Chasing the rare to inform all of us (Australia, southeastern and eastern coasts; spanning centuries to present-day): Imagine having “nowhere to go, nowhere to hide and no capacity to run” as a roaring fire heads your way “lighting up the horizon with a livid orange glow.” You live in a unique part of the world where bushfires are a way of life. In your world you’re rare. In the spiritual world, you’re a symbol of relaxation and peace. Yours are called “million dollar babies.” You’re simply “unlike anything else we know of.” Who are you?

If you hadn’t seen the cover and title of Danielle Clode’s newest book, would you guess you’re from a species around for some 37 million years yet only abundantly studied over the last twenty or so years?

Koalas are iconic symbols of Australia. Surprisingly, very little is known about them. Danielle Clode, an Australian zoologist/biologist, wants to change that. “It amazes me a creature this iconic and distinctive to Australia is so mysterious.” Her husband says, “Maybe there’s not much to know.” Her reply, Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future,” vividly shows “there is just a lot more to koala than meets the eye.”

In dedicating this unusual, beautifully told story, Clode confirms what the reader delightfully discovers: there’s something in this book everyone can enjoy and learn from. When Clode lays out a “perfect world” and fears of an “apocalyptic wasteland,” she’s not just speaking about koalas. “Quite literally,” she says, she’s standing up “to protect life as we know it.”

Via rawpixel [CC0]

Koalas are a “singular creature: idiosyncratic and inimitable.”

Singular might be one way to describe the author too. How often does someone spend their childhood education sailing around a continent, then attending college and winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where she earned a doctorate in zoology? One might assume her curiosity to “tell the story of the koala” was instilled early on – seeing, experiencing a stunning and wild landscape of enormous, unique biodiversity. A word that encompasses all forms of life in a geographic region.

Clode, an award-winning, mostly nonfiction writer, did it the “hard way” to craft this captivating and quite accessible book combining creative and academic writing, which she teaches at Flinders University in Adelaide. The school states its commitment to the “Traditional Owners of Country” (numbering close to a million Aboriginal peoples), reflecting Clode’s respectful acknowledgements before and during – not after – Koala’s fascinating story unfolds. 

Creating this book involved researching, visiting, interpreting, and integrating numerous fields of knowledge: “Botany, ecology, Indigenous knowledge, evolution, paleontology, anatomy, conservation biology, history, toxicology, psychology, veterinary and nutritional science, and animal behavior.”

Thanks to two American Presidents – Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover – koalas became popular and were saved back in the early 20th century. Teddy, the reason they’re called bears when they’re not. Hoover banned importing them for their soft and thick fur, leading Australia to bar exporting them so the killing stopped. Hoover provides an interesting example of the value of travel, appreciating koalas from his time gold mining in Western Australia. 

This two-minute National Geographic video highlights some of the koala characteristics you’ll read about:

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/koalas-101

Two pages of compelling novelistic prose preface each of the book’s six parts – Into the Woods, From Fossils to Bones, Life in the Forest, A Life in Reflection, Everything Changes, and Future Tense. For instance, the opening sentence begins with: “A cool breeze ruffled the koala’s fur, causing her to stir in her sleep.” Sleep as in twenty hours a day, which has given them a bad rap that they’re dumb. 

A few questions Clode explores argues why they’re smarter than we might think:

  • Why do koalas only eat specific types of leaves from one species of tree: Eucalypts? A designation referring to “800 or 900” types of gum trees.
  • Why do they choose only a handful of these species, such as river red gum, manna gum, swamp gum?
  • How do they know which leaves they can eat? Especially when the leaves of these trees are toxic for other creatures? (Note: a eucalyptus plant is toxic to dogs and cats.) Key is how specialized their teeth and digestive system are to their survival.

Between sleeping and eating, koalas are “an almost entirely arboreal animal.” Why it’s highly unlikely to spot them in the wild. Perched high up in these trees, they find safety away from predators on the ground. When they do climb down its nightfall, when most people aren’t searching for them.

