BOOKPATHS

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Minneapolis, Minnesota; San Francisco, California; Corvallis, Oregon; The Bronx, New York; Scituate, Massachusetts; Vancouver, British Columbia; Berkeley, California; Seattle, Washington; Machias, Maine

Works of Heart : Building Village Through the Arts, edited by Lynne Elizabeth and Suzanne Young (Oakland, CA : New Village Press, 2006)

Works of the Heart : Building Village Through the Arts profiles “citizen artists” who are working to “revitalize place, celebrate culture and inspire social change” through “community-based arts projects.” Essays describe North Philadelphia’s Village of Arts and Humanities; Minneapolis’ No Name Exhibitions housed in the restored National Purity Soap Company; The Garden of Hope/The Healing Garden at the University of San Francisco Medical Center; the mud murals of Fairplay Middle School in Corvallis, Oregon; impromptu opera and theater in the Bronx Market; the Faith Quilts Project, a public quilting project reaching out from Massachusetts; Vancouver, British Columbia’s Public Dreams Community Art and Celebration Organization; River of Words based in Berkeley, California; and The Beehive Collective of Marias, Maine. Suggested books, websites, and additional resources are found throughout the book. Works of Heart : Building Village Through the Arts is a work of love that could change the world.

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

“The word love is not commonly used among planners and community development specialists who cautiously measure the ‘social capital’ of ‘civil society,’ so we laud the late Jane Jacobs, to whom this book is dedicated, for speaking up about that gutsy emotion that truly makes the world go ‘round. Communities that ‘get it’ express a central vibrancy so irrestible, their good work is self-perpetuating. Such zeal, such neighborhood caring, is the stuff this book is made of.” – from Works of Heart : Building Village Through the Arts, edited by Lynne Elizabeth and Suzanne Young

Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, Libya

Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep talks with Azar Nafisi about Literature from the Axis of Evil, edited by Alane Mason, Dedi Felman and Samantha Schnee. The book “gathers short stories and poems from three countries that once received that label from President Bush – Iraq, North Korea and Iran.” Syria, Cuba, Sudan and Libya are also represented.

The same link also leads to a profile of an unrelated, but equally welcome, project, a CD, compiled by music producer Erik Hillestad, of “lullabies sung by women from countries deemed U.S. enemies.”

You can listen to the Azar Nafisi interview, along with some lullabies, on the NPR website.

Columbus and Clarksdale, Mississippi; Provincetown, Massachusetts; New Orleans, Louisiana

Beth Greenfield looks at “four festivals dedicated to [Tennesse] William’s work and life” scheduled for the “coming months.”

“Three are established events in his native South, including an 11-day festival in Columbus, Miss., Williams’s birthplace, starting this weekend. The fourth is a new festival Sept. 28 to Oct. 1 in Provincetown, Mass., where Williams worked on “The Glass Menagerie” on a borrowed typewriter.” – from “Tennessee Williams Festivals: Blance, Big Daddy and Menagerie,” by Beth Greenfield, New York Times

Holland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslavakia, Hungary

“The ninth of December, 1933, was just ending and I didn’t get back until January 1937 – a whole lifetime later it seemed then – and I felt like Ulysses, ‘plein d’usage et de raison’, and, for better or worse, utterly changed by my travels.” – from A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor (New York : New York Review of Books Classics, 2005; also previous editions)

The landlord [in Rotterdam] asked where I was going: I said: ‘Constaninople.’ His brows went up and he signaled me to wait: then he set out two small glasses and filled them with transparent liquid from a long stone bottle. We clinked them; he emptied his at one gulp and I did the same. With his wishes for godspeed in my ears and an internal bonfire of Bols and a hand smarting from his valedictory shake, I set off. It was the formal start of my journey. – from A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

In December of 1933, an 18-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Forty years later, he looked back on that time, composing a memoir that currently fills two volumes. The first volume, A Time of Gifts, follows Fermor as he travels solo through Holland, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Fermor’s curiosity and tolerance make him the best of travelers and the best of guides to time and place, traveling as he did just as Adolf Hitler was rising to power. It is, indeed, a “gift” to travel with Fermor through the pages of A Time of Gifts, to see the landscape and meet the people before Hitler and World War II would destroy too much of what he saw.

