Walking with Annabel: her wonderful books on women walking
May 1, 2024 at 4:01 am | Posted in Annabel Abbs, Annabel Streets, Living creatively, stress management, walking | Leave a commentTags: 52 Ways To Walk, Annabel Abbs, Annabel Streets, Brian Wilson, Clara Vyvyan, Daphne Du Maurier Frieda Lawrence, Frieda: The real story of Lady Chatterley, Georgia O’Keefe, Gwen John, Nan Shepherd, Simone de Beauvoir, The Beach Boys, The Joyce Girl, walking – creative benefits, walking – health benefits
Annabel Abbs wrote Windswept: Walking in the footsteps of remarkable women (Two Roads, 2021) about some famous and not so famous women who were serious walkers at times when that was unusual and often dangerous. (It’s back in the library before I took a photo, so another of her books I discuss below features in the picture.) In Windswept she explores the lives of Simone de Beauvoir, Daphne Du Maurier Frieda Lawrence, Clara Vyvyan, Nan Shepherd and painters Georgia O’Keefe and Gwen John by travelling in their footsteps.
In the spirit of Gwen John she began sketching as she walked rather than photographing what she saw. It was a revelation:
Our profligate use of cameras – too easy, too fast, too careless – means that instead of capturing the moment, we lose it. When we draw or paint we expand the moment, creating space for all our senses and fixing the memory with blade-sharp clarity.
(p. 125)
Windswept sings with fascinating observations about history, creativity, feminism and more. ‘An insight into influential creatives,’ wrote Wanderlust Magazine, categorising the book in its Best Travel Books 2021.
It is a memoir also of the author’s own life and how important walking has been for her. It should be important to all of us.
Our bodies, with their springy tendons and shock-absorbing joints, were built to walk for hour upon hour, day after day. The human heart, say experts, “evolved to facilitate extended endurance activity”. Sedentary people have smaller hearts with thicker walls, less able to pump quantities of blood for long periods. But we can rebuild and reshape our hearts merely by adopting an endurance activity like hiking. (167, 8)
Annabel Abbs has also written novels based on the lives of Frieda Lawrence (Frieda: A novel of the real Lady Chatterley), James Joyce’s daughter Lucia Joyce (The Joyce Girl), and others, such as The Language of Food and Miss Eliza’s Kitchen. Continue Reading Walking with Annabel: her wonderful books on women walking…
In the arms of the angels: How To Be An Artist and On Connection
September 1, 2023 at 6:36 am | Posted in creativity, imagination, leadership, Living creatively, value of the arts, Winston Churchill, writers' health | Leave a commentTags: creativity, How To Be An Artist, imagination more important than knowledge, Inspiring Australians, Jerry Saltz, Kae Tempest, Kirstin Ferguson, leadership, Marcia Hughes, mental health, On Connecting, Pareto and 80/20, The 2% Solution - simple steps to achieve happiness and balance
‘Every good work of art has courage in it somewhere,’ writes Jerry Saltz in his How To Be An Artist (Hachette, 2022). He also claims that ‘Courage is a desperate gamble that will place you in the arms of the angels.’ (p. 81)
Is the concept of courage relevant when we’re thinking about making art? In a world where we’re being sabotaged daily with messages telling us not to, telling us to consume instead, in a world where the manipulators of marketing know precisely how to best sow the seeds of self-doubt in order to sell more of their clients’ products, yes: relying on our own resources to see what sort of art we can make does take courage.
Jerry Saltz was a long distance truck driver who never wrote a word until he was nearly forty. Einstein famously told us that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge.’ Saltz writes, ‘Creativity is what you do with your imagination.’ He advises us to ‘write down your flights of fancy, your moments of wonder and fear, your dreams and delusions of grandeur. Then put them to work.
‘Make the imagination your compass star.’ (p. 5)
Recently I bought two books at Canberra’s wonderful Portrait gallery shop, The Curatoreum https://www.thecuratoreum.com/ Jerry Katz’s one above and English poet Kae Tempest’s On Connection (Faber, 2022). They’re both slim little books filled with riches for the heart and intellect. I mention one of my favourite Tempest poems in this blog: https://tinyurl.com/penhanleywordpress17jan
Landing in the present tense Continue Reading In the arms of the angels: How To Be An Artist and On Connection…
Alba Donati: a cottage full of books
June 12, 2023 at 4:15 am | Posted in Alba Donati, Bookshops, Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop, gardening, Living creatively, stress management, value of the arts | Leave a commentTags: Alba Donati, Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop, Emma Cline, The Guest, Villa La Bianca
Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop by Alba Donati. Trans. By Elena Pala. (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2022. 193 pp)
People want stories
In December 2019 Alba Donati opened her bookshop in Lucignana, her home town, a village of 180 people. The bookshop sat on a two and a half metre site on a craggy hill. Just before Covid, in the middle of nowhere – surely a venture destined to fail. But no: in the hands of the right person, such a seemingly mad undertaking can be just what people need, and people came and are still coming to her little bookshop.
