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
Expanding the moment
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…
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…
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…
Gently altering the world – the arts
March 30, 2020 at 11:24 pm | Posted in art, arts and health, Common Good, creativity, humour, humour as medicine, rural Ireland, Stand-up comedy - Australian, stress management, value of the arts, writers' health | 5 CommentsTags: Cill Rialaig, Elizabeth Cope, Genevieve Lacey, James Veitch, Ken Robinson, Michael Jnr, Peter Ammer, Shankill Castle, TED talks - funny, You can't ask that
Returning from a writing residency in Cill Rialaig, in Ireland’s County Kerry – https://cillrialaigartscentre.com/residencies/ – it was weird to be back yet not be able to hop on my bike and see friends, go to tango lessons, films, cafés and libraries or walk around the lake.
I watched that ingenious ABC program You Can’t Ask That and this time it was on nudists. I thought they would just answer the questions in their clothes.
But no – there they were, all shapes and sizes, in the nude. It reminded me of an unusual art exhibition I heard about in Cork.
Near Kilkenny I stayed a week at the fabulous Shankill Castle – https://shankillcastle.com – home of painter Elizabeth Cope and her husband Geoffrey. I have one of her beautiful paintings, pictured above. You can see her work here – she does landscapes, still lifes and portraits. She had an exhibition in Cork of only her nudes. A group of nudists asked if they could view the exhibition in the nude. The gallery said yes. I suppose it wasn’t winter. Continue Reading Gently altering the world – the arts…
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