We learn that two-thirds of Australia’s mammals are marsupials, more than anywhere else in the world. Like the kangaroo, koalas have outside pouches for carrying and nurturing their babies called joeys – the difference between marsupials versus mammals. But their “remarkable” and complex digestive system puts them in a class of their own. So you’re not likely to see koalas in a zoo elsewhere in the world. Feeding them their select types of gum tree leaves, fresh, makes them the most expensive animal to care for and thrive outside their native forests. The San Diego Zoo is a leading exception. If you have time, you can watch them on the zoo’s live cam:

Many frown upon anthropomorphizing animals, but Clode’s discussion on how the joeys cling to their mothers and how their sense of touch is critical to survival is relatable and heartwarming. Koala fingerprints are unique like ours too. And like us, the tips of their fingers have a purpose: to make them more sensitive when they touch things. Are fingertips “as important to koala evolution as it has been to our own”? the author asks.

Wanting to understand “what’s it like to sit at the top of a tree – to see the world from a koala’s perspective –” Clode makes us wish we too could climb trees. She posits they’re able to spend so much time on their “rump” because they don’t have tails and the skin on their behinds is “extremely tough” with “particularly thick” fur. A “comfortable cushion.”

In dedicating her book to all people who care deeply about the environment and wildlife, climate change a thread and threat throughout, Clode shows herself to be a wonderfully observant nature writer, a dogged researcher (includes twenty pages of detailed resources), historian of evolution, and a passionate activist. It helps that we see koalas as “cute and cuddly,” though their claws act like razors.

Startling is an estimate that only 60,000 koalas remain, which led last year to their joining the growing list of Endangered Species. Ten years ago, koalas were classified as “vulnerable.” Despite Australia’s vastness, koalas are concentrated in only two regions in the country. Perhaps the continent’s size and species diversity is why they have the poorest record of preventing the extinction of mammalian species? Among the reasons Clode attributes to their dwindling population include agriculture and the timber industries; highly contagious “retroviruses” likened to HIV; and climate change, horrifically seen in increasingly catastrophic bushfires.

Danielle Clode lives in bushfire country. She wants us to care. About the fate of koalas, and what their story is telling us. About their need to “climb to freedom” – and ours.

Lorraine

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How everyday objects can mean so much (Northeast Poland, Odessa Ukraine, Lower East Side of Manhattan, Brooklyn’s East New York, & Deerfield Park, Florida; 1920s – 2015): If “our lives are a dance with history,” then Objects of Love and Regret leaps off its 300 evocative pages.

One of America’s “leading public historians” Richard Rabinowitz has taken an unusual perspective on “survivors and strivers” in his stirring, multifaceted memoir. Doing what he does professionally, curating American museum exhibitions, he uses ordinary objects to tell extraordinarily meaningful stories on the complex forces and psychological consequences of history, trauma, economics, cultural values, and societal norms that profoundly shaped his family over the 20th century.

This is, and is not solely, a Jewish immigrant story. It’s a book that has something that resonates for everyone. Surprising in scope, memories, and takeaways.

Rabinowitz’s search to better understand what his East European Jewish parents went through coming to America in the late 1920s is especially focused on the “singularity” of his mother Sarah. Having survived Soviet “pograms” that killed “nearly a hundred thousand Jews” in Poland and Ukraine, the book is both a heartbreaking, terrifying story of anti-Semitism from a 100 years ago that alarms us today as bigotry towards Jews is surging. It’s also a Jewish immigrant story seeking “freedom and independence,” enduring tremendous poverty and hardships that more broadly applies to all immigrants when they come to America to escape persecution. Which is why Rabinowitz has the greatest admiration for Sarah as the “bedrock” for his family who nurtured a “House of Hugs.” 

