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Thread: Nature Writing

  1. #16
    running amok Sancho's Avatar
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    I liked the descriptions of St Petersburg. I’ve never been there either. When I read a particularly artful description, I find myself slowing down and enjoying the view, much like hiking to the top of a rise and taking in a beautiful sunset. Ya just gotta stop and take it in, smell the roses so to speak. I suppose the style of writing matches the style of reading. I’ll zip through an action scene to see what happens, and I’ll race through a journalistic article to get the information, but I’ve gotta slow down to absorb a bella vista.

    I’m currently reading two books that have nature-writing possibilities: the first one is a collection of essays by Susan Orleans - On Animals, the second one is a sometimes funny sometimes tragic book by Mary Roach - Fuzz, When Nature Breaks The Law.

    This is from the Mary Roach book. She’s with a Colorado Wildlife Official visiting an Aspen house that’s just been broken into by a bear:

    This bear reminds Breck of one that was breaking into Aspen homes back when his study was underway here. They called him Fat Albert. “He was just kinda a laid-back. He’d gently open a door of a cabin, go in, eat some food, and leave. People would go, ‘Wow, he didn’t destroy my place at all.’” That’s why he was fat, and that’s why he was alive. There’s more tolerance for a bear like that.
    Sounds like the lady-dove in Praça Roosevelt is doing the right thing - playing hard to get. Don’t get too eager, sister. Make him work for it. I have been down to that neighborhood. I remember walking around there early in the morning and enjoying the feel of the place. Theater district, right? We stayed at a hotel on Ave Paulista, so it was a short walk over there, and I like to walk. I also like to run, so in general I’d go the other direction and take jog on the paths around The Ibirapuera Park.

    As for underground Montreal, I agree, not very scenic, but warm. They used to have a Swedish restaurant down there called Mövenpick. It was a lot of fun. You’d check in and they’d give you a card and then you could go around to a bunch of different food stations and pick out you wanted, and they’d stamp your card. Then you’d pay when you left. The locals called the Mövenpick the “Move and Pick”. Anyway, my kind of place, you don’t have to sit around and wait for a waiter. They used to have one in Boston too.
    Uhhhh...

  2. #17
    running amok Sancho's Avatar
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    Ack!

    It’s Susan Orlean not Susan Orleans.

    Swine spell checker!

    Been reading her stuff in The New Yorker for years.
    Uhhhh...

  3. #18
    On the road, but not! Danik 2016's Avatar
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    Slowing down is just what I´m doing presently. Petersburg is a gem of a book and I think it shows the transition between the 19C and the 20 C novel. People were still discovering the multiple uses and effects of electric light. But I'm reading its about 800 pages slowly. Each section of chapter seems to contain scenes more than a narrative and some of these scenes are very powerful.

    Petersburg is, of course, an urban novel. It seems to be( I am to much in the beginning) about a young man, who haunts people running around in a red domino costume and who is probably getting involved with a political group that goes at the establishment of a bureaucratic Russia which is represented by the domino youth´s own father. All this is built up very slowly.
    So there is not much nature writing in the novel. But here is a passage that fits our theme (although nature here seems to have a more symbolic use):

    "Those were strange, misty days: across the north of Russia venomous October was passing with its freezing tread; and across the south it draped dank mists. Venomous October fanned the forest’s golden whisper, and the forest’s golden whisper submissively lay down upon the ground—and the rustling purple of the aspens submissively lay down upon the ground, to wind and chase at the feet of a passing pedestrian, and to murmur as it wove from leaves a red-and-yellow web of words. That sweet chirruping of blue tits that in September bathes in waves of foliage had long since ceased to bathe in foliage: and the blue tit herself was now hopping forlornly in the black network of boughs, which all autumn long, like the mumble of a toothless dotard, sends its whistle from the forests, leafless groves, the gardens and the parks.

    Those were strange, misty days; an icy hurricane was making its approach in tattered clouds, leaden and blue; but everyone believed in spring: the newspapers wrote about spring, officials of the fourth class discussed spring; a minister who was popular at the time pointed to spring; and the effusions of a Petersburg girl-student carried the scent of nothing less than violets in early May."

    Lol! I fully agree about your comment on the smart lady-dove. In earlier times, when it wasn´t forbidden, I used to feed some doves on my window sill. There was a doverick I named Macho-Man after the son. Well nourished and with shining feathers, when he chose to execute his dance an d he chose it often, there wasn´t any room left for anybody else.

    Ibirapuera is still beautiful an Pça. Roosevelt is still a Theater District. The building where I live is, in fact, very near of the Teatro Cultura Artística which you might have known. The theater burnt down parcially in 2008. Efforts have been made since then to rebuild it, but the money seems to have run out in the middle of it, and the half done building stands abandoned.

