Nature Writing

[bounty]

I appreciate that recommendation Sancho, thank you. I belong to an online book swap club and just entered it into my wishlist. id also like to take a trip this summer up to buffalo to a huge used book sale there and i'll keep my eyes peeled for it.

what you've written makes it a variant to viktor frankl trying to figure out why some concentration camp prisoners survived and why some died. in the end he seemed to rely a lot on a sentiment he must have gotten from Nietzsche, "he who has a reason why can bear any how." and I embarrassingly left off "holocaust literature" from my previous survival post.

plane crash in the andes---that's Alive by piers paul read! compelling story with lots of moral controversy similar to the donner party one. they had to eat their dead comrades in order to survive. good movie version of the story too. I think that's called Survive.

now im reminded of the true story that inspired Moby Dick (which sucks and is one of the worst all time books ever!), In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Stanley Philbrick, that's a great read also.

by the way---are you a football and/or seattle seahawks fan?

[Sancho]

Football is a sport I could never warm up to. You see, I went to The Univ of Texas, and at that time their gridiron strategy was - run to the left, run to the right, run up the middle, punt. So I decided to not waste any more time on football. It gives me more time to read. Baseball by contrast … now there’s a kingly sport. I like the pace of the game. You can read a book at a baseball game (although maybe not if you’re sitting down the third-case line). I like the ethos, the pathos, the logos of Baseball. I like the mythos. I like that it’s played in the right season. Baseball is played by gentlemen as well as by little kids, played in ball parks as well as on sandlots (“you’re killing me, Smalls”). I’m a fan of the game but not so much a fan of any particular team. That said The M’s had a pretty good year. During the division playoffs I thought the perfect Series matchup would’ve been the The Mariners and The Padres.

The book fair in Buffalo sounds awesome. That’s my kind of event - a bunch of book lovers stumbling around, digging through piles of used books, bumping into each other, finding hidden gems. I can spend hours in Powell’s in Portland, or for that matter Strand Books in Manhattan, or John R King’s in Detroit, or Ken Sander’s in Salt Lake City. Pretty much any town I visit will have a good used book store. I found a first edition copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang at a no-name book store in Billings Montana.

You know, I think I’ve read all those books you mentioned. I really like Nathaniel Philbrick’s style. I can burn through his books. One by him I enjoyed was The Last Stand. It was all about Custer, Sitting Bull, and the battle at The Little Bighorn. I read it in parallel with S.C. Gwynne’s Empire Of The Summer Moon. Philbrick’s book was about the north plains Indians and Gwynne’s book was about the south plains Indians, the Lakota Sioux and the Comanches.

[bounty]

I don't think there is a time when The Sandlot is on tv that I don't watch it. it's one of my all time favorites.

apart from how wonderfully, nostalgically moving the whole of the movie is, I think the scene where squints kisses wendy peffercorn is one of the funniest scenes ever.

"I've been coming here every summer of my adult life, and every summer there she is oiling and lotioning, lotioning and oiling. I can't take it anymore!"

there was a credit card commercial some years ago (mastercard or visa, I forget which) that featured frank Sinatra's Summer Wind, it seemed to capture the scene and the sport perfectly. I love baseball history and ive read at least one of the biographies of most of the biggies. im slowly enjoying ted Williams right now.

there is a lot of good baseball writing out there, both fiction and non-fiction (and movies too!). have you read some? doris kearns Goodwin's Wait til' Next Year, while not strictly about her relationship with her father and the Brooklyn dodgers, its a lot about that, and its one of the best written books ive read.

have you ever heard the comedy bit by George carlin where he compares baseball and football?

have attached a photo for you.

the sale in buffalo is by the AAUW. its a scholarship organization for women at the college level. book sales seem to be one of their primary methods of fund raising. they have sales all around the country. ive only been to two, one at penn state that had about 250,000 books and another in ann arbor that had about 75,000. the one in buffalo advertises itself as having 125,000. they usually have bag sales on the last day.

I have that custer book by Philbrick. maybe i'll pick it up after im through with ted Williams...

[Sancho]

Ha! I do remember that Carlin bit. In fact I may have been channeling it when I did my comparison.

Hmmm, baseball books. I’ve gotten some good recommendations from folks on this website. Aunt Shecky is a baseball fan. She pointed me towards a collection of articles by Roger Angell She also recommended the other Roger (Kahn) and his book - The Boys Of Summer. That is a book I enjoyed immensely. It’s all about the Dodgers, Brooklyn and L.A., but mostly Brooklyn. It’s a lot better than I made it sound. Somebody, I forget who, turned me on to Leonard Koppett’s A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Baseball. Koppett does a deep dive into the technical aspects of the game.