“This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day’s doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my books.” – from A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Website
New York Review of Books Classics

[Hungarian border] “The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants lent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.” – from A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leight Fermor

North Dakota, New York City, Wyoming...

“Among several tribes on the northern plains, the passage of time from one summer to the next was marked by noting a single memorable event. The sequence of such memories, recorded pictographically on a buffalo robe or spoken aloud, was called a winter count. Several winter counts might be in progress at any one time in the same tribe, each differing according to the personality of its keeper.” – Winter Count, by Barry Holstun Lopez

Winter Count, by Barry Holstun Lopez (New York : Vintage, 1999)

Linger in bed one winter morning reading the exquisite stories in Winter Count, by Barry Holstun Lopez. Each story is a revelation of memory and personal history, of moments that change lives – the appearance of six antelope, seen through the window of a North Dakota mansion, “frozen so still they seem to shimmer in dry grass;” Great blue herons “descending slowly” into a wintry New York City garden; an eerie Wyoming tale of the White buffalo’s “death song;” a “celestial” wind in the “upper Sonoran country “ of Arizona; a memory of geese “running like horses before a prairie thunderstorm;” a tapestry of enlightenment at the Prado in Spain; a woman “extending her hand to the shells on Sanibel Island;” reconnecting with “the inscrutable life buried in a wheelbarrow full of bulbs;” or the mysterious “disappearance of the Niobara River” in Nebraska. Winter Count takes us to places and moments that remind us of experiences in our own lives, moments embedded in our memory, in our own "winter count."

“’As professional historians, we have too often subordinated one system to another and forgotten all together the individual view, the poetic view, which is as close to the truth as the consensus. Or it can be as distant.’” -- from “Winter Count 1973 : Geese, They Flew Over in a Storm,” Winter Count, by Barry Holstun Lopez

Barry Lopez Website
http://www.barrylopez.com/

“’If one is patient,’ he said, ‘If you are careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved.’” – from “The Orrery,” Winter Count, by Barry Holstun Lopez

The Gulf Coast

The American Booksellers Association has established an online “Hurricane Resource Center.” You can find out about the status of ABA bookstore members and learn how to contribute time and/or money to their “Bookseller Relief Fund.”

The Mississippi River

NPR’s Weekend Edition highlighted John Barry’s book, Rising Tide : The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The “epic disaster” left nearly one million people homeless. Listen to the interview on their website.

Read an excerpt from Rising Tide : the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on the Simon and Schuster website.

More from Robert Macfarlane

“Browse the complete archive of Guardian First Book award winner Robert Macfarlane's series of essays on the relationship between writers and the landscape," including his thoughts on Annie Dillard, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Willa Cather, Raymond Carver and Barry Lopez.

Bookpath: Ecuador, Australia, Azores, etc.

Natives and Exotics : a Novel, by Jane Alison (Orlando, FL : Harcourt, Inc., 2005)

"People wandered and wandered, and what did it mean, where on earth did they ever belong? They weren't plants, after all." -- from Natives and Exotics, by Jane Alison

Where is home and what damage has been done to the earth in the name of progress are just two questions that move through the pages of Natives and Exotics, by Jane Alison. The questions are voiced in a beautiful, poetic, style of writing that fully captures a sense of place for all the "homes" in the novel. Natives and Exotics begins with three short chapters that introduce some of the ways in which exploration and colonialism "rearranged" the world in the late 1700s. In the Galapagos Islands, a "British mariner" leaves his mark by carving his initials and the date on the shell of a giant tortoise. In London, Sir Joseph Banks is "presiding over Kew Gardens" and sending "eager young botanists...to hunt new plants and ship them home...." And, in the Atlantic, Alexander von Humboldt sets sail for Spanish America, wanting "to plumb the secret unities of nature -- to learn how living things gained a foothold on land, how land itself was created." This shifting, or "rearrangement," of the world that continues today, is at the heart of Natives and Exotics.