    Pandemic closed a lot of restaurants here in my region. But there are still some good self services left, where one can pic and chose the dishes and they are not so expensive. I visited a Mövenpick with my father the one time I went to Switzerland, but there you ordered the food from the menu.
    "I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
    Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row

  4. #19
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    im certainly off from the intricacies of the ongoing discussion but hopefully not too far out of the ballpark in general...

    it seems like every western ive read takes the time to talk about the land.

    a sand county almanac by leopold comes to mind.

    and there is an author named Patrick McManus who used to write for outdoor/hunting magazines who has also written a large handful of books about his time outdoors. his books aren't a homage to nature so to speak, but the locations are there and his writing is hysterical.

  5. #20
    running amok Sancho's Avatar
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    Back in the 80s I got a subscription to Outdoor Life just so I could read Patrick McManus’s back-page stories. I remember one where he discussed strategies for getting a new hunting rifle into the house and past his wife, Bun. One method was - he’d put a lamp shade on the barrel of the gun and show it to Bun and gush about the wonderful new floor lamp he’d found and how fine it’d look in the living room. Bun of course would demand that he immediately take the hunting-rifle floor-lamp abomination down to his area in the basement.

    Anyway it was something like that.

    Ya know, just like in Westerns, nature writing pops up in just about every genre. There were some gorgeous passages about the nature of Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Sci-Fi classic Red Mars.

    And here’s one from the horror genre. Stephen King’s The Body (the movie Stand By Me was based on it) I just happen to be reading it now. If you remember it’s set in the fictional town of Castlerock, Maine in 1960. 4 twelve-year-old boys (Gordy, Chris, Teddy, and Vern) go on a 2-day trek to see the body of a boy (Ray Brower) who’d been hit by a train. Ray was from the next town over and he’d been missing for about a week, but the boys had some pretty good information about what had happened to him and where his body was.

    Anyway they’re settling in for the night in their camp in the woods on the first night. They’re about halfway to the body:

    We didn’t talk about Ray Brower as the dark drew down, but I was thinking about him. There’s something horrible and fascinating about the way dark comes to the woods, its coming unsoftened by headlights or streetlights or houselights or neon. It comes with no mothers’ voices, calling for their kids to leave off and come on in now, to herald it. If you’re used to the town, the coming of dark in the woods seems more like a natural disaster than a natural phenomenon; it rises like the Castle River rises in the spring.
    Uhhhh...

  6. #21
    Registered User bounty's Avatar
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    hi (again I think?) Sancho,

    I have ten of mcmanus' books. I vaguely remember that story. I think the first book of his I got is called "the night the bear ate goombaw." he's a kid out camping with a friends family and since he doesn't have a sleeping bag he's wrapped up in an old bear skin fur cut. in the middle of the night he has to urinate and when he gets up, through the distortion and shadows of the campfire, people think there is a bear in camp. someone yells "bear!" and he doesn't know its him. the father of the family starts running and Patrick, thinking the safest place to be is with the adult male of the bunch starts running after him, which makes the father think the bears chasing him. im laughing all over again thinking about it.

    sometimes I watch "family guy" and I recently re-watched the episode where they did their own take on three Stephen king stories. the stand by me story was one of them.

    I read "dandelion wine" by ray Bradbury this past year and I have a recollection of the marrying of the wine to the gloriousness of the summer.

    i'll have to keep my eyes peeled for nature snippets in books not essentially about nature...

  7. #22
    running amok Sancho's Avatar
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    Hey bounty, I think it’s “again”. I seem to remember us chatting about nautical tales a while back. Pretty sure. Donno. Maybe. Anyway it’s one of the reasons I like this website so much - we have these running conversations that sometimes go on for years. And of course we have Danik to hold the whole thing together.

    Pat McManus, it seems to me, was one of those guys from a few of generations ago who just preferred to be outdoors. My grandfather was one of those guys. He could wander for hours, even days, in the north woods and know exactly where he was. But drop him off in a big city and he’d be lost inside of two blocks. (For him Duluth was a big city) He sent me a copy of They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They? I’ve still got it somewhere. The picture on the cover tells the story. There’s a broken-down nag of a canoe, beached, and a man sort of turned away and pointing a pistol at his trusty old ride, intent on putting it out of its misery. It’s the same idea as a famous Bill Maudlin cartoon of Willie or Joe (not sure which) covering his eyes and holding his .45 to the hood of his broken-down Jeep.

    Come to think of it, all those guys - Willie, Joe, Maudlin, McManus, my Pop’s Pop, were roughly from the same generation.

    I’m going to have to read the Bradbury story. Right now I’m reading Agatha Christie’s Death On The Nile. I’ve yet to find any nature writing in this murder mystery.
    Uhhhh...

