Hedge Society

Skellig Michael

Irelandtravelpictures.net

A few years ago, I picked a book off the shelf at a reading retreat. I like books on travel and have an extra fondness for books on pilgrimage and peregrinatio - a word that means a kind of sacred wandering around.

It was the cover of the book that caught my eye - a photograph of a long set of stone stairs reaching to the top of a mountain on Skellig Michael, a rocky island off the coast of Ireland that hosted a monastery on its summit for over 600 years.

I was pleasantly surprised by the new-to-me author, Daniel Taylor, a professor of literature and writing at Bethel University in Saint Paul, MN, who has written In Search of Sacred Places: Looking for Wisdom on Celtic Holy Islands, a very welcoming book with an easygoing pace and a sense of humor that often goes missing when writing about pilgrimage.

In the opening chapter on Iona, Taylor writes:

"The journey to a sacred place is as important as the place itself. Traveling is an action - of the body and the will - in the direction of a desired destination. The act of going is itself a vote for meaning. It accepts risk - the risk of coming to harm, of being a fool, of wasting time and energy - for the mere possibility of a highly intangible reward."

He then goes on to wrestle with the nature of pilgrimage by taking on the nature of holy places,

"The very idea of holy wells would have given my Sunday School teachers heartburn, and there are reported to be 3000 such wells in Ireland alone."

and saints,

"But I should not let myself too quickly off the hook. If they were sometimes too extreme, why am I never extreme at all? If they hated too bitterly their daily human failings, why do I hate mine so little - preferring instead to excuse and stroke and nurture them?"

then promptly leads his family into a bog and gets lost.

Now that's my kind of pilgrimage. I wouldn't want to intentionally get lost in a bog but I think it would smack the romantic notion of retreat and pilgrimage out of me if I lost my shoes in some gooey earth all because I was convinced of a shortcut. I find it hard to imagine golden beams of light and epiphanies, but I can probably do lost and muck with the best of the least of them. (I also noticed that this book is self-published through Taylor's own Bog Walk Press.)

Later, Taylor considers the thin places of the earth and quotes Welsh Poet, R.S Thomas who wrote these lines when visiting a Celtic holy place.

I often call there.
There are no poems in it
for me.

I loved these lines and immediately wrote them in my notebook. It's what I feel when something is aesthetically beautiful or even overly simplistic but does not speak to me. I can enjoy it at a certain level but it does not need to have the meaning that someone right next to me might be getting. It doesn't mean I'm stoic or lack some kind of understanding.

There just might not be any poems in it for me.

Thursday storytime, gather round.

Here's a true story from Roald Dahl's Memories with Food at Gipsy House, a book he wrote with his wife Liccy before he died in 1990.

"Not long ago we went over at the special request of a children's bookshop in Arnhem to sign books. Holland has lots of bookshops devoted to children, and the nice thing about them is that they are designed specifically for children, with small tables and chairs and low bookshelves, and they even have some rooms with very low ceilings that only children can enter. It's all splendid. Anyway, off we went to Arnhem and the signing started. The queue outside the small shop stretched like a long, curving anaconda all the way down the street and round the corner into the next block, and the street the bookshop was on became so packed with young people that the traffic had to be diverted.

Liccy, who endures such things with good-natured resignation, sat herself in a coffee-shop directly across from the action and sipped a good Dutch coffee and watched through the window. Suddenly she noticed that a mother and her small son were standing not in the queue but to one side of it, and the little boy was crying his eyes out and the mother was trying to comfort him. Liccy said to the waiter (who spoke English), 'Please go and ask what is the matter.'

The waiter went out and returned and said, 'The mother has to go to work and hasn't got the time to stand in the queue, so the little boy can't get a book and have it signed.'

Liccy said, 'Please go out again and ask the boy's name and which is his favorite book. Then tell them to wait a minute longer.' Once again the old waiter went out and returned and told Liccy the boy's name was Johan and the book he wanted was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Now Liccy moved fast. She crossed the street and pushed her way through the crush in the shop until she came to me signing away at the back. 'Quick,' she said, 'sign a copy of Charlie to Johan.' I did so and, unseen by the mother and the little boy, she carried it back through the crowd to the coffee-shop.