Throughout the book, the characters in the interlinking stories wonder about home and belonging. It is 1970 and there is 9-year-old Alice living in Ecuador with her mother and new stepfather, a diplomat for the U.S. embassy in Quito. She is dazzled by the beauty of the landscape, even in the midst of political unrest, but feels a "crucial kinship" with Australia, a place that lives only in her early memories, a few mementos, and in stories her mother tells. Her grandmother, Violet, is the subject of the next story. She's a native of Australia, but is drawn to England, sensing that it is her true home. Still, as a new bride in 1929, Vi works the land in the "almost outback" near Adelaide with her husband, Alf. Vi struggles to remove, "sets herself against," a large mallee root from the land as she contemplates her own roots. Throughout Natives and Exotics, there are references to roots -- roots of plants being planted or removed and the roots of people to family and place. Moving back to the 19th century, readers next meet Vi's great-great-grandfather, George Clarence, "a born gardener." Born in Scotland, a place of horror in his memory, he and Mr. Clarence, the man who is "nearly" a father to him, are forced off their land during the "clearances." They flee to "Saint Michael, a Portuguese Island in the Atlantic," where they restore a citrus orchard and begin a garden they hope will be "a forest, forbidding, impenetrable by men," but they realize too late that they, too, "are as deep as anyone" in the earth's destruction. War causes George to flee again after the death of Mr. Clarence, this time "sail[ing] for South Australia," where "maybe on that lonely, ancient continent...he would at last find his habitat."

The last chapters return to Vi and Alice, Vi in old age, "traveling at last" to Europe and North America, a trip that takes her to England, the place she thought would feel like home. There is a brief connection, but she finds herself homesick for Australia, her place in the world. And Alice, now a young woman, is traveling in Scotland, transfixed by its beauty, but not entirely certain about its place in her family history. Her willingness, at the end of Natives and Exotics, to simply see with no desire to "rearrange" the landscape is encouraging.

Natives and Exotics is a lushly descriptive book, filled with both insights and questions. It would certainly be a welcome companion when visiting any of the book's settings, but it fits just as easily into any destination or homeland. It's wisdom reaches worldwide. Natives and Exotics allows us to see ourselves as the characters alter, whether they mean to or not, nature and cultures and as they search for a place to belong.

Websites
Reading Group Guide
http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/natives_and_exotics1.asp

"'What is natural, they mean,' said Mr. Clarence. 'What is native. From natus, how it was born.'" -- from Natives and Exotics, by Jane Alison

"'You feel some sort of kinship to exotics, don't you,' said Mr. Clarence, as George stared at engravings of new-found plants, his hands and face black with volcanic soil." -- from Natives and Exotics, by Jane Alison

But it was suddenly so amazing: one small pool in a hollow in this rock, water the depth of her hand, and in it lay hundreds of tiny shells. A miniature conch, black mussels the size of her fingernail, an orange crab as big as an ant drifting along the bottom. A whole little world. She looked up again at the seascape all around, rolling water, blowing sky, dunes, the green bluff rising behind; she looked in the way you look when what you really want is to have it, to absorb, but all you can do is take deep breaths of air.

But maybe you actually did absorb it. Maybe, if you looked hard and lived it a little, it did slip inside you, get transformed somehow, and you really did have it, you'd walk around with it forever. This little pool, like that water in Ecuador they weren't supposed to drink, that's what if suddenly felt like. Tiny transparent images of that mountain, the inky sky, and Vi's garden with the palm tree, all of it swimming inside her. -- from Natives and Exotics, by Jane Alison

V. S. Naipaul

For an interesting look at V. S. Naipaul, see Rachel Donadio’s profile, “The Irascible Prophet : V. S. Naipaul at Home,” in this week's New York Times Book Review.

“Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder.” – from “The Irascible Prophet : V. S. Naipaul at Home,” by Rachel Donadio (New York Times Book Review, August 7, 2005)