The objects that trigger and organize the chapters mean these dances are “touchstones of love,” not just “loss [that] leaves us with lifelong regrets.” One of the biggest takeaways, beautiful and poignant in light of the pandemic, is the concept of “Enoughness.” Sarah embraced it in everything she did. It’s a Count Your Blessings attitude. Gratitude for the things we have. Clichéd, but when you feel and see how life-affirming this positive mindset can be it causes you to reflect. 

Calling himself a “microhistorian,” Rabinowitz shows himself to be a mensch: “a generous and thoughtful adult.” One of many Yiddish words that pepper the narrative that add richness to the prose. A literary dance. There’s something about Yiddish words that deepen the meaning of English ones, particularly when the author translates most of them. Which speaks to how much Rabinowitz wants us to take in the deepness and power of emotions.

As Rabinowitz digs into the emotional meaning of the stories behind the objects, he acts like a psychotherapist. In fact, four psychologists were consulted and acknowledged. 

Arriving in America from a Polish ghetto or shtetl – a Yiddish word that refers to a village and a ghetto, in this case Wysokie–Mazowieckie, to live in the tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City was a different type of ghettoization. Is it any wonder then that one of Rabinowitz’s human rights exhibitions was designing the Tenement Museum in Lower Manhattan? Today, an emotionally affecting reminder of life primarily for early Jewish immigrants (Italians and others too) in the US.

Is it any surprise that there was no room in Rabinowitz’s house for racism? Or, that he also designed museum exhibitions like the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio?

Sarah was a balabusta. A “highly competent homemaker” who “ritualized” cooking to the point of it becoming “holy.” Her “lifelong distrust of rabbis, born of a close familiarity with the domestic lives of the religious authorities in the shtetl,” symbolic of how impoverished, discriminated, and segregated people preached to by people of privilege felt, she devoutly practiced a form of secular religion preserving her cultural heritage through cooking, with her mother Shenka nearly literally tied to her apron’s strings. The kitchen and comforting meals the center of the life they made makes this also a moving generational story of motherhood. A joined-at-the-hip dance about the meaning of Home. 

So when Rabinowitz discovered in 2015 a faded, green-painted bottle opener Sarah bought for Shenka from a pushcart peddler on the Lower East Side for twenty cents, haggling from 25c, in 1934, the simple tool that could easily have been tossed away made him realize this wasn’t “really about kitchen work” but “about the bond” between mother-and-daughter. “What had produced this closeness?” Rabinowitz explores.

Particularly poignant when contrasted against Rabinowitz’s father David, who went from one job to another and cycles of unemployment, worsened since he saw his life’s purpose as providing for his family. For decades, he suffered from a low sense-of-self.

Sarah is the “Empress of Empathy,” steadfast in weathering an intricate dance of economies spanning years of lows, some highs, and everything in-between. Good times came when David worked for the war effort as an electrician, and then a jeweler in the Diamond District of Manhattan.

Examples of some of the objects’ storytelling: “Papa Doesn’t Know from Ice Cream” is about “one of the first battlefields for the clash of old and new cultures” when Sarah eats her first ice cream cone costing 3 cents at twelve, newly arrived in America in 1928. “Isaac Guss Finds an Artillery Shell” is about Rabinowitz’s maternal great grandfather who perished during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920, which even the historian “knew nothing about.” A cigar box tells the story of tenement life. How you could have so little and yet stored inside this cardboard box you saved small things as if you had a lot.

A cobalt-blue bottle of perfume romantically named Evening in Paris depicts a very different side of Rabinowitz’s father. “Dave Splurges” when he has so little money is about a twenty-year-old in love, who despite being poor, did so elegantly; his nineteen-year-old bride always attentive to how she dressed. No matter how poor they “did not feel themselves excluded from the better things in life.” A dance of pride.

By Jorge Royan [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons

By 1948, the family saved up enough money ($13,000) to buy a two-story rowhouse in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York near Jamaica Bay. Under 1,000 square feet, it represented the “American dream.” Though they still lived a fairly insular life, shared with Italian immigrants, really knowing your neighbors who looked out for each other meant you didn’t feel isolated anymore. The once ubiquitous aluminum folding “beach chair” isn’t about beaches but about grabbing a chair and parking yourself on the sidewalk in front of your home chatting with a dozen other families. Tight-knit neighborhoods, when mothers stayed at home and your neighbors’ children were in and out of each other’s houses, shows us what was lost.

Many other objects summon nostalgic and sad dances. Like the creamy Charlotte Russe New Yorkers loved versus the mailman’s whistle alerting a loved one died during the war.

Objects of Love and Regret is and isn’t just A Brooklyn Story or a New York story. It’s America’s story too, transforming over the last century. Transforming today, right before our eyes. Sending a timeless message: Remember what you have, and what you’ve lost.

Lorraine

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Meet the Mother of French Modern Art (Paris, late 1800s to 1941): How could such a highly influential modern art dealer from the early 20th century, of mostly undiscovered French avant-garde artists called les Jeunes, be unknown to us? As in Berthe Weill was the first to enthusiastically discover, promote, fight for, and exhibit Picasso and Matisse, leaving her mark on art history.

As in advancing an extraordinary list of other French artists like Marc Chagall, Toulouse Lautrec, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, and artists from other countries such as Diego Riviera (Mexico) and Amedeo Modigliani (Italy).

As in a Who’s Who of something like 500 “novel” artists we’re told, listed in a stunning, twenty+ page Glossary of Names of emerging artists representing and furthering revolutionary art movements that bucked conventionalism: Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Pointillism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Realism, Synchronism, and Futurism. (For characteristics of these new modernist styles, see: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/glossary/https://www.theartstory.org/movement/synchromism/, and https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/futurism.) Fauvists, Cubists, and Surrealists are the most frequent, described in this informative video:

Could it be that Berthe Weill, fittingly called by the artists Mother Weill, was a woman in the male-dominated art world? She opened her first gallery in the “starving artists” Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in 1902 – the first one to do that in the Belle Époque era. Could it also be that Weill was Jewish, notably when half of France was conflicted about the innocence or guilt of Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus? The Dreyfus Affair exposed the ugly consequences of anti-Semitism resounding today. French President Emmanuel Macron showed how damaging this period was in France’s history by opening the Maison Zola-Musée Dreyfus in October 2021, in Medan, a village near Paris.

Certainly there’s been plenty of time for us to have heard about this trailblazer – gutsy, persevering, colorful, witty, sarcastic, and fascinating – since she wrote her memoir Pow! Right in the Eye! in 1933!

Note the two exclamation points in the title. A tip-off that her writings in these journal-type notebooks are unusually excessively punctuated. A no, no in the creative writing teaching world (use sparingly, if at all). Then again, Weill marched to her own rare beat. Weill, nobody’s fool, asked Paul Redoux, a French artist and journalist to write the preface, in which he explains that what makes her prose so special is that it’s not weighed down by “literary verbiage.” Instead, it’s an “extraordinary” original source document from both an “artistic and psychological” perspective:

“Artistic, in what it told about so many artists’ beginnings and their initial struggles, everything that crowded the French painting scene over twenty-five years.”

“Psychological, in what those sentences – and it would be sacrilege to change a word of them – said about a courageous, tenacious, visionary, and enthusiastic soul” . . . wonderfully expressed in disjointed, punchy sentences that weren’t so much as written as spoken, they were so natural and alive.”

Punchy is spot on! This is a punchy memoir in every way.

Which makes it not an easy one to translate, refreshingly says translator William Rodarmor, winner of the 2021 Albertine Prize awarded by the French embassy for French literature translations, who:

“Found tackling Weill’s memoir to be a mix of pleasure and terror. The pleasure was in learning intimate details about an array of twentieth-century artists from a lively, sharp-eyed observer. The terror was in wrestling with Weill’s rapid-fire prose, idiosyncratic style, and cryptic references while being haunted by the fear of getting something wrong.”