Here’s two more-recent books I’ve read: The Soul Of Baseball, by Joe Posnanski, and Ty Cobb, A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen. The Soul Of Baseball is all about Buck O’Neil, who played for the Kansas City Monarchs and then scouted and managed at various MLB teams well into his 70s. The Ty Cobb book tries to go back and undo the hatchet job Al Stump did on Cobb towards the end of Cobb’s life. These two books intersect in a weird sort of way. Deserved or not Cobb had a reputation as a racist and as a bit of an A-hole. He was from the South and he did occasionally slide into the base with spikes up, but hey, it was a different time. Cobb was also someone who openly acknowledged the talent of black players. Cobb even played exhibition games with players from the Negro leagues. A true racist wouldn’t have done neither. Leerhsen goes into all this in his book. In the Soul of Baseball book, O’Neil at one point goes to the funeral for Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe and delivers the eulogy. Radcliffe had played in the Negro leagues as a catcher and a pitcher, hence the nickname “Double Duty”. In the eulogy Buck O’Neil tells the story of one of those exhibition games. Cobb was trying to steal a base and Radcliffe, as catcher, threw him out. Things were looking tense until, as Cobb recalled, he saw that Radcliffe had written on his chest protector — “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”

Okay, one more. Catcher In The Wry, by Bob Uecker. It’s kind of a sleeper in the canon of baseball literature, but Christ did I laugh while reading this book. Never a dull moment in the dugout with Uke, eh?

By the way, bounty, I also laughed out loud at the Abbot and Costello pic.

[bounty]

holy cow Sancho, that was me ~6 yrs ago that recommended koppett. I just went back and hunted up the old post.

i loved uecker's book! and i thought he was great in Major League. on that note, another good baseball movie, especially if you like Jessica biel, Summer Catch.

i appreciate those recommendations. i'll add them to my wishlist on the swap club im in. i can suggest a few more to you, one especially if you like reading about ty cobb. Ty and the Babe by tom Stanton. their careers overlapped a bit but this book is more about their intertwined lives after baseball, most notably in a charity (if i remember rightly) best of three golf match. you might also like For love of the game by Michael shaara. and George will has a couple worth mentioning, bunts! and men at work.

ive got a large handful of stuff i haven't read yet. one of the most compelling title wise is fathers playing catch with their sons. is there any other way that Field of Dreams could have ended? its interesting to note too in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 when peter quill meets his father, and he starts to learn how to exercise his new found powers, he makes a ball and they play catch with each other.

haven't read the natural yet, and i have some old zane grey baseball stories that i should give a shot to also.

if you liked the boys of summer i would say wait till next year is a must read for you.

yes, that photo still makes me laugh out loud too.

[Sancho]

That Koppett book is a good one. I still refer to it when I’m trying to suss out why a team or a player made a certain decision and it’s not immediately obvious what they were thinking. And you were right, it wasn’t all that easy to find. I got a well-worn copy of it Powell’s. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for the Doris Kearns Goodwin book. I think I saw her not so long ago on Meet the Press. She always sounds like the adult in the room when the politicos get to banging heads.

The Natural is a fine read. I wished I’d’a read it before watching the movie. Other than a basic outline, the book and the movie bear little resemblance. The Roy Hobbs character is totally different. I went through the first part of the book picturing Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, but then once I got a clue I started picturing John Rocker instead.

[bounty]

another one just popped into my head Sancho, Praying for Gil Hodges by Oliphant. the title genesis is the author was a boy in catholic school in brooklyn, the dodgers were in the world series against the yankees and there was news that hodges was sick. an announcement came over the school speakers during asking for prayer.

tell you what---it might be awhile because The girl who played with fire is pretty long, but when im through with that, i'll give the natural a read.

meanwhile, I feel bad for distracting you and danik from the intent of the thread and the conversation you were having...

[Sancho]

No worries, bounty, in my humble opinion straying off topic is what life’s all about. Besides I don’t think we really went too far afield. I mean the thread is about nature writing and we were chatting about a book entitled — The Natural. Am I right? At any rate it got me thinking — there’s some great sports writing out there. I ought to start a new thread…

[Danik 2016]

Bounty, my conversation above with Sancho happened many months ago. In fact I was trying to comment books I hadn´t read and this limits somewhat a conversation about books. I think it great that you have so many books in common.

