Finished reading: An Old Woman’s Reflections by Peig Sayers 📚

Life on Great Blasket island, three miles off the west coast of Ireland, was hard and cold, with a meager living scratched out from the ground and the sea. Life in the 20th Century was as primitive as it had been in the 19th and 18th. Among other effects of this isolation was the community’s continued reliance on Gaelic to pass along its rich oral tradition of history and folktales. The island never had more than 150 or so inhabitants and was eventually abandoned in 1953.

Oxford University Press published a series of seven books of Great Blasket memoirs and reminiscences. Peig Sayers was hailed as one of the island’s great storytellers. Her book is a collection of transcriptions of stories written down for her by her son, stories she remembered from others’ telling and stories of what happened to herself.

It took a while for me to get into the rhythm of the book; these stories were meant to be told, of course, not written. When she quotes poetry, the words are transcribed into English as lines of unrhymed prose, so there is a natural loss of emotion and power. And I’m sure the music and rhythms of her speech, the way she would tell the story, would make these reminiscences come alive in a way that they don’t on the quiet page.

Still, as descriptions of a time and place long gone, I was fascinated by the details of the lives they led and the characters she knew. Since we can’t recapture the experience of Peig’s storytelling on the page, here’s a description of the effect they had on a neighbor who had actually sat around her fireplace and heard her stories:

Often her thoughts would turn to sad topics; she might tell, for instance, of the bitter day when the body of her son Tom was brought home, his head so battered by the cruel rocks he had fallen on from the cliff that his corpse was not presentable to the public. So Peig, with breaking heart, had gathered her courage together and with motherly hands had stroked and coaxed the damaged skull into shape. ‘It was difficult,’ she would say; and then, with a flick of the shawl she wore, she would invoke the name of the Blessed Virgin, saying ‘Let everyone carry his cross.’ ‘I never heard anything so moving in my life,’ a Kerryman confessed to me, ‘as Peig Sayers reciting a lament of the Virgin Mary for her Son, her face and voice getting more and more sorrowful. I came out of the house and I didn’t know where I was.’

Finished:

• The Irish Writers: Oscar Wilde by David Pritchard 📚
• The Irish Writers: W.B. Yeats by David Ross 📚
• The Irish Writers: George Bernard Shaw by David Ross 📚

A neat little set of literally mini-biographies – each about 200 pages and about 4"x6" – very easy to hold in the hand. Bought from a newsagent’s across the street from Trinity College in June 2025. Apart from their major works, I knew very little of these authors so these little biographies suited me just fine.

Stray observations:

• Ross is the better writer of the two. His command of context and content, and his style, simply made his two books more enthralling and readable. The first chapter of his Shaw book, "Two Cities," summarizes in 11 pages the economic, historic, religious, and cultural conditions of London and Dublin. It is a confident, breathtaking summary that provides a context for the emergence of Shaw -- and Wilde and Yeats -- onto the cultural and literary scene.
• The Wilde book compresses an awful lot into a small space. What it illuminated for me was how long it took Wilde to "become" Wilde. I did not know how relatively late in life his success came, with his discovery of plays and their witty, aphoristic dialog being perhaps his ideal literary form. I also did not know that his father also indulged in sexual misadventures, which brought stress, shame, and hard times to his mother and family. The sins of the father...
• While Yeats and Shaw did not engage in sexual adventures in the same way, they had their own hangups and issues with women that distracted their wives and caregivers. Yeats sponged off of them, Shaw adored the adoration of his younger female correspondents while stringing them along and keeping his paper conversations a secret from his wife.
• An irony that linked all three of these Irishmen: their desire to be active players on the larger literary stage of London. From Ross's book on Shaw:

Of the three, Yeats was most involved with their home country. Part of his vision was to establish a modern Irish literature, written in English, and Ireland continued to be a prime source of his inspiration, even though he spent as much time in England as he did there. Wilde was not concerned with Ireland. Shaw never forgot that he was an Irishman, and like Yeats was a Unionist who believed in Home Rule. But, though much in his thought and writing is Irish, he did not feel the rootedness in Irish history and culture that Yeats felt and nourished. He wanted to reform not Ireland or England, but the world.

Did my ankle and knee PT this morning, read another story in the latest First Line literary magazine, and started in on my inbox.

Since my semi-retirement in April and now full retirement, I’ve found that my much-vaunted and hard-fought-for productivity habits have totally unraveled. With no one imposing a deadline on me, I tend to get around to things when I want to do them. Which is, in its own way, very relaxing. I get to things, just not when other people want me to get to them.

I’m unsubscribing from some newsletters, or moving them to Readwise Reader app. I usually delete a lot of things that arrive daily, which are reminders from FollowUpThen or ads from local businesses I want to stay aware of.

