In which she says nice things about me. It is very pretty, too… For real substance, read this Sierra Club interview. I have a million ideas starting up just from reading it… Helen, I need to pick your brain!
Tag: Nature writing
Good essay
Barry Lopez in Granta. The first quote is so often the writer’s dilemma. “As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was traveling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, …
Shrewdunnit
Conor Mark Jameson, who might be familiar to readers of the blog from his involvment in getting the TH White memorial plaque up at the World Center at Boise, or for his excellent book Looking for the Goshawk, has a new title out: Shrewdunnit: The Nature Files. Shrewdunnit is done in an old form, one …
Quote
On our rockstar Helen, by Jonathan Katz, an uncommon observation. “… the writer Wilfred Sheed wrote once in the New Yorker that “every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” Sheed wasn’t being nasty, he was being honest. I loved Macdonald’s talk and a I loved her book, but I died a little tonight. …
Helen Rockstar!
Randy Davis wrote me today to tell me about a signing for Tom McGuane’s new book– I will delay getting it until I can get an inscribed one in Denver. He was at the Strand with Tom Brokaw. “My oldest son went to see/hear the McGuane – Brokaw show at Strand Books in Manhattan. Late …
On translating Russian
In my Sportsman’s Library, usually called “The Book of books” around here, I wrote about Mikhail Prishvin’s Nature’s Diary, and the problem of translation: “There is also an interesting book by Prishvin, published by Pantheon 1952, called The Lake and the Woods, a handsome volume illustrated by woodcuts. A close read reveals it is the …
Pluvi wins a big one
Helen Macdonald has just won the Samuel Johnson Prize, a VERY big deal. Nice to see prizes go to someone whose writing eminently deserves it, especially when her choice of subject is so quirky, even controversial, as falconry. It may say something about literary England– or nature loving England– that they would give a prize …
Charles Bowden, R.I.P.
“… But I don’t think so”, as he wrote of his old friend Edward Abbey in my favorite of all of his works, Desierto, the closest thing he ever wrote to a nature book. The inscribed flyleaf (double or right click to enlarge) beneath his terrifying later Murder City, is in that book; he had …