If it weren’t for the collaboration between Manhattan gallerists Julie Saul, who led this effort along with Lynn Gumpert, director of NYU’s Grey Gallery, we probably would still not know what Berthe Weill meant to the modern art world. The complete vision for this project to be realized in 2024 when the Gallery is set to open the exhibition, Berthe Weill: Indomitable Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde. Saul sadly passed away in February 2022, even before this book was released. Poignant news that punches us too as you appreciate the task of pulling the book together. 

Saul and Gumpert made the smart decision to relocate Reboux’s “Preface: First a Few Words” after we’ve read the slim diary-like memoir. In doing so, he confirms what we’ve been feeling all along: that this “itty-bitty woman” (under five foot) with oversized eyeglasses had the “strength and faith” of a “husky giant.” A remarkable force of determination, risk-taking, and fervent devotion to the cause of nurturing what Weill astutely eyed as great art. Her quest was never about becoming rich. Which you might assume she became, but she didn’t. Continually, she mocks herself for her bad business sense, and chronically struggles financially to keep her gallery running, having to move five times due to expenses, problems with landlords, and so on.

Self Portrait, c. 1920, Émilie Charmy
via wikiart.org [Public Domain]

Outspoken about the “comings-and-goings” of a dizzying collection of diverse artists – painters, illustrators, watercolorists, sculptors, printmakers, decorators, collagists, engravers – plus collectors, other art dealers, art critics, writers, poets, and playwrights she crossed paths with, but she doesn’t say much about her family or personal life.

What stands out is that her father was a “ragpicker,” and how much she treasured her frequent travels with friends, many artists themselves. She never married. One artist friend Weill was quite close with was Émilie Charmy. Interestingly, she too is being newly rediscovered. Charmy seems best known for her self-portraits. She’s associated with the Fauvists, especially its leading figure Henri Matisse. Known as “King of the Wild Beasts,” the name attached to this new dazzling color style of painting.

Weill intended to end her memoir at her twenty-fifth anniversary as a gallerist, but decided to add an “Appendix” that takes us to her thirtieth year in business. She closed her gallery in 1941, marking forty years. She died in 1951.

Translator Rodarmor wrote most of the detailed “Notes” that come afterwards. Chapter-by-chapter over twenty single-spaced pages, he takes great pains to fill in the blanks of this “heroic slayer of the dragon of banality.” Which is why you might not want to skip them as you’ll find you’ll want more enlightenment about someone who was “always interested in everything new.” Someone who gravitated to youth and “everything that makes life bearable.”

This is a charming, lovingly produced book that makes it clear that despite the “aesthetic revolution of eye-catching splendor” that defied the ordinary, the fickleness of art, “too subject to the whims of speculation,” took years to make a dent in. Even with the enormous up-hill challenges Weill went through to showcase women artists, it’s impossible not be floored by how many were still “stricken from the history of art.”

Weill writes about how “beauty and good sense triumphed together.” But you have to wonder if or when that would have happened if it weren’t for one striving woman who never stopped believing.

Lorraine

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Still interpreting Hemingway (1923-1936 short stories set in Michigan, Spain, Italy, Austria, Africa; 1936-1944 historical novel spanning the Spanish Civil War, Winter War in Finland, WWII, Cuba): You’ve probably read at least one Ernest Hemingway novel sometime in your life, but have you read his short stories?

Legendary for writing prose as simple as can be, his sentences may seem straightforward but “important things were left unsaid,” explains acclaimed author Tobias Wolff, anthologist for this new collection of nineteen short stories that show why we’re still interpreting the meaning of Hemingway’s stories nearly a 100 years after he wrote them.

Wolff, who’s written his share of short stories, novels, and memoirs, including This Boy’s Life considered a classic, regards Hemingway “important” like “Winston Churchill, or John Wayne, or Mickey Mantle.” All historical figures “larger-than-life.” Poignantly, he remembers when and where he learned Hemingway had killed himself.