[Sancho]

This one is about the joys of sleeping out in the open. It’s from Cheryl Strayed’s book about solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, Wild. The day before this scene she’d hiked over twenty miles on the hot dry Modoc Plateau in Northern California. The water tank she’d planned to use as a resupply was dry, but she’d managed to find a boggy reservoir to rehydrate. Then she’d fallen asleep, exhausted:

I awoke two hours later with the vaguely pleasant sensation that tiny cool hands were gently patting me. They were on my bare legs and arms and face and in my hair, on my feet and throat and hands. I could feel their cool weight through my T-shirt on my chest and belly. “Hmm,” I moaned turning slightly before I opened my eyes and a series of facts came to me in slow motion.

There was the fact fact of the moon and the fact that I was sleeping out in the open on my tarp.

There was the fact that I had woken because it seemed like small cool hands were gently patting me and the fact that small cool hands were gently patting me.

And then there was the final fact of all, which which was a fact more monumental than the moon: the fact that those small cool hands were not hands , but hundreds of small cool black frogs.

Small cool slimy black frogs jumping all over me.

Each one the size of a potato chip. They were an amphibious army, a damp smooth-skinned militia, a great web-footed migration, and I was in their path as they hopped, scrambled, leapt, and hurled their tiny, pudgy, bent-legged bodies from the reservoir and onto the scrim of dirt that they no doubt considered their private beach.

[Sancho]

There’s a pretty good article in The New Yorker this weekend about nature writing.

The Problem Of Nature Writing, by Jonathan Franzen:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/th...nature-writing

If you’ve read his stuff before (I have), you know he’s a bird lover and birds pop up in his writing frequently. In the article he makes a comparison of nature writing to religious writing, specifically The Bible. He says he’s not religious and when he tried to read The Bible as a young man he bogged down in the Psalms. He found Psalms repetitive. Only later, when he became a bird lover, did he realize the joy and nuance a true believer finds in Psalms is somewhat akin to the joy he finds in bird watching. He then reasons that if an evangelical wants to make the Bible interesting to a nonbeliever, it’d be best to stick to the stories and steer clear of Psalms. Similarly for a lover of nature to write something compelling for a casual observer of nature, it’d be better to make it a story than to go into an intricate description.

I just scratched the surface of what he explores in the article, so I put a link to it above. At any rate, he might be onto something — most of the examples of nature writing we’ve quoted in this thread are part of a larger story.

[Danik 2016]

Enjoyed the article, Sancho, specially its humor. It want to make people more conscious of nature particularly birds destruction.

"Almost all nature writing tells some kind of story. A writer ventures out to a lovely local wetland or to a pristine forest, experiences the beauty of it, perceives a difference in the way time passes, feels connected to a deeper history or a larger web of life, continues down the trail, sees an eagle, hears a loon: this is, technically, a narrative. If the writer then breaks a leg or is menaced by a grizzly bear with cubs, it may even turn into an interesting story. More typically, though, the narrative remains little more than a formality, an opportunity for reflection and description. A writer who’s moved to joy by nature, and who hopes to spread the joy to others, understandably wishes to convey the particulars of what incited it."

[tailor STATELY]

Agree with the premise of the article... Lol, Psalms !

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[Sancho]

He’s got a point, eh guys?

I read Michael Punke’s The Revenant a while back and in it there were some glorious descriptions of the Rockies, but what I remember is the Grizzly Bear attack on Hugh Glass. Actually even more than the bear attack I remember the maggots eating the dead and putrefied skin around the wounds on Hugh’s back a few weeks after the bear attack.

Then there’s the movie of the same name, starring Leo DiCaprio. I saw the movie before I read the book. And I gotta say, I didn’t even pay attention to the story in the movie. I was just wowed by the cinematography. The nature photography in that film was jaw dropping.

And that sort of gets back to Franzen’s article. He points out that one of the problems of Nature writing is: why read about it when you can go out and enjoy it. Maybe cinema acts a bridge between reading about nature and actually going out into it. Of course you’ll never get the full sensory experience of The Rockies from a film, or from reading, but the upside is there’s very little chance of being eaten by a bear while sitting in a BarcaLounger watching a movie or reading a book.

[tailor STATELY]

re: "maggots eating the dead" reminded me of the movie depiction of "The Northwest Passage"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage_(film) where a maggoty head spurs madness.

I watched the movie "The Big Year"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bi...ark%20Obmascik. some time ago that, though tongue in cheek, opened my eyes to birding beyond my 30-minute perusal of a Roger Tory Peterson book. Did "The Big Year" spur further interest in nature or did the subplots overcome the narrative ? Prolly yes and yes

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor