Eagles in California, Tigers in London
by Will Burns.
There are certain things in the natural world that will never, ever cease to raise my spirits, no matter how often I experience them, or how small or commonplace they seem to be. When I see a bird of prey, even the now almost ubiquitous Red Kites, it just makes me feel something, the same when I see a swallow flying, or swifts and martins in the summer sky. There is a stirring in my chest, and I feel somehow ageless and intrinsically linked to some timeless, fiercely alive and ancient Earth. The feeling is expressed with more eloquence than I could ever hope to muster in Raymond Carver’s brilliant poem, Eagles.
But there is another feeling of exhilaration that comes from the seemingly ceaseless habit of watching wildlife, and that is the excitement of seeing something new. Something you have never seen before. Sometimes this is something you have waited to see, a bird or animal that you long for, romanticize, that you yearn to watch hove into view over some spectacularly prescient vista. (more…)
Edwyn Competition Now Closed
Thanks to everyone that entered the Edwyn Collins competition on last weeks newsletter. The correct answer is; ‘Falling & Laughing: The Restoration of Edwyn Collins’.
The winner of the tickets for Edwyn’s sold out show at the 100 Club tomorrow night has been notified (and if you come find me at the gig I’ll buy you a pint. I’ll be the guy playing records).
Jeff,
Discovered the most amazing book while I was with Phil and Jan in a 50p box outside a house. The Epic Voyage of the Seven Little Sisters by William Willis from 1956. A man of sixty builds a raft and sails across the Pacific with a cat and a parrot. More impressive than Thor Heyerdahl as he was all alone. Incredible book. And has a little of The Bird Effect in it when he relates stories from his life including being so ill in a jungle that tribesmen looked after him and to make him better they cut in half live parrots and tied them to his feet and replaced them every few hours. At first when they removed the parrots the internal flesh was black and as he regained full fitness they remained pink!
Anyway, that was my mad discovery for the month along with the Martin Carthy version of Cum on Feel The Noize…
see you soon,
Ceri.
This Summer, I Will Be Mostly Reading…
9 August 2010 // Summer Reading 2010
Will Burns.
The summer so far has been spent with poetry from Simon Armitage (Seeing Stars) and as ever, Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems, which I hope I never tire of. I am also half way through Hunger by Knut Hamsun, which has been on my list of books to read for an age, and is so far living up to all expectations, and also providing some much needed perspective on my own financial concerns – as anyone who has met me will attest, I am anything but starving to death..! (more…)
The Hackney Optimist
illustration by John Richardson.
by Luke Turner.
Part One.
Perhaps the part of Caught By The River’s Collection Of Words On Water that most caught my imagination was the extract that told of the hundreds of men who, every Sunday, would mumble excuses to both spouse and the Lord, and eschew church in favour of fishing on the reaches of the Lea that flow through north east London, via Tottenham and Hackney. I’ve lived in that area for the past ten years, and have spent many weekend afternoons walking along the Lea Navigation, enjoying one of London’s few big horizons, and watching men passing balls and bloodied noses on what was Hackney marsh, but it never occurred to me that there any fish still in what looked like a stagnant trench. These, I thought, were dead waters, and anyway, it was years since I had fished properly, and even as a boy, it was an infrequently practiced pursuit, consisting of outings in the River Severn on family holidays, or the occasional trip to local gravel pits, where I caught a frisby and a bream. (more…)
Electric Eden
Our second (and final) extract from Rob Young’s book Electric Eden, which was published this week by Faber & Faber.
In Rudyard Kipling’s classic Edwardian children’s book Puck of Pook’s Hill, a faery apparition casts a spell over two children by waving a clump of oak, ash and thorn leaves across their faces. They enter a time-travelling trance in which historical figures – Romans, Domesday-era knights, feudal barons – manifest themselves and spin rambling yarns of their exploits, battles, treachery, heroism and derring-do, all of which have taken place across the very land that now forms the kids’ adventure playground. This vertical exploded view of England’s pastures is Edwardian psychogeography, designed to instil a sense of the heroic history that has cut its furrows deep in the soil, sowing the seeds of a national psyche. Ushered there by Puck’s cunning wood magic, the greenwood becomes the gateway to an idealised England where the imagination runs naked and free, until the time comes to swish the oak, ash and thorn twigs once more, awaken from the English dreaming and return to . . . well, in Kipling’s children’s case, no doubt a piping hot tea of crumpets and scones, lavished upon them by a servile nanny. (more…)
Chris Watson Watch
A Guide To Coastal Birds.
Episode One. Originally broadcast on Radio 4, today, 14.45
listen now on the iplayer.
from the BBC website:
Brett Westwood is joined by keen bird watcher Stephen Moss on the Devonshire coast. With the help of wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson they offer a practical and entertaining guide to identifying the birds that you’re most likely to see and hear in Britain’s estuaries; birds like Redshank, Dunlin, Curlew and Knot. (more…)
Electric Eden
Pentangle in a London park, June 1968. Left to right: Bert Jansch, Danny Thompson, Jacqui McShee, Terry Cox, John Renbourn. Credit: Topix
by Rob Young. From his book Electric Eden (Faber & Faber paperback).
The swimmer arches her back, bobbing between dreaming and waking, just as her face rises and sinks at the liquid threshold of air and water. Sunbeams dazzle the surface, dilating into the sleeper’s vision as if through a fisheye lens. Up on the riverbanks, on each side, she is lazily aware of ‘Moonflowers bright with people walking/Drinking wine and eating fruit and laughing . . . Death alone walks with no one to converse with.’
The gracious paradise evoked in Pentangle’s song ‘Pentangling’ might be a vignette from the Thameside of William Morris’s News from Nowhere. The sunlit hippy dawn meets Morris’s bucolic medieval Arcadia. The weather is perpetually hot, the sky clear, ownership is banished, and a carefree, effortless existence is nourished with an abundance of good things to eat and drink. It is, in Donovan’s words, a ‘land of doesn’t have to be’ – a flower child’s utopia where the only thing missing is a big rock candy mountain. ‘You know I fished just a little to ease my body and soul/ Just sit and dream on the riverbank/ Let my mind relax and let my consciousness be easy and free.’ (more…)
Port Eliot, Slight Return
6 August 2010 // Port Eliot festival
Big thanks to Chloe Evans for this ace card:
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Songbird Blues
Jeff
this is a link to an interview with Jonathan Franzen about an amazing piece he wrote for the New Yorker about the killing of songbirds in Europe, worth linking to on cbtr.
Mathew (Clayton)
Caught by the River