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Wolff’s Stanford University profile, where he’s an English professor emeritus, lists thirty-five honors and awards, excluding receiving the 2015 National Medal of Arts. So when he tells us Hemingway was a “very complicated man,” we listen up.

These stories demand putting on your thinking caps. Some so short you’ll breeze through them and miss the whole point. Longer tales are equally open for interpretation, to such a degree Wolff doesn’t just offer his interpretations prefacing a particular story but chose other notable contemporary writers to join him such as Edna O’Brien, Tim O’Brien, Abraham Verghese, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

It’s fascinating to see how you may not agree with their analyses, but certainly welcome their insight. That’s because Hemingway intentionally left things up to the reader to figure out. His famous quote about writing one true sentence, doesn’t quite ring true in these stories; the cliché read-between-the-lines couldn’t be truer. Owing to Hemingway’s Theory of Omission, or Iceberg Theory:

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

This collection, then, is fresh and eye-opening; also surprising how profoundly sad many are. Until you pair it up with its companion documentary, a Ken Burns three-part PBS mini-series, Hemingway, that aired when the book came out. This double-review also morphed into reading what the best of historical fiction does: help us feel the emotional push-and-pull of a very complicated man.

Who better than Paula McLain, an early pioneer of the literary sub-genre of women behind the famous men? Her first historical foray into one of Hemingway’s wives (he had four) was The Paris Wife, when married to his first wife Hadley Richardson and they had his first son (he had three) nicknamed Bumby. Love and Ruin – what a perfect title!

The novel takes us into Hemingway’s third marriage to Martha Gellhorn, a journalist whose literary ambitions were smothered by a man who thrived on grabbing all the attention. Later, she became a famous war correspondent – why the novel is such an ambitious undertaking – and a novelist, memoirist, and short story writer in her own right. Love and Ruin emotionally complements the stories, especially when the couple were both reporting on the Spanish Civil War, where they fell madly in love.

Hemingway fictionalized his stories from his life. So the more insight you have into Ernest Hemingway the writer and the man behind the public persona – the grandiosity and intensity of his needs, desires, and demons – the greater your appreciation for what’s said and unsaid.

His fondest memories were as a boy summering with his family in northern Michigan, kindling his love for the outdoors and sports. (On second thought, perhaps you’ve read his Nick Adams Stories? A few included here.) Other stories relate to Hemingway’s fighting in and covering wars, and his ardor for bullfighting and big game hunting.

McLain, like the Burns documentary, wants to show us his many sides. Why Hemingway was so complex: his cravings for constant love a hole that’s never filled; his manic-depressive mental state, with bouts of excruciating loneliness. He’s both loving and raging. His addictions are significant factors in his self-destructiveness. Martha is sensitive and sacrificial, yet he’s out-of-control revengeful when she finally decides come hell-or-high-water to leave him for weeks at a stretch, even months, on assignments for Collier’s magazine, so affected and committed to telling America about the suffering of refugees during WWII. So expect plenty of suffering in Hemingway’s stories too.

The Hemingway Stories challenged me. Love and Ruin captivated.

Loneliness runs through so many stories, sometimes accompanying excessive alcoholism. In Out of Season, the Italian hotel gardener is “quite drunk” in a story that seems to be about fishing, but actually has little to do with it. The old, handsome drunk who finds solace and compassion in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is not without suicidal thoughts. (Hemingway’s father committed suicide too.)

Two stories are awfully bloody and they’re not about war. The Undefeated, “a great bullfighting story,” says Tobias Wolff, is also “touching” whereas Indian Camp is a horrific medical tale. It helps to know Hemingway’s father was harsh and a physician. Wolff believes Hemingway “handles very sensational material in an absolutely unsensational way,” but Verghese, a physician himself, is appalled at how “insensitive or hardened to the suffering” the character in the story is. Beware, it may turn your stomach.

