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 bookin 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 thereal Lady Chatterley), James Joyce’s daughter Lucia Joyce (The Joyce Girl), and others, such as The Language of Food and Miss Eliza’s Kitchen.
In Praise of Walking by Shane O’Mara, 52 Ways To Walk by Annabel Streets andHoward Jacobson’s The Dog’s Last Walk. Can you spot a theme here? Okay, the last is a joke but it was on my reading pile and I’d been enthusiastic about walking five or six kilometres a day again and wanted to reinforce my intent with some scientific facts about the physical and mental benefits of regular walking. The first two books offer ample evidence that if those benefits could be put in a pill some drug corporation would be making billions out of it.
Then after a variety of circumstances, I was hit by severe vertigo, (Glad to see ‘benign’ at the start of the doctor’s diagnosis though – can’t imagine how awful this would be if it were chronic!) Benign or not, it put paid to my resolution to walk. As for cycling and tangoing, they were like a distant dream. How glad I was though of my years of tango practice. The Argentine tango is based on intense core control. When the vertigo struck and the world went topsy-turvy, it was instant and instinctive that I felt a steel-like column kick in within me. This meant that I might have been walking in the wrong direction, but my core held me upright when everything else preventing me from collapsing onto the ground had suddenly gone on holiday!
Who KilledJFK? and British Scandal
At first I couldn’t even read without nausea. Thank God for podcasts: Who KilledJFK? presented by Rob Reiner and Soledad O’Brien gripped my psyche while the world around me swirled. New evidence, new interviews – and Rob Reiner (director of my favourite, The Princess Bride, and When Harry met Sally) really knows how to tell a story. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Also I love British Scandal with Alice Levine and Matt Forde. They’ll never run out of topics. They cover the Post Office scandal, which now has a series based on it with Toby Jones, Mr Bates versus the Post Office. That’s where the warped values of our NeoLiberal society inevitably lead, beginning back in that Post Office era when the new technology, the computers’ mistakes were blamed wrongfully on human beings, with lives wrecked or lost, and ending up with the same result in our Robodebt scandal.
Then I graduated to Succession on my laptop. It’s as brilliant as everyone says. It’s the Shakespeare play for our time. In the future people will look back on our collapsed civilisation and understand from Succession why it foundered. The trenchant writing and psychological insights, the acting and suspense, the subtlety and high production values … it’s the best series I’ve seen since The Handmaid’s Tale.
And to balance the toxic family life and society Succession depicts so well, I then went downstairs to the TV for some mental balance (in the absence of my physical balance) in the form of an uplifting, funny family setting in the NorwegianPørne, about a social worker with a complicated life. It’s on SBS On Demand and it will lighten your heart.
The vestibular system: ‘a miracle of micro-engineering’
After I stopped vomiting I could read again and return to the three books mentioned above. O’Mara deals with vertigo in his book. It’s in the ACT Library system on page 55-56 if you’re interested. He calls the vestibular system ‘a miracle of micro-engineering’ – I’ll quote a little about our inner ear:
Within the semicircular canals, little hairs protrude from the inner surface. They have small crystals at their tips and are attached to ‘stretch receptors’ at their base. The hairs move in a fluid. Think of them like tulip flowers at the end of a stalk, swaying in the wind. The minute tugs when they move change the shape of these receptors a little – just as the wind blowing the tulips will cause the roots to stretch in the soil. This stretching, in turn, causes a change in the receptors’ electrical state, and sends a signal to the brain via the vestibular nerve. It is a simple, reliable and robust way to convert a movement signal into an electrical signal.
The ostoliths, meanwhile, are fixed at right angles to each other, and are hive-like masses with hairs that are fixed in calcium crystals. These align with linear movement … The crystalline masses move when the head moves … And because the position of these always-on senses is fixed within the head, the brain has a constant reference signal provided by the semi-circular canals and the otoliths for the brain and body in three dimensions.
