We took the highway out of Tofino towards the junction.  Today our aim was to reach Virgin Falls, right at the end of the inlet.  Our only access was through a logging road, so we left the main junction and headed off through the thick forest along a stony track.  The irony wasn’t lost that in order to gain access to the wilder places, we were using a road designed to facilitate the rape of the forests.  Either side of the track lay thick forest.  As we drove, everyone scanned for a bear – a high point of the trip if we were to catch a glimpse of one – your eyes lost their bearings a few rows of trees in.  It was as if the forest began to swallow you.  I’m sure a lot of this was second growth, you could tell by the size of the trees around.  Nonetheless, it seemed wild.  There was an edge of the unknown about.  You could imagine losing yourself here.

As we passed Kennedy Lake and the road got somewhat worse, we started to see the inlet to our left; little coves accessible only by boat lay at the base of sheer slopes where we were level with the tops of trees.  To the right, the rock cutting loomed high above, exacerbated by mighty trees which seemed precariously perched on the edge but whose branches and trunks towered above us so far that it made you dizzy looking at the heads of them.  We had been driving nearly an hour by now and we began to feel very distant from all the bustle of Tofino on Easter Sunday.  It was as if the deeper into the forest we travelled, the further away from our society we ended up.

Suddenly we broke through the forest cover and were faced with a testament to our ability to make our mark on surroundings.  A swathe of clear-cuts lay ahead of us.  You can never prepare yourself for the devastation of a clear-cut area and I am always horrorstruck at the brutality of this.  I wish to remain so.  If I become inured to this then it would be to deny the fundamental horror of the rape of these forests.  There is a careless air of disregard surrounding clear-cut areas – only humans could execute something so vicious.  Broken stumps lay all around – indiscriminate, universal destruction.  How many years combined did these trees live and how little thought and time went into the action severing their links with this world?  The action was irreparable – no matter how many seedlings were planted, how hard they had worked at removing the roads, the damage had already been done.  This ecosystem had been destroyed and while a new one grew now in its place, this new one would be different.  We can never know what has been lost in this place.  A part of this is our own loss.  In being a species that can do this, we show that we have lost our connection with the forests around, we are out of sync with the natural world.

We found the falls, the river level was low (there hadn’t been much snow that year, the winter had been mild, another symptom of our changing climate).  The falls were still beautiful.  Along the way the road bridged several small rivers.  Looking either side of the bridge, icy cold water, clear as only crystal iced flow from high mountains is, bubbled over grey, river-worn stones, forming pebble beaches rimming meanders.  We scanned for fish – we saw none, although the warning signs were there to prevent the dumping of garbage and engine oil in a fish habitat.  They were too well camouflaged on the rocks for us to see from afar.  As we drove out, I checked the high tree-line for lone bears coming out of hibernation.  We were more likely to see one than a cougar.  High up, on harsh inhospitable slopes, steep and tree-ladened, the bears remained hidden today.  A wise move on their part for we are the more dangerous species of the two.

As we followed the logging road back, the mountain-filled horizon was visible.  One of the party pointed out that it was a traditional view of Canada.  In the far distance, rugged snow-covered peaks stood, almost close enough to touch but distant enough not to be of my world.  Despite the fact that individual trees were visible, or perhaps because of that, I could visualise the isolation there.  In the mid-ground, dense forested peaks, covered from base to top with cedar and fir, a green cloak hiding so much.  Contemporary Canada had had its say, however, as in the foreground a clear-cut slope screamed its presence, justified in its position in the vista as much a part of wild Canada as the trees that once occupied that space, although not something the tour brochures broadcast.

We need to be reminded sometimes, that there are wild places.

A couple of new reviews up over on my reviews blog. American Gods by Neil Gaiman and A Lost Lady by Willa Cather.

There’s this eerily compelling (for those of you who like to list) meme/application flying round on Facebook at the moment that enables you to pick your ‘5 whatevers’ and, whilst I usually shy away from the Apps side of Facebook, it’s drawn me in and I’m constantly having an internal debate with myself to select my ‘5 whatevers’.  I’m also really enjoying the random things my friends who I know well have selected (and yes, my friends on Facebook are actually flesh and blood friends – not for me the 150+ acquaintances that the youth of today seem to accumulate).  What’s been frustrating is the absence of the story behind the selection – I want to know why they’ve chosen the five.  With that in mind, I thought I’d share my 5s with you over the next week, story and all.

So, first out, the 5 Albums that Shaped Me.  A toughie.  Too many not too few but also so many genius albums that just didn’t make the cut because, brilliant though they are, I wouldn’t say they ’shaped’ me in a particular way.  They aren’t epoch-defining for me.

1. This is the Sea by The Waterboys

Before I became a ‘responsible’ parent (i.e. before going to a gig became a tour-de-force of organisational skill), I used to be a ‘girl who gigs’.  We’re close

enough to London to go in for the evening for anything that’s going and when money was less of an object, we used to take every advantage of that.  I love live music and anyone that knows me well would testify to the fact that my musical leanings are notoriously eclectic so I’ve had the opportunity to spend a great few years seeing all of my must-see bands live.   This love of live music, whilst it was likely to surface at some stage, really hit me at age 13 when I went to see Simple Minds live at Milton Keynes Bowl.  It was my first live gig and, much as I’d explained to my mother that I would quite obviously die if I didn’t get tickets to go, we really were too hard up for her to spring for what was then, a fortune in concert ticket capital.  I was not one to be daunted by circumstance, however, even at 13 and I decided to put my skills to work and earn my tickets (OK, so I filled in a crossword and sent it off and won them, but I have word skills not car cleaning skills, so sue me!).  The concert was great and the experience was life-defining but what really stood out was the band that came on second on a festival-style day line up and only played a 45 minute set.  That was when I found The Waterboys and realised that a really good band can sell themselves to you on a genius live performance.  I stalked this album after that concert.  It was back in the day of vinyl and cassette tapes and I used to hang around the local record store just looking at the dust-jacket (I only had a tape player so I couldn’t justify buying the LP but I did convince the record store to give me their display copy to mount on my wall).  I actually had to rebuy the cassette because I wore it out.  So, for my introduction to live music, this has the first spot.

2. The Joshua Tree by U2

If The Waterboys introduced me to live music, U2 cemented my addiction.  I had the good fortune to see U2 play Wembley Stadium (the old one, with the lions and the character not the rather anodyne modern edifice that replaced it) in 1987 on this tour and this album never left my cassette player that summer.  In a testament to my devotion to the important things in life, I refused to compromise and revise that weekend even though my O-levels started on Monday morning and I sat the whole lot of them with my Joshua Tree Tour T-shirt firmly affixed to my back – I was 15 and it was a statement (15 year olds are very good at statements!).  I’m pleased to say that I have lost neither my addiction to T-shirts nor my ability to work out what’s really important in life over the ensuing decades – I don’t even remember what the exam was that I sat that Monday but I don’t think I’ll ever forget Bono belting out classics on the Wembley stage.  My one lasting image of that concert, however, is not the stage but the wheelchair bound guy at the back (where I retreated to because if you know me, you’ll testify that I just about come up to sweaty armpit level and there was a box I could stand on at the back by a concession stand) – he was no longer wheelchair bound but scooped up by one of his friends and they were both going crazy, lost in the music.  Great live performances really can make you less earthbound.

3. Levelling the Land by The Levellers

What can I say?  I was a student once too.  This reminds me of the kind of shared experience you only get with your closest friends and a big bag of marijuana (which, obviously, no-one inhaled, *ehem, ehem*).  Seriously though, this is the album I come back to when I want that dose of nostalgia that only music can bring (you know the one, the visceral one that actually takes you back to where you used to listen to it).  When nothing else is right, out comes ‘Levelling the Land’ and all becomes well in the world again.

4. Blood Sugar Sex Magik by Red Hot Chili Peppers

‘Under the Bridge’ was the soundtrack to one of those evenings in life where everything and everyone comes together at the right time, in the right place and in a random and unexpected fashion.  I remember very clearly the moment when we all sat around an open fire and listened to it on repeat (which in those archaic days involved a lot of rewinding of cassette tapes).  It was a moment of change in all our lives because our close group of friends was separating after the final year of school and it was the last time we all sat together as childhood allies without complications of partners, widening networks of friends and a hefty amount of mileage between us.  It was the reason I packed this album when I set off around South East Asia later that year, the reason it now has many more associations than just teen-angst, most vividly listening to it on the verandah of a shack in a hill-tribe village in the Golden Triangle north of Chiang Mai, Thailand watching children who could barely toddle wielding machetes and women in an eclectic mix of national dress and modern attire.  It still comes with me everywhere, but in the age of the iPod at least I don’t have to carry the brick sized Walkman that I did then (which is a good job because some mean individual filched it from my backpack when I was camped out at Bangkok airport waiting for a flight to Indonesia … ).

5. Ten by Pearl Jam

In the true spirit of leaving the best ’til last … I bought this when it was released (one of those kind of random purchases that I used to make when I actually had money to make random purchases) and it blew me away.  It opened up the whole Seattle scene to me – I was so a grunge-head, even had a scruffy lumberjack shirt to boot.  This is one of those albums that just become your best friends.  When I first went away to Uni, I was a mature student (well, chronologically at least) and didn’t really need a new complement of friends so it was an upheaval.  I’d only just got back from a fantastic few months travelling and it seemed odd to be sitting in a room in halls having to redefine my connections (I would say ‘a bare room’ but I tend to move with at least 3 boxes of books, anywhere, even abroad … and some rugs … and some posters … erm … and the odd piece of furniture …) and this was the album I chose to listen to while I hung out the window looking at the lights in the botanical gardens on the other side of the road (which I never got around to visiting despite the best intentions …).  I finally got to see Pearl Jam live in Warsaw on a bitterly cold November 1st (Day of the Dead in Poland, so I’d spent the day walking round cemetaries looking at candles).  I was just blown away by the concert and the fact that I’d finally managed to see one of my all-time favourite bands live (albeit in a really unexpected place).  We slept the night on Warszawa Centralna (the main train station) and it was FREEZING.  There’s a real underbelly of society that spends the night in Warszawa Centralna (or at least there was, over a decade ago) – drug dealers, prostitutes, drunks – but none of that mattered because hell, I’d just seen Pearl Jam and they had played loads of songs from ‘Ten’.  The fact that this is the first back catalogue re-release leading up to the band’s 20th anniversary in 2011 just makes me feel old!

So, what are your 5 and why would you choose them?

It’s been a week or two since I got back from my conference trip to Chicago and I’ve been meaning to upload this post but circumstances have been against me, however, I think it’s high time to share my impressions.  So, penned on my last morning in sunny (and intermittently soggy) Chicago, here they are:

“It’s a great, great city.”  That’s what runs through my mind as I spend my last morning writing this in the Chicago Cultural Center café with a mellow, nostalgic soundtrack running in the background (and yes, I’ve bowed and gone down the ‘-er’ route, it being a name, normal English spelling will be resumed presently).  I arrived almost a week ago to a crisp, cold morning on the shores of Lake Michigan.  Loathed as I am to waste a minute of any trip somewhere foreign and new, I took advantage of the jet-lag-induced early rising to walk down, on that first morning, and watch the sunrise on the lakeshore over the still-iced harbour.  It was cold, the wind off the lake was icy and this was the end of the winter season so the sun rose low on the horizon, illuminating the little lighthouses on the edge of the enclosed dock.  I can imagine, having done my time in Eastern Europe which can give Illinois a run for its money as far as snow and cold goes, what it would be like at the height of winter and my boots certainly wouldn’t have been warm enough.  There’s something about early mornings in strange cities: the light, the sense of a metropolis gradually ‘coming round’ from a night of slumber, the rituals of that specific breed of early-riser that seizes that time of day for themselves.  The city was still a bit bleary-eyed but there were a hardy group of joggers running the lakefront path towards the Field Museum as I made my first proxy-pilgrimage to Soldier Field on behalf of my husband who was at home minding the toddling terror for the week.

I’ve spent a week in the city.  I’ve done the tourist route: The Field Museum, The Adler Planetarium, The Shedd Aquarium, Soldier Field, The Sears Tower, Buddy Guy’s.  I’ve spent many hours just walking about, the architecture is fantastic.  I’ve dined in bars, drunk beer at lunchtime and eaten cakes for breakfast – all the things that define, for me, ‘travelling time’.  So, what impression have I gained?  There certainly seems to be a gulf between rich and poor here, but I’m sure that the same would strike a foreign visitor to London and the people begging for spare change here were certainly very pleasant (thanks indeed to the man on the prime pitch that pointed out the beginning of Route 66 to me).  They formed a sharp contrast to the condo high rises and the ostentatious demonstrations of wealth.  The old-time ‘let our altruism be well known and reflect well on us’ attitude still appears to prevail in some fields.  Inside the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium (all named for some lofty benefactor or other), you find walls devoted to different classes of benefactors … I kid you not, there are strata within strata, every opportunity to purchase an upward trajectory of worthiness even in this modern age (frightfully un-English, don’t you know, to be so open about taking credit).