  8. #23
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    ive never seen it in print but supposedly one of the fathers of modern sociology (marx, weber or Durkheim) said "mankinds greatest problem is his distance from nature."

    I just started reading pushkin (prose not poetry) and "the girl who played with fire." I don't think they'll be much nature writing in those either. im also in a ted Williams biography and although hunting and fishing were huge pastimes of his, the author doesn't really include Williams' reflections on being out in nature. now that I say that though, there might have been a comment on his liking the solitude.

    parts of "dandelion wine" were exquisitely written and very touching. its construction is interesting too. its not written from a continuous story perspective. its almost like a collection of short stories that are related to each other by virtue of time, location and recurring characters.

    if you end up liking "death on the nile" Sancho, let me recommend "murder on the orient express" to you, and then go watch both recent movies with Kenneth Branagh playing Poirot. I think he does an excellent job and the movies are really good.

    I love Poirot. for years ive been trying to locate a manuscript called "the Belgian at baker street; did hercule Poirot meet sherlock holmes?" by rafe McGregor.

  9. #24
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    accidently posted twice...

    hmmm, how to delete a post?
    Last edited by bounty; 12-21-2022 at 07:45 PM.

  10. #25
    On the road, but not! Danik 2016's Avatar
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    Hey, guys!
    Just chiming in for a Christmas greeting! Welcome back Sancho and thanks for your friendly reference. Reading currently two very urban books, "The return of the Caravels" by Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes and "Tomb of Sand" by Geetanjaly Shree. I´m keeping the eyes skinned for interesting nature passages!
    "I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
    Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row

  11. #26
    running amok Sancho's Avatar
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    Indeed, Christmas greetings all around! We’ve got a cold snap rolling through western Washington right now so for the next couple of days we’ve actually got some Christmas-like weather here. Makes me a little envious of somebody living south of the equator, Danik.

    I’ll check out the movies, Bounty. I like to see how the movie makers interpret a good novel. What they decide to emphasize is almost never what I found compelling in the book, but it makes me look at the book in a different way. That said, Stand By Me was a very close rendering of The Body, I thought.

    So here’s a nature-writing snippet from a recent book that was also made into a movie. Michael Punke’s The Revenant. What could be more natural-worldy than an impending grizzly bear attack?

    He saw the cubs before he saw the sow. There was a pair, and they tumbled toward him, bawling like playful dogs. The cubs had been dropped in the spring, and at five months weighed a hundred pounds each. They nipped at each other as they bore down on Glass, and for the briefest of instants the scene had a near comic quality. Transfixed by the whirling motion of the cubs, Glass had not raised his glance to the far end of the clearing, fifty yards away. Nor had he yet to calculate the certain implication of their presence.

    Suddenly he knew. A hollowness seized his stomach half an instant before the first rumbling growl crossed the clearing. The cubs skidded to an immediate stop, not ten feet in front of Glass. Ignoring the cubs now, Glass peered toward the brush line across the clearing.

    He heard her size before he saw it. Not just the crack of the thick underbrush that the sow moved aside like short grass, but the growl itself, a sound deep like thunder or a falling tree, a bass that could emanate only through connection with some great mass.

    The growl crescendoed as she stepped into the clearing, black eyes staring at Glass, head low to the ground as she as she processed the foreign scent, a scent now mingling with that of her cubs. She faced him head-on, her body coiled and taut like the heavy spring on a buckboard. Glass marveled at the animal’s utter muscularity, thick stumps of her forelegs folding into massive shoulders, and above all the silvery hump that identified her as a grizzly.
    I gotta tell ya, and I know it’s unnatural, but when I read a scene like this, I’m almost always pulling for the animal — give him hell mama bear! Of course if mama bear would’ve eaten Hugh Glass on page 23 there wouldn’t have been much else to talk about for the next 200 pages or so.
    Uhhhh...

  12. #27
    On the road, but not! Danik 2016's Avatar
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    Well, it seems that Hugh Glass escaped from Mama Bear, I hope Mama Bear also escaped from Hugh Glass.

    A Happy Christmas for you and yours, Sancho and Bounty. Here in S Paulo we are having a lovely "winter" day, 19º now. Brazilians are asking what happened to summer this year. It`s scheduled for February it seems.
    "I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
    Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row

  13. #28
    running amok Sancho's Avatar
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    19 degrees sounds pretty nice, Danik. We hit 19 degrees here too, only it was on the Fahrenheit scale, which isn’t really all that cold for someone in Minneapolis but we don’t see it all that often here.