Who knew? O’Mara’s book covers everything you want to know about the wonders of the human body and walking plus some urban research topics like the ‘walkability index’ of cities. It’s readable and fascinating but the one I found most inspiring is Annabel Streets’ 52 Ways To Walk. Her style is fluently energetic,the book is crammed with wonderful examples of the miracle of our bodies when we walk. It’s also illustrated with charming drawings by the author. Her enthusiasm is infectious.
Noise
Because of the fragile state of my inner ear I was more sensitive to noise than ever before. When writing about walking in cities, Annabel Streets presents the evidence of the detrimental effects of noise: raised blood pressure, increased diabetes, obesity, heart attack, stress, inflamed blood vessels which raise the risk of stroke … it goes on. Children under flight paths do poorly compared with those living in quiet conditions. Okay that’s a link, not causation, but the University of Michigan has established that people in noisier environments had a 36% greater chance of developing Alzheimer’s.
‘Noise vibrates the tiny bones in our ears and morphs into electrical signals that pass to our brain, triggering our stress hormones, disrupting our pulse, heart rate and blood pressure, upsetting circadian rhythms.’
Research has been proving this for a long time. Twenty years ago I thought that around about now, noise would be the new smoking and there would be laws passed to limit the decibels we are exposed to. Not a bit of it. No one has done anything about this enormously detrimental problem and in that twenty years, in the last ten actually, Australians in particular have increasingly gone for diesel-guzzling, destructive, inefficient, enormous and enormously noisy four-wheel drives, so the problem is a lot worse than it was one or two decades ago.
Birdsong
Try to go for walks in quiet, natural places is Street’s advice. The British National Trust found that the sounds giving us greatest pleasure are birdsong, a running stream, rustling leaves, silence, twigs snapping underfoot, animal noises, wind whistling through the trees and rain falling on leaves.
Even short walks, she writes, are useful. A ten minute walk after each meal is more effective at lowering blood pressure than a single longer walk. Walking alone is good for reflection but walking with a group triggers ‘a cascade of feel-good chemicals’ in us that endure far longer than the duration of the walk and ‘good social ties mean better physical, mental and cognitive health, as well as longer life.’ (p. 208)
Howard Jacobson’s The Dog’s Last Walk is an amusing book of essays, the title one a poignant observation of just that, inspiring memories of dogs in life and literature. Other essays deal wittily with a range of contemporary topics, like social media. He succinctly sums up the problem with it:
In the heat of violent exchange, everything but opinion gets lost. A generation has grown up that – online, at least – is deaf to tone, impervious to irony, incapable of grasping that thought can be tentative and argument exploratory. Theirs is a battleground of stated positions. One view lowers its head and charges its antlers at another. All we can hope is that in time they will have butted themselves into unconsciousness. (p. 285)
I’m with Jacobson, (and I think blogs are different – just digital essays, really) especially when I think about the maniplulation of voters by lies spread on Facebook and other social media and the detrimental effect on democracies everywhere. Social Media is the leaf blower of communications.
‘Leaf blower’ is a euphemism – the accurate term should be ‘Hand-held hurricane’ – precisely the force they generate, hence their effects, of dessicating earthworms, for instance, and spreading air-borne dog and rat faeces into the lungs of passing pedestrians and of course deafening anyone within a two or three kilometre radius.
The vertigo diminished until I only have about two per cent of it now. I lost about three weeks, in which noise, even someone talking loudly, felt like an assault on my inner ear’s tiny, fragile hairs and crystals. The whole experience intensified my awareness of how fragile life itself is.
