Reprinting a “lost” post that somehow got dropped during migration to Micro.blog many years ago.

In response to Michael’s post of recommended films, here’s my list of the various media we’ve been ingesting (movies, TV, books, performances) the last several months. Not all are enthusiastically recommended. But maybe you will get a sense of what I like and don’t like, and can then judge whether to trust my appraisals. This is one value that critics and reviewers provide, if nothing else Movies were seen via Netflix, Amazon Prime, or at the mighty Carolina Theatre.

God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man : a saltwater Geechee talks about life on Sapelo Island by Cornelia Bailey with Christena Bledsoe (2000). I read to Liz before she goes to sleep and we’ve found over the years that memoirs tend to be our favored material. This book is an oral history told by Bailey about her life on the Georgia barrier island of Sapelo, populated by the descendants of slaves who had worked cotton on the island. The memoir covers her life from when she was born in the ’50s to the present-day, with lots of cultural history and stories going back to pre-Civil War times. Even in the ’50s, the inhabitants lived in a supernatural world alongside the natural one; she talks about “haints,” interpreting dreams, and the ghosts of dead ancestors always close by as daily companions. Bailey’s easy way with a story and lively memories make this a delightful reading experience. We’ve not gotten there yet, but we will soon hear about the decline of the old ways as the young move off of the island and the few residents who remain fight off pressure from the State of Georgia, which owns nine-tenths of the island. The book’s title derives from the Geechees’ (cousin to the Gullahs) belief in the equal power of God, “Dr. Buzzard” (voodoo), and the “Bolito Man” (luck).

Tig (dirs: Kristina Goolsby, Ashley York, 2015). A documentary of standup comedian Tig Nitaro, who lived through one of the most hellish years one could imagine and her struggles with transforming some of those experiences into jokes and material, along with rebuilding her life and career. I don’t want to say more, as I came to this knowing nothing of her struggles; as her story would turn a corner and go somewhere new and unexpected, I was swept along and as shocked or delighted as she was. Her bravery in so many aspects of her life – not just shakily rebuilding her career but taking bigger and bigger personal chances too – had me shaking my head in admiration.

Silicon Valley, season 1 (2014). So great to have a Mike Judge TV series again and this one is so smart and so spot-on in its satire of the Silicon Valley culture. The culture is already so over the top, it’s hard to see how it can be lampooned, but Judge and his writers do it. The skeletal and spectral Jared is my favorite character. Be warned that it can be pretty raunchy, particularly the last episode.

The Overnight (dir: Patrick Brice, 2015). When did quirk become the new normal? A thin piece that, after the mysteries are explained, starts rousing to some kind of strange life – and then it’s over. Afterward, I started writing an essay in my head on how the story sets up the characters and its themes, deconstructing why do the leading ladies and leading men look alike?, and finding evidence that at film’s end  things are still not as they seem … when I wondered why I was polishing my bucket to hold a drop of water. One of the quips I’ve seen all over the web lately goes, “Some things once seen cannot be unseen.” This is especially true of Adam Scott and Jason Schwartzman’s skinny-dipping scene.

Hello Ladies, the series (2013) and the movie (2014). How much of this series you can tolerate depends on how much you like the cringeworthy comedies that Stephen Merchant has created with Ricky Gervais. His hapless ladies’ man and lame cool guy routine gets routine pretty quickly, while his character’s willful ignorance, inability to learn his lessons, and punishing trials never seem to go further than trying to raise a larf. When I could get past the plots, though, I enjoyed watching his character Stuart hanging out with his friends and particularly his attractive tenant Jessica, and following their stories with more interest. The characters’ craving for something they can’t have blinds them all, one way or another. Merchant and his co-writers also have an uncanny ability to suggest tenderness and vulnerability peeking out from under the farce’s bedsheets. The series’ last two episodes were the high point, focusing on the characters with the comedy taking a back seat. The movie wraps up the series’ loose threads with a hackneyed plot in the first half that shifts gears in the second to a serious study of this damaged character and his redemption. I was actually cheering for him at the end. And the movie sports one of the funniest sex scenes ever, so there’s that.

Alice Gerard & Rayna Gellert, Laurelyn Dossett. We went to Duke’s Music in the Gardens series to see these great folk performers. Because live performance by real musicians is what it’s all about. Support your local artists.