Up in Michigan, the first story, may be the briefest but it gets under your skin. Written in 1923, it depicts how constricted women’s lives were and how relevant today. Perhaps set in Michigan because this place marks Hemingway’s innocence? Like the “neatest girl” in the story, Liz, with a crush on a man who barely notices her until one day he returns from hunting, starts drinking whiskey, and out-of-the-blue kisses her, strangely. Disturbingly. She’s sitting on a chair and his kiss isn’t gentle, nor the way he grabs her body. Their dialogue is spare so you must read into the narrative to decide whether she even knew what she was getting into. Hemingway captures her innocence with, “Something clicked inside of her and the feeling was warmer.” Then her ambivalence? Fears? Wishes? saying, “Don’t, Jim.” The story shows how difficult it is to prove rape – my interpretation. Not what Edna O’Brien, “Ireland’s greatest living writer,” says:

“Many women feel that Hemingway hated women and wrote adversely about them. I would ask his detractors, female or male, to read this story. Could you in all honor say that this was a writer who didn’t understand women’s emotions and hated women?”

Some authors comment on their favorite story. Mine, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, is the last in the collection. War veteran O’Brien says it’s probably his favorite too, along with Verghese because of how “in one short story a man can so effectively have his own life flash before him.” Here you’ll find Hemingway’s lyricism: “The snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder.” Here too is: “I loved Africa,” says Harry, the character who “loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.” Like Ernest Hemingway.

Lorraine

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Ocean Decade – Why we love the sea, and why the urgency to protect it (Cornish Coast and the Isles of Scilly, England, 2019-2021 present-day): What does the sea mean to so many? asks British author Wyl Menmuir who lives a mile from the Atlantic Ocean along the Southwest tip of England in Cornwall, the “longest shoreline of any county in the British Isles,” 326 miles.

Like The Many in Menmuir’s 2016 longlisted Booker-prize novel set on the Cornish coast, his nonfiction The Draw of the Sea describes many ways the ocean means to so many. In so doing, he shows us why the UN declared 2021 to 2030 the Ocean Decade. Why the multitudes who love the sea, live by it, depend on it, can no longer do so without understanding the urgency of what’s happening to it. “If you ask ten different people what they see when they look at the coastline you will get eleven different answers.” 

The “otherness” of “a sacred space” that’s “everything the land is not” explains why there’s no single answer to why the sea captures us profoundly. Perhaps all the reasons can’t be contained in this one book, but it feels as though they are. At least for Britain’s North Coast region of the Atlantic Ocean, with its stunning beaches, towering cliffs, hidden coves, and long history, folklore, culture.

Cornwall beach by Weldon Kennedy on Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Aesthetically, we’re drawn to this handsomely produced book, with its golden, glittering dust jacket. Watercolor images of the sea at low tides wrap the inside cardboard cover front and back creating a sense of wholeness. Sixty black-and-white photographs taken from the camera Menmuir carries around with him illustrate otherworldly ocean tales he digs up. A striking one is of a walrus tucked into a cranny on an “ambulance boat,” having gone way off course. A “symbol of climate change.” Marine mammologists and marine scientists are examples of the diversity of people Menmuir sought out to gather a broad perspective as to what this unique ocean world means to many.

As a creative writing teacher at Falmouth University located in Cornwall, Menmuir is many things too: literary poet, historian, photojournalist, and a lover of the sea – a Thalassophile.

An eight-page A Glossary of Sea Words found at the back of the book demonstrates a genuineness of wanting to communicate a world unknown to so many of us who’ve not spent time on the Cornish coast. A world deserving of its own vocabulary. British English revolving around the sea feels like a foreign language!

For instance, beachcomber along the shoreline translates into “wrecker” along the “strandline.” Hence insight into the meaning of the title of the opening chapter “Strandline Gleaner.” There’s a long-history of shipwrecks on these rough northern seas, so there’s a Cornish word for “someone who collects from the beach items washed up from the shores – a “wrecker” whose action is “wrecking.” Menmuir has a word for the know-how: “flotsamancy, a prediction of where the most interesting wreck will wash in, based on a combination of hunch, tip-offs and weather tracking.”