The books on walking and Jaconbson’s amusing essays increased my appreciation of the simple joys of moving when the world isn’t spinning, of humour and of nature. Luckily, most of us can find places to walk that are away from the four-wheel drives and leaf-blowers. I’m back to tango (which, in fact, can be done with closed eyes) and increasing my walking. I haven’t climbed onto my bike again yet but I’m closer to doing a six kilometre walk every day I try. Just listen to Annabel Streets about walking amidst trees:
Trees have a poweful physiological and psychlogical effect on us. Terpines are potent phytoncides produced in the leaves, stems and roots of them and they act as anti-inflammatories, anti-depressants and reduce glucose and insulin levels in older people. Students who took a ten minute walk through trees before studying retained much more than students … [it] improves communication between neural pathways. … A 2010 study showed that those who walked over a mile a day went on to have the most robust memories in later life, cutting risk of memory loss in half.
When I mentioned in my last blog that everyone inevitably suffers tragedy, that’s not quite correct – some people do escape it – because tragedy refers to untimely death. The death of parents, even though it might feel tragic to their children, is not a tragedy (unless those children were really young) because it’s in the natural order of things.
But if the manufacturers of fast food and now of almost all food available in supermarkets continue having their way (making ever-expanding profits from addicting us to their ultra-processed food) we’ll all go to untimely deaths in the not so distant future due to our ever-expanding waistlines and list of diseases.
Over the past few generations we’ve started eating substances constructed from modified starches, invert sugars, hydrolised protein isolates and seed oils that have been refined, bleached, deodorised and hydrogenated. These calories have been assembled into concoctions using synthetic emulsifiers, low-calorie sweeteners, stabilising gums, humectants, carbonating agents, bulking agents and more. And it’s making us sick at rates that our health systems can’t cope with. It might be a slower tragedy than we usually think of as tragedy but in terms of people’s happiness and longevity, their quality of life and fulfilment of their unique potential, it is tragic.
These people are not our friends
Chris van Tullekin’s book is mandatory reading, giving the public the information it needs to make informed decisions about what to eat to prevent diseases like diabetes 2, obesity and heart failure. (more…)
During a week at the coast recently with four others, one of the books I’d brought was Johann Hari’s Lost Connections: Why you’re depressed and how to find hope (Bloomsbury, 2018). Three of those friends at different times picked up the book and couldn’t stop reading it. Not because they were depressed but because Johann Hari’s books are like that: exceptionally easy to read and about intrinsically fascinating topics. He has the beautiful style of a bright person who reveals his mistakes and the anxieties and puzzlements of his heart in an appealing and often humorous way. He’s an independent thinker who presents rigorous evidence and complex information lucidly.
I’d read many books on depression when I was fighting a serious bout back in the 1980s. Fighting is not an apt verb because one of the worst things about depression is that it takes away one’s energy. Hard to fight anything when it’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning. The book that helped me most then was Maggie Scarf’s Unfinished Business. That was at a particular time in my battle and it could be different for different people and would be different for me at a different stage.
I beat my youthful depression after an epiphany that came after more than a year of weekly counselling with a gifted psychologist. Much of that time I was unemployed and libraries are free so I read everything my counsellor recommended, even some novels, like The Colour Purple. They all helped and I found anything written by Dorothy Rowe powerfully illuminating. Rowe was an Australian psychologist who later went against the new pharmaceutical trend and insisted that the SSRI drugs were not effective, that depression was a symptom of a deeper problem, which was best solved by the old-fashioned ‘talking cure.’ You can still buy her books in second hand shops and online and they’re really worth reading: accessible and with a clear-eyed, common sense analysis of our society and people’s behaviour.
Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression
Years later, Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression (Simon & Schuster, 2001) came out and even though it was, thank God, not relevant to me any more, I read it and it’s a towering piece of work, the best and certainly most comprehensive about depression I’d read up to then.
But Hari’s Lost Connections eclipses even that. Not that we should compare them – all of these books and especially Solomon’s are brilliant and I’m sure have helped countless people.
The weekly radio co-hosting preparation was swallowing too much time and compelling me to spend most of it on current affairs. I’m doing it only once a month now. Without the radio over-commitment, I limit current affairs consumption to basic knowledge of what’s going on. What’s going on is always depressing. And there’s nothing ordinary people can do about the corruption and ignorance level to which this country has sunk.