On a day like today, where I have 50+ emails in the box, I like to sit and just plow through the inbox from top to bottom, put stuff in Google Tasks or Keep or Evernote, and then stop when the inbox is empty or I’m tired of doing it.

Note: Found this draft in my Marsedit folder – yipes! Must be over a year old by the time it sees print. Which makes it at least 2 years older than the previous Nova Scotia books posts. ACK. Lightly edited though it could be much better.

Final post! Almost a year after our trip was done and just before we start the next trip!

The only book 📚 I bought at the tourist shop at Hall’s Harbor, a great restaurant and mainstream gift shop, set in a picturesque postcard. Here’s a live webcam of the harbor.

I bought this book at the gift shop, which did not make me less conflicted about contributing to Nova Scotia’s Maud Lewis Art & Industrial Complex.

By any measure, her life was a hard one. Born with birth defects and rheumatoid arthritis, living in a harsh climate, with a husband who people suspected did not treat her well, in a ridiculously tiny house not built to stand that strong weather. We saw the actual house many years ago, transplanted to a permanent Maud Lewis exhibit in Halifax NS. It seemed an incredibly, ridiculously small dwelling for two people. But considering that they lived on the edge of – if not in – poverty, they lived as thinly as did their neighbors.

The poverty was made somewhat bearable by her discovery of painting and its ability to earn small amounts of money that contributed to keep her and husband Everett in the basics.

Her story was ill-served by the cliched and horribly dishonest movie “Maudie”. While Sally Hawkins’ intelligence and energy ennoble any movie, its portrayal of Everett was highly speculative and that’s not including Ethan Hawke’s awful performance. Look at some of the contemporary accounts of his interactions with reporters and Maud’s customers: he was a talker, a glib salesman, the high-energy front man. He may have been dour and sour behind the scenes, but wouldn’t that have that been more interesting to play?

Not to mention the total dishonesty about Maud’s daughter. Read Maud’s Wikipedia entry and you’ll see a more fascinating and complex story than the fable presented in the movie.

But by all means: buy the “Maudie” soundtrack. A more wonderful and melancholy set of songs I’ve never heard, and we have never tired of hearing it.

Back to the book: it’s a thin one that takes scenes from her art and juxtaposes them with actual pictures of those scenes and landscapes, representing perhaps what Lewis would have seen in childhood or out her tiny home’s window. Quotes dot the book from people who knew her. It’s not a lasting contribution to Maud Lewis’s story, but provides an interesting way to look at how she transformed pictures from life into pictures in paint.

Finished reading: A Year’s Turning by Michael Viney 📚

Purchased in a bookshop in Galway because I had not yet purchased any books while in Ireland and I felt I really needed to. And lord, that gorgeous cover illustration by Sheelyn Browne. Viney’s book of natural history, fact, lore, memoir, prose poetry, and his own drawings originated from columns he wrote in the mid-70s when he, his wife and daughter moved “back to the land” in a rural area of County Mayo on the West Coast of Ireland. The book was originally published in 1996 and reissued in 2022.

The essays – one for each month of the year – serve as a naturalist’s notebook of poetry, observations, history, science, and life in a remote and empty area of country. I had quite a bit of trouble following the thread of his essays until it occurred to me to mentally insert a few lines of white space between topics here and there; seeing these passages as entries in a scrapbook (with no need for transitions) made the chapters as a whole make more sense.

The book is studded with wonderful bits of lore and fact: phenology is the study of nature’s calendar; “botanists have calculated that spring moves north across flat ground at roughly two miles an hour” while trees begin to redden from north to south at about 40 miles an hour; primroses bloom early (prima rose, the first rose) to capture light and moisture before woodland trees start to leaf. “Woodland suits primroses because moisture evaporates more slowly in the shade.”

Viney’s prose can be intensely poetic and evocative:

There are at least seventy sorts of blackberry along the hedges of Ireland now, some hauling themselves about with briars the thickness of my thumb and armed with hooked prickles of a medieval ferocity.

But the writer’s attempt to put his love into words sometimes makes the prose giddy on its own perfume:

How lush, by comparison, our ‘bleak’ Mayo hillside, how sprawling and coarsely tangled and seething with flies and bees! But down on the duach, at the margin of the lake, there was an echo of the spare and precious flora of seventy-seven degrees north. For eleven months of the year, the closebitten sward is a sodden green carpet mostly innocent of blossom. And then, in August, its wettest parts put up a flush of chaste and beautiful white flowers.

What impressed me was, even in the mid-90s, Viney’s chronicling of environmental change. The hillsides that had been unchanged since the years of the Famine were seeing more plastic as litter in the landscape and in the ocean, more roads, the disappearance of species, the fading away of older generations who knew and appreciated the old ways of living in harmony with a sometimes harsh but often beautiful nature.