Despite the size of the city, people don’t seem to be invisible though.  I was struck by the fact that everywhere I went, even on the buses, there were ‘regulars’.  The knew each other and the drivers, the waitresses, by name.  It seems very much like a city you can find your place in.  It is certainly a city replete with culture – not just behind financial barricades (such as the uber-pricey opera) but free concerts, free art exhibitions, public works of art throughout the city – cultural life is very much alive and kicking here.  It’s a city of sport – everywhere you look: Bears, Blackhawks, Cubs, you name it, someone’s cheering it on or wearing it proudly on their (often rather rotund) belly.  It’s a gritty city, a ‘real’ city – from the cracks on the sidewalk to the snow and ice damage on the roadway, Chicago breathes, pulsates and is very much alive with its own unique character.  It grabs you and doesn’t let go.  It’s a lake-edge city, a place that has carved its way in the harsh climate of the Great Lakes area over generations and some of that tenacious, pioneering spirit seems to have left its mark on the concrete and steel of modern-day Chicago.

On the downside, I’ve learnt that people really can be too polite and solicitous – there’s customer service and then there’s invasion of personal space and, as usual, the US veers too far towards the latter for me.  I’ve learnt that Americans clap and whoop and cheer in cinemas (being toddler free, I treated myself to a night out to see Watchmen – my first time back in the cinema since Junior was born) – apparently even watching a movie is as much about being observed as it is about the act of observation.  I’ve learnt that you shouldn’t stand anywhere near the vicinity of the kerb edge on a wet day – apparently slowing down when driving through puddles is a peculiarly English trait (once again, another big ‘Thank you’ to the SUV driver that doused me from head to foot with puddle water).  As I looked down on the city from the top of the Sears Tower and reflected on what I’d really learnt here, I think the main thing was how absolutely welcoming native Chicagoans had been during my time here – warm, friendly, funny.  How fiercely loyal they are to their city and what wonderful, passionate advocates they are for it.  With the exception of one rather rude grandmother at the Planetarium (who seemed to be of the impression that her three year old granddaughter needed lessons on how to be generally rude and unpleasant to everyone), everyone I’ve met here has been friendly and open, proud of their city and happy to share the parts of it they love best with a slightly mad English tourist.  All I can say is that I can’t wait to come back again, when I’m free of work obligations, to fully explore a place that has so much more to offer than 5 days can do justice to.

This week, The Book Gnome will be mostly crushing on the latest series of ‘Supernatural’.  Demons, monsters, heavy metal puns and cute evil-hunters, all packaged up with a humorous tone last seen effectively applied in ‘The X-Files’ … what’s not to love?

I’ve been picking up my poetry collections recently and dipping in – something I promised myself I’d do more of this year.  They’ve followed me everywhere and I find that there’s a comforting feeling coming back to my old favourites, like visiting old friends you haven’t seen for a while.  A love of poetry is something I had instilled in me from a young age, growing up in a house where poetry books were always available, encouraged always by the wonderful use of language in this written form, and (for better or worse) it has been something that I have always written myself.  This led me down the path of considering why people write.

I find it much easier to explain why I read: stimulation, excitement, transportation to distant worlds, distant lands, acquisition of knowledge, the sound of words, their interplay … the list is endless.  For someone, however, who has written in some form or another all their life, from diaries to blogs, homemade newspapers to cyber-reviews, childhood illustrated books (a wordsmith I may have been from a young age, an illustrator I am not but my Mum appreciated them) to more substantial adult writing, it is much harder to elucidate reasons.  It’s what I do, I never really remember a time when I didn’t and the notion of stopping is inconceivable.  The vast majority of my writing has not been written for an audience – heaven knows, I’d be mortified if some of my teenage diary entries came to light!  I write to think, to reason and to order things in my head.  What happens to these when I’m dead and gone is of minimal importance, it is the act of writing that initiates catharsis not the eventual product.  I blog now, something quite different from anything my thirteen-year-old self could have envisaged as I dutifully kept stubs of cinema tickets and mementoes folded in the pages of that year’s journal.  I suppose it is the first time I’ve really addressed any form of ‘audience’ in a concrete sense and it is a really rewarding experience.  But it is fiction and poetry that I still really love, the one I miss if time has taken me away from my notebooks for too long, and that is harder to explain the motivation for.  For me, this is rarely something I’ve had the opportunity to share, until the advent of this cyber age at least, but still something I need to write.  I guess inside all people who write, there is a little germ of an idea that it would be great to be able to say ‘occupation author’ or ‘poet’ but it is not the prime motivation.  For poetry especially, but other writing too, it is impossible not to write the words.  There’s a kernel of an idea or a combination of words that begs to be written.  However, writing doesn’t always come easy, while sometimes something has to be voiced, writing about things that don’t inspire, writing what you have to do, these are harder tasks and contain none of the pleasure or release, no matter how efficiently accomplished – a reason I considered and dismissed pursuing a journalistic career when I was younger.

