Can't teach an old popcorn machine... and my Best Books 2010

I had 8.5 minutes on National Radio to barrel through my Best Books for 2010, and barrel I did - despite my best intentions to go for the unhurried conversational pace of the lovely Graham Beattie who offered up his Best Books yesterday.

I have so much I want to say to do justice to the chosen books, and although I try to cull some of my thoughts to - you know - take a breath, they just come popping out unbidden and unstoppable like popcorn from a popcorn machine.

The great thing is I said most of what I wanted to say. Eight and a half minutes is a good amount of time for the review slot (Graham managed manfully on just over five), so I was lucky. And host Kathryn Ryan is a good sort, batting at the flying popcorn with a grin on her face, chomping on the odd one, and licking the butter off her fingers.

Click here for the review with Kathryn.

Here are my Best Books:

1. Katherine Mansfield The Storyteller by Kathleen Jones (Penguin NZ)
2. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (4th Estate)
3. Ephraim's Eyes by Brian Walpert (Rose Pewter Press)
4. How the Land Lies by Pat White (VUP)
5. These I Have Loved edited by Harvey McQueen (Steele Roberts)


And if you have trouble with the link to the review, I've had a listen back and fleshed out my notes so you can read at your leisure....

Best Books 2010: Nine to Noon 

1.    Katherine Mansfield The Storyteller by Kathleen Jones (Penguin - biography)

This book took ten years to write and is meticulously researched using new material in public domain.

I met Kathleen, a UK writer, when she visited NZ last year. She reached into her pocket and produced a brooch which had belonged to Katherine Mansfield, and was a gift from an elderly woman who’d known KM and Ida Baker. It was a gesture of thanks to the author for her sympathetic and sensitive approach to Mansfield's life. It is sympathetic writing - a story tenderly told in the language of a poet, which Kathleen Jones is. 

Most biographies have an elegiac tone in looking back over  a life - this bio has a sense of real time, of events unfolding in front of us. Two reasons: the precise details of KM’s life are given every step of the way as we follow her moving around different houses and countries, seeking a place to settle down and write, and later a cure; the structure is unusual - going back and forward in time, including on into John Middleton Murry’s life and marriages after Katherine. 

2.    Freedom by Jonathan Franzen [4^th Estate - novel]

Like his hit novel Corrections, Freedom is one of those old time literary novels - the Epic. 

It's the story of an American middle class mid-western American family in turmoil : late 70s to today (Patty & Walter Berglund and their two children). It looks at the impact of modern life on their lives and the impact of their lives on the planet. There are dollops of familial love & hate, lust and betrayal, and the book is packed with political and environmental issues e.g. over-consumption/over-population/loss of birds/Iraq war. 

Freedom is hectic, funny, erudite, intensely psychological with precise, layered characters that are beyond being hateful or loveable – they just are.

3.    Ephraim’s Eyes by Bryan Walpert (Pewter Rose Press – short stories, available at Unity, Bruce McKenzie's and other independent bookstores, or online e.g. Book Depository)

Bryan Walpert is an American who lives in NZ, an academic and poet. 

Like Franzen, his characters are pitch-perfect with authentic lives, but there's nothing hectic or epic about these stories. They are what I call Black Diamonds: crafted, polished, cerebral, compact with a dark undertow – and cleverly linked.

Brian won the Manhire Science Prize for  one of the stories; he often uses prism of science and philosophy to explain life’s vicissitudes. He believes the way to the heart is through the head. Their impact reminds of Charlotte Grimshaw’s story collections. 

Each story contains someone’s grief - man damaged by war who owns a magic shop and finds himself teaching tricks to a needy boy, a man whose job is to check billboards for damage but who is taken up with checking the perceived wreck of his own life, a woman with a secret needs a new cupboard, and gets a mycologist in as a flatmate to help pay for it.

Now two other New Zealanders whose work has had an impact on me this year: 

4.    How the Land Lies by Pat White [VUP - memoir/essays]

This book charts the life of a man who felt the odd one out in a West Coast family. Sensitive, intellectual and vulnerable, he was drawn to art and poetry rather than farming. He writes of how he lived on the land down South and ended up in the Wairarapa growing olives. This book is also a contemplation on the healing and overarching power of nature – and of the need for people to slow down and take care of and enjoy what is god-given.

There are two outstanding chapters on the kahu/falcon and the power to be had in walking, and a  tender evocation of the Wairarapa and of farming there. 

5. These I Have Loved ed. By Harvey McQueen [Steele Roberts - anthology]

The last book by poet, educationalist, and ground-breaking anthologist Harvey McQueen who sadly died on Christmas Day. This is an anthology of a 100 NZ poems Harvey loved. A great range from old classics like Milking Before Dawn by Ruth Dallas to James K Baxter to Jenny Borndholdt to Mark Pirie’s poke at NZ nature poems.

It's like reading one of my mother's well-thumbed anthologies for its comfortableness. Harvey mentioned one of them: 'Other Men's Flowers' by Lord Wavell as an inspiration. 

Wonderful introductions to each section giving the reader a taste of what one of Harvey’s students said was – ‘the best poetry teacher I ever had’. They put poets and poems in context and give them each  Harvey's personal stamp of approval. This is the same unhurried, erudite, thoughtful writing as This Piece of Earth, Harvey’s wonderful memoir of life in his garden which bids us all to take more time to reconnect with the earth.      

Harvey McQueen's Memorial Service is 11 am tomorrow Friday January 28 at Old St Paul's Mulgrave Street, Wellington. 