Me & Earl & The Dying Girl (dir: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, 2015). A self-absorbed white high-school boy shakes off his cloud of mope after alienating his black friend and breaking the heart of the dying girl. Oooooo-kay. What makes the movie work is its kinetic storytelling (reminded me of Thank You For Smoking, for some reason) and the movie parodies. And maybe it’s me, but I was really offended by the popular girl offering herself as Greg’s prom date. Why did these characters give Greg the time of day?

The Audience (dir: Stephen Daldry, 2013) Seen via the National Theatre’s live stream into selected movie theaters. An entertaining collection of vignettes showing Queen Elizabeth II’s relationships with her prime ministers, from Churchill to Cameron. Funny, middlebrow, fast-moving, a few piquant observations on the queen’s role in her country, Mirren is as masterly as they say, and I didn’t believe any of it for a second. I prefer The Queen (2006).

I’ll See You In My Dreams (dir: Brett Haley, 2015). So good to see Blythe Danner onscreen again, even in a posh Hallmark Channel type of movie; the supporting actors are great, the lines are funny, and Sam Elliott is sly and dry as the man who wakes Danner’s character out of her late-in-life lethargy. Warm, affecting, encouraging. Despite a few lapses (are post-pot-smoking hunger binges really that funny?), everyone acts like grown-ups and it’s nice to spend time with characters who don’t make me cringe. As with most every movie we’ve seen this year, the performers are all appealing and make the material they play shine brighter.

True Stories (dir: David Byrne, 1986). An art-student type vanity project by Byrne that doesn’t have a proper story, but that’s also not the point. IMDB says there are 50 sets of twins in the movie. Why? Who knows? They’re just there, the way the Talking Heads songs are there, the way the preacher is ranting on SubGenius themes, the way David Byrne stiffly narrates a day in the life of a small Texas town and its amusing small-town characters but never, I think, makes mean or mocking fun of them. He seems to simply enjoy them as they are. I enjoyed the movie’s oddball stance and easygoing pace. John Goodman, in one of his earliest roles, is there with his screen persona fully-formed and grounds the movie with his heart and vulnerability. And, God, but “Wild, Wild Life” is a fun number.

A Serious Man (dirs: Ethan and Joel Coen, 2006). Larry Gopnik is a nice man, but not a serious man, in the sense that his Jewish community in the Minneapolis suburbs would recognize. And when the trials of Job start assaulting him, he has no idea what to do or where to go for help. No blood, no gangsters, over the top in all the right ways, funny, fantastic period detail (the mid- to late-Sixties), anchored to a fine lead performance by Michael Stuhlbarg. The Coens never explain everything in their movies so there is usually something unresolved at its center. I like having some undefined spaces in a story.

Love & Mercy (dir: Bill Pohlad, 2014). Because we had seen The Wrecking Crew documentary a few weeks before, I got a kick seeing them portrayed onscreen in several scenes where Brian Wilson is crafting songs for the next Beach Boys album; for me, these scenes were the most fun of the entire movie. Paul Dano is incredible as the young, strung-out Brian Wilson who finds himself as isolated from the people around him as his 40-year-old strung-out self is under the care of a really creepy therapist. I never really bought John Cusack as the older Wilson. All of the “that can’t be true” moments I experienced seem to have mostly happened as depicted onscreen. Wow.

Welcome to Me (dir: Shira Piven, 2015) Kirsten Wiig is terribly appealing as an unbalanced young woman who wins the lottery, stops taking her meds, and uses her winnings to stage her own Oprah-style show, dispensing bad advice and settling scores with everyone who she felt ever wronged her, from the second grade on up. The movie has the guts to take that premise to its logical conclusion and Wiig goes with it, as her at-first quirkily adorable character sinks into darker places. Hell is inside us and we take it with us wherever we go. This was a movie where, as I watched, I mentally charted the by-the-book plot points, reversals, higher stakes, final push, etc. An OK movie – not bad but not great.

Philomena (dir: Stephen Frears, 2013). We were on a Steve Coogan kick after enjoying The Trip and especially after falling in love with his TV series Saxondale (2006-07). We’d missed this one on theatrical release. Philomena no doubt follows the same screenplay template as many of the other movies on this list, but I found the performers so appealing, the story so sad, and the anger so fresh, I didn’t notice. The movie tweaked the real-life story, of course, but the bones are there. Coogan and Dench make a good team. Worth your time.