According to Max Fisher we can thank social media for this. Fisher has outlined how this happened in his The Chaos Machine: The inside story of how social media rewired our brains and our world (Quercus, 2023).
Neuroscientist Polly Crocket discovered that social media activates a powerful set of neural pathways and that online norms of ever escalating outrage and conflict ‘transform ancient social emotions from a force for collective good into a tool for collective self destruction.’ Fisher explains that this technology, ‘by training us to be more hostile, more tribal, and more prone to seeing out-group members as less than fully human, might be doing the same to society and politics as a whole.’ (p. 46)
Online platforms like Facebook mean that ‘billions of people’s moral compasses are potentially tilted toward tribalism and distrust. Whole societies are nudged toward conflict, polarization, and unreality – toward something like Trumpism.’ (ibid)
Tearing society’s fabric apart
The Facebook founder is making too much money from the feedback loops manipulating preferences towards extremes to pay more than lip service when governments try to make him rein in its algorithmic preferences. The head of the UN Fact Finding mission found that social media, especially Facebook, played a ‘determining role’ in the genocide in Myanmar and then Sri Lanka. The misinformation and lies spread by Facebook tore the fabric of those societies apart, just as we see it doing the same to other countries. In Sri Lanka when the government blocked Facebook the violence stopped.
‘Every good work of art has courage in it somewhere,’ writes Jerry Saltz in his How To Be An Artist (Hachette, 2022). He also claims that ‘Courage is a desperate gamble that will place you in the arms of the angels.’ (p. 81)
Is the concept of courage relevant when we’re thinking about making art? In a world where we’re being sabotaged daily with messages telling us not to, telling us to consume instead, in a world where the manipulators of marketing know precisely how to best sow the seeds of self-doubt in order to sell more of their clients’ products, yes: relying on our own resources to see what sort of art we can make does take courage.
Jerry Saltz was a long distance truck driver who never wrote a word until he was nearly forty. Einstein famously told us that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge.’ Saltz writes, ‘Creativity is what you do with your imagination.’ He advises us to ‘write down your flights of fancy, your moments of wonder and fear, your dreams and delusions of grandeur. Then put them to work.
‘Make the imagination your compass star.’ (p. 5)
Recently I bought two books at Canberra’s wonderful Portrait gallery shop, The Curatoreum https://www.thecuratoreum.com/ Jerry Katz’s one above and English poet Kae Tempest’s On Connection (Faber, 2022). They’re both slim little books filled with riches for the heart and intellect. I mention one of my favourite Tempest poems in this blog: https://tinyurl.com/penhanleywordpress17jan
on Tuesday afternoons (Rod and Penny on ‘Bunkum Faves and Raves’, 3.00 to 4.30 on current affairs, ancient history and the arts – an eclectic but entertaining mix). What with researching for that and continuing with the Argentine tango plus collage plus a new writing group, it’s been a while since my last blog. As well as all this and trying to keep au fait with contemporary literature, a couple of friends and I are reading the six short-listed Miles Franklin award novels. See https://lithub.com/here-is-the-2023-miles-franklin-award-shortlist/
We don’t talk about them until everyone has read them all and then we meet for an animated discussion about them and which one we think should have won. It’s fun. Nearly every activity I do these days is fun but there are too many of them! And still too many books to read realistically in the time available.
I flip through one, a recent gift, Lune by Kate Reid, a large, expensive coffee-table book with an irresistible-looking iridescent croissant on its luxurious, puffily-padded cover.
It was while trapped in Heinrich Böll’s cottage on Achill Island last December (iced in, but with the day before’s Saturday Irish Times and Guardian to read) that I first came upon rave reviews in both newspapers of this book Lune by a young Melbourne woman with an unusual story.