She writes: ‘People want stories; it doesn’t matter who wrote them, they need stories to take their minds off things, stories to identify with or take them elsewhere. Stories that won’t hurt, that will heal a wound, restore trust, instil beauty into their hearts.’
A child who loves the bookshop is Angelica, always looking for a ‘different’ book. And ‘when she says “different” she narrows her eyes, leaving this world behind and travelling back in time.’ The author sees herself in Angelica, ‘Finally revisiting my childhood without fear. Because childhood is a trap: there are beautiful things and ugly things, you just have to find a magic wand to turn one into the other. Now that I’ve got my cottage full of books, I have nothing to worry about.’
Family dynamics and gardening
Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop seems to be simply quotidian simplicity, sprinkled with perfect sentences like this: ‘One last glance at the jasmine in full bloom and I retreat into my tower, happy.’ Nothing much happens but we read on, captivated. This book has a sense of quietly building energy with the concentrated power of a haiku. This shouldn’t surprise us because, before starting her bookshop, amidst a busy professional life in the Italian publishing industry, Donati also found time to write award-winning poetry.
In this short bookshop diary, Donati gives us a captivating memoir, with profound insights into themes such as family dynamics and gardening. She claims a sixth sense in bringing people together who belong together. For instance, she persuades her estranged brother to visit their mother in hospital, ‘like a normal sister would. It took me fifty-five years to bring us together again, and forty-eight to get Mum and Dad on speaking terms again.’ She continues: ‘I’m nothing if not patient, working away in my little corner, always looking like I’m busy doing something else. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to heal a wound, other times you just have to forget about it, think of something else, cry over something else. It’s just another job, really, or perhaps more of a vocation: I’m a bookseller who specialises in fixing things.’ Continue Reading Alba Donati: a cottage full of books…
Thirty Two Words for Field and Sand Talk – Irish and Indigenous wisdom
May 12, 2023 at 9:17 pm | Posted in arts and health, Australia behind, Blasket islands, Books, capitalism, Common Good, Democracy, Indigenous wisdom, Inequality - Australia, Living creatively, Manchan Magan, mental illness, Nature writing - Irish, rural Ireland, Sand Talk, sustainable living, value of the arts | 1 CommentTags: Indigenous wisdom, Irish wisdom, Julia Louis Dreyfus’ ‘Wiser than Me’, NeoLiberalism dogma versus Indigenous wisdom, our co-dependent relationship with nature, The Voice referendum, Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost words of the Irish landscape by Manchán Magan, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk
Connecting with a better world
Apart from reading some fantastic books, I’ve been having fun with my new Kick-Start creative writing workshops. They’ve been zipping along with the poetic contributions of talented students, filling the BRAG room on Tuesday nights with laughter and creative verve. BRAG stands for Braidwood Regional Arts Group and you can find it here: https://www.bragart.com.au
I’ve also been filling in for someone on a local radio station plus submitting my novel MS, Off the Plan, and making collages out of my painted papers and photographs, even working towards an exhibition with some others. And still dancing the Argentine tango. Brilliant books like Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost words of the Irish landscape by Manchán Magan (Gill Books, 2020) have taken up some time too.
Sounds resonate inside us. If ever you’ve heard a cow lowing after losing her calf, you’ll have felt with her the panicked despair floating out on the air. In Irish there’s a word for the sound: diadhárach – the particular loneliness of a cow bereft of her calf. Before the English suppressed the Irish language, words like this connected the speakers more deeply to the world around them. It’s great that Irelanders learn Irish in school now, reconnecting with their native tongue after centuries of English repression of it.