Think of what it means to doubt the ’naturalness’ of weather. We have never been sure what it would do, but we could be fairly sure of what it would not do, on average and over a period. Given a windy winter like this one, we could count on ‘fickle’ nature not to do it too often or too catastrophically. But supposing we lost that assurance: supposing, after sixteen storms since Christmas, we had good reason for trusting that there would not be sixty more? …

It cannot help that the people who might make decisions about global warming are themselves so totally insulated from natural things and especially from weather. One sees them on television, being ushered beneath umbrellas from one heated capsule to the next. What can they possibly know of life amid wind and rain?

Also: a 2022 article from the Irish Times on Viney’s 45-year history with the newspaper.

I saw my first new-Who David Tennant episodes on Netflix while trying to write papers for my master’s degree back in – 2009? 2010?

I became a devoted fan of the Moffat/Smith and then the Moffat/Capaldi eras (well, the first two Capaldi series anyway), and bought those series via iTunes and Amazon. I simply HAD to be part of the conversation as new episodes were released. I ate them up, along with the online reviews, the podcasts, the extras.

I liked the big decisions of the Chibnall era – Jodie Whittaker’s joyful energy, Segun Akinola’s fabulous music (so much more fun to listen to again and again than Murray Gold’s), the new lenses that provided a new look for the show, the companion casting – but the stories … well, I missed the Tesla episode and then totally avoided the Flux storyline. I felt like I didn’t miss anything.

I signed on to Disney+ for the Davies Mach II era and was as hopeful as all other fans – the Tennant/Tate episodes were so fun and, like everyone, I’m dazzled by Gatwa’s style and zazz.

But the stories … why were the best stories of the Chibnall and Davies II eras – “The Haunting of Villa Deodati” and “Rogue,” respectively – written by other writers? (Though I have to say, “Dot and Bubble” is the exception that tests the rule.)

The ineffable magic of the first Davies era is absent in Davies II. Even though he brought the band back together, the creative lightning did not strike twice.

The episodes are sumptuously staged, the acting spot-on, the callbacks to earlier days very welcome and warming, but the stories … well, I have now taken to reading a few trusted reviewers’ opinions first and if they don’t like an episode, I give it a pass. I have skipped more episodes of Gatwa’s second series than I have seen.

I will likely tune in to the finale because that’s what I do, but I think I will be soon signing off from the review sites and podcasts. Time to sign off with a grateful and heartfelt goodbye for all the fun the series gave me and move on.

Finished reading: Scenes of Visionary Enchantment: Reflections on Lewis and Clark by Dayton Duncan 📚

Growing up in the South, Lewis and Clark were names in a history book. Important enough to study for a test answer, but with no local associations to their exploits they did not live long in the memory. (In North Carolina, it’s all about the Lost Colony, a few Revolutionary War sites, lots of Civil War battlegrounds, and a few civil rights landmarks.)

When we visited the Fort Clatsop Bookstore near Astoria OR in 2024, I bought several Lewis and Clark related books because I knew nothing about them. I opted for essay collections because I thought they would provide both a sweeping view of the mounds of historical data compiled about the Corps of Discovery and spotlights on specific moments that defined the expedition.

The first book I read, Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs’ Why Sacagawea Deserves the Day Off and Other Lessons from the Lewis & Clark Trail, was a good introduction for a newbie but it was a warm-up for the real deal, Dayton Duncan’s Scenes of Visionary Enchantment: Reflections on Lewis and Clark.

For my money, this is the best introduction to Lewis and Clark, why their exploits were so important, and why they have a hold on not just historians but the public imagination. Duncan’s essays are grounded in a love for and personal scholarship of the Lewis and Clark lore, a plain and straightforward writing style that clearly conveys information and detail, enough personal details and opinion without the essays centering on the writer, and an approach to the material that is respectful, imaginative, and clear-eyed.

What do I mean by that latter claim? Duncan is a Lewis & Clark enthusiast and until reading these books, I did not know there were so many devotees who re-read the journals of the expedition and trekked to retrace the Corps’ path. It’s his imaginative evocation of the Corps’ historical melieu that helps lift his storytelling – or retellings of these well-known episodes – to a more expansive dimension.

Duncan is always careful to remind the reader that, while we know the expedition’s outcome was successful, that was never something the two captains assumed. Duncan reminds the reader, at all times, that boldness, prudence, resourcefulness, grit, hard work, physical endurance, and sheer luck worked together to bring all the expedition’s members – save one who died of a burst appendix – back home safely. As Duncan points out, this is one of the few such excursions in history that actually ended successfully.

I never knew, for example, that the Spanish Army had set out with hundreds of soldiers and Indians to either capture or kill the Corps’ members. But information traveled so slowly and through such torturous routes in those days, that Lewis and Clark never encountered their pursuers. It’s likely they never even knew they were being pursued.