Once again she asked the old waiter to go out. 'Take this book,' she said, 'and give it to Johan and simply say to him, "Now and again in this world something magic happens."' Through the window of the coffee-shop she watched the lovely old waiter, who by now was thoroughly enjoying the whole thing. She saw him hold out the book with the flyleaf open showing the name and the message and the signature, and she saw his lips moving as he told about magic happening. Then she saw the look of absolute incredulity on the face of the small boy and the gasp from the mother, and the wonder on both their faces as they moved slowly away with the boy still holding the book open in front of him as though it was a holy thing."

Book joy

The boy-in-the-hedge twittered a news link about libraries the other day that said Calgary's public library is one of North America's busiest systems. When times get tough, people buy less and borrow more. Think of those millions of books, churning out into the world, then coming back and going out again. Books traveling at home and abroad, visiting houses, condos, bathtubs, bedsides, buses, trains. Books written and read by old people, young people, funny people, sad people. Books that carry our fingerprints on their covers as smudged secret messages to each other. Books reincarnated into used bookstores, waiting to be adopted, waiting to be refound, and to become real again.

  (Photo: one wall inside Shakespeare & Company, a used bookshop in Paris.)

The Principles of Uncertainty

My life feels pretty uncertain right now, so a book called The Principles of Uncertainty made me stop and flip through its pages. The flyleaf got me: "What is this book? What is anything? Who am I? Who are you? Stop it/Forget it. This is a year in my life, profusely illustrated." And so it is. Imagine having illustrations for every day of your life - something you saw, something you thought, somebody you met. Like a picture book called Me, 2009.

The Principles of Uncertainty is a compilation of a year-long column that Maira Kalman wrote and illustrated for the New York Times. Here's April, 2007 where you can find out what comes after "If something does go wrong, here is my advice..."  

The Principles of Uncertainty
by Maira Kalman
Penguin Press, 2007

16: Friday Roundup

(I dropped off my niece for a bus trip from Edmonton to Red Deer where her parents would pick her up. Behind the hotel drop off, there is another run down roadside motel with these great signs. I've taken pictures of the sign before but never had a sky like this one. It was -40 and by the time I got my 20 or 30 shots off, my eyes were blurry and runny, my cheeks nearly frozen, and the camera was grinding away slowly in protest.)

Our little Friday Roundup usually has a theme. Who doesn't like themes? We think themes should have their very own theme song. This is a music genre overlooked for far too long.

This week we are fascinated by signs of all kinds. A few years ago, a friend gave me the picture on the right hand side of this page. It comes from photographer Sam Fentress' book Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape:

"Over the last twenty-five years Sam Fentress criss-crossed forty-nine states, photographing thousands of religious signs along America’s highways, city streets, and country roads. He found messages placed on the elemental raw materials of everyday life, on bikes, cars and buses, trees and rocks.

Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape is the result of these sometimes sought, sometimes serendipitous encounters. A striking photographic chronicle emerges from the most unlikely places, from beauty salon windows, highway pylons and burger joint marquees. These pictures, both individually and collectively, document a distinctly American religious phenomenon."

Find out more about this book along with a look inside here.

We also have have a book called Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts sitting on our shelves. It may seem that much of the material outlined in this book can now be seen in Flickr collections but photographer Jeff Brouws and Chronicle Books have made a lovely little print object, reminiscent of an oversized postcard with the material divided into eleven sections with titles like Farm Forms, Bowling, Freight Cars and Freshly Painted Houses. What is it about those blocks of numbered Storage Units, abandoned Gas Stations, and Partially Painted Pickup Trucks that outline the human stories in the midst of large landscapes? Brouws' photos are often set against cloudy skies and washed out backgrounds giving the reader that drive by, "now you see it, maybe you'll remember it" sense of looking out a passenger side window.

We'll put up a flickr set of some of the signs we've collected over the years during our Beyond travels.

And of course there are those who are interested in capturing the signs of stressed out punctuation including  apostrophe abuse and unnecessary quotation marks.

We can relate. Once an editor...