Still Alice (dir: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland, 2014). I remember seeing a TV movie decades ago with Richard Kiley and Joanne Woodward, where Woodward’s character, a poet, is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and begins slowly falling apart while her husband bewilderedly tries to understand and cope with the loss of his wife. I’ve also just described the broad outline of Still Alice, which sports a fantastic performance by Julianne Moore, and which features a sequence from the novel that had me on the edge of my seat. Aside from those assets, though, I can’t say this movie said anything more to me than that decades-old one did. It’s gorgeously filmed, and themes of connection/disconnection are always poignant. I choked up at the end when Alec Baldwin, as the husband, talks to their daughter; it’s probably the only time I’ve seen Baldwin that vulnerable and it got my attention and past my defenses.

Vertigo (dir: Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). I backed a Kickstarter campaign for new seats at the Carolina Theatre, and one of the rewards was a backers-only showing of this movie with our backsides in the new comfy chairs. (Nice and cushy but they don’t breathe after about 90 minutes.) It had been decades since I’d seen Vertigo, and watching it on the big screen was glorious – it enhanced the richness of the colors, the swell of the music. The movie has a tone and pace unlike any other Hollywood product of the time, even other Hitchcock movies of the time. I kept trying to squeeze it into a noir box and it resolutely wouldn’t go; it was too brightly lit and beautiful looking (those shots of San Francisco!) to be noir. But its storytelling is less about murder than it is mystery, mood, and tone poem. So many motifs (time, memory, reflections, the abuse of women by men) criss-cross the movie like webbing that its creepiness – especially Scottie’s obsessive remaking of Judy – is hard to shake. Yes, it’s dated, but it has a lingering power and gnawing aftereffect that few movies have.

Finished reading: New Bern History 101 by Edward Barnes Ellis 📚 Purchased from Mitchell Hardware during a Christmas stay in New Bern. Of the two popular history books on the town, this was the more substantial in terms of names, dates, and stories on the city’s colonial, Revolutionary, and Civil War history, along with the devastating 1922 fire that swept the city. It also includes extra chapters where the author both dumps his reporter’s notebook and provides key historical documents. I learned a lot but … in retrospect, I probably would have enjoyed the other book more, as it had shorter chapters, more pictures, and looked like more of a fun souvenir while telling more of the town’s quirky stories, like the one about the Taylor Sisters, who aren’t mentioned at all in the Ellis book.

Finished reading: Where Do Comedians Go When They Die? by Milton Jones 📚 A fictionalized memoir of sorts by British standup comedian Milton Jones. The narrator’s reminiscences let Jones ruminate on his craft, his colleagues, his audiences, his agents, and the emotionally brutal pasting a comic runs the risk of taking every time he goes to work. Not a great novel, but if you skim the ludicrous interludes where the narrator is held in a Chinese jail cell, you’ll pick up hard-won details of a comic’s life and art.

I have all three of the collections, but Volume III 📚 is the first I (mostly) read most of. I read this ebook mainly because my backlit Kindle provided the only readable light in our Airbnb. I also felt a grim duty to sample these literary Christmas offerings of the ages and see what if any Christmas spirit they would move in me.

As with all Delphi’s ebooks, these are public domain texts, mostly clean of scanning errors but with a few stories indifferently proofed from the scans. The ebook contains 18 pieces on Christmas themes or that have Christmas as a setting, arranged roughly chronologically and covering a wide range of authors – from the Victorians to a pair of anodyne holiday quatrains by H.P. Lovecraft (!). Alas, the quality range is narrower and, even within that tighter band, wildly variable.

The ebook’s main novelty for me was its collection of curiosities: an overwritten paean to the Pilgrims by Harriet Beecher Stowe (“The First Christmas of New England”) and a group effort (“Message from the Sea”) from 1860 by Charles Dickens and five other writers; the latter is near-interminable in its coincidences, melodramatic situations, over the top stagey characters, and annoyingly verbose omniscient voice. As this group effort is the first story in the collection, one learns from it the valuable art of skimming that will get one through the rest of the book. (Does a novella have five parts? Start at part four.)

Among the standout stories for me: Beatrix Potter’s famous “The Tailor of Gloucester.” Anthony Trollope’s “Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage” is a smoothly written Christmas trifle of young lovers and misunderstandings, and M.E. Braddon’s “The Christmas Hirelings” is pure sentimental Victorian treacle and all the better for it. Edgar Wallace contributes two smartly done pulp stories, while M.R. James takes the book’s quality prize with two of his unsettling ghost stories, “Lost Hearts” and “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance.”

