t change so we know the message is sent by air not by vascular system or by root.
That’s what otoliths means? Earstones? Huh.
138. North End Love Songs by Katherena Vermette (The Muses Company, 2012)
Saw it won the gg. Found a copy.
A novel in verse about a native family where the brother disappears and the family deals. Mostly the grief of the sister. The first section had character/life sketches of various anonymous native girls, each given a name of a bird species in the poem. The first section I guess sets up the scene of urban decay of smoking, drunk, raped and abused young teens on the streets, and the burned out lives. The last poem which was a collage of many voices had the only sense of community of varied voices who were not set as pitiable and powerless.
139. Life on Mars by Tracy K Smith (Graywolf, 2011)
Saw references to the book. Found a copy.
Presented in reviews like a monolithic theme book but it’s not. Each chapter is a best of. It’s not a tribute to space and her father as a whole. Crafted, competent. I wasn’t struck my super lines in a frame or poems put in to pad the book to length. Each poem stood and delivered.
I had said I would wait to comment on her previous book until I read this but her previous doesn’t relate in control of tone. There’s a completely different voice to a different audience here.
140. Like Color to the Blind: Soul Searching & Soul Finding by Donna Williams (Times Books, 1996)
This book I’m still processing. It was a memoir of her as an Autistic spectrum person meeting her first love, their expanding relationship and marriage, and in postscript, divorce. The exploration of the mind is fascinating as she tries to figure out her own processing. She and her boyfriend learn how to communicate as a couple, as individuals. Both got sensory overload and they figured out the patterns. Loud, fast voices, florescent lights, unfamiliar places with too much to process at once, too much movement. In sensory overload, or too much to perceive or too much emotion, she can still be communicative. They developed a sign language, and she can type.
They both were self-supporting, in careers, university degrees, read for leisure or business and yet didn’t know they had a perceptional issue that could be fixed. Our workarounds are maladaptively adept sometimes as humans. In the journey, they discovered they both have Irlen syndrome. With colored filters, their brains could suddenly read text with ease and with processing in the emotional centre of the brain. The problems of spatial perception were removed. Is one clumsy because the senses are trying to compensate for lack of depth perception and eyes that are not hooking up with the brain in a neurotypical way.
They learned that they were working from scripts. As we all are to some degree but there was discontinuity and sense of lack of self when triggered. A sort of disconnect when under threat. She and he went thru old photos and found a photo trail of different behavioral modes and gave them names. The subroutine of her when under threat may become spoiled child coquettish to navigate or may become masculine in your face commanding. Neither she felt were her and both were overreactions. They invented workarounds for discerning shelf vs these schemas. There is a frozenness to facial expression, disconnect with eyes when it is a defence rather than true self. The scripting of defence is high functioning, competent but may work for its own set of motivations to keep self safe. But when self wants to expand, or take calculated risks…there’s conflict.
She named the selves. She called out the selves. She looked at clothes and said, these are clothes chosen by this defensive mechanism. Self is another. When trying clothes that felt right, defences attacked. What part of the brain wins? How can you tell which part of self is talking and why? She worked on teasing all that apart.
141. How long is a piece of string: More hidden mathematics of everyday things by Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham (Robson Books, 2002)
My main beef is that the chapter titles were written by a someone following conventions of newspaper headline writers who don’t read the body text. “Is it quicker to take the stairs?” which talks about elevators, but doesn’t answer the question. It talks about different models of program for elevator, how they are staggered over different default floors to minimize wait times. “What makes it a hit single?” talks about patterns of music over human history, different scales but doesn’t address its ostensible topic. Luckily it has a useful index with the real topics.
This claimed to be a book of what anyone would chat about at the pub. That would be a strange pub. Benford’s Law would come up? These articles were at great length. Fractals in everything was neat enough. How a Albania in 1996 went down due to pyramid schemes that the bank and government went for but demonstrating how a pyramid scheme necessarily will fail—interesting.
The mathematics of editing. Interesting.
The story of people using computers to generate letters to predict by letter every possible outcome of the football game and offer to let people pay some sum to get the inside track. Most letters would get the wrong result but each letter would go to some who got the chance letter with the results that happened. People forgot when the prediction was wrong but when they got a sequence that was right, it paid off the costs for mailing all those letters and then some.
142. The Blacksmith of Fallbrook: The story of Walter Cameron, blacksmith, woodcarver, raconteur by Audrey Armstrong (Musson Book Company, 1979)
Bought in 1986 and signed by the author.
Stories of his life and he could remember from when we was 2 in the 1800s. Stories of his carving and of how to train horses. Memories of running a village store. A lot of details but not a lot of plot or connections between stories or depth to the stories. Still oral history in a unique voice of a time we don’t get to hear much about. There were television shows and articles about him. Wonder if there was another book too.
Although called a raconteur, he is more of a talker. There’s some similarity to a very young poet listing things. Cameron doesn’t have plot arcs, suspense or lessons. I kept wishing the person recording would have drawn him out for details. With questions, he could have been able to fill in all kinds of details. They are often thumbnail sketches. When he does expand out more, it takes you right there. He’d previously explained his general store in Fallbrook became a social hub with people hanging out by the fire, on the porch, even into their main house as men kept to the store and women gathered with his wife in the house.
Kind of a mean trick but gave the lesson. He was characterized more with his stories as being kind and less beastly than some, disapproving of not giving an honest deal or a fair shake.