Cornwell is likened to “an outstretched arm” that’s “open to the wild weather and putting it in the path of the Atlantic gyres,” so even the author’s house is built from wood salvaged from a shipwreck (hardwood from a Nigerian tree, Iroko.) Today these beaches are a collector’s paradise, but long ago livelihoods depended on it. A “secret business” made into a documentary, The Wrecking Season. The book opens with an epigraph, paying tribute to the playwright Nick Darke who made the film, passing away soon after he spoke these words:

“It’s the beginning of the day, you’re alone, first on the beach. No footprints, there’s a gale blowing, gigantic sea running, and there’s wreck as far as you can see. You’re alive. Your eyes are everywhere, your heart’s thumping, you’ve got such a sense of anticipation – some people jump out of aeroplanes for that kind of thrill. I just walk onto the beach.”

Darke’s prose lyrically sets the tone for Menmuir’s intimate and humane compilation of spirited testaments to the meaning of the sea to the many. Often variations of, “We go down to the sea for a taste of freedom, a taste of the borderless and expansive.”

The sea is so powerful it’s ingrained in our language, Menmuir points out:

“When we grieve, we are adrift or unmoored . . . and when we are struggling – mentally, financially, spiritually – we try to keep our heads above water. We look to dry land, try to remain grounded, and we hope for plain sailing in the days to come.

In the second chapter “Island Fisher,” we meet an endangered lobsterman, Jof Hicks. Menmuir interviewed him on the essentially uninhabited island of St. Agnes, one of the fifty islands that make up the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast. An ancient world, Jof used an ancient craft to weave “withy pots” from the barks of willow trees, instead of plastic lobster traps that have taken over the industry. Presented as a time-consuming, ethical approach that could help save the seas from its “greatest threat”: the mind-boggling amount of plastic debris washing up along the shores endangering the fish we eat and the health of the oceans. The effort Menmuir made to seek Jof’s unique and sea-loving story sticks with us when we learn that he wanted to speak with Jof again only to find out he’d passed away. Jof’s words live on: “In the past, we paired science with economics and that has failed . . . So let’s pair science with art and see what happens.”

People collect the plastic debris obsessively, often for nostalgic reasons. Memories of childhood toys like plastic cowboys are treasured. “Fisherman’s kisses,” which are tiny pieces frayed off of fishing nets, are reminders, though, of the extreme need for ocean conservation. One group combing a beach area found 10,000 of these so-called kisses in no time. Consider too this shocking factoid: there’s an “estimated eight million pieces of plastic that enter the sea every day, amounting to almost 270,000 tons”!

In the breathtaking “Depth Plumber” chapter, we’re introduced to a relatively new “sport” of underwater diving in which the diver uses minimal equipment – freediving. Less is more for this supposedly “relaxing,” almost “spiritual” experience. There’s no oxygen tank, only the diver’s ability to hold his/her breath under water as long as humanely/superhumanly possible. The record-holder – 7 minutes! While we think it’s the loss of oxygen that causes us to exhale, or in this case, swim to the top of the water gasping for air, we’re told it’s actually the pain of too much carbon dioxide.

The freedivers Menmuir follows are women. Some call themselves mermaids; they actually perform as mermaids at parties. The author, an avid surfer (surfing is a big part of life here including a group called Surfers Against Sewage) is in awe of the “serenity” of the freedivers. Terrified of what he’s observing, he still tries it. One woman especially catches our attention too: diagnosed with ADHD saying freediving makes her feel calmer, freer, thus giving us a glimpse into what it might feel like when your brain is on sensory overload. Still, given all the sensations and things she must see under the waters, surprising. Apparently less discordant than land life. What does that say about what we’ve done to our landscapes?

Menmuir turns that question into everything the land is not. Plunging deeper into why we can no longer take the seas we love and rely on for granted.

Lorraine

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