A deeper truth
Manchán Magan considers in his book ‘how words can be wedges that prise back the surface layer of thought and feeling, revealing a deeper truth.’ (p. 185) He observes in his intriguing book that old languages are rich in words that ‘emphasise our interrelatedness with all life and that reveal the empathy we have with each other and with our surroundings. They acknowledge our co-dependent relationship with nature, revealing almost as much about our inner processes and frailties as about the world around us.’ (p. 311)
You don’t have to know a word of Irish to be totally absorbed by this enchanting book. The author offers 45 words for stones and 4,300 words to describe character traits. He spent summers on the Blaskets with his grandmother where he learnt the many ways to express the changing qualities there of the light, winds and the sea. The language expressed a different way of being, of connecting with the landscape around them. Continue Reading Thirty Two Words for Field and Sand Talk – Irish and Indigenous wisdom…
Lost Focus – Johann Hari’s feasible solutions to our burning problems
April 13, 2022 at 4:08 am | Posted in capitalism, Democracy, depression, digital technology, dreams, Leisure, Living creatively, media negativity, mental illness, stress management, writers' health | Leave a commentTags: ADHD, Aza Raskin, extremism, Facebook, Google, Johann Hari, sleep, Stolen Focus, toxic culture
Tsunamis of information are drowning us
We’ve lost our ability to focus. Tsunamis of information are coming at us, drenching us every minute of every waking hour. We can’t keep up with it, mentally or emotionally. What we sacrifice when we try is depth. Not to mention sanity, peace of mind and our democracy.
In other words, the stakes could not be higher. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus (Bloomsbury, 2021) is an important book, beautifully written, which outlines practical solutions for the problems that unregulated social media has unleashed.
While researching this book, Hari interviewed 250 relevant experts worldwide. One of them was Aza Raskin. You mightn’t have heard of him but chances are, he’s influencing your behaviour every day. His dad invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. The internet used to be divided into pages. When you got to the bottom of one, you had to decide to click a button to get to the next page – an active choice that gave you time to think: do I really want to continue reading this? Aza designed a code that took away that choice: infinite scrolling.
All social media now uses a version of this. It automatically loads more when it gets to the bottom. It will scroll infinitely.
Soon after his code took effect, Aza Raskin began noticing how his friends seemed unable to pull themselves away from their devices. He did some sums, and calculated that his invention was making people spend 50% more time than they otherwise would on sites like Twitter. For many it’s vastly more. He saw people becoming angry, hostile and lacking in empathy as their social media use rose. Had he invented something that not only drains away people’s time, but ‘that tears us, rips us, and breaks us’? (p. 116) Continue Reading Lost Focus – Johann Hari’s feasible solutions to our burning problems…
Drinking the days: biographies and oysters
January 28, 2020 at 10:36 am | Posted in Australian memoir, Christina Stead, Democracy, Dennis Glover, Kay Schubach, Living creatively, mental illness, optimism, value of the arts | Leave a commentTags: David Leser, Derry Girls, George Orwell, Greta Thunberg, Jonathan Self
‘Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.’ American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) wrote that. I love it and would often think of it after opening the curtains first thing.
But her words took on a tragic tone in the mornings after the bushfires began. We could no longer open windows. Canberra’s air quality suddenly became literally the worst city in the world.
Actually it wasn’t as sudden as it seemed. Canberra’s air quality has been gradually worsening in the past few years, along with the rest of the country’s, thanks to our Government doing less than nothing about vehicle and other emissions responsible for raising CO2 levels.[1]
But I was aiming at an uplifting, positive post, damn it! I normally slant towards the upbeat, the whacky, the whimsical, but before veering in that direction, a serious point needs to be acknowledged. Continue Reading Drinking the days: biographies and oysters…
Thinking women, hope and regeneration
June 12, 2019 at 6:56 am | Posted in Andrea Goldsmith, Australia behind, Australian novels, Democracy, Living creatively, Movies, optimism, Toni Jordan | 2 CommentsTags: 2040: Regeneration, Damon Gameau, Invented Lives, Julienne van Loos, Kafka, optimism in depressing times, Rebecca Huntley, Sarah Macdonald al, The Fragments, The Full Catastrophe, the importance of play, The Thinking Woman, Toni Jordan
It’s been hard to find anything uplifting to say in the last few weeks. The last time I read John Milton (1608-1674) was in English (Hons) many years ago. But I just came across a quotation from Paradise Lost that seems like a sanity-saver in the world we’re enduring now.
‘The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’
I can imagine a certain homeless lad I see often, camping endlessly outside Dickson Woolworths, waiting for a Government flat to come up – or any of those poor, skinny, desperate blokes on Manus Island or Nauru who find themselves simultaneously in Hell and in Limbo – saying, ‘Yeah, that’s easy for him to say!’
And yes, Milton had his books and his house, music and writing, and his wife (a succession of three) and children.
But everyone has his own trials and Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, and of course when writing poignant poems like ‘When I consider how my light is spent’. His first two wives died, he also lost a son and a daughter, and he had a strained relationship with his remaining daughters.
Blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.