Duncan takes the data – Lewis and Clark and several of the soldiers under their command kept journals, and the wealth of firsthand information is what makes L&C scholarship such a rich field – and serves it up in really appealing ways. One essay is all about what the homefront newspapers were reporting during the two-year trip and how Jefferson was sweating waiting to hear about whether his bet on Meriwether Lewis and the expedition would pay off or whether they would simply vanish without a trace.

Duncan’s essay on 10 leadership lessons from Lewis and Clark starts as a take-off on those faux-business leadership books. But he indeed draws 10 good lessons from the journals by retelling and reframing the stories, mining the journals for details that evoke that time and place.

As for clear-eyed: as this quote makes clear, the aftermath of Lewis and Clark’s discoveries was not a success for the native tribes or the natural world. Comparatively little of what the Corps saw on their travels can be seen today due to dams, development, and American capitalism’s inability to let a good thing be. The native populations that were so numerous and culturally vibrant were reduced by smallpox, broken treaties and promises, and depleted natural resources.

Some of the most affecting passages for me were descriptions of what happened to the captains and crew after their triumphant return. There are few records of what happened to all the Corps soldiers. And Ambrose is clear-eyed about the individual failings of Lewis and Clark; while the trail and its outsized adventures and exertions brought out the heroic best of their characters, their return to civilization almost inevitably shrunk them back to society’s size.

Lewis suppressed the publication of a book by one of his soldiers so it would not compete with his own account – which he never wrote. Lewis’s depression swiftly returned after he re-entered civilian life and he was dead 3 years later. (Murdered or a suicide? Again, lots of lively debate on that .) Clark’s slave, York, accompanied him on the trail. As Duncan speculates, York’s voice was considered during crucial votes taken along the trip and the hardships of the journey equalized all the men (and woman). But back home, Clark refused to free York and was irritated by York’s insistence on joining his enslaved wife.

That’s what I love about Duncan’s essays: they show the high and the low, the best and the worst, the heroic and the craven, the beautiful and the ugly. The Lewis and Clark story is too vast to be one thing. It’s many things encompassing many stories, and these essays can start a new explorer of that landscape on the right path.

So, I finally finished downloading hundreds of Amazon ebooks and comics after the announcement that Amazon is removing that capability.

Was it worth the trouble?

Ebooks that (I assume) authors and publishers have pulled from active sales are still in my library. Relatedly: on Audible, I subscribed to several of their programs before the days of podcasts, such as Robin Williams’ interview show. You can’t find that show on Audible anymore but those shows are still in my Audible library.

I’ve never had reason to download any Amazon ebooks or comics before. Why did I do it now? I remember a friend saying years ago how “they don’t want us to own things, they just want us to rent them.” Hence his ongoing purchase of CDs and DVDs and Blu-ray’s. Amazon’s announcement proves he’s still not wrong.

I may just zip up all these books and store them someplace in Backblaze and never look at them again. Just like I do now with all the physical books on my shelves and the ebooks on my Kindle Oasis.

Update, 2025-05-30: Duh. I have a Kindle Oasis. I downloaded all the books I really wanted to keep, hooked the Oasis up to my MacBook, and then copied them over. Much much less hassle.

A weird occurrence illustrating “respond to what shows up” and “why the hell does the universe think this is my business?”

Our cohousing’s condo building is next door to a big church that holds a Christmas village soiree over two weekends. It features a lighted Christmas ‘hayride’ that goes around the block and typically exits a few hundred feet up from our property.

Occurrence #1: I happened to be outside yesterday afternoon when two guys from the church asked if they could use our driveway to exit to the street since their usual exit was blocked. Me: Um, well, OK, I’ll email the community and see. Send the email, gather responses, call the guy back. He thanks me and says they discovered another driveway exit in between their usual exit and our driveway, so they’ll use that instead. OK, fine.

Occurrence #2: Hours later, the hayride truck has been making its rounds, and I am taking out the recycling; this happens to be the night when the bins are moved from their usual locked corral to the street curb. I go out to the street and – lo! – I see an SUV pull up and park right where they will block the truck exit.

I let the couple know that the driveway is being used and point out where else on the street they can park. They thank me and park across the street.

So what?, you may well ask. My first thought in both of these cases was, “Who the hell died and left me in charge of this furshlugginer driveway??” My second thought was, “Well, I’m not in charge here but something tapped me on the shoulder and placed me here to take care of something for some reason. So, take a breath, respond to what’s showing up, and take care of it.”

The whole thing reminded me of one of David Reynolds’ Constructive Living sayings, “I am Reality’s way of getting Reality’s work done.”

I learned a new word: bumf, meaning “reading materials (documents, written information) that you must read and deal with but that you think are extremely boring.”

According to the Merriam-Webster site, it’s of British derivation, short for toilet paper or (pardon me) bum fodder.

You’re more than welcome.