    The thing about an impending grizzly attack in literature is that it usually leads to an actual grizzly attack:

    The grizzly dropped to all fours and was on him. Glass rolled into a ball, desperate to protect his face and chest. She bit into the back of his neck and lifted him off the ground, shaking him so hard that Glass wondered if his spine might snap. He felt the crunch of her teeth striking the bone of his shoulder blade. Claws raked repeatedly through the flesh of his back and scalp. He screamed in agony. She dropped him, then sank her teeth deep into his thigh and shook him again, lifting him and throwing him to the ground with such force that he lay stunned—conscious, but unable to resist any further.
    From Michael Punke’s The Revenant

    Go mama bear go! — (El Sancho’s unnecessary comment.) Of course I’m saying that from the perspective of someone living at time when humans have killed almost all the wild animals in the mountain west. The book is set in 1823-24, a time when our species and the grizzly bear were on a more equal footing for survival.

    Anyway I liked the writer’s choice of pronouns - mama bear is a “she” not an “it”.

    The bear attack scene at the beginning of The Revenant reminded me of newspaper stories I’d read about bear attacks. Back in the 80s I lived in Fairbanks Alaska and about once a year we’d get a good bear attack story in the local paper, The Daily New-Miner. The story was usually accompanied by a photo of the survivor (if there was a survivor). He be sitting in his hospital bed with his head shaved and a bunch of sutures on his face and scalp, an eye and some teeth missing, and a great big smile on his face because, you know, he was alive. One descriptor almost all the bear-attack survivors used was — LOUD. Evidently a bear attack is noisy. Not just the growling but the sound of the bear’s teeth/claws raking across the victim’s scalp/skull is evidently quite noisy.

    A note about my use of pronouns: the person in the bear-attack stories in The Daily News-Miner was almost always a “he”. Women have more sense than to put themselves in that situation. And that reminds me of a few years later when I was living in North Georgia. One year we had a rash Copperhead bites in my area. A copperhead is a mildly venomous snake. The local hospital reported that most women tended to get bitten on their feet or ankles while most men tended to get bitten on their hands or face. Makes sense. “Hey, Bubba, hold my beer and watch this…”
    Uhhhh...

  14. #29
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    thank you danik, and to you.

    its been so long since ive read either of those two books Sancho that I couldn't make a book to movie comparison. they are by far Christie's most famous stories and I think each of them has been made into movies at least 2-3 times. just yesterday "who is hercule Poirot" was an answer on jeopardy and the reference was to someone who played him back in a 1978 version. ken Jennings, the host, remarked on what a great job he had done and what a good adaptation it was.

    if you watch the movies id enjoy hearing your reaction. i thought Murder on the Orient Express was the slightly better of the two. although some of that might have come from my having a hard time seeing Gal Gadot as anything other than Wonder Woman.

    the current "bomb cyclone" we're facing here in the states and this category is reminding me of jack London's To Build a Fire. the temperatures were more extreme in the story than what's going on but nevertheless...

    i am a big fan of survival literature. with the notable exception of zombies, which can occur anywhere, a lot of survival stories occur in natural settings---man alone in the wilderness, man lost at sea, man against the elements on a mountain, etc.

  15. #30
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    If you haven’t read it already, bounty, you might like Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. I’ll try not to butcher this too badly because it’s been a while since I read it, but it’s one of those books l think about a lot. It’s not a single survival tale but bunch of, more or less, case studies. The full title is Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. In the book Gonzales tries to figure out what it is about the 10 percent or so of people who manage to stay alive when thrown into a survival situation - lost in the woods, car slides into a deep ravine, falls to the bottom of a crevasse, plane crashes in the Andes, stuff like that. Anyway aside from needing a lot of luck, it seems the survivors share a few personality traits and more importantly have the rare ability to see the situation for what it is rather than to try to shape the situation into something they’re familiar with.

    A couple of other takeaways I remember are: when lost in the woods, little kids statistically have a better chance of survival than adolescents. A 4 or 5 year-old will tend to hunker down and conserve energy and warmth while an adolescent will tend to travel and usually get into more trouble. If you’re looking for a little kid who’s lost in the forest, check the hollowed out tree stumps. Farm kids and city kids do better than suburban kids in survival situations, farm kids because they have certain knowledge about how the natural world works, and city kids because they are imbued with a sense of wariness from a young age. Suburban kids were toast - too sheltered.

    It seems Gonzales has had a fascination with survival skills from a young age. He grew up in awe of his father. In the book he tells the story of how his father survived being shot down over Germany during WWII. The senior Gonzales was a B-17 pilot in the 8th Air Force and was leading a mission over Nazi Germany when his wing was shot off by a German 88. He commanded “Bail Out” to the crew but then lost consciousness as the plane spun in. He woke up in the wreckage with massive injuries and a not-too-pleased German farmer pointing a pistol at his head. His dad is a member of a very small club of World War Two Aviators who fell to the earth without a parachute and survived. At any rate his father’s story is well worth the price of the book.
    Uhhhh...

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