The oddest, most provocative story was Bret Harte’s “The Haunted Man,” subtitled

A CHRISTMAS STORY.

BY CH — R — S D — CK — NS.

In it, a “Haunted Man” is plagued by a Ghost of Christmas Past and is mightily unimpressed by the spirit’s theatrics. The story’s voice and dialog viciously satirize Dickens’ style and his well-known tale:

Again the Goblin flew away with the unfortunate man, and from a strange roaring below them he judged they were above the ocean. A ship hove in sight, and the Goblin stayed its flight. “Look,” he said, squeezing his companion’s arm.

The Haunted Man yawned. “Don’t you think, Charles, you’re rather running this thing into the ground? Of course it’s very moral and instructive, and all that. But ain’t there a little too much pantomime about it? Come now!”

Harte’s “The Haunted Man” and Ambrose Bierce’s cynical “Christmas and the New Year” splash ice water into the face of readers wanting Christmas cheer and comfort. They were bracing antidotes to the other stocking stuffers.

Our summer trip to Toronto included a stop at the wonderful McMichael Canadian Art Collection, which featured a great exhibition of First Nations, Inuit, and immigrant art plus a large permanent Group of Seven collection.

Of the landscapes that were on display, the colors and design of Tom Thomson’s landscapes grabbed me. But what has grabbed the public imagination even more than his paintings and sketches are the circumstances surrounding his death and burial(s) (yes, burials). There’s even a whole Wikipedia page on his death and the curious details around it.

Thomson died before the formation of the Group of Seven. Of all the artists from that time, Thomson seems the most singular, remote and unknowable. He preferred the outdoors over the city. He died young with his life and thoughts on art barely documented. All we have left are his paintings and the reminiscences of those who knew him.

So, interested in Thomson’s story, I picked up two books at the McMichael gift shop (art museum gift shops are the best): a novel, Canoe Lake by Roy MacGregor, and a play, Tom Thompson: On the Threshold of Magic by Barry Brodie.

In Canoe Lake, Eleanor, a young woman from Philadelphia, searches in rural Ontario for her birth mother. Her questions kick off memories in Russell, an old-timer in the village living in a residential hotel, and his friend and unrequited love Jenny, now a spinster recluse but who at one time was going to marry a visiting artist named Tom Thomson. Eleanor’s detective work digging up secrets some people want kept jostles against Russell’s memories of Jenny and Tom, and of course, those worlds will collide in Canoe Lake, the site of Thomson’s death.

It’s a terrific novel, very well done, with depth and great textures, and a sensitivity for its characters, especially the hapless Russell. Definitely worth a re-read.

In his Author’s Note, MacGregor reveals his long fascination with the facts and mysteries surrounding Thomson’s death and MacGregor’s own distant family connection to it. The novel drapes a fiction over the bones of his research, though you can feel MacGregor really savoring the conversations of Thomson’s friends as they examine his body recovered after six or seven days in Canoe Lake, and speculate on the unusual gash on his temple and the fishing line tangled – or wrapped? – around his ankle.

MacGregor returned to the subject later with a non-fiction account of the incident and the times, Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him. The Author’s Note is a précis, I think, for this fuller treatment.

Tom Thomson: On the Threshold of Magic by Barry Brodie is a poetic play with Thomson narrating his inner journey from young man to artist to his afterlife, with all the characters in trembling awe of his artistic vision. Over half of this slim book is in fact devoted to the play’s writing and initial staging, and the back-stage stuff is honestly the most interesting part.

NB: Thomson’s studio now sits on the McMichael grounds.

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 18th and 19th. 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.

Finished reading: Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan 📚

One of the blurbs says “ice cool, self aware, and very funny.” Definitely icy and detached. A witty novel of a young lower-class Irish woman in Hong Kong and her romantic and sexual adventures among higher-class striving junior professionals. The characters are so high-verbal and articulate that you could cut yourself on their casual, lacerating banter. Ava, the narrator, is so detached from her own life and needs that I felt equally distanced; as funny and sparky as she could be, I also wanted to shake her and tell her to grow up. Though that last page is really good: her body finally chooses what her busy mind has denied her. The last of the books I bought in Ireland.

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.