One of my favourite poets, Seamus Heaney (whose use of language, I have to admit, I am just a wee bit in love with), examines his own motivations for writing in the ‘bookend’ poems of his collection ‘Death of a Naturalist’.  In ‘Digging’, Heaney situates his profession as a poet in the context of his family ancestry of manual work: where his father and grandfather dug for potatoes in fresh fertile ground, digging deep to find the best soil, planting something that would grow to feed and sustain people, Heaney follows in their footsteps, wielding his pen, digging inside himself.  I particularly like the lines:

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it

From ‘Digging’ by Seamus Heaney in ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (1966)

His pen is as much a tool as the spade his father uses, our expectation of what he will find as real as the expectation of bounty when you raise a potato root and hope to see it full of promise.  Inherent in this is a sense of the unknown and the unspoilt, expectant promise that exists at the moment a writer’s pen hovers above the blank page, in this moment anything is possible.

Heaney revisits the introspective on his writing motivation in the final poem of the collection, ‘Personal Helicon’.  This is one of my favourite poems, I love the imagery of the well, the onomatopoeic language and rich descriptives.  What resonates is the concept of the draw of an empty page, of the act of writing, of the essence of peering into the shielded darkness, unsure of what is below.  I will leave you with the final verse, one of the most evocative images of the motivation and compulsion to write that I have come across and ask you to consider how far it applies to you:

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

From ‘Personal Helicon’ by Seamus Heaney in ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (1966)

So, for reasons beyond the ken of man and monster, I haven’t been able to write very much on this blog of late (well, to make it sound slightly less exciting but more accurate, I’ve been very time-poor, but I like myths and monsters better).  I’ve managed to get some posts written which I will be gradually uploading over the next little while so this is just to put you all on notice, The Gnome is back!

Apart from generally sounding off about things that I think are important, which are multitudinous and random, I also intend to bring you some more regular post subjects over the next few months.  As a result of LibraryThing based reading groups focusing on particular authors, I’ve been reading about authors, old and new, in more detail in addition to purely reading their novels so I shall be sharing some of that knowledge with you all from time-to-time.  Coming soon, Willa Cather, my first LibraryThing Monthly Theme read (from the group of the same name).  Also, I shall be introducing you to some of my favourite poems, one way or another, because they never really get reviewed in my catalogue as I rarely read poetry collections from start to finish but dip in when I need inspiration.  I’ve got a vast backlog of my own writing, stashed in boxes and piles of notebooks (some of them italian leather bound and with a wonderful smell), which, for good or ill, I’m going to find a place to put here.  I’ve come to the conclusion that musty boxes are no place for much loved words, they need a bit of freedom (even if some of it does come under the banner of painful, idealistic University poetry writing, enter at your peril!).

I’ll tweet when new content is up (if I remember), but do stop by from time to time and drop me a comment as I’m always glad of the contact.

So, I’ve had a New Year’s blitz on some of my outstanding reviews and there’s a whole batch of them on my reviews blog.  Reviewing sort of got away from me at the end of last year … too busy reading (and eating and drinking beer …) but I’m making a valiant effort to catch up.  There’ll be more soon – at least I’m up-to-date with my Early Reviewer commitments thus far ..

This monumental saga of the life of a Norwegian woman in medieval times is far less well-known in translation than it should be. Often divided into three separate works, this edition is a compilation of the three parts. Having read it as one novel, I would balk at calling it an omnibus as none of the sections could really count as a stand-alone novel. The saga needs to be read in full to appreciate the scope and breadth of Undset’s writing …

Read it in full over on my reviews blog.

This was a random, experimental book choice – it was on the 1001 Books list and I hadn’t read any T.C. Boyle before so I mooched it as a trial balloon. It was certainly a satisfying read and I’m going to search out more of his novels after this.

This book centres around two drastically different communities in the late 60s/early 70s hippy era: a commune in California and a bush community in Alaska living off trap lines and hunting trips …

Read the full review over on my reviews blog.