Friday Roundup: Book Cover Design

After our post on book design, I found the cover of the first edition of A Wrinkle in Time designed by author and illustrator Ellen Raskin.

I wonder if book companies would consider releasing more posters of vintage book covers. And then, as with most roundups, a few other things came to mind:

Book Cover Contest: Penguin Books and Creativity ask artists to create a cover for the novel The Island at The End of the World.

Covers: dedicated to the appreciation of book cover design.

An Archive of Book Cover Designs and Designers

And the wonderful Book By Its Cover which includes comics, sketchbooks, and a children's books section that could have me spending my rent money fairly quickly. So if you see someone camped out in a hedge with a big pile of children's books and a big smile, that would be me.

Oh and  Uppercase reminded us of this great little stop motion video:

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

Book: 101 things

The boy in the hedge introduced me to a little book he has on his shelf: 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. The author, Matthew Frederick, has compiled a pithy selection of exactly that - and like all good lessons, some of them apply to life in general. Like this one:

"Architects are late bloomers. Most architects do not hit their professional stride until around age 50! There is perhaps no other profession that requires one to integrate such a broad range of knowledge into something so specific and concrete. An architect must be knowledgeable in history, art, sociology, physics, psychology, materiality, symbology, political process, and innumerable other fields, and must create a building that meets regulatory codes, keeps out the weather, withstands earthquakes, has functioning elevators and mechanical systems, and meets the complex functional and emotional needs of its users. Learning to integrate so many concerns into a cohesive product takes a long time, with lots of trial and error along the way. If you're going to be in the field of architecture, be in it for the long haul. It's worth it."

And this one:

"Summer people are 22 inches.
Winter people are 24 inches."

Books as Art Objects

I love reading my books but I love looking at them too. I organized all the shelves by color last year to mix them up and challenge my brain to see them in a different way. Right now as I sit on the couch, watching sky change in the small window over the dining table, a little row of hues of green catches my eye - the poems of TS Eliot, a graphic novel on Louis Riel, the collected stories of Carol Shields, the complete works of Emily Carr, a beautiful hardcopy of Leaves of Grass, a battered paperback version of The Hobbit, a secondhand Patagonia by Chatwin, the shiny paper cover on GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy. Poets and revolutionaries, housewives and painters, adventurers and theologians all in one splash of green. It makes me quite happy. 

I just received a little pamphlet inside of a local magazine that outline the best books from my part of the country for the upcoming year. Outside of local subject manner, the most common feature of many of these books is terrible design. What's inside these books may be what truly counts but the lack of effort or insight to turn these little objects into a piece of art is surprising to me. There are a lot of good designers out there who  know composition, color, and typography. Many are affordable and can make an average book look like a must have objet d'art.

Book lovers know that the book, the actual form that is a book, can be as much about what is on the outside as on the inside. I read online but nothing substitutes for the feel of a good book, the object in my hands and both of us in time and space. Reading can be as much as an aesthetic, a physical experience, as it is an interior one. I have books that I am in no rush to reread but I like the look and feel of them, I enjoy the memory of them and the book itself is the photograph that gives me back that memory.  They were good books, not great ones, that are the right size for their subject - a good font on the inside and a proper weight for the hand. The fact that the book is an art object to me does not mean it has to be expensive either. I own beaten up paper backs, purchased from book sales, with someone else's handwriting in the front cover. This book has a life, a story, a shared history and I am about to play another part in it. Another reading of A Wrinkle in Time or The Cloister Walk in front of the fireplace or outside on a blanket on the lawn. 

And this is why I am surprised that so many publishers - especially small publishers who struggle with finding audiences and selling their books and probably exist out of love for everything a book is and can be - rush to print the text without thinking about the book will look and feel like. Oh sure, you might love your little toddler when she runs around in the morning with her hair standing on end, her grape juice moustache, and strawberry jam stained pj's. There is a certain charm to that. But when it's time for the kindergarten concert, there's nothing quite like a clean shirt, a few barettes in the hair, and a little soap and water on a facecloth. She's still the same toddler but it's okay to let her put her best wobbly foot forward.