Now I long to follow the author’s extremely detailed instructions and bake some of the 64 delectable creations inside, but because of the aforementioned creative pursuits I’m reluctant to spend the time – many of these recipes take literal days! And besides, I live in a place some call ‘Breadwood’ where it would indeed be profligate to use my time that way when I can buy surely almost as good pastries at one of the six bakeries within walking distance, (with five of the six excellent quality).
As it is, I eat too many of those fine pastry-cooks’ carbohydrate offerings. And so I am led to the well-meant but unfortunate event of the other morning, which taught me a lesson that I want to share with you, dear reader.
My Near-Death Experience while Attempting To Save Time(more…)
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.’ (more…)
Apart from reading some fantastic books, I’ve been having fun with my new Kick-Start creative writing workshops. They’ve been zipping along with the poetic contributions of talented students, filling the BRAG room on Tuesday nights with laughter and creative verve. BRAG stands for Braidwood Regional Arts Group and you can find it here: https://www.bragart.com.au
I’ve also been filling in for someone on a local radio station plus submitting my novel MS, Offthe Plan, and making collages out of my painted papers and photographs, even working towards an exhibition with some others. And still dancing the Argentine tango. Brilliant books like Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost words of the Irish landscape by Manchán Magan (Gill Books, 2020) have taken up some time too.
Sounds resonate inside us. If ever you’ve heard a cow lowing after losing her calf, you’ll have felt with her the panicked despair floating out on the air. In Irish there’s a word for the sound: diadhárach – the particular loneliness of a cow bereft of her calf. Before the English suppressed the Irish language, words like this connected the speakers more deeply to the world around them. It’s great that Irelanders learn Irish in school now, reconnecting with their native tongue after centuries of English repression of it.
A deeper truth
Manchán Magan considers in his book ‘how words can be wedges that prise back the surface layer of thought and feeling, revealing a deeper truth.’ (p. 185) He observes in his intriguing book that old languages are rich in words that ‘emphasise our interrelatedness with all life and that reveal the empathy we have with each other and with our surroundings. They acknowledge our co-dependent relationship with nature, revealing almost as much about our inner processes and frailties as about the world around us.’ (p. 311)
You don’t have to know a word of Irish to be totally absorbed by this enchanting book. The author offers 45 words for stones and 4,300 words to describe character traits. He spent summers on the Blaskets with his grandmother where he learnt the many ways to express the changing qualities there of the light, winds and the sea. The language expressed a different way of being, of connecting with the landscape around them. (more…)
We tap into our creativity through play. The technique I use in my Kick-Start workshops is a key that smoothly unlocks a door to the side of your brain that’s much less used in our linear, left-brain-dominant society. Under the Neo-Liberal economic dogma dominating every aspect of society no matter which major party is in power, results – sorry, outcomes – in every field are measured by the sole criterion of financial profit. Under these conditions and with all the unnecessary evaluative paper work engendered by this dogma, we forget how to play. Creativity requires risk. If we’re too frightened of failure we can’t be creative.
If we want to create we have to play with ideas, some of which might not work. Risky. But some amount of failure is necessary in the process of creative expression. Then when something does work and we produce something original and of high quality there’s nothing like that buoyant feeling of exhilaration!
Expanding our potential
In past tutoring and teaching jobs I discovered that I have a knack for spotting people’s potential. I get a kick out of seeing that blossom. With my accessible, brain-balancing technique and the timed workshops where we drop ourselves into the calm centre of the present moment, students tap into memories and sensations to write strong pieces of poetry or prose in their own unique voice. If they choose to read their work aloud we find their pieces quirky or funny or sometimes so poignant we all have tears in our eyes.
After the first workshop we build on the creative technique just learnt, and use more traditional literary techniques like modelling, rhythm and recurrence, metaphor, juxtaposition and creative tension to deepen the writing and refine expression and give the whole thing more punch. (more…)
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