Corvus : a review

I didn't do it justice on National Radio this morning. Not one bit. But listen if you must. Checking in just prior to the review, I was told I had ten minutes (a long time on radio) so I lined up the facts in my head, ringed important notes, firmly marked a place to read from ... but as I was waiting, the NASA astronaut being interviewed before me slipped over the 10.30 a.m mark (talking about being smelly in space!) and then the 10.35 mark, and suddenly ten minutes was just over four. Such a shame, but that's radio for you.

It doesn't always matter - a lesser book can cope with four minutes - but Corvus is one of those books that almost overwhelms a radio reviewer because there's so much to talk about, and that discussion can go in all directions. The book itself is a forest of ripped slips of paper marking extracts that have to be remembered or read out loud (my poor family has patiently listened to most of them). Frankly, it looks like a rook has got to it.

And now I have no time to write up a proper review for my blog because I have to mark short stories and poems by my extramural Massey students. So here are some notes on this glorious book which can be characterised as a memoir about a family that lives with birds not unlike Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. It is also a paean to birds and in fact to all wild creatures, to wilderness, to nature, to the whole of the earth.

Birds, says Woolfson, are indivisible from their environment, unlike humans who have lost that connection over time. Birds are the marker of the health of our environment, too. We may curse them and the way they live cheek by jowl with us in ways that don't always suit our need for control. But, as she says, imagine a world without them, without bird song. What that silence would mean.

Corvus: latin for raven or crow.

Corvids: an order of birds that includes rooks, magpies and crows.

• among the most intelligent, if not the most intelligent, birds - brains the same size and capacity of apes and known by some as 'feathered apes'
• complex social organisation, gregarious
• live cheek-by-jowl with man
• surrounded by superstition (the 'devil's bird'), treated with suspicion and active dislike due to black colouring, being 'hoarse-voiced', cleaned up after battles (carrion) and disaster (Great Fire of London for example) but can't pierce skin with their beaks - need others to do that
• live in rookeries with large, untidy nests
• eat insects, birds eggs, very young birds
• live around the planet - some in NZ
  
  

Esther Woolfson lives in Aberdeen. She's a writer and fell in accidentally with birds. Her adoptions included:

• Doves in a doo'cot
• Bardie a cockatiel (her daughter's bird)
• A Rook called Chicken
• Spike the Magpie
• Ziki the Crow

She says living with birds was like marrying into another family, being introduced to a new society. Her book is full of her observations, but it is also full of the knowledge she amasses about these fascinating birds. There is a large bibliography and she wrestles with the things she learns - the intelligence of the birds, their capacity for feeling, whether or not they are happy or unhappy living with her. There are some wonderful stories - moving, heart-warming, stimulating - and some simply fascinating information for all those bird lovers out there. For example, the details of how birds fly and the historical envy humans have for this singular skill.

Signs of corvid intelligence:

• vocalising - Spike and Chicken can say words - especially Spike who can say his name and say 'hello' - one of his favourite curious sounds was 'eh?'
• caching (hiding) food in case of future need - or just to keep it - shows an ability to think ahead and to lie - Woolfson's birds hid things all over the house in holes in the wall, cushions, books.... and took great care over this
• reaction to the environment - the birds show fear of some things (men with ladders) but not others, they don't think their reflections are other birds but assume they are simply themselves (Woolfson refers to scientific research to confirm this), they consistently like some music (Schubert, Bach) but not other music (Benjamin Britten), they think black things such as rubbish bags are dead Corvids and react angrily or upset ... and so on
• feelings - woolfson is convinced corvids show empathy, joy, grief, mischievousness, anger - it's a controversial view and it is hard to measure this or to be sure but Woolfson can have no other explanation for what she has seen living with these birds - some literature says that without words there are no feelings but she asks why this should be so - this discussion in her book takes the reader (as much of the book does) away from birds and into a philosophical discussion on what makes us human
  
  

Woolfson writes simply and movingly about the business of living with birds. The formality of the rook who bows on greeting, caws 'good morning' every morning, preens carefully every night, who offers gifts with precision and care. There is wonderful humour e.g. the family never mentions James I to Chicken the rook because he decreed that all rooks should be killed. Spike is simply hilarious with his 'human' voice calling 'Spiky!' or yelling 'Hello!' down the phone to Woolfson's daughter.

She tells us other famous people - writers like her - have kept corvids. Charles Dickens had a pet raven and Truman Capote had a pet rook called Lola. The latter friendship is especially fascinating and wonderfully rendered in The Truman Capote Reader. Lola cached things inside The Complete Works of Jane Austen. Capote found all sorts of things in there including someone's car keys and the first page of one of his short stories - one he had abandoned because he couldn't find the first page. His grief on losing her is intense.

Oh, there is so much more from the history of birds (the discovery of the feathered archaeopteryx, the hummingbirds that are 30 million years old) to the beauty of flight and feathers. There is some exquisite writing about birds in the wild, and corvids in particular, and about Aberdeen and about the wider world of nature.

And were Woolfson's birds happy? She says they seemed to be happy in the way they acted, their health etc, and, as she points out, they were members of the family whom she believed she could read as well as her own children. As she also says, there were no other options for them as abandoned birds - in the wild they'd probably have died. In the end, Spike the Magpie becomes more aggressive and territorial and suddenly and inexplicably (and terribly sadly) dies. Why? Woolfson doesn't know, but suggests he needed more than she could give. Chicken, on the other hand, seems content with domestic life.

Of course any family living with birds or animals must be a bit mad - there are bird droppings, food cached everywhere, birds homes to clean, windows that must be kept shut - but by the end of the book I felt that we could all do with more of this sort of madness. People like Esther Woolfson are surely closer to where humans used to be - 'indivisible from the environment' - and remind us what we have lost.

This is a humbling book. A wonderful book. Highly recommended. And it's going off now to my friend Helen who has a blackbird nesting outside her kitchen window. She says I can go and see it. Any day